The chapel is empty, save for the bees. Her back tenses as she spots the first one, then ten, then a hundred. Treila has only stepped foot in here three times in the last six months, and every time she has been accompanied by every other servant in the keep, and many of the refugees. Without human bodies massed within, the room feels all wrong. Feels like something out of place.

She keeps her distance from the hives. Outside, the sun is beginning to set, and she figures that must mean the bees are coming home for the night. Taking shelter. It should be safe, to walk among them, but she can’t. Not when she can still remember how her flesh had swollen, how her skin had wept. Her stomach had been empty, her veins on fire.

Treila keeps to the walls instead. She presses a hand to one, and feels it warm beneath her fingertips. Solid. Real.

Then she hears footsteps, fast and angry, and she retreats, slips behind one of the pillars of the hall and presses herself flat to it, sinking into the growing shadows.

“—Your Radiance,” says a nun, voice thin as she struggles to keep up with the prioress ahead of her, “I am sure His Majesty meant no disrespect—”

“Do not make apologies for him!”

Oh, the prioress is angry. Treila tastes it on her tongue. She is furious, and that makes Treila stand to attention.

“They are desperate,” the prioress says. “Of course they are desperate. We all are. I cannot blame them for that, but Ser Voyne, Ser Leodegardis”—she does not say the king, is too afraid to speak treason even here—“they refuse the barest inch of caution. What does it cost them, to simply treat them as unknown envoys, sequester them for a night, question them as to their intentions? And instead, they accept every request, in public, in broad view of—eugh!”

Metal clatters on the floor. One of the Priory’s fine instruments of worship, no doubt.

“Your Radiance, you must admit, the circumstances of their appearance . . . what are we here for, if not to believe?”

The prioress does not immediately respond. She also stops pacing, her footsteps falling silent.

“We have reached the limits of our resistance, Your Radiance,” the nun continues. “You said yourself, we have run out of time. And if this is the moment of our greatest need—”

“Silence a moment, Sister,” the prioress says, and draws an unsteady breath.

Treila dissects every word, every pause, every outburst, because she needs to know if this is territorial anger, or something more. If the prioress only objects to not being consulted, that is one thing. But if the prioress does not, for even a moment, suspect those painted strangers of being what they appear to be, then Treila’s fears are well-founded. The rest of the castle has gone mad.

And Treila needs to get out, as fast as she can.