Ser Voyne sat sweat-soaked and itching for a proper fight in the riot's wake, listening as the rest of the King's council debated the merits of killing their own people.
"It will free up food for other mouths," the pragmatists argued. They did not say outright that flesh was flesh, but Voyne saw the hunger in their eyes. The fearful and the faithful insisted that law and order must be kept, no matter the cost; in the closed system the castle had become six months ago, there was no room for chaos. But the loyalists cried that there must be as many hands to bear arms as possible when relief finally came—when the siege was broken, when they could take back the fields.
This was when Voyne leaned forward in her seat, and the room quieted.
"I would agree, except that treasonous hands had best not hold swords," she said.
That earned nods and soft murmurs of assent. After all, she was a war hero. She had been at Carcabonne; she had seen terrors. She should know.
*Does know,* she reminded herself when her confidence faltered under the weight of eyes on her—eyes that saw her fine armor and her seat at the King's right hand. They were listening to her, but perhaps they shouldn't. Perhaps she had lost the taste for it; she hadn't seen any terrors lately.
The King didn't let her get close.
She felt his eyes on her most of all, and so Voyne didn't add the more damning rebuttal to the loyalists' argument that was burning a hole in her breast: that there had been no sign of a relief force, and the chance of them ever leaving these stone walls was so small she could no longer see it.
There would be no taking back the fields, with treasonous hands or not.
Today's riot was just the beginning.
They were not meant to be pinned down in Aymar, though of course it was constructed for just such a possibility: a strong spur castle on a ridge manned by Ser Leodegardis, his brothers, his household. A garrison of not inconsiderable strength, managed and provisioned well. But even Aymar had its limitations, and feeding so many refugees and knights and servants for six months was never going to be possible. That was before considering that the King was here in residence with them, along with his own sizable retinue. The farms beyond the walls had all been torched, squatted on, and turned to waste. The kitchen gardens, while extensive, had now been picked bare of even the autumn-bearing crops, far too soon. The stores had sustained them this far, but only due to a miscalculation, because they had all hoped they would be gone long before now.
Relief was supposed to have arrived a month ago.
Instead, they were stalemated. They had fended off rounds of attacks from Etrebia, but they had destroyed few of their rams and towers, only fighting back hard enough to make them bide their time out of range. Etrebia's men were entrenched and willing to wait for resupply. Aymar's inhabitants were prepared only to starve.
Voyne saw all of this, and she was furious, and wanted nothing more than to ride out herself and force her way through to victory. Instead, she put down riots and sat at her liege's side, spoiling for a fight she must not start.
"We need to send another messenger," Ser Leodegardis said from the King's other side, fists clenching on the table as he resisted the urge to bury his head in his hands. He, too, felt the weight, but he bore it better. "Before our strength begins to fail. The descent—"
"Is too treacherous," his cousin, Ser Galleren, snapped. "Why do you think the relief has not come? Every single person we have sent down the cliffside has either died or been captured."
"One more messenger is one less mouth to feed," Denisot, the chamberlain, pointed out. "We lose nothing by trying. A faint chance of hope is better than none at all. And hope may stave off another riot."
King Cardimir closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. "We must provision any messenger we send. We can't even give them a knife."
Prioress Jacynde did not flinch, not even when all heads turned to look at her. Her engineers were even now hard at work, trying to manufacture their salvation in exchange for nearly all the iron in Aymar. Every hinge, every pot, and even a fair number of weapons and plows—the dregs that would have been given to the refugees to arm them in an assault. All handed over, melted down, into a new tool that they hoped would buy them more time.
Time to starve.
"We must consider," Jacynde said, "that our messengers have gotten through."
Silence.
Voyne clenched her jaw. Tight.
Cardimir did not move.
"Prioress," Leodegardis warned.
"If we refuse to consider all options, we will miss opportunities," Prioress Jacynde said. "If our messengers have gotten through, and if relief has not come, then we must assume we are too great a risk to rescue."
The silence cracked, exploded, and there was shouting. Cardimir and Leodegardis shared a look, and Voyne considered getting to her feet, joining the fray with words if not with fists. That need to act boiled in her blood. It would feel so good.
It would do no good at all.
The Prioress was right, after all. Even if no messenger had gotten through, word must have reached the capital city of Glocain and the princes by now. There should be a relief force.
There was not.
There may never be.
Their army had always been proud, and skilled, and well-funded. They had laid siege, and this was a perversion of the way of things. They knew every way that a siege might be won or lost, and yet they had not been able to break their attackers' lines.
Voyne had marched across every mile of the King's land. She had led armies to great victories and called for desperate retreats. She knew that, realistically, there might be no winning move here.
And she knew, too, that whatever happened here was not her responsibility. She did not wear the mantle of a strategist anymore, or even a leader. She was a knight of the King's guard. It was not her job to prevent this.
