Iron Heart

by Nina Varela

  Almost freezing to death had saved Ayla’s life, too.

  She was so cold that it didn’t feel like cold anymore. It didn’t even burn. She barely noticed the winter air, the snow soaking through her threadbare boots, the ice crystals that whipped across her face and left her skin red and raw. She was cold from the inside out, the coldness pulsing through her with every weak flutter of her heart. Dimly, she knew this was how it felt right before you died.

  That was how Rowan had first found her, in the snow-choked streets of Kalla-den. A lost orphan, with nowhere else to go.

  “They told me there were no survivors,” Storme said. His voice sounded strapped-down, tightly controlled, like he was holding back—not tears but some raw emotion, some old grief. “They said I was the only one, everyone else was dead. Years later, I heard there were survivors of Delan. The rebels just hadn’t found them, or who knows, maybe they were lying. I don’t know. I’ll never know. But—I was nine. I’d just watched the Automae kill my parents. I was terrified and grieving and alone. I believed them. When they told me I could join them, I said yes.”

  Ayla realized her vision was blurring. She pressed her lips together and kept walking, one foot after the other. She brushed her knuckles against the horse’s flank. Demonic beast or not, it soothed her—this big warm animal who had not experienced terrible things.

  “So I joined them. And I mourned you. As I said, it wasn’t until years later I found out there were other survivors and I realized there was a good chance you were still alive. But for years, I mourned you. I followed the rebel group west and then south, spending a few weeks or months in a dozen towns and villages, establishing connections, spreading the word: We are rising up against them. The rebels used me as an eavesdropper, a thief, a spy—I was small, I could slip in and out of places the others couldn’t. Nobody suspects a child, not even the Automae. And I mourned you.”

  “I mourned you too,” Ayla choked out. “I never stopped mourning you. There was a third body next to Mama and Papa, I thought it was yours, I thought for sure it was yours. It must have been someone else’s child.”

  His expression fractured. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Ayla.” He took a deep breath, steadying himself. “After . . . After three years, the original group split into factions. Some of them remained in Rabu, some headed to Tarreen, some to Varn. There was nothing for me in Rabu. I chose to come here, to Varn. We managed to cross the border to the west and made our way to Thalen. Then, in Thalen, there was . . .”

  “There was?” Ayla prompted when he didn’t finish. “There was what?”

  Storme cleared his throat. “A rebel girl. Her name was Annedine.”

  Ayla waited, but again he didn’t continue. “What happened with Annedine?”

  “I . . .” He shook his head hard. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have named her. That is one secret I still cannot tell.”

  Ayla didn’t protest. Everything else he’d told her was so overwhelming, she could leave the story of Annedine for another time. She couldn’t stop thinking about nine-year-old Storme hiding in the branches of the Bone Tree, burning, shivering. They’d both survived the raid and then come so close to dying anyway.

  “But I still don’t understand,” she said, glancing up at him. “After all that, after traveling with human rebels for so long . . . how did you end up as the right hand to Queen Junn?”

  “That’s another secret,” he said. He was avoiding her eyes. “Just trust me, Ayla. I know what I’m doing. The queen plucked me from obscurity. She gave me—”

  He broke off, but Ayla could finish the sentence in her head. A home. She swallowed the nasty retort on her tongue. She’d fought with Storme once, fought with Benjy today. She needed to stop fighting with the people she loved.

  “But . . . she’s one of them,” she said slowly.

  “And it’s different here in Varn, all right? The Kinds aren’t enemies like in Rabu. Here, we live and work together. It’s not perfect, but it’s better. And the queen and I—and you—have a common enemy. A common goal. Why should I not work with her? Why should I not remain at her side?”

  The echo of Benjy’s words rang through Ayla like a bell toll. She didn’t know what to think. For so long, everyone around her had said: They are monsters. There is no reasoning with them. Stay away. And now . . .

  She frowned. “Well, tell your precious queen to leave Benjy alone. She’s toying with him, leading him along. He’s not something she can play with before devouring.”

