Page 27 of The Starving Saints
The chamberlain is there, too, and the marshal, and the four guests. And those four guests...
She knows them. She knows them, because she cleaned their icons for years, knelt at their feet, offered up praise and processed the honey from the hives painted in their colors. The Warding Saint, so similar to Ser Voyne in appearance, but richly ornamented; the Absolving Saint, all silvered and earnest, head bent to listen to every whispered word; the Loving Saint, one hand curled below his chin, fine fingers sliding back and forth against his jawline, enticement and comfort both; and the Constant Lady, sitting statue-straight in Her chair, only a breath away from looking up and seeing Phosyne staring.
Her heart gives an unexpected pang of recognition, of longing.
A young boy tends to the fire, then runs to fetch food from the kitchens. And thereisfood, a whole spread of it, not just dried meat. Phosyne thinks she smells verdancy, then shakes it off; she’s too far away.
But she doesseegreen.
There are vegetables on those plates. Her mouth waters; her stomach cramps. She knows exactly how everything on that table would taste in her mouth, and her mind shrieks at her to force her way inside, to gorge herself. It had been easier to starve when there was so little to eat, and so little that appealed. But these vegetables are plump and fresh, not dried and stored through the winter, somehow uneaten until this very moment at the height of summer.
Fresh ones, not grown in the castle gardens, because those have all been picked clean. Nothing to flower, nothing to fruit.
They’re from somewhere else.
When? How? Perhaps Phosyne missed the moments the gates were raised, but for somebody to have reached them at all without cries of death out on the walls—no, she’s missing something.
Phosyne’s rotting breath fills her nose, and is acrid enough tomake her duck down, take shelter, instead of staring like a desperate fool. Her stomach riots, but her higher faculties resume control.Greenmeans outside. These strange visitors, then, have come from outside and have brought offerings. So many offerings that the tables looked ready to groan.
A miracle. Food, and the hand of what appears to be the Constant Lady.
And yet, no sign of the Priory.
For just a moment, she thinks to run to Jacynde and ask if she, too, can feel the wrongness. If that’s why she keeps her distance. Of course, that presumes she canrun, and that Jacynde’s creatures would let her near.
Still, she makes herself stand up. Makes herself leave all that bounty, and staggers to the walls for a closer look at the world beyond.
In the eight months she has lived in Aymar castle, even before the siege, she has rarely wandered. Her room is her sanctuary. She knows almost nobody in the castle household, let alone the refugees or the king’s contingent. There’s nobody she can go to, except perhaps for Ser Voyne and Ser Leodegardis, to ask what is happening.
But when she reaches the gatehouse, the shadows wrap around her, and she goes unseen as she listens in.
Three guards in armor sit around a pitted table, all perched on wobbling stools.
“Georgie didn’t do it,” the redhead is saying, throwing down worn cards on the table. “And I didn’t do it. And I don’t know that anybody could’ve done it without somebody noticing, that winch can’t be moved on its own—”
“But they’re here,” says the one with the coiled dark hair. “Somebody must’ve. If a door’s not open, no one’s getting in. And if theycanget in, then we’re all fucked, because Etrebia could just march right up here and—”
“We’d skewer ’em before they got close,” says the angry one, and their fury seems to bleed through the rock and into Phosyne’s cheek, and she is panting, and—
She realizes, suddenly, that even if the shadows abandoned her,they would not see her; she is pressed against the stone wall on theoutsideof the gatehouse.
She doesn’t know how she can see them, hear them, and suddenly she can’t anymore. But that is for tomorrow, or the next day, after she deals with the more obvious terror:
Nobody opened the gates.
Nobody opened the gates, and yet there are four strangers within Aymar’s walls, gentle and kind and beautiful, and they are allowed to move about under their own power. They areguests. This makes no sense. Phosyne has been kept up in her tower, and Ser Leodegardisknowsher. He saw her walk into this castle under her own power. The gates were open, then.
But they are closed now, and surrounded by a heavy earthen wall manned by enemy soldiers, and how,howcould anybody make it all the way along the path that leads from the plain beyond up to the gates of Aymar without anybody on either side noticing?
They are not natural. They are not people in costume, or people at all. Phosyne knows that with a galling certainty that makes her head spin, the same certainty that tells her what the guards inside the room look and feel like. She pushes herself up off the ground (When did she kneel? When did she fall?) and nearly vomits, but keeps whatever bile is left to her down. She staggers back toward the upper bailey, the safety of her tower, the comfort of the wicked creatures that reside in her workspace.
But that thought brings her up short, too. She slows. Leans hard against an inner crenelation, hopes nobody with a bow sees her weaving shadow.
Pneio and Ornuo appeared, as if from nowhere. The gates did not open, but suddenly she was den mother to two creatures she has never seen before, never read of. They came to her fromsomewhere, just as her theories about the purification of water, just as the technique by which she can light a candle and have it burn without using up its fuel.
Her stomach sours far beyond its physical pangs.
These saints are here by her hand, and she doesn’t know how she did it.
