She has no control over herself as she stalks through the water, and it makes her breath come sharp and thin. It doesn’t feel like prowling the keep for the Lady (though remembering how, exactly, it felt is like trying to grab hold of a dream), but she is sure it didn’t feel this wrong. This uncontrollable. No, she’d thought she was in perfect control.

Right now, she knows she is a puppet.

She reaches Phosyne. She bares her teeth. “Don’t do that again,” Ser Voyne growls. It’s half warning, half plea.

Phosyne stares, confused. Then she nods. “No, of course not,” she says. She licks her lip, brow furrowing in thought, before finally turning and gesturing at the wall. “If I lift you, can you reach the top, do you think?”

Voyne snorts. “I don’t think you can lift me.” But the idea does have merit. “Reverse it. I lift you up, you go get help, get a ladder.”

“And I get dragged back to the great hall again, and you’re stuck here until your Lady comes to fetch you?” Phosyne’s tone is not kind, but Voyne figures she earned that. She’s right, after all: when they go up, Voyne needs to be first out. She needs to assess the situation, figure out the best options available. Otherwise, they’ll both be lost again, and Voyne isn’t sure if she can claw her way back without the madwoman at her side.

“You’re right,” she concedes. Best to be practical and honest, here, even if she’s burning with shame, immolating from the inside out. Even if her head still hurts and her mind threatens to spin apart at the slightest breath. “The problem remains, however, that you haven’t eaten in days and, even if you had, the heaviest thing you’ve lifted in a month is your chamber pot.”

And Phosyne hasn’t lifted even that since Voyne took over her care and feeding.

Phosyne won’t look at her as she asks, “Do you have any better ideas?”

“No,” she admits. Still scowling, she thumps her hand against the rock.

Then she looks over at Phosyne curiously. “The chapel,” Ser Voyne says. She only remembers snatches. Less detail, even, than what she has done for the Lady, if only because it felt like her mind was being teased out through the fault lines of her skull. So many conflicting demands, concepts, desires. But she remembers Phosyne’s hand on her cheek. Her body against the rock. And then—nothing. Just the wall.

Seeing Phosyne outside the chapel, fleeing.

Phosyne, now, swallows thickly, then grimaces. “I already tried,” Phosyne says. “It isn’t working, whatever it was I did. And in the chapel, there was a place to land on the other side. I’ve already thought that one through.”