Page 6 of The Starving Saints
“So that she can conjure food from nothing?” she asks, brow pinching. She searches her king’s face for some scrap of sense. She finds it. He is confident and calm.
That’s a hundred times worse than misguided faith.
“What is a second miracle after a first?” he asks with an indulgent smile that makes Voyne feel small, childlike. She hates that smile, and if she were not so worn down, so stunned, she would bristle at it. Instead, she just shakes her head, helpless, not understanding. He takes pity on her. “She is to be thanked for fixing our water issue last month,” Cardimir says.
Voyne’s world lurches into a new alignment. She frowns. “But the Priory—”
“Agreed to take responsibility, in case there was a problem. And in case it worked. Nobody would have trusted the cisterns if they knew a heretic was responsible for clearing them.” He waves a hand. “She is... a wild thing. One of Jacynde’s order, originally, but strayed. Jacynde hates her, but Leodegardis is adamant in his patronage, and she has paid her way admirably so far.”
That gives her pause.
Because the water issue of last month was also an impossible solution to an impossible problem. Aymar’s location was strong, but its strength had nearly been their undoing. Built on a rocky outcropping, the castle’s only source of water was rain and a single well in the lower yard. The rains had stopped months ago as summer rolled in. The cisterns had begun to dry out, so they’d hauled water up and out, up and out, before the well could dry, too.
With that water, so desperately needed, had come pestilence. It had begun slowly, a few children beginning to vomit, low fevers rolling through, and in their meetings, they had steeled themselves for the sorts of illness that spread among the closely packed. They let the Priory step in, begin segregating the ill, treating them, fumigating the castle with cloying incense.
They had known, at least, that it couldn’t be the water. Water pulled from stone was clean. The cisterns were capped and guarded. It couldn’t be the water.
But it was.
As the well’s level had dropped, the water had turned foul, and they had spread that foulness to every cistern. At first, the water had tasted normal, had looked clear, but eventually the buckets they hauled up stank of shit. There was no other water.
And then, a miracle. Jacynde’s nuns had created a powder that, when mixed with the water, caused the water to heave and shudder and shine with wondrous colors, before finally turning clear and odorless again. Leodegardis had ordered his household to test the cleared water themselves, and when they did not sicken further, when they grew hale once more, the cisterns were cleared.
Voyne reflects that she has not actually tasted the cleared cistern water; there is another tank, one that captured rain before the summer began to dry, that lives just below the madwoman’s room. It delivers clean water via a pipe into the kitchen, and Cardimir drinks from it exclusively, as does she.
Just in case.
Knowing now that it was not the Priory that solved their woes, but this strange, gaunt wraith of a woman who has somehow bewitched her king, Voyne is glad for their caution.
She scrubs at her face, sitting back on her heels. “What of the Priory’s new invention?” she asks, testing out the new landscape beneath her. “Do we also have this madwoman to thank for taking our iron from us?”
Leaving us ill-armed to repel an attack?she does not add.
“That was Jacynde’s order,” the king assures, and the world slows its spin, settling into its new configuration with a groan. It’s only a little off-kilter. “But I do not doubt she could have derived something similar. And until Etrebia strikes again, we have far more need of food. You know this, Ser Voyne.”
“I do, my liege,” she says, then takes a deep breath. Tries to be grateful for the clean water, hopeful formiracles. It does not sit well in her practical breast, which burns instead for a blade, a battle plan.
This will have to suffice.
“What will you have me do?” she asks.
“Her name is Phosyne,” Cardimir tells her. “I want you to go to her tomorrow. Do not let her out of your sight, and do not let her remain idle. Reassure me that she is working as hard as she can. We have only enough time for results.”
She wants to say no, wants instead to askhimto send her away as a messenger. It would be a better use of her skills. But if he is right, if this Phosyne has worked one miracle already and only needs help to produce another—
She can trade one escort for another. A king is not so different from a madwoman.
“Yes, my liege,” she says.
3
Aymar Castle does not quiet with the setting of the sun. Soon, moans of hunger will echo through the halls, and even now people are restless. Few are sleeping, though there is little to do for those not on guard duty, no candles to see by. Some attend the evening Priory service. More sit and talk in window niches, looking nervously toward the walls, half expecting another night assault, though Etrebia has not moved in a fortnight. They argue about trivial things enlarged by the growling of their stomachs. They search for scraps of food in the empty dirt.
Treila prowls.
There is an art to catching rats. It is not one she learned in childhood, but she has become quite proficient. So proficient, in fact, that what little money changes hands inside these walls eventually makes its way to her, in exchange for one, three, five cooling bodies. Most think that rat-catching requires bait, and that would be the easiest option by far, but this is not the first time Treila has faced down starvation and survived it. She knows how to entice when she has nothing left to give.
Or, more accurately, how to spot something a rat would want and set a trap to waylay it.
