Page 92 of The Starving Saints
When she looks back up at him, she can see them, the purpling bruises on his face, his throat. She dragged him out of this building, threw him down, ordered him to eat. His fellows had held him, then, when she left to resume her patrol.
“I wasn’t myself,” she protests, half apology.
He doesn’t care. She can’t blame him.
“And you won’t be yourself again soon enough,” he mutters. He is so thin. He is starving. He doesn’t look at all like the people out in the yard.
“Did you eat?” she asks.
He grimaces. It bares all his teeth. “They tried to make me.”
“But?”
“But it all came right back up. It turned to ash in my mouth.” Theophrane hesitates. His beard has gone patchy over the last six months. “Maybe—maybe it would’ve been better if it hadn’t. I wouldn’t know, then, would I? What’s happening out there?”
“No,” Voyne says. “No, you wouldn’t.”
And wouldn’t it have been easier if she didn’t know, either?
But she does. He does.
Silence stretches between them, broken only by the occasional ecstatic cry from without.
“They hate iron,” Theophrane says at last. “At least, I think it’s the iron. It’s the only thing I can figure that saved me.” He displays one muscle-corded forearm. His skin is flecked all over with what looks like soot, until Voyne realizes it’s not on the surface of his flesh, but underneath. The blurred edges come not from particulate but from the lens of skin.
“It gets in you,” Theophrane says with a bitter twitch of his lips. “Iron filings, all the rest, in with the burns. Unavoidable. But when one of those things tried to take a bite of me, it slagged its jaw. I built the ring after. They haven’t gotten close since.”
“Iron,” Voyne repeats. She thinks of her sword, skewering Jacynde. All the iron that they gave to the Priory, that was melted down and turned into ammunition. So much lost armor. So many lost weapons. Even the few iron nails in this place, stripped from their moorings, given to Theophrane to melt down and repurpose.
All gone, now, gone over the walls.
And the false saints came in its absence. The False Lady and the bees that have gone mad with Her arrival kept Voyne from her sword. It makes sense, now.
She can use this.
“One piece,” she says, rising to her feet. “Give me one piece from your ring. Anything. I can use it. I will fight them.” It’s as good as a sword, if what Theophrane says is true. If it isn’t, he loses nothing, not really. “Whatever you can spare. Please.”
He glares. He does not move.
“I can take it,” Voyne adds, voice softening, “or you can give it.”
She is stronger than he is. She’s been kept better fed, even before the saints arrived. Not, she understands now, so that she could protect her liege, but because she was a prized possession, and it would not do to let her waste away. So honeyed wine and the last of the cheeses were for her. She feels guilty, so guilty, but not enough to surrender her strength for it.
In another life, Theophrane might have looked on her as his salvation. The hope of rescue. But instead, even as he pulls something from the pile, he glares at her with hatred.
He tosses his offering at her feet. It’s a hammer. Small. The head is rough iron, the handle worn wood. It’s well-loved, but useless now, if only because the metal makes up such a small portion of it.
She doesn’t look away from him as she crouches and picks it up. Her fingers are thick and swollen, stingers still embedded; the joints almost don’t close around the handle. But she doesn’t look away, even as she straightens, retreats to the door.
“Your little witch did this, didn’t she?” he asks. “You should have killed her that day she nearly lit my shop on fire.”
“It was already too late,” Voyne tells him.
His expression shutters. He draws tight within himself.
Voyne opens the smithy door and steps back into the blistering sun.
The Warding Saint is waiting for her. At his heels are the shifting, refracting shapes of a hundred observers.
