It’s like she doesn’t know what to do. How to lash out. She looks confused, brow pinching, lips parting. The glaze of her eyes sharpens, and for just a moment, Phosyne sees panic.

“Ser Voyne,” she demands in response. “Listen to me.”

Where the command in her voice comes from, she cannot say. Maybe just desperation.

Wherever it hails from, it works. Ser Voyne goes still, but her eyes remain sharp, her brow pinched.

In the brown of her iris, there’s a ring of color that doesn’t belong. It’s hard-edged, like it was inked with a paintbrush.

Phosyne cannot fix this on her own. She knows that. She knew it enough to consider begging forgiveness of Jacynde, who would have her jailed at the slightest opportunity. But Jacynde can’t help her, and the feast is tonight, and she needs somebody on her side to tell her what to do, what question to solve first. Ser Voyne is supposed to be on her side, even if that hasn’t ever worked out for her before.

She reaches up and touches Ser Voyne’s cheek.

“Can you hear me?” she asks.

Ser Voyne nods shakily. Her skin twitches beneath Phosyne’s touch. Where Jacynde was hot, Voyne is cold. Her eyelids spasm. She’s having trouble focusing, thinking.

Phosyne can relate.

“You are to look after me. Do you remember that?”

Ser Voyne nods, slowly, the movement ungainly and wrong. But she does not look away. She is listening. She’s remembering, with great force of will. Her body has begun to tremble.

Phosyne leans into her. Drags her hands along the muscles of her arms, corded and tense. There’s anger there. Good. She should be angry. If she could see the mess they’re in, she would be raging, and she would be beautiful in her rage.

“I’m out of my tower,” Phosyne points out. “I’m not supposed to be. The last time I got out, you nearly killed me. You were so angry, because together, we’re supposed to be saving this castle, and I never do what you ask.”

That gets a snarl out of the bigger woman, and then suddenly, it’s not Voyne pressed into the wall, it’s Phosyne. Her head cracks against the stone and she bucks, trying to get the knight’s weight off her. It doesn’t work.

Ser Voyne’s fist closes around her throat. Her thumb and forefinger press into the points of Phosyne’s jaw, and she gasps, head falling back against the wall. She’s supposed to be afraid, she knows that, but this whole mess is so confusing and turned on its head that Phosyne isn’t really surprised to realize she’s enjoying this. That her body sings when Ser Voyne squeezes a little tighter, and panic blooms in her chest.

“That’s it,” she gasps out. “You hate me. Remember?”