A lesser girl would have been consumed by that grief, even as she and her stepmother and her father’s closest servants were thrust from the house, marched off the land and into the wilderness. A softer girl would have wept, and refused to walk, and starved.

Instead, she had taken the rage beneath the grief and used it to keep her going. The servants left, or died; her stepmother disappeared the first night, likely running back to the king to beg mercy once more. And Treila had kept walking.

Aymar has nowhere to go, though. Soon the grief will pass and the stomachs of its wretched inhabitants will remind them how much they can still suffer. It will ease things, briefly, having fewer mouths to feed, though not nearly long enough. Each mouth already eats so little.

Treila does not attend the funeral. She does not attend many services. Half of it is her squandered faith, trampled in the dirt five years ago and never quite recovered; the Constant Lady does not have a saint for her, no Vengeful Saint or Starving Saint. No true balm for her bitterness, no witness and no succor.

The other half is pragmatic wariness. She knows how quickly a single beesting can multiply to hundreds, courtesy of her desperate attempt to tear a wild hive open to get at the honey within. They stung her bleeding and raw. She had nearly died.

She’d fled, then collapsed in a meadow where, swollen and still starving, she’d dreamed of the Constant Lady. Each stinger throbbed where it rested in her skin, and the too-perfect Lady had looked down at her, face immobile. No benediction, no offer of salvation—just silent judgment, and then She’d turned and walked away.

It seems absurd to think that a visitation, when a fevered nightmare makes far more sense. But Treila still has never shaken that feeling of abandonment, of censure. And if the Priory knew about that day, about how she’d violated the hive, how she’d been struck down in retribution, she imagines they wouldn’t want her, either.

So she takes their blessing on her tongue each day as they walk the castle walls, because everybody else does it, because she does not want to stand out. But otherwise, she keeps her distance.

Instead, Treila works to clear the hole at the base of the wall. She pulls out loose stones one by one and discards them among the rubble. It takes far longer than the length of the funeral, of course. She works for days. Sometimes, it is busy enough that she is lost in the bustle, but people are moving around less and less. They are hunkering down, preparing for their own individual sieges. And by a day after the bombardment, word has gotten out; the scanty rations the quartermaster gives out each morning will still be gone in two weeks. Maybe less.

Boots are being hoarded for boiling.