She presses them to either side, her hand now solid and the floor now insubstantial. The hole she carves is just wide enough to admit her bucket. That bucket is, of course, filled with waste, but a little powder and a quietly sung note, and the water she dumps it into is clear once more. She hauls up one full load, sets it on the floor safely away from the gap, and retrieves the candle that she cannot fully extinguish from the cup it is submerged in.

It flares to life. She strokes the flame. It grows hotter beneath her fingertips.

She plunges it into the bucket.

The water turns hot around her hand, steaming, scalding, enough to peel every layer of grime and filth up from the stone where she has worn it in with six months of pacing. A year of pacing, really; this room was hardly better before the siege began. But she knows how to keep a clean space. She kept her cell spotless all her years in the Priory, and isn’t sure just when she fell out of the habit.

That’s not true—she knows. It became less important to her the moment she tasted magic for the first time. The Lady was right about one thing: it is intoxicating, even as it has destroyed every aspect of her life, crushed it into dust, swept it away on the breeze. She has sacrificed her body on the altar of knowledge.

But the Lady hasn’t.

So it’s not required.

Phosyne turns the thought this way and that as she works, scrubbing and sweeping and dumping all the accumulated detritus out of her window. She’d call it a sanctifying, but that feels pretentious, even to her. At the very least, it is a clearing of the decks. She refamiliarizes herself with every inch of her rooms, every join of stone.

She stops when she reaches Jacynde.

The woman is, at last, stirring. Perhaps it’s the damp cloth still on her lips. Perhaps it’s just the time, the darkness that is flooding the room because Phosyne hasn’t bothered to light any lamps or candles, save the one that lives in the steaming bucket. Whatever it is, it’s making her eyes move below her closed, swollen lids, making her hands curl and grasp at the thin blanket below her.

Prioress Jacynde did not drag herself to Phosyne’s door. She was left there, by . . . who? It is possible, maybe even overwhelmingly so, that the nun who first called for Phosyne’s aid came back for it once more. That, faced with Jacynde insensate, not healing, she hauled the woman’s body to the door of the one person in the castle who might still be safe.

But.