And it is so like the night of the feast, when she enters the great warm room. It feels like the whole of the castle is concentrated here, though Treila knows that to be impossible. The walls could not contain them all. But the crush of bodies is so much tighter and hotter than it was the night of the feast, and the yard outside so empty.

Treila, shivering, pushes her way in. Every brush of skin against skin makes her flinch. She waits for one of the faces to turn, to see her with the Loving Saint’s piercing eyes, or the golden blank hunger of the beasts, but there is only mindless rapture. Nobody cares that she steps on their feet, that she crushes them into their neighbor. Nobody reacts at all, except to let her pass.

And then the bodies begin to thin. Each step becomes a little easier. Treila stops just short of falling out of the press of bodies entirely, held up by a flash of yellow—the Lady’s face, turned away from her, gazing out to the center of the clearing.

Phosyne stands before Her.

Before them both, the king hangs upside down. He is naked, pale, just a man.

Less than a man; Phosyne has opened his belly, and his organs lie at her feet on golden platters. They have been carefully sorted. His kidneys gleam. His liver glistens. His heart still seems to beat, though Treila is sure that is only a trick of the light, or of her own rising gorge.

In Phosyne’s hand is a knife not made of iron but of bone. It is sharp, though; she is flensing the skin from Cardimir’s corpse with casual flicks of her wrist. She is focused, wholly, on her work, reducing a great man to nothing more than a hanging side of meat.

She is fascinated. Treila can see it in her eyes, when at last she wises up and focuses on the butcher instead of the butchered. It’s easier.

And it means she’s looking when Phosyne at last realizes that Treila is there.

It’s a subtle shift. It’s shocking that it happens at all, Phosyne is so clearly enamored with her newest project, her newest investigation. She doesn’t stop, of course, but she moves through the rest of the flaying knowing that Treila is there. She joints the meat knowing that Treila is there. She presents each lovingly sectioned cut of flesh to the Absolving Saint knowing that Treila is there.

She speaks to the Lady, words swallowed up by the heat of the room, knowing that Treila is there.