There are few people in the chapel outside of the king’s retinue and Ser Leodegardis’s household. The most pious, perhaps, or direct relations. Nothing like the first funeral; if there could have been a feast, there would have been.

But people sensibly keep their distance from death, when it lurks just outside their door.

“This man, Jecobe de Avienten, has left us seemingly out of order. A single death, too late to join his fellows. But his death was a natural thing. His life has ended, his death has begun. And so we honor and respect that change, that brave venture into the unknown.”

Brave, Voyne thinks, and almost laughs. Brave, truly? She thinks of his family, who has likely watched him suffer, then realizes, bitterly, that chances are good that he has no family at all. Otherwise the empty pews make no sense.

And what of the people who will come next? When starvation comes, it is the isolated who are taken first. Men like Jecobe. That he died in the attack was, perhaps, a mercy.

This is a bellwether.

The rest of the funeral is unobjectionable. The service that follows is reassuringly, predictably standard, and if not for the body on the slab, the bees dancing over its cold flesh and suckling at the honey on its brow, Voyne could almost feel okay again.

When it’s over, King Cardimir still kneels, head lowered in prayer for the salvation of the keep, as he does every week. Around her, Prioress Jacynde’s nuns launch into motion, a carefully orchestrated dance, just like the bees they tend to. They avoid the body and busy themselves with the processional that follows the service. Their dedication and order is a far cry from Phosyne’s scrambling madness. The thought galls Voyne, enough to make her stand, knees creaking. She thinks to ask something of Jacynde, some advice, some clarity—or at least to confirm her suspicions, that there is nothing useful in Phosyne, after all.

Perhaps it wasn’t true that the Priory had taken the credit for cleaning the water to still fears; perhaps they’d planted the thought that it was Phosyne who had done it out of kindness, to allow her blighted mind some privacy instead of allowing her to be cast out into the general population, where she surely could not manage.