Page 93 of The Starving Saints
“Come,” he says. “My Lady has need of you.”
Voyne grips the hammer harder. She feels something ooze from the punctures. Blood, honey, something else? “I have no need of yourLady.”
He considers this, taking her measure. Can he see Phosyne’s touch still on her?
He holds in one hand a piece of ripe fruit. It glistens with juice. Her stomach roars in answer to it.
The Warding Saint extends his hand to her. “Eat,” he says. “You will feel better if you eat. The little mouse won’t hold your lead anymore. She is a far crueler mistress, isn’t she? No art to it, no kindness. She doesn’t care what you want, does she?”
It’s a transparent ploy, and yet Voyne is still tempted. She is, in herheart, tired. What can one hammer do against the writhing mass of hunger before her? And what can one madwoman, sitting on a throne and ordering Voyne to kiss her when they both remain in danger, really offer for protection?
But Voyne is sick to death of following orders. Any orders.
The hammer cracks into the Warding Saint’s head like his skull is only as thick as an eggshell.
He falls at her feet, howling, writhing, the crater smoking with a bitter stench. Honey spills out of him like blood. She falls to her knees and brings the hammer down again, again, into his cheek, his orbit, his jaw. He splinters and falls to pieces. She slams the iron down into every chink in his armor, pulps every exposed inch. He howls until the last. He spasms. He sobs.
His armor is not as heavy as it should be, and is not made of steel. The buckles do not work well; they are poorly made, poorly balanced. The straps don’t feed smoothly through them. She knew this from the start. She saw this the first day they arrived.
She didn’t know to be afraid of it.
Still, she strips it off his body, belts it all in place on hers. It’s just pageantry, but it makes her spine a little straighter, a little stronger. She hefts the hammer in her hand, dripping as it is with honey, and looks out in challenge at the prowling host before her. She sees a face, two faces, three. They are gone as quickly as they appeared.
They are not the only things moving. The tableaus have broken apart. People, people she is sworn to protect, are edging closer. She wants to open her arms to them. Take charge. Tell them she is here to right these wrongs.
But behind her, the door to the smithy hangs open. She hears Theophrane shouting her name. Begging.
She stands, head spinning. At her back, her audience is prowling closer; she can feel it in the hot pepper breath that gusts around her. She can hear the crack of bone as they devour the offering she has made for them. They feast upon their own; they make no distinction.
Her world is shaking at the seams. She has done something wrong. Her gut twists.
In front of her, she sees bodies. A mass of bodies. Farmers andtrappers and cartwrights and shop clerks, unwashed and half-starved and piling into the smithy. They rush through the door like a wave.
She can make out every hair on their heads, smell the stink of their bodies, and when she looks at them she doesn’t feel drunk or drifting.
They are human, only human, but they tear Theophrane apart all the same.
39
It’s daylight outside the keep, but Treila barely notices until she sees that the mortal inhabitants of Aymar are awake once more, and it is easier to find her way.
Easier, but far more exposed. She wants shadows. She wants darkness. She doesn’t want this target painted on her back. It is so much worse to flee from monsters in the light of day.
If the Loving Saint is still seeking her, though, there is no sign. She doesn’t risk looking back as she plunges into the press of bodies before her. There are so many. They are all distracted, all with juice- and blood-stained lips, all clamoring for sustenance. For salvation. Who they turn to changes. In one knot of humanity, it is a child, counting out beans in the dirt, offering one out of every ten to the ravenous crowd around his feet. In another, it’s a tangle of three men, mouths open with pleasure, flesh sticking and sliding in a mess of blood and sweat. As long as Treila presses toward the center, and then allows herself to be pushed back out on the other side, nobody notices. Nobody cares.
But that doesn’t mean she’s safe. One moment she can see half again as many bodies, though they are thin and insubstantial, and in the next, they are gone completely. Her head spins. The whole world tries to spin with it, but at the wrong rate, blurring and doubling.
Unacceptable. She jerks her head once, lips curling in a snarl, and forces herself to look. The seasons refuse to progress, time continues to unspool, but she ishereand she will make sense of it, the way she has made sense of all the rest.
The world rights itself between one blink and the next.
She is, of course, not alone.
The rest of the Loving Saint’s kind are scattered throughout the yards. They look like paintings, unearthly and flat. They should be incapable of movement, but they aren’t. Their limbs, when they have limbs, slide and jerk and reconfigure as they prowl across the yard. Most ignore her, but a few look up at her attention. With hunger. Without her saint’s mark on her, they will hunt her down and eat her. She knows that, better than she knows anything.
And he will not be far behind them. She can practically feel his hot breath on her neck already.
So she ignores the damned arrayed before her and dives, instead, into the walled garden. It will lead her back inside, through the kitchen door. Inside is safer. Inside is less exposed.
