“Eat,” the knight repeats, this time with a little more force. “Or I will pry your lips apart and force it down your throat.”

“The honey,” Phosyne tries, then falters. “I can’t.”

“You can, and you will, if you don’t want your body to shut down.”

Phosyne looks back at the plate, at the honey and the meat, the meat she has been living off of, slaughtered cattle and chickens and everything else the farmers brought with them, when they could not bring their crops. Too early in the season, when Etrebia had swept in and forced them off the land. Aymar’s gardens could only produce so much. She has not had fruit in months.

It clicks. She has only had meat.

“I have seen men die like this,” Ser Voyne confirms.

Phosyne can hear the weight in her voice; she has been withdrawn, the last day. Something happened when she was called to attend worship the morning before. Many somethings, perhaps. Phosyne was vaguely aware of a change, but something about the honeycomb Voyne has presented her with makes it all slide, briefly and brilliantly, into focus.

Voyne is distraught. Pulled in too many directions at once. Angry at Phosyne, of course, always, but also desperate.

“I thought,” Phosyne says, slowly, “that you might not mind my death.”

Voyne scowls. “You are mine to care for,” she says, too quickly.

There are so many things bound up with those words, to care for. Phosyne sees them like threads, winding tight around Voyne, biting into her exposed skin. She really needs her armor, Phosyne thinks. She doesn’t know how to exist without it.

Ser Voyne’s care only comes from duty, and anger that Phosyne might die instead of producing something useful, but it still makes her flush with shame.

Phosyne doesn’t speak, doesn’t move. The room’s thick heat is blanketing, smothering. Her mind wants to drift again, and perhaps Voyne’s drifts, too.

“I’ve failed too many people,” Voyne says, the words clumsy on her lips. “While thinking I was serving. Yesterday, I thought I saw a ghost. A starved ghost who would have fed me if she could.”

It is like there is a wound in her breast, wet and weeping, and Phosyne can see it pulsing.

And then Voyne turns cold again.

“Eat the honey,” she says, and pushes the plate toward Phosyne once more.

Phosyne’s heart aches, and she picks up the comb with delicate hands. She wants to keep a little, just a little, for her research, but its sticky sweetness coats her fingers, and she knows, then, that she will eat all of it. All of it wasted, ultimately. What does it matter if Voyne forces her to live a few days longer, if she loses an avenue to saving them all?