Page 80 of The Starving Saints
Just like when the creature in the dark grew angry that she’d learned the rules of the game elsewhere, the Loving Saint’s knee-jerk response tells her more than any words. These two predators are territorial, and they don’t like knowing they aren’t alone in this little fiefdom.
She ponders her next question, turns it over like a coin across her knuckles. The humid night air has resolved around her into summer, certainly, so there’s no point in mentioning that she knows it’s autumn beyond the walls. But if time does not flow at the same rate here as it does in the world at large, she might have been gone for—who knows?
“What did I miss?” Treila settles on. It’s just coy enough that he’ll enjoy it.
He huffs something that might be a laugh. He’s on his hands and knees beside her, and he prowls a step up, then glances back over his shoulder to her. “The wizard in the tower is learning how to walk the tightrope.”
That can mean nothing good. But she hasn’t toppled yet. That’s something.
Treila wriggles onto her hip. The stairs aren’t particularly wide. It’s a long fall down. He’s on the outside; she could push him. She wonders if he would fall, and if he did, if it would matter. “How many feasts have gone by without me?”
“It never really ends,” he replies. “But don’t you want to know about your knight, too?”
“She isn’t mine,” Treila says, too quickly. She feels exposed after.
He just grins. “She’s been on the prowl,” he tells her. “Looking for answers. Looking for something to fight. Looking, I think, for her sword.”
His gaze drifts to the doorway, and Treila’s follows. She creeps forward, enough that she can see somebody moving in the gloom. Not Ser Voyne, though. No, whoever it is has a shorn head, and is unsteady on her feet. Treila can hear her rasping, roughshod breathing.
The prioress, she realizes, weak and staggering.
And then there is a laugh, sliding through the humming of her missing ear, and a wash of sunlight. The Constant Lady steps into the throne room. Treila strains to see more.
But the Loving Saint catches hold of her arm and pulls her back. “It’s not safe in there,” he murmurs, body warm against her back. “Better to watch the shadow play.”
“They wouldn’t know I was there,” Treila argues, but goes still all the same. The Loving Saint’s hands stroke over her hips. His mouth falls to her neck, featherlight. She should kick him for his troubles, but it feels good. Indulgent and sweet, with a blistering edge.
She strains to hear words. There is the soft murmur of one voice only, the Lady’s, and then a wet, slick sound, a wail, a thud.
Treila knows those sounds, though not in that order; by the time her father’s head was parted from his shoulders, he could no longer scream. Her skin goes cold. Insensate. The buzzing in her ears turns all-consuming, obliterating.
It is the sound of bees, erupting from the hive, swarming over her, piercing her flesh.
“Where’s your mind gone to?” the Loving Saint asks, taking her chin, dragging her out of the dark. “Somewhere frigid and angry.”
Foolish girl, she thinks, viciously. But she’s shaking now. She can’t help it. Five years. Five years, and she shouldn’t be so reactive. She is better than this. She has made herself better than this.
“What was done to you?” he murmurs. “What did they take from you? I can smell the scent of snow on your breath. Snow, and blood. Your winter woods.” He pets her sides, and she can feel him wriggling, peeling, untangling. He is searching for that core of her, that thing that makes her dangerous, that element the Lady cannot predict. He thinks he is going to find it. “What are you remembering?”
She makes herself soften. Be easy for him. “Only bad dreams,” she says. “Of when I had a tender heart.”
“Is that why you run away so readily?” he asks, nuzzling at her pulse.
“You told me to go,” she reminds him. Her breath catches in her throat.
“And yet you came back. Changeable thing. We’re not so different, I think, you and I.” She can feel his smile against her skin, and the lightest brush of teeth. She doesn’t flinch. “Why did you return?”
“I wanted to.” It is the truest answer, if not so simple as it sounds. She toys with options, angles she can show him. What would intrigue him? What would keep her safest? What would make him spill some new detail?
“Your knight calls to you so loudly?” he asks, and oh, she hasn’t led him far enough astray at all.
“I want towin,” she says, too quickly, too honestly, as she turns to face him, reclining across the steps. She came back to prove she was clever enough, quick enough, not only to get out alive, but to salvage something of value. Save a few other lives, even though nobody had come back for her after her father’s death. But that isn’t the whole of it.
If it were, the mention of Ser Voyne wouldn’t gall her so deeply.
She’s still clinging to girlish dreams of revenge, even now that they’re pointless. Sentimental loathing, useless here. She tenses under his touch, half expecting him to grip her harder. To fall upon that show of weakness.
But he doesn’t.
