Her hands are covered in a sticky mix of red and gold.

This is the last retreat left to check. The ground floor, which smells of leather and sweat and metal, is empty. In fact, most of the keep is empty. The king, that wretched, glorious man, has been loyal and true. He has taken his household, and Ser Leodegardis’s too, to the great hall. They have been there all morning, providing the hands her Lady has needed to give them all such bounty.

Most of the keep is empty. She does, however, hear scrabbling from below. The lower rooms, storehouses, workspaces.

Rats, searching for their next meal. Thieving little rats, who do not have the decency to heed her Lady’s invitation.

There should be metal on her shoulders, she thinks, an errant thought that distracts her just as she reaches the steps. There should be metal, like the Warding Saint wears. Where has it gone? She doesn’t rightly remember, and that, too, is curious. But then the rats shift and squeak again. Closer this time.

She descends a few steps, rounds a corner. This room is lit by thin shafts of daylight, throwing heaps and piles into shadowy relief. A perfect place for hiding.

She spots her rats, two forms huddled above . . .

A hole, at the base of one of the walls without windows, nearly hidden by a cleverly placed barrel.

Ser Voyne knows these halls, and is fairly certain that there was no hole there before. She feels cool air. Smells the damp.

Both rats are staring up at her. Rats, and not rats; they are women, too. Her eyes glance off one with blonde hair, her gaze refusing to resolve her features, and lands on the other. Gaunt, dark-haired, twitchy.

Ser Voyne’s hands flex at her sides. She remembers anger. Her hands, around this woman’s throat. You are to look after me. The words float through her mind, make her shudder.

They’re talking to her. It takes effort to listen.

“—it’s nothing, just a cache,” the blonde one says, though Ser Voyne cannot see her at all now. “Just a hiding place. I was getting food—”

The words mean little to Voyne, as if she can’t hear them. There is sound, she knows there is sound, but the words simply don’t matter.

Ser Voyne stalks forward, remembering how it feels to impale oneself upon a blade and keep moving. She has given her vow, and seizes the woman she is supposed to look after by the throat.

She lost her, earlier today. She remembers that, too. She lost this woman. Phosyne, the name appears, emerges as if from fog. “You are out of your tower,” she says.

Footsteps behind her. The blonde one—the Lady? No, not the Lady, she has made this mistake before, she is not to turn around—flees.