Phosyne gasps in pain and her arms twitch. Again, it looks as if she holds something slender, like a cat, but there is nothing there. Another bit of her madness? Does she hallucinate, too? Or does the witch force the world out of its order? Spit in the Constant Lady’s face?

“Do not dare move, witch,” Voyne growls into her ear.

Phosyne tries to hunch, but Voyne drags her head back; she has no patience left to let Phosyne hide.

“I apologize,” the madwoman gasps out. “I didn’t mean—let me go. I’ll go back to my tower, the attack is over, I will go back to my work, please—”

And Voyne is out of patience. She slams Phosyne into the wall of the smithy.

“Give me one reason why I should not have you brought before my liege for nearly finishing Etrebia’s work,” she says, low and even into Phosyne’s ear. There is none. None at all. Whether Etrebia retreats or remains in the morning, Voyne will be quit of this insipid creature.

But the glow of the explosions of Etrebia’s siegecraft, the glow of the charcoal pile, is in Phosyne’s eyes as she says, triumphant, “I have an idea for a miracle.”

6

6

When the next dawn comes, Etrebia remains encamped.

Treila is not surprised; she has long given up on miracles. But Edouart and Simmonet are distraught. They thought their salvation was at hand, when the news spread through the tight press of bodies sheltering in the lowest levels of the keep. She’d taken them with her into her workroom, if only so she could get there quickly, make sure her little gap was safe, and had been kept up far past the end of the bombardment by their hopeful whispers.

They cry themselves to sleep each night, now that they know the truth: victory does not mean freedom, and they are all still starving.

Some died in the bombardment. There is a funeral the next day. Treila thinks that, had nobody died at all, the inhabitants at Aymar might have collapsed in on themselves in frustrated, aimless agony. Death provides catharsis. She knows that her own father’s murder gave her focus, in those first terrible days.

It was all she could see, as she scraped for bits of food, for makeshift shelter: her father on his knees before King Cardimir, her father’s neck bared to Ser Voyne’s sword. Her father’s young wife, so recently wed, begging for mercy. Her father silent, all his obscenities exhausted before dawn, when he was dragged from his bed, from his chambers, from his title. No longer Lord de Batrolin: the king had declared him a traitor, and so her entire world had been redefined.