Outside, the wind echoes the heaving of their lungs, bursting against the face of the keep. The stairs rock and yaw beneath them, like nothing so much as a ship adrift. They are all adrift, here in the eye of Phosyne’s power, raw and terrible and tasting, unavoidably, of her.

A snap. A cry. Something else torn loose, tossed into the swirling abyss Voyne can see whenever she passes by an arrow slit.

Phosyne is far too light, and far from pliant. She isn’t trying to fight, Voyne reminds herself, but that doesn’t stop the paroxysms of pain and power from twisting her frail body, pitching her this way and that, making her spine bend and nearly crack as she howls.

Treila keeps casting wary looks back at them, and Voyne keeps her expression closed off.

She hopes they will reach the throne room. She has a suspicion this will only work in that space.

Voyne has learned a thing or two about negotiations, about oaths, about intent. Everything within these walls is an exchange; their horrible guests had only made it more literal. Power bargained for sustenance. Obligations forming the warp and weft of the world, reciprocal and definitional. She was, perhaps, the first to feel the truth of it, eating at the False Lady’s table, falling at Her feet. She’d come very close, she knows now, to freeing them all that first night. If she’d only kept her head, struck the False Lady instead of the Warding Saint, they could all still be slowly starving, waiting for the end.

That—that is all that waits for them on the other end, though. Voyne stops on the stairs, mere feet from the closed door to the throne room. Treila makes it a few more steps, then pauses with her hand on the wood. Glances over her shoulder.

“If I do this,” Voyne says, “if I break the siege, then what next?”

Treila quirks a brow. “Then we walk out of here.”

“Etrebia—”

“Is gone. I have seen it. We exist, in here, in a bubble. Beyond the gates is freedom, Voyne.”

Her mouth goes dry.

“The refugees,” she murmurs.

“Those that live,” Treila agrees, slowly, with a fine smile, so very much like a pleased cat’s, “have survived the worst siege in history, and will walk out with us. A fine trick, hm?”

A few nights’ horrors for salvation.

Voyne only prays they will not remember.

“Come,” Treila says. “Whatever you have planned, let’s do it quick. There’s one saint left in the keep, and while I am eager to tear his throat out too, I’m a little woozy.”

Voyne nods, and cradles Phosyne a little closer.

Phosyne whimpers, and presses her face to Voyne’s throat. Outside, lightning splits the sky, and one of the guard posts spins lazily in the air, shedding tables and chairs and, Voyne imagines, playing cards. A whole keep, rent apart.