Ser Leodegardis is given fine slivers of heart, presented by the Absolving Saint on milky porcelain. He flinches, though his red-rimmed eyes are empty of tears. All cried out before, Phosyne thinks, as she comes to sit across from him. She holds Treila’s knife in the folds of her robes. It is heavy against her thigh.

He is aware. Aware enough to recognize her, and what he has been served. But he’s still bewitched enough to feed himself. His shoulders tremble as he chews. His head bows as he swallows.

He’s not the only one in the hall who retains a small piece of himself. Ser Voyne had been busy, on her trip to the cistern. Her water has slaked the thirst of many, binding them subtly to Phosyne with every sip. But Leodegardis has had the lion’s share. He burns with twined loyalties, to the Lady and to Phosyne, so much like Voyne herself.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asks when he has clamped his hand against the wood of the table, as if to still it.

The Absolving Saint has disappeared back into the kitchen, and the Lady is missing. Phosyne has a moment. Below the table, she presses the knife into her lap.

“Not yet,” Phosyne says.

“Did you call them? These invaders. These jailers of ours.” He plainly has grasped that the thing wearing the Constant Lady’s form is something else, if only by Her actions.

“No.” Her lips twitch into an apologetic smile. “If I had, this would have turned out much differently.”

She thinks.

“When I took you in . . .” Leodegardis grimaces in pain, as if he has to fight to remember. She’s not sure if he’s fighting against the haze the Lady creates inside his mind, or his own guilt for everything that has transpired. “I didn’t mean to use you. Maybe I should have.”

“It would certainly have given me structure. Putting me in that room, giving me no purpose except to learn . . . things got out of hand, I think,” Phosyne says, and feels a pang of fondness for this man. He will not survive the night, she thinks. His other leg has been cut away. He is balanced in a nest of cushions, provided by the Absolving Saint. She oversaw the process, the negotiations. Leodegardis did not fight. In fact, he begged for them to do it, perhaps because he thought it would spare his king.

“But I do not think I can be used, not the way you would have liked,” she adds, more softly now. “My knowledge does not proceed linearly. It cannot be forced. It arises as some echo of another layer of reality, like a room adjoining this one without a door. I think . . .”