by Nina Varela
“One drop of human blood can produce ten barrels of heartstone dust,” Hesod said, dismissive. “The process is very refined. In the beginning, our Kind consumed fresh blood, and the longer we lived, the more blood we required. It was impractical. Unsustainable. The Makers found a way to transmute blood into stone, to imbibe plain ore with blood magick. They saved innumerable human lives. You’re being melodramatic, Crier.”
“You knew.” She couldn’t comprehend it. “All your years as sovereign, you knew what was happening. And you let it continue.”
“Yes, I did.”
“How could you?” she demanded, voice breaking. “How could you just—this, and everything else? The raids—you destroyed entire villages, entire families, like it was nothing. Like they meant nothing at all to you. Like they were just—pieces on a chessboard.” She couldn’t look away from him, this person who for sixteen years had been her father, this person who had walked with her through the flower gardens and let her sit in his study and taught her about politics and economics and had never taken her seriously, not once, and had replaced her with another child the moment she defied him, this person with so much red blood on his hands. “You are everything that is wrong with this world,” she said. “You really are a monster.”
He regarded her. His face was completely blank, no trace of shame or anger or anything. Maybe a trace of pity. “I hope you realize this outburst is yet another example of your immaturity, daughter. There is no such thing as monsters. I am Automa. I am exactly like you. The only difference between us is our beliefs. Our choices.”
“You’re nothing like me.”
“Really? If a Scyre cut us open right at this moment, and laid bare our inner workings, we would be indistinguishable from each other. Everything you’re Made of, I am Made of as well. There is nothing inside you that is not also inside me.” He caught the look on her face. “Yes, I know about Scyre Kinok’s little trick. Midwife sabotage, was it? Someone tampering with your blueprints, some nonsense about a fifth pillar? Tell me, daughter, did it make you happy, thinking you were special?”
“No,” she said. “I was terrified. Because I thought my father would be ashamed of me.” She blinked and a single tear fell. “I am not afraid of that anymore. I just have one more question for you, Sovereign.” A question that had been burning inside of her ever since she’d learned Ayla’s story. “Were you there at . . . at the raid in a village called Delan?”
The lantern sputtered. Hesod’s eyes left Crier and it felt like a physical weight being stripped away, like invisible binds being severed. He opened the tiny glass door of the lantern and removed the candle in its metal bowl. It was almost entirely burned down, yellow flame drowning in the melted wax, clinging to the very last bit of wick. The trail of smoke had turned black and oily.
Hesod dipped one finger into the melted wax and held it up to catch the light of the wall sconces, watching as it cooled and hardened on his skin, turning from clear to ghostly white.
“I have been to many places,” he said. “I cannot possibly remember all of them.”
“You liar,” Crier spat. “Our Kind remembers everything. Delan, in the north. Seven years ago it was raided and burned to the ground. Were you there?”
He sighed. Rubbed the wax between finger and thumb. “Yes, I was there. What of it? The villagers had been hoarding grain. I’d offered them a generous bargain: they were allowed to keep their land, and in exchange I collected a portion of each year’s harvest. But of course they became greedy. I discovered they had been falsifying their output, calculating my portion from barely two-thirds of the real harvest. They knew it was an act of treason and they did it anyway. Was I supposed to turn my back?”
“So you destroyed the entire village.”
“I believe in fairness and justice, daughter. Land in exchange for grain. If one side of the promise breaks, so too will the other.”
The candlelight was dying, the darkness growing. Crier couldn’t stand it. She needed to see his face for this. She needed to see the emptiness in his eyes, so she would not forget. She pushed off the wall and joined him at the wooden table, taking the seat opposite him. How many meals had they spent like this, facing each other across a table? But it had always been the table in the great hall, in the cavernous room that could have held fifty and instead held only two. Three, once Kinok came to the palace.
“I spent so long thinking I was Flawed,” Crier said, leaning into the light. She knew he would be able to see the tear tracks on her face, and he would think that made her weak. “Not just when Kinok tricked me. Before, too. Because I felt things. Because I wanted to feel things. I thought I had a poisonous seed inside me, and every day it grew, and someday it would kill me from the inside out.” Her voice was thick with tears, but steady. She was no longer shaking. “But I was never the one with the poisonous thing. I was never the one with the Flaw.”
A sound came from the hallway outside the room. Shuffling footsteps. Junn must have sent someone to collect Crier. It was startling—she’d forgotten there was a world outside this room, that she would leave this place and Hesod would stay.
“Of course you weren’t Flawed,” said Hesod, soft and sweet. Almost crooning. “Of course you weren’t. You are young and naive, you frustrate me, but you are still my greatest creation. My daughter. I Designed you to be my successor. To head the Red Council, to lead this nation, to take my throne. That is why I am being so harsh with you, child. It is important that you accept the reality of this world. Otherwise you will never be able to control it.”
Control. That was all leadership meant to him. How had she never seen it before?
She shook her head. “You’re lying. You were never going to let me lead. You appointed Kinok to the council over me.”
