She doesn’t look away from him as she crouches and picks it up. Her fingers are thick and swollen, stingers still embedded; the joints almost don’t close around the handle. But she doesn’t look away, even as she straightens, retreats to the door.

“Your little witch did this, didn’t she?” he asks. “You should have killed her that day she nearly lit my shop on fire.”

“It was already too late,” Voyne tells him.

His expression shutters. He draws tight within himself.

Voyne opens the smithy door and steps back into the blistering sun.

The Warding Saint is waiting for her. At his heels are the shifting, refracting shapes of a hundred observers.

“Come,” he says. “My Lady has need of you.”

Voyne grips the hammer harder. She feels something ooze from the punctures. Blood, honey, something else? “I have no need of your Lady.”

He considers this, taking her measure. Can he see Phosyne’s touch still on her?

He holds in one hand a piece of ripe fruit. It glistens with juice. Her stomach roars in answer to it.

The Warding Saint extends his hand to her. “Eat,” he says. “You will feel better if you eat. The little mouse won’t hold your lead anymore. She is a far crueler mistress, isn’t she? No art to it, no kindness. She doesn’t care what you want, does she?”

It’s a transparent ploy, and yet Voyne is still tempted. She is, in her heart, tired. What can one hammer do against the writhing mass of hunger before her? And what can one madwoman, sitting on a throne and ordering Voyne to kiss her when they both remain in danger, really offer for protection?

But Voyne is sick to death of following orders. Any orders.

The hammer cracks into the Warding Saint’s head like his skull is only as thick as an eggshell.

He falls at her feet, howling, writhing, the crater smoking with a bitter stench. Honey spills out of him like blood. She falls to her knees and brings the hammer down again, again, into his cheek, his orbit, his jaw. He splinters and falls to pieces. She slams the iron down into every chink in his armor, pulps every exposed inch. He howls until the last. He spasms. He sobs.

His armor is not as heavy as it should be, and is not made of steel. The buckles do not work well; they are poorly made, poorly balanced. The straps don’t feed smoothly through them. She knew this from the start. She saw this the first day they arrived.

She didn’t know to be afraid of it.