Page 25 of The Starving Saints
In her chest, something blooms. Something tremulous and terrifying. Hope, out of season. Impossible hope.
Another miracle for the pile.
The pale woman’s three companions have that same unearthly cant to them. One, a young man, looks across the crowd with an ecstatic smile of welcome. One watches with furrowed brow, silvered lips pursed in a moue of empathetic pain. One is clad in armor that, Voyne thinks briefly, incongruously, does not quite make sense. The buckles are in the wrong places. The metal reflects the sun strangely. But in another moment she does not care, because the woman with the golden face is turning toward her.
Her irises are rings of color, red and blue and green. Ser Voyne goes completely still. She has never seen anybody with eyes like that, except for the painted image of the Constant Lady, and that, more than anything else, is what brings her to her knees.
Tears sting at her eyes. She can feel a scream building in her chest, desperate and overwhelmed and exhausted, and she feels the same passion rippling through the crowd.
The Lady smiles, leans down, touches Voyne’s face. Her hands are delicate, nails clean, and She smells only of flowers. Flowers, sun-drenched meadows, proper summers without starvation and death and hopelessness, and Ser Voyne weeps now, openly. The Lady won’t let her look away.
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Treila sees Voyne fall.
The whole crowd sees it. The yard is packed with every single person in the castle, all drawn out from their tents and their holes and their miseries, all watching the procession that approaches the king. Every single one sees Voyne step forward. And every single one sees her fall.
They also see the blonde-haired, painted woman touch the top of Ser Voyne’s head in benediction, then turn to the king, who does not kneel, but holds out a hand.
The crowd breathes. Inhale, swell, exhale, wither. The fear they have clutched hand in hand with hope is released. Treila canfeelthe charge of expectation that dances from shoulder to shoulder, lip to lip.
She steps forward, unable to help herself.
Ser Voyne is crying, wholly focused on the painted woman, unaware of everything else around her. It’s greater than the pain she wore when she at last recognized Treila’s face. It is bigger than Treila, than their sordid history, than guilt over a single death. And why shouldn’t it be? Ser Voyne looks at this woman and sees salvation for all of Aymar.
Treila’s struck with the laughable feeling that they’ve taken away something that ishers, and that’s her signal to get the fuck out of there and clear her head.
She retreats into the crowd.
The first ring of people she pushes through is silent, but beyond that, there are whispers, growing to stronger murmurs. She hears talk of food. Of rescue. There is giddiness. Not just hope, but giddiness,no wariness at all. She wants to punch somebody, shake them until they see sense again. Captivity has honed her mistrust of every other soul in the world to a fine point. What has it done to theirs?
She can’t stand it. Any of it. This sudden happy ending makes no sense.
Treila reaches the nearest tower and finds it unguarded. Whoever is meant to be here has joined the thrumming mass. She slips inside, up and around the stairs, out onto the wall. Without soldiers blocking the way, it’s the quickest path back to the upper bailey, and from there to her workshop. But her workshop has no answers. It only has a hole to a dead-end cave that whispered to her in her starved brain.
The chapel is closer. She does not want to go there, doesn’t want to hear the hum of bees, risk a sting, but it’s the only place she can think to go for answers. After all, those four people were painted to look like the icons. There must be some connection.
It’s weak, but then she’s feeling unsteady all around.
Halfway to the chapel, she finds Edouart perched on the rampart, staring down at the yard. His fist is pressed against his teeth. He is gnawing on his own flesh. Then he glances over, sees her, and his eyes turn desperate.
He doesn’t say anything, though.
She comes to stand by him anyway. When she sneaks a look herself, she can only make out Ser Voyne’s retreating back, trailing after her liege and the strange party, ushering them into the great hall.
“Is it over, then?” Edouart asks. He doesn’t sound happy. He doesn’t sound hopeful.
Clever boy. Always cautious, this one. She could’ve stood to have been more like him, back when it would have mattered. “I don’t see how it can be,” she says. “It’s just four people.”
“Simmonet said they were the saints, come to life. Come to rescue us.”
“Where are their swords?” she asks. “Food? No, if anything, they’re a ploy. A way to get somebody inside the gates.”
He looks like he’s about to cry. “I think they’re here to judge us. They’ll help us only if we deserve it. And if not...”
Anxious boy.
“Well,” she says, “if not, there’s not much to be done about it. But nobody down there seems worried.”
