Another day or two. She need only bear the madwoman’s inanities a little longer. Then she will be able to sit at the table once more with the other knights and strategize: How will they take what the Lady has granted them, and win salvation?

Phosyne still has not told her how the fire started, the night of the bombardment. She will not tell her anything about her miraculous idea. Voyne leaves her to her dark and stinking cell, guards now posted at her door to stop her from any other smoldering wanders. Outside, she breathes the clean and slightly cooler air, and tries not to look at the scars from Etrebia’s assault. There are so few strong hands to put things back to rights.

The chapel hums with the buzzing of bees, the air filled with winged bodies passing in and out of the arched, open windows. They, unlike everybody else in this castle, can pass freely over the walls and to more fruitful fields, but they always return home, filling the rows of painted boxes with honey. It’s a shame that they work too slowly to feed the hundreds of mouths that wait.

Voyne kneels beside her liege on pillows once cased in velvet, now only sacks of worn-away nap. She is so grateful to be near him, and far away from Phosyne, that when Prioress Jacynde leads voices raised in hymns, hers is strongest among them.

And what a balm those hymns are: predictable words, in predictable order, about how to find solace in an unpredictable world. The hymns preach order, measurement, constancy, when all the world is yet lost in chaos. To build a bed, a house, a nation is to create an anchor, something to hold on to.

When Voyne was a little girl, the engineers in service to the Constant Lady had not yet solved the problem of comb-building. They had not divined the correct proportions that would persuade a hive to build only within movable frames, instead of filling every nook and cranny with waxy lattices. They’d used skeps still, lovingly-woven baskets that the bees would fill all the way to bursting—and then, each fall, the skeps would be destroyed in the harvest, and the bees with them. Honey had been far more precious, more rare. She’d tasted it only on feast days, but she’d gorged herself then, on honey cakes and mead and sweet comb crushed between her teeth. Now, she parts her lips and Prioress Jacynde places just a dot of honey on her tongue, a benediction.

It is, of course, sweet, but more than that, it brings with it flavors floral and vegetal, freshness she now longs for with her whole soul. This is not last year’s honey; they must have begun to process some of the frames of honeycomb. It’s too early for it, but perhaps they were so full they had to be drained.