It’s tempting to believe Phosyne is speaking to herself. She wants to haul Phosyne back up to the tower, where she belongs. Phosyne herself had cemented that in her mind, somehow, in the chapel.

After she—

After she—

Ser Voyne makes herself face it fully: after she carved the prioress’s tongue from her mouth and gave it to the Absolving Saint to take back to the Constant Lady. To eat.

It’s like reaching a fire after a day out in whipping snow. It hurts. But the pain turns to an ache turns to some measure of restored movement.

But as she passes the next window, a glint of gold in the night catches her eye. She knows she can’t afford to stop, but she slows, and then she sees him: Cardimir, out in the upper yard, attended by two saints, his crown upon his head. Fires have been lit, sending everything into stark, unsettling relief. The Absolving Saint and the Warding Saint stand close by; the Warding Saint clutches one of Cardimir’s servants, a woman Voyne knows. Her skirt is hiked up above one leg, baring her thigh.

The Absolving Saint kneels before her, and touches her vulnerable skin. Her head lolls back. Red blooms where the Absolving Saint touches, enough blood that Voyne can see it from here as it falls into a goblet. The same one she has sipped honeyed wine from so many times in the past. There is a ring of people around the horror show, watching, kneeling, adoring. Nobody moves to stop any of it.

The Absolving Saint stands. He draws what might be honeycomb from his sleeve, crushes it into the cup. And Cardimir, without hesitation and with an easy air, takes the goblet and begins to drink.

Disgust wells in her. Disgust, and terror, and a bright urge to race out into the yard, to lunge at the saints, to rescue her king.

Except he doesn’t appear to want rescuing.

Neither did you, she reminds herself. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t protest. She didn’t even pause to consider who she had been eating.

Her stomach lurches.

A hand seizes her elbow. She recoils, hissing, but it is only Phosyne. “Come on, we don’t have much time,” Phosyne says. A feeling of weighty silence follows on, and then Phosyne shakes her head. “Our friend says to tell you that he’s hardly worth saving. But more importantly, they will stop you if you go to him. Or they will make you hold the cup.”

Voyne flinches.

She wants to close her eyes as she resumes her descent. She doesn’t want to see herself fleeing.