Leodegardis doesn’t promise, but he also doesn’t foreswear her. “Go rest,” he says instead, offering a tired smile. “It’s almost time for evening service, I think. Perhaps the Lady will grant you some comfort.”

A good suggestion, and kindly meant. She clasps his shoulder, then leaves him to his nightmares. They all feel it, the weight of death bearing down on Aymar, but he is Aymar. They are all about to die, and she is about to fail, but he is about to crumble.

She winds her way through the keep and to the chapel tower. Jacynde’s nuns are indeed hard at work, ready to guide the few parishioners who are here to observe the setting sun. Voyne, grateful, lets the familiar words and hymns wash over her. It isn’t the balm it used to be, back when she was young and idealistic and fervent in her belief that the world could ever be orderly, could ever make sense, but it still soothes her jagged edges. It is a relief, to be reminded that she isn’t alone, is never alone. The Constant Lady always has a hand upon the world.

After, she makes her way up uneven staircases long-since memorized, twists and turns as familiar as the halls she played in as a child. Few rushlights burn, but there is midsummer moonlight streaming through windows, more than enough to guide her by. She steps aside to let a serving girl pass, then takes the final turning to reach what used to be Leodegardis’s room, now given over to Cardimir, to Voyne, to their servants. A little household for the king, shut up in a keep and starving quietly, only a little slower than all the rest.

She slips inside, and is surprised to see Cardimir waiting for her.

He sits by the hearth, where there’s no fire thanks to how warm and sticky the air is. “Come,” he says, voice pitched so as not to wake the servants who have already bedded down in their partitioned section of the room. Voyne goes to him, kneels before him in greeting. He touches her shoulder absently, the one that hurts, the one that is scarred from an arrow she took for him years ago.

“I had forgotten,” he murmurs, “the power of your presence.”

“You saw the riot?” she asks.

“Through the strangest vantage point,” he says. “What do you know of Leodegardis’s madwoman?”

“The heretic?” she asks. “Very little. Only that she arrived a few months before we did.” It hadn’t felt important to learn more, no matter Leodegardis’s odd affection for the woman.

But the entrance to her tower room is not so far away. Voyne has seen the woman a few times, drawn and furtive and skulking. Her eyes drift in that direction.

“I have charged her with finding a way to restock the quartermaster’s stores,” he says. “Now that our other options have run out.”