It’s strange, to wash Jacynde’s exposed scalp. To have this woman, prickly and powerful and angry, limp beneath her hands. Once, Jacynde was Phosyne’s entire world (though Jacynde barely noticed Phosyne until Phosyne had already begun to slip away). Her sermons and preferences and biases had shaped Phosyne’s life and belief. Had guided her through her faith.

Her faith is . . .

Her faith is complicated, even without considering the form of the Lady walking the castle walls Herself, instead of being carried as a statue in a litter. She’s fairly sure that her faith wasn’t always so complicated. There must have been months, years, when it was as simple as breathing—or, at least, simple enough that she could wrestle with her doubts within its confines. But then her mind had started to turn, and her research had shifted from waterwheels and pulley systems to the basest nature of water itself, because she’d heard it whisper.

Not literally, of course. But she’d been helping test a new dam design, ruminating on how much she could convince a river to change its nature, and 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.

From there, everything had fallen apart. Fallen together. She’d given up on structure. Her duties became less and less important than her theories, and she began acquiring books: fiction books, and recipe collections, and alchemical treatises that would have gotten her excommunicated.

Did get her excommunicated, eventually, along with all the rest that had gone wrong.

And where was her faith in all of that? There was no moment when it stopped, when she decided she no longer believed in the Lady or Her saints. She isn’t even sure that she doesn’t believe in them (the actual concept of them, not whatever is wearing their costumes). It just hardly seems to matter anymore.

At any rate, now Jacynde is just a woman, and a half-dead woman at that. Phosyne doesn’t know what to do. If the water doesn’t work, must she try something else? A way to restore vitality, or belief, or holiness?

That might be it. Jacynde’s holiness, her proximity to the ineffable, has been forcibly stripped away.

That doesn’t give Phosyne much hope that she can fix it.

Her musings are interrupted by a knock at her chamber door, and she forces herself up on creaking knees. Sunlight filters through the window in the loft with the character of midday, though Phosyne doesn’t think it’s been half so long as that.

But what does she know? She’s mad, isn’t she?