Or perhaps it’s because the quartermaster has more need of it than holy rites.

The offering given and received, Ser Voyne anticipates the end of the service, and a moment to talk alone with her liege, but instead, there is a rustle of fabric as two nuns enter from the lower chamber, bearing up a body between them. Another funeral, Ser Voyne realizes, and looks around, but nobody else appears surprised.

They all know, she realizes. It is only she who is out of the loop.

The dead body is that of an older man, his features already drawn well before death; the lines creasing his skin are deep furrows, and there aren’t many that suggest laughter. Beneath his skin are only hollows, empty spaces, where his flesh has withered down to nothing. She thinks, horribly, it might be the first starvation death, until she sees the abbreviation of the leg, just above the knee. One of the people rescued from the rubble, she realizes.

She had thought the funerals concluded. She had thought they had known the measure of their loss.

One last soul taken by Etrebia’s hand, before the rest of them begin to succumb to privation. Somehow, this is worse. Worse than the mass funeral she had been summoned to on the first day after the attack; she’d stood guard for that one, watching the crowd as they regained their fervor, their commitment. It had been beautiful, glorious, terrible; she could see every mouth lapping up the balm they were given, the righteous reactivity of a people acutely wounded, not slowly eroding. She’d known already, though. There was no sign of Etrebia’s retreat. There was no change, despite a miracle.

She’d suffered, that day. A brilliant crash from the exaltation of the night’s victory down into the muck and mire of entrapment, of Phosyne’s madness, of the resumption of the ordinary.

Is that why today’s funeral is so quiet? So ill-attended?

She watches as Jacynde anoints the dead man’s brow with honey (food for somebody else; how dare they waste it?), arranges the limbs into a death repose, leans close and closes her own eyes, as if in sadness.

“Death is the natural result of life,” Jacynde says, and her voice rings out through the room. “One follows the other, inevitable as the sun rises and sets. But though the setting sun cools the air and wakens the beasts of the night, death instead is a singular rupture. Death does not come all at once; it leaves many of us in the sunlight behind, to grapple with a loss that comes seemingly out of order. Our own rhythms distract us from the procession.”

Voyne and the others echo assent, understanding, though Voyne does not entirely feel it.