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That need to act boils in her blood. It would feel so good. It would do no good at all.
“Drink,” he says. “One last comfort, before the horror.”
They were heroes together, for a time, planting their flags on conquered battlefields, making legends of themselves. Now they stare each other down across a vast gulf that grew when they weren’t looking.
She can trade one escort for another. A king is not so different from a madwoman.
this is not a mercenary transaction but a kindness. A mother is more likely to pay for kindness.
But he is trying to be strong and good, the way they describe boys in stories. She can see Edouart is wary of him, and she’s glad; it’s the strong and good ones who cause the most damage, in her experience.
It’s a learned frustration; she should know how to sleep like the dead when she has the chance, and instead she knows how to survive on so little sleep she might as well be dead.
They are close, closer than Phosyne meant for them to get, and her rib cage aches with how fast she is breathing, how hard her blood pulses in her veins. She hasn’t been so close to another person in months, maybe years, and for all her fury, she can’t look away from Ser Voyne’s blazing eyes. They’re a piercing shade of hazel, and they are so bright with answering fervor. Her whole imposing presence, her coiled, barely leashed threat, is making it impossible to think.
But the glow of the explosions of Etrebia’s siegecraft, the glow of the charcoal pile, is in Phosyne’s eyes as she says, triumphant, “I have an idea for a miracle.”
can do this. She can go by touch and instinct. She is a slippery thing of darkness, an eel in girl’s skin, and she is brave.
And what a balm those hymns are: predictable words, in predictable order, about how to find solace in an unpredictable world. The hymns preach order, measurement, constancy, when all the world is yet lost in chaos. To build a bed, a house, a nation is to create an anchor, something to hold on to.
They have made pacts with their fellow knights, If my body should fail before yours, you must take my flesh into your own, you must get out. But that was different. That was done with eyes wide open, among equals. Here, now—
There are so many things bound up with those words, to care for. Phosyne sees them like threads, winding tight around Voyne, biting into her exposed skin. She really needs her armor, Phosyne thinks. She doesn’t know how to exist without it.
it adds up to either greater fear, or the removal of fear. Neither make sense.
“Your king is not as good to you as he should be, perhaps. Does he not know what he has in you? The passion. The strength. You would break yourself open against every weapon Etrebia could bring to bear on you, and still push forward. You’d spear yourself on the blade and keep walking, until you could wring the life from their necks. Wouldn’t you?”
A miracle so profound may be indistinguishable from horror.
It’s very similar to how she chases down her ideas. They come out of nowhere, in sudden flashes, and she is helpless to do anything but pursue them.
Phosyne leans into her. Drags her hands along the muscles of her arms, corded and tense. There’s anger there. Good. She should be angry. If she could see the mess they’re in, she would be raging, and she would be beautiful in her rage.
“How do you untangle madness from reality?” she asks instead.
But this creature is a clever sort, and just like with Phosyne on the ground beneath her, she finds she likes being seen for what she is: a threat.
She’s curious about that fury in the Lady’s eyes. About what, exactly, this creature under her hands is. About how it would feel for him to don Ser Voyne’s guise again, and sink to his knees, and . . . “If you stay,” he says, eyes shining in the evening light, “it is eat or be eaten. But I promise I’ll make it good.”
This time, Voyne feels the compulsion crash into her. Her shoulders rock as she tries to control her breathing, resist it. But it doesn’t work, because she’s too busy being confused that Phosyne wants this, wants her to cage her against the wall, exude all of Voyne’s greater physical strength and all her intimidation. But then she remembers Phosyne against the chapel wall, and how, at first, Voyne was certain she was enjoying being choked.
Phosyne purses her lips. “Go up first,” Phosyne says. “Use me as—as a handhold. A ladder.” And there’s that compulsion. She grits her teeth. “Don’t,” she snaps. “I can’t—” Because now all she can hear is use me use me use me and that is not useful in the slightest.
What happened to her, down in the revels? There are lurid suck-marks on her throat that weren’t there earlier. A brush with the chaos, then. A seduction. Phosyne only hopes she’s kept her head.
