Ser Voyne is silent at first, marshaling her will or slowly letting go of her propriety. And then she places her head into her hands. “Food is dwindling. Rations are scant. You know that, or you wouldn’t have offered me some of your portion.”

Treila nods. “I know.” A pause. “We all know.”

Ser Voyne nods, not surprised. “We have two options left, if we are to last until rescue comes,” she murmurs.

Two options. Treila frowns, thinking. One is simple: humans are made of flesh just as much as dogs are, and the deaths will begin soon enough. But the other, she can’t imagine.

“And is rescue on the way?” Treila asks, mind working.

“I don’t know,” Voyne confesses, heartbreak weighing down her words. “It should be, but it should also have arrived by now. And because it has not . . .”

Her voice breaks completely.

Because it has not, we must assume it is not coming. That it will never come, no matter how many messengers we send over the wall.

Treila hesitates only a moment, then reaches behind her, places one slight hand on Voyne’s gloved knuckles. The knight flinches, but doesn’t turn to look. She needs the anonymity if she is to speak. Treila hides a smile. “Ser knight,” she says, “I know that you would defend me until the end. All of us. Tell me, what has you so distressed?”

Voyne draws in a shuddering breath. “They will either begin to feed us the dead,” she says, “or they will feed us heresy.”

Heresy. Treila rolls the word around in her mouth, even as she makes the appropriate noises of shock, distress. To eat the dead is terrible, of course.

But she has done it before. She assumed it would come to that, sooner or later. “I don’t understand,” she says.

“I am glad of that,” Voyne says, and Treila bites down a sharp laugh. The knight’s hand has turned over beneath hers, is clasping her fingers gently. “But flesh is flesh. I don’t think they will announce when the change happens, but it will happen. I am sorry.”

“But isn’t that heresy itself? To—to do that?” She minces around it as if she is not intimately familiar with the taste of human meat.

As if she is not, in a dark part of herself, looking forward to it—if only because she knows it will not break her.

“There are worse things,” Ser Voyne breathes, “than that.”

“What?” Treila pushes. “What can be worse than what we are driven to, when all else is lost? Doesn’t it all become the same, then?”