But that didn't reduce the weight Voyne felt on her shoulders and chest every waking moment, as hunger gnawed at her belly—though not as harshly as it did for others. She was well fed. She sat at the King's right hand, or near enough, and that came with perks.
The King reached for his honeyed wine. He drank deep. And then he passed the cup to Leodegardis, who sipped, and to Voyne, who stared.
"Drink," he said. "One last comfort, before the horror."
And she took the cup and drank.
After, when the room was quiet and all but empty, she and Ser Leodegardis sat alone in the chamber, heads bowed together over a map. The physical aches and pains of the day had at last made themselves known. She had shed her armor and sent her page away again, and rubbed at her aching shoulder through her gambeson.
There was so much to be done, and so little. The chaos and physicality of the riot had provided the smallest break in the unending stretch of days endured, and now she was having trouble fitting back into her shell.
"Send me out," she said, the first time either of them had spoken since the sun set.
"You know I can't do that," he said. "Least of all because I have no actual authority over you. His Majesty—"
"His Majesty has kept me useless on a leash for two years," she interrupted, not looking up from the map, the routes more or less accessible to a clever climber marked out along the topography of the cliff they sat on. She tried not to sound bitter, only practical. She knew how to be practical. "I am ornamental, not useful."
"You were useful today. You stopped the riot quickly, without death."
"But with much frustrated rage," she pointed out. "If I remain, that rage may turn to hatred. If you send me away, you may buy peace for another week."
"Are you a coward, then?"
Voyne flinched, recoiled, and finally looked up at him. "Excuse me?"
"You would abandon your King."
"I would risk my life to save him."
"But you wouldn't die by his side."
Leodegardis held her gaze in challenge. They were close in age, a difference of no more than three or four years. They had known each other since they were teenagers, perfecting their work with the blade, strengthening their bodies and learning tactics, learning languages. They had been heroes together, for a time, planting their flags on conquered battlefields, making legends of themselves. Now they stared each other down across a vast gulf that had grown when they weren't looking.
In another life, Voyne could have been him. Tasked with the protection of the border, entrusted with a castle, with a span of fields and towns, with the lives and well-being of hundreds, thousands. They both won their King's favor on the battlefield, earned his trust. They should be equals.
Instead, she was a glorified lapdog. Within besieged walls, she was worthless.
She turned away, finally, bowing her head. "I was mistaken," she said, throat thick. "But please—please promise me, that if my actions today threaten your control here, that you will remember my offer."
Leodegardis didn't promise, but he also didn't foreswear her. "Go rest," he said instead, offering a tired smile. "It's almost time for evening service, I think. Perhaps the Lady will grant you some comfort."
A good suggestion, and kindly meant. She clasped his shoulder, then left him to his nightmares. They all felt it, the weight of death bearing down on Aymar, but he was Aymar. They were all about to die, and she was about to fail, but he was about to crumble.
She wound her way through the keep and to the chapel tower. Jacynde's nuns were indeed hard at work, ready to guide the few parishioners who were here to observe the setting sun. Voyne, grateful, let the familiar words and hymns wash over her. It wasn't the balm it used to be, back when she was young and idealistic and fervent in her belief that the world could ever be orderly, could ever make sense, but it still soothed her jagged edges. It was a relief, to be reminded that she wasn't alone, was never alone. The Constant Lady always had a hand upon the world.
After, she made her way up uneven staircases long-since memorized, twists and turns as familiar as the halls she had played in as a child. Few rushlights burned, but there was midsummer moonlight streaming through windows, more than enough to guide her by. She stepped aside to let a serving girl pass, then took the final turning to reach what used to be Leodegardis's room, now given over to Cardimir, to Voyne, to their servants. A little household for the King, shut up in a keep and starving quietly, only a little slower than all the rest.
She slipped inside, and was surprised to see Cardimir waiting for her.
He sat by the hearth, where there was no fire thanks to how warm and sticky the air was. "Come," he said, voice pitched so as not to wake the servants who had already bedded down in their partitioned section of the room. Voyne went to him, knelt before him in greeting. He touched her shoulder absently, the one that hurt, the one that was scarred from an arrow she had taken for him years ago.
"I had forgotten," he murmured, "the power of your presence."
"You saw the riot?" she asked.
"Through the strangest vantage point," he said. "What do you know of Leodegardis's madwoman?"
"The heretic?" she asked. "Very little. Only that she arrived a few months before we did." It hadn't felt important to learn more, no matter Leodegardis's odd affection for the woman.
But the entrance to her tower room was not so far away. Voyne had seen the woman a few times, drawn and furtive and skulking. Her eyes drifted in that direction.
"I have charged her with finding a way to restock the quartermaster's stores," he said. "Now that our other options have run out."
Voyne averted her eyes so that she did not stare in horrified disbelief.
"My liege?" Her mistrust colored her words more than she wanted it to, but it had been a long day. A long day of nearly killing desperate, hungry people. She understood, of course. It was tempting, to hope for an impossible solution, but she had thought her King was better than that. More reasonable.
But it was also a distraction. They couldn't afford distractions.
"I have asked her for a miracle," Cardimir said.
Voyne bowed her head, mastering herself with the reflex of long practice. "I see," she said. "And what provisions does she demand for such a thing?" If it wasn't much, if it was only a way to keep the woman occupied, perhaps it wasn't so bad.
There was so little to do but wait for death now.
"Very little," he said. Her shoulders eased. "But I want her to have more. I want her to have you."
Voyne's head jerked up. She stared, unable to stop herself. "Me."
"I need you to watch her," he added. "Encourage her. She is... disorganized. I would see her supported. Given oversight."
"So that she can conjure food from nothing?" she asked, brow pinching. She searched her King's face for some scrap of sense.
She found it. He was confident and calm.
That was a hundred times worse than misguided faith.
"What is a second miracle after a first?" he asked with an indulgent smile that made Voyne feel small, childlike. She hated that smile, and if she were not so worn down, so stunned, she would have bristled at it. Instead, she just shook her head, helpless, not understanding. He took pity on her. "She is to be thanked for fixing our water issue last month," Cardimir said.
Voyne's world lurched into a new alignment. She frowned. "But the Priory—"
"Agreed to take responsibility, in case there was a problem. And in case it worked. Nobody would have trusted the cisterns if they knew a heretic was responsible for clearing them." He waved a hand. "She is... a wild thing. One of Jacynde's order, originally, but strayed. Jacynde hates her, but Leodegardis is adamant in his patronage, and she has paid her way admirably so far."
That gave her pause.
Because the water issue of last month was also an impossible solution to an impossible problem. Aymar's location was strong, but its strength had nearly been their undoing. Built on a rocky outcropping, the castle's only source of water was rain and a single well in the lower yard. The rains had stopped months ago as summer rolled in. The cisterns had begun to dry out, so they had hauled water up and out, up and out, before the well could dry, too.
With that water, so desperately needed, had come pestilence. It had begun slowly, a few children beginning to vomit, low fevers rolling through, and in their meetings, they had steeled themselves for the sorts of illness that spread among the closely packed. They let the Priory step in, begin segregating the ill, treating them, fumigating the castle with cloying incense.
They had known, at least, that it couldn't be the water. Water pulled from stone was clean. The cisterns were capped and guarded. It couldn't be the water.
But it was.
As the well's level had dropped, the water had turned foul, and they had spread that foulness to every cistern. At first, the water had tasted normal, had looked clear, but eventually the buckets they hauled up stank of shit. There was no other water.
And then, a miracle. Jacynde's nuns had created a powder that, when mixed with the water, caused the water to heave and shudder and shine with wondrous colors, before finally turning clear and odorless again. Leodegardis had ordered his household to test the cleared water themselves, and when they did not sicken further, when they grew hale once more, the cisterns were cleared.
Voyne reflected that she had not actually tasted the cleared cistern water; there was another tank, one that captured rain before the summer began to dry, that lived just below the madwoman's room. It delivered clean water via a pipe into the kitchen, and Cardimir drank from it exclusively, as did she.
Just in case.
Knowing now that it was not the Priory that solved their woes, but this strange, gaunt wraith of a woman who had somehow bewitched her King, Voyne was glad for their caution.
She scrubbed at her face, sitting back on her heels. "What of the Priory's new invention?" she asked, testing out the new landscape beneath her. "Do we also have this madwoman to thank for taking our iron from us?"
*Leaving us ill-armed to repel an attack?* she did not add.
"That was Jacynde's order," the King assured, and the world slowed its spin, settling into its new configuration with a groan. It was only a little off-kilter. "But I do not doubt she could have derived something similar. And until Etrebia strikes again, we have far more need of food. You know this, Ser Voyne."
"I do, my liege," she said, then took a deep breath. Tried to be grateful for the clean water, hopeful for miracles. It did not sit well in her practical breast, which burned instead for a blade, a battle plan.
This would have to suffice.
"What will you have me do?" she asked.
"Her name is Phosyne," Cardimir told her. "I want you to go to her tomorrow. Do not let her out of your sight, and do not let her remain idle. Reassure me that she is working as hard as she can. We have only enough time for results."
She wanted to say no, wanted instead to ask him to send her away as a messenger. It would be a better use of her skills. But if he was right, if this Phosyne had worked one miracle already and only needed help to produce another—
She could trade one escort for another. A King was not so different from a madwoman.
"Yes, my liege," she said.