Phosyne is very glad that only Pneio left her tower during the bombardment, and that she was able to haul him back without Voyne’s notice. Her best guess is that Voyne cannot see the little beasts, for she doesn’t comment on them, even when Phosyne can clearly see them dart between hiding places. They are like smoke.

Their heat, though, Voyne has noticed.

“Unblock the windows,” Voyne demands, the morning after the bombardment.

“No,” Phosyne says, scrambling for some excuse.

“A person needs sunlight,” Voyne says. “Fresh air. A break from this infernal heat and stench.”

Phosyne positions herself in front of one of the filled windows. “My work requires the dark.”

Voyne’s jaw tenses, twitches. It’s clear that she is itching for relief. For a summons to do as she did the night before. She is not a creature made for standing guard, but for action. Phosyne hates to see her caged like this, but it isn’t up to her.

She waits to see if Voyne will lunge.

Bruises make a patchwork of Phosyne’s dry, pale skin, lurid and uneven as if her body lacks the resources to soothe them. She feels the ache of each one, even as her mind is afire.

“Leave the windows,” she says. “Let me work.”

“Your miracle,” Voyne says.

Her miracle. Her idea for a miracle. “I have much to study,” she says, desires coming into conjunction for a blissful, hopeful moment. “I need supplies. Can you get them for me?”

She requisitions twenty candles from the priory. It earns her an hour’s privacy, and Voyne an hour’s walk.

The next several days are spent deep in work. Her hands dance over the candles, purest beeswax, clarified and cast by exacting standard. She burns them down, one after the other, observing, reading, waiting for the next shift in perspective, the next advancement.

She revisits the memory of the bombardment. The press of bodies, her terror over Pneio and Ornuo free to wander, the moans of the frightened and injured. The flash of racing shadow that she’d had no choice but to chase, out into the strange silence after the attack. She’d smelled such odors that night, bodily and chemical, some traces of what the Priory had done.

Salvation, Voyne called it, when Phosyne had enough presence of mind to finally ask. Intercession. The Priory, too, plays with fire these days.