  “What are you talking about?” Storme asked.

  “They were all lovey-dovey at the ball last night,” Ayla said. She rolled her eyes. “It’s made him a fool.”

  “I see,” said Storme, very softly, and then neither of them spoke at all.

  Later that night, belly full from dinner, Ayla slipped into her bedchamber. Her mind was still reeling from everything Storme had told her, thoughts swooping like seabirds. She’d been waiting all day for some time alone. She knew once she started thinking about it she wouldn’t be able to stop. The quiet devastation of her brother’s story.

  She changed into her sleep clothes, pulled back the blankets, and froze.

  There, on the mattress, was a folded-up piece of parchment.

  Cautiously, Ayla held it up to the lamplight. The parchment was yellow and worn, the creases soft, as if it had been unfolded and refolded a thousand times. It was a letter, she could tell that much. Messy handwriting, the ink blurred with age. Even if she’d been reading her whole life, it would have been near incomprehensible.

  Ayla sank onto the mattress, lost. Then she leaped up and hurried to her writing desk, fetching a pen and a fresh piece of paper. She smoothed out the old parchment. Tried to focus on identifying one letter at a time.

  After a quarter of an hour, she was pretty confident she had the first two words.

  My Storme . . .

  My Storme,

  Today I have a story for you.

  Once, a witch charmed a collection of bones into dancing whenever she played the flute. The bones were mostly in the shape of a person, with a few bits missing here and there; when they danced, they rattled together as one, and when the music stopped, they clattered to the ground, silent and still as any tomb. The witch didn’t do this for any particular reason. She didn’t want to frighten the nearby villagers or play a trick or disrespect a sleeping grave. I think she was just lonely. I think she just wanted to dance. She lived out her days, her witch’s life span, in a small cottage at the edge of a clearing in the deep, dark woods, and after a while the bones learned to dance to birdsong, and the soft coos of owls and mourning doves, and sometimes even the cry of a faraway wolf. And the witch, who had previously not spoken to anyone for a long, long time, sometimes put away the flute and sang, every song she could remember and a thousand she invented on the spot, and the bones danced their rattling dance, teeth chattering on the floorboards, and the witch laughed and the bones danced to that, too.

  My favorite thing about humans: we sing to our dead.

  Yours. Yours. In flesh, in blood.

  Annedine

  10

  They’d traveled all this way for nothing. Crier didn’t really know what she was expecting—a perfectly preserved cottage with a sign on the door, HERE LIES YORA’S HEART? She was a fool. Even if the Tourmaline stone were here, it could be buried anywhere beneath the long grass. Or on the pebbly shore where Leo and Siena had stood. Maybe it had been hidden there and was then carried away by the rippling waves, swept out to the deep center of the lake, where the water was black and still. Maybe it was resting at the bottom of the lake, covered with sand and silt, a little chunk of sky.

  Footfalls behind her, muffled by the grass. Hook. He came to stand beside her, looking out over the seemingly endless stretch of water. Even Crier, with her Automa eyesight, could make out only a faint black line at the very edge of the horizon. The other side of the lake. Varn.

  “I’m sorry,” said Crier. “I
should have known this would be fruitless.”

  Hook hummed. “Honestly, these past couple days, it’s the happiest I’ve seen them since . . . since Erren was captured. Tourmaline was always a long shot. We’ll keep looking, yeah?” He sighed. “We always keep looking. We always keep trying.”

  Are you my friend? Crier wondered, glancing at him. In the sunlight, his skin glowed. His eyes were a brown Crier associated with soft, rich earth, the kind that could grow anything, that nurtured every seed. We’re allies, she thought. Is that the same thing?

  No, probably not.