“Because the world isn’t ready for your ideas, Crier. I was trying to protect you.” He reached across the table and she jerked away, revolted at the idea of being touched by him. If she hadn’t been looking closely, she might not have seen the flicker of irritation in his eyes. “You need a few more years to grow. What kind of a father would I be if I threw you to the council unprepared? They would laugh you out of the room, you and your little essays. I couldn’t let that happen to you. I know you better than anyone else, Crier, and I knew you needed more time. All I wanted was to give you more time.”
As always, there was a part of her that wanted so desperately to believe him. But—
“Even if that was true, it doesn’t change anything else you’ve done,” she said. “The lives you took yourself and the lives that were taken on your orders. I have nothing left to say to you, Hesod. When this is over and you are tried for your crimes, I wish you all the fairness and justice you granted the villagers of Delan.”
She shoved her chair back, wood screeching against the stone floor, and got to her feet. The movement jostled the table, and the candle flame finally sputtered and died, leaving nothing but the cold blue light of the wall sconces in its wake. It gave Crier the sudden impression of being plunged underwater. Of being drowned.
“You don’t understand what I’m offering you, my daughter,” said Hesod. He was a black shape in the watery darkness, a shadow swathed in shadows. “You have always wanted to be sovereign. I know that hasn’t changed. If you ally yourself with me now, I will forgive you for running away. I will forgive you for betraying me and breaking your promise to the Scyre. I will forgive you for angering him and turning him against us. With me at your side, you could be a glorious ruler. I want to be by your side. Will you let me, daughter? I will forgive you for the choices you made. Will you forgive me for mine?”
Crier paused with one hand on the doorknob. She looked back at him, eyes adjusted to the dim light, and studied the lines of his face one last time. Then:
“I don’t know if any of us can be forgiven,” she said, and left the room.
Her feet took her first to her own bedroom. To her writing desk. Eons ago, in the days leading up to her wedding, her
father had given her a golden key. It was the key to what he called his trophy room: the room where he kept all the human artifacts he’d collected over the years. Sacred objects, ancient books, relics of the War of Kinds. Sickened by the idea of it, Crier had tucked the golden key away in the drawer of her writing desk. Now, she was ready to use it.
Down one winding hall. Another. There, the door. Key in the lock. A click, and the trophy room door opened soundlessly beneath her touch. She stepped inside. The silence of this room was a physical presence. Like cotton stuffed into her ears. The door swung shut behind her, and Crier was alone.
And furious.
She had never been this angry in her life. Not when she’d realized Kinok was blackmailing her. Not when her father had given the council seat to Kinok. Not when she’d learned Queen Junn had murdered Reyka. Not when she’d run away from the palace. Not when she’d seen those bodies in the Iron Heart, seen their blood oozing slowly into the black stone vessels, realized what was happening. Not even when Kinok had pointed his sword at Ayla’s throat. So many times in Crier’s life, her dominant emotion had been fear. I am Flawed, she’d thought, and she had been afraid. Kinok is plotting something, she’d thought, and she had been afraid. I will never have a say in my nation’s future, she’d thought. Reyka is missing and nobody else seems to care. ARM is growing dangerous. I don’t want to marry Kinok. Ayla wanted to hurt me. My father never cared about me. I don’t know how to stop Kinok. I don’t know how to save anyone. I don’t know how to save myself.
Fear and fear and fear. Frozen water in her veins, her ice-white heart. Her own body a prison. Mouth wired shut, limbs heavy with frost. The bravest thing she’d ever done was running away, and even then she’d been terrified. She’d second-guessed herself, felt guilty for leaving, wondered if perhaps she was overreacting, if she should have stayed and played the perfect, obedient child, even if it was unbearable. Ungrateful, her mind had whispered. Naive. Ignorant. Helpless. You are the Lady Crier, daughter to the sovereign, and that is all you were Created to be, and you will never be anything else. How dare you defy your sole purpose?
“No,” she said aloud, staring at her reflection in a tarnished hand mirror propped on one of the shelves. Her eyes were wild and bloodshot. “No. You’re wrong.”
She whirled around, taking in every detail of the room, all the hundreds of objects on the shelves. Rusty old daggers and glass baubles and children’s toys, a painted leather mask, fat yellowed books, a wooden jewelry box crusted with gemstones of all colors, a series of little porcelain animals, a pocket watch. A set of reed pipes, a rag doll, countless knives and arrowheads, a crown of dried flowers, a tattered white dress. This collection of stolen things. Heart hammering at her temples, breaths loud and harsh, Crier committed all of them to memory even as her vision started blurring around the edges. This collection of ghosts. Her father’s crimes. She took them in, sick with fury. Grief.
Then she burst into tears.
She sank to a crouch, buried her face in her hands, and cried like she had never cried before. The loud, uncontrollable sobs of a child. A human child. Even newbuilt Automa did not cry like this; they were taught very early on what was acceptable, and this was not. Tears streamed down her face, hot and itchy, salt on her lips, as if she had an ocean inside her and it was finally brimming over.
After what felt like hours, the sobs petered out into shaky, hitching breaths. Crier sniffled hard. She lifted her head, feeling full and hollow all at once. She wiped her face, her nose, blinking away the last tears.
Then she frowned.
On one of the bottommost shelves, mostly hidden beneath the sleeve of the white dