Treila fists her hands in her skirts so that he won’t notice how raw and scraped her fingers are.

The high noon sun glints off the metals that decorate the Constant Lady and Her saints, flashing into Treila’s eyes, making them water, making her head pound harder still. She thinks she might crack, break into pieces. If she did, might she be narrow enough to get through that gap?

As things stand, there’s no point in going back. Even if the voice was only in her head, she doesn’t have the tools or strength to widen out that passage.

The realization is sobering.

Her turn comes at last. When she kneels, she nearly falls. Her pulse thunders in her ears. She knows this feeling, and she curses it even as she braces herself, plants her hands against her thighs, tilts her head up and closes her eyes with her lips slightly parted. She doesn’t want to see the pity of the nun who dips her thin glass rod into the dish of honey, spins it. The nun knows, too, that Treila is starving, but doesn’t know that this was avoidable. That if she’d eaten a little more before going into that tunnel, she wouldn’t be so tragically feeble now.

But that one sweet dab of comfort doesn’t grace her tongue. Treila opens an eye, then both, and closes her mouth because the nun isn’t even looking at her.

Instead, she’s looking at the king, come sweeping down the steps at the entrance of the chapel, flanked by Ser Leodegardis and Prioress Jacynde. Behind them is a woman, set apart, face gone pale with . . . shock? Devastation, surely. She has the look about her, every furrow deepened, eyes staring after the other three.

Treila recognizes her instantly.

It’s Ser Voyne, more broken than Treila has ever seen her, and twin shocks of fear and delight rock her back onto her heels.

There is murmuring all around her, and nobody is looking. Treila quietly joins the crowd. She can’t stand the thought of waiting for a meaningless touch of honey to her tongue, not when this is playing out before her.

It’s not much. It’s subtle. But Treila has watched Ser Voyne for months now, whenever their paths cross, and she has seen Ser Voyne at the king’s heels like a favored dog. They have never walked so far apart, let alone with Ser Voyne looking so hurt, so devastated. So vulnerable, without her armor.

It clears Treila’s head in an instant. Makes her mouth water.

Treila cannot take vengeance on a king; even she is not so bold and desperate to believe that. But she notes now with interest how very little the king marks his chosen lapdog, how that lapdog’s carefully controlled countenance is broken now, pained, frustrated. Betrayed. Treila knows that feeling too well to miss it here.