  It ached a little. Crier wanted to be his friend. Was that so impossible? Contrary to what Kinok had once tricked her into believing, she didn’t have a fifth pillar. She had no Passion. She was Automa, through and through, a Made creature, flawlessly Designed. Intellect, Organics, Calculation, Reason. There was no room inside her for emotions like this. For yearning like this. For loneliness like this. But she was so human-shaped. She was so human-shaped. How could she live in this vessel and not feel any attachment to the world, to its people? How could she live in this body and have no room inside her for the way Ayla’s voice became low and raspy at the end of a long day? The way Crier’s own hands felt when she played the harp, like she was an extension of the instrument and all her hundred strings were singing? The way Hook watched over his band of children who could not let themselves be children, who were so much braver than Crier, who had lost friends and hunted monsters and still sang songs about coming home?

  There was a library in Yanna. Crier had never been; the sovereign had never allowed it. She’d never even seen the library in real life. But she had seen illustrations. A painting, once. The library was made of pale pink stone, same as the Old Palace at the heart of the city. It must have looked resplendent at sunrise and sunset, illuminated in pink and gold and ripe-peach orange. It was huge, the size of a city square, six stories tall, with a dome that, before the War of Kinds, had been painted with gold leaf. There were dozens of human poems about that golden dome: the half-sun, the harvest moon, fallen to earth. A golden fruit. A god’s golden eye. Inside, the library was open and airy, the walls lined with hundreds of thousands of books and scrolls, in the Zullan tongue and the language of the alchemists and a thousand others. Crier thought of that library often. She imagined herself walking through it slowly, trailing her fingers across all those dusty spines, selecting a book at random, reading it, memorizing it, selecting another. She didn’t need to sleep like humans did. She could have stayed awake in that library for days and days, just reading. Just breathing in the smell of sacred things. In another life, she could have done that. In this one, it felt impossible. As did kinship and Ayla and everything else she’d ever wanted.

  “Ayla?”

  Crier came back to herself.

  “We won’t give up,” Hook told her, reassuring. He must have taken her silence for despair. “We never give up.”

  Crier took a deep breath. Briny lake-smell in her lungs. “Never?”

  “Never,” he said.

  “Because . . .” She remembered Ayla standing over her. Ayla gripping a knife. The knife quivering in Ayla’s hand. The look on Ayla’s face: at the time, Crier had thought it was anger. Now, she thought perhaps it had been fear. “Because there are things worth dying for.”

  “Nah,” said Hook, and he rolled his shoulders, twisted from side to side, stretched his arms up over his head, shook himself out. “Because there are still things worth living for.”

  Crier had worried the rebels would hate her for leading them to a dead end, but it didn’t seem that way at all. They’d waited until dusk and then picked their way down the sloping shores to the beach, where Crier’s boots sank into the wet sand with every step. Finally she just took the boots off and went barefoot, thrilled with the sensation of cold wet sand between her toes. They found an overhang of rock and clay, a pocket deep enough to hide the light of a small fire, and set up camp for the night, tying the horses outside, close enough to the water that they could drink their fill. Bree and Mir made a driftwood fire, and Crier watched, fascinated, as the flames turned blue and green. It reminded her of the Reaper’s Moon celebration all those weeks ago, masked humans dancing around the bonfire, tossing in bits of algae. Cheering and drinking when the fire flashed blue. And Ayla in the midst of it all.

  They ate and spoke softly, in sleepy, half-finished thoughts. Crier sat there, careful not to get too close to the fire, wary of the light refracting in her eyes. She racked her brain, trying to think of anywhere else Tourmaline could be. She reexamined the visions she’d seen, the memories she’d tumbled through, searching for any sort of clue. . . .

  If I make it through the night, I’ll meet you at the Queen’s Cove, Leo had said.

  Crier bit her lip hard, fighting back a swell of foolish hope. The memories in the locket ended when Leo gave it to Clara the night their village was attacked—if they’d found each other again, surely he would have taken it back and continued to add memories. So . . . Leo and Clara had never seen each other again after the scene on the lakeshore. They had never reunited at the Queen’s Cove. But what if Leo had survived the night? What if he’d gone to the Queen’s Cove anyway? Crier could picture it so vividly: Leo, injured, dragging himself into a rowboat. Pushing off the shore. Dawn breaking across the lake. If he’d made it to the Queen’s Cove, but for some reason Yann and Siena were already gone . . . What if the Queen’s Cove, not the ruined village, was his final resting place?

  It felt too much like something out of a faerie story. A tragic ending. But Crier had already come this far—she might as well visit the cove, just in case. It was on the Varnian side of the lake, a bit of a hike. But under the cover of darkness . . . she could be there and back by dawn if she moved quickly. She had no rowboat, but she’d be faster on foot anyway, following the curve of the shore. Crier stared into the center of the smoldering campfire, the tiny spot where the flames burned black, calculating. There were the border guards to worry about. Automa soldiers of Rabu and Varn posted in their stone watchtowers, scanning the shores, the bluffs, the water. If Crier got caught—if the guards realized she wasn’t just any young Automa girl but the sovereign’s runaway daughter—

  Erren was one of thousands. To find them—to save them—I’d risk walking into a trap. I’d risk just about anything.

  What would Ayla do?

  Crier almost smiled. She knew the answer.

  Ayla would do the reckless thing.

  The reckless thing, as was usually the case, started out all right. Crier waited until the rebels had doused the fire and curled up on their sleeping mats, settling in for the night. She waited, counting her own heartbeats, forcing herself to be patient. One hundred beats. One hundred twenty. One hundred forty. She waited until she heard eight human heartbeats slow, eight rhythms of breathing evening out, a quiet rush like faraway ocean tides. Then, silent as a shadow, she slipped out from under her own blankets. She picked up her boots, her bare feet soundless on the pebbly ground, and snuck out from beneath the overhang of rock.

  She was a hundred paces down the beach when she heard someone approaching. Two someones. Moving quickly. Crier whipped around—guards already?—but it was only Hook and Bree.

  “Giving us the slip, Ayla?” Hook said as the two of them approached. His voice sounded light, but Crier’s stomach still dropped.

  “No,” she said. “No, of course not. I was just”—human accent, human accent—“going to check on something, I was gonna be back by dawn. I swear. I wouldn’t leave with no explanation, not after all you’ve—”

  “Breathe,” said Bree. “He was joking.”

  Oh.

  “I heard you sneak out is all,” said Hook, gentler this time. “Something told me you weren’t off for a midnight stroll. Seems I was right. So . . . ?”

  “So . . . what?” said Crier.

  “So what trouble are we getting into tonight?”

  She stared at him. It was pitch-bla
ck out, the beach lit only by a waning moon, but her eyes caught more than a human’s did. She could see Hook’s expression, and sometimes it was hard to tell, but it didn’t look like he was making fun of her. Bree looked serious too, regarding Crier steadily.

  “I . . . I’m going to the Queen’s Cove,” said Crier. “It’s the only other place that could possibly have clues about Tourmaline. I don’t think much will come of it, but I have to check.”

  “The Queen’s Cove,” Hook echoed. “How far away is that?”

  “Just over a mile. Near the edge of the Varnian border.”

  “And you were planning to go there on foot, in the middle of the night, search the entire cove—in the dark—and be back by dawn?” Bree asked.

  Yes, because if Crier was alone, she could have run the distance to the cove in ten minutes. But of course it would take Ayla, the human, at least twice as long, and searching in the dark would take ages.

  Best to play dumb. “I didn’t want to take a horse,” Crier said. “Don’t they need sleep?”

  “Don’t you?” said Bree.

  “The horses’ve had a couple hours, and today was easy on them anyway,” said Hook before Crier could answer. “A few more miles won’t hurt ’em. Come on, then, we’ve wasted enough time chatting. It’s time for an adventure.”

  “An adventure,” Bree muttered, wry.

  “You don’t have to come along!” said Hook as the three of them headed back toward the camp, where the black shapes of the horses looked like strange rock formations on the beach.

  Bree huffed. “You know I do. Someone’s gotta make sure you don’t get yourself killed.”

  “Ayla will protect me.”