Everything feels strange, and she’s not even sure who she is, anymore. That thought isn’t hers. It’s more like scales being peeled up. Something slipping out from underneath. She hisses.
then the sun had caught on the water a certain way, and she’d been able to taste it without dipping a hand in to drink, had heard the quality of the light on the surface and down, lower, where she could not see.
“Can you feel the urgency in your own words? The press of muscle that is not muscle, the slide of conjuration? When you purify your waters, what does it taste like, the notes that you sing into being?” The Lady’s eyes are still closed as She recites this litany, lips curling, pleased and pleasing. “Do you even know what it is you do to the world?”
She has seen so much suffering. She has been the instrument of it so many times: the edge of the blade, the lick of the flame.
She has sacrificed her body on the altar of knowledge. But the Lady hasn’t. So it’s not required.
His beautiful face doesn’t shift, but the tension that dances between them has a different edge, now. He, like all the rest, is hungry, and he watches her with the eyes of a shrike, prepared to impale her on barbed thorns to keep her all to himself as he tears her to pieces. The creature who cocks his head and scents the air is something old. He smiles, and his teeth are sharp. “I’d recommend you run, little girl.”
She opens her eyes and gazes up, even as the water stings her corneas. She opens her lips, and lets the water scour away the last of the honey.
While the Lady and Her saints are so terribly close to human, these things are smoke and scent. They echo with the same salivating lust, but lack their betters’ table manners. Flashes of color, flashes of light, there and gone again, flat in one moment, fulsome in the next as claws rake over her back.
Simplicity is a lie. Service is never easy, not when done right.
(Foolish girl, she tries to tell herself. But with only one ear, she barely hears it.)
Phosyne glances up at her, and for a second, there is both the disjointed mess of a girl and the frightening lick of a flame.
Treila de Batrolin, fierce and broken, kisses like she is dying.
“I sup on flesh and bone, petal and root, the same as you, but more rarified things besides: lust and longing, fear and ecstasy.”
What she wants, what she truly wants, is to unspool time. Go back to when Voyne was alive and they were curled together in the garden.
Treila lets herself be swept up in it, if only to obliterate herself a little longer, so that no prying eyes might find her.
“But as sweet as it would be to eat you with your dead knight’s face,” he sighs, and Voyne’s colors begin to bleed from him, his hair begins to lengthen, “I find I’m sick of playing to your fancies.” His teeth sharpen. His eyes gleam in the dark, catching the moonlight.
The monsters’ laughter is everywhere. And behind them, riding the wave of their bloodlust, is the Loving Saint, grinning, scenting the air, drinking in her terror. Her missing ear surges with the roaring buzz of a thousand bees, loud enough to deafen.
“You never give up, do you?” he asks. “I was going to kill you gently, eat you sweetly, but that wouldn’t do you justice. You wretched, vicious little thing.”
In his chest is a snarled thicket of a stomach, hungry, aching, desperate. And inside of her is a prism, a flashing diamond: heavy and unmoving, the result of every time she refused to abandon herself, no matter the guise she chose to wear.
Her teeth pierce the pale, lovely column of his throat. They crack through his windpipe even as blood surges into her mouth, coats her tongue, drowns her in sticky sweetness. Sweet. Like honey. There’s no trace of iron, and she laughs, fierce and jagged, because of course there is no iron in his veins. He is screaming. The noise gurgles, shrill against her tongue. She bites again, and again, chews and swallows, even as he thrashes beneath her. Her nails pierce his clothing, his skin. She claws him until his flesh is ribbons, until she is painting them both with his blood. They are on the
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The taste of all these lives has opened a yawning pit inside of her. They all hold hunger in their bellies, and it is amplified, sharpened within the crucible of her skull. What is falling through the stone as if it were water before this? What is seeing the boundaries of her little room compared with the whole world stretched out before her? She wants to know all of it. She wants to touch it all, grasp it, bend it before her. The world is vast, and suddenly she is at the pinnacle of it, and she knows so little.
“You’d take everything if you could,” the Lady murmurs. “And you can. You are a black hole, little mouse. Endlessly hungry, endlessly, and all you had to do was notice it. How does it feel? Is it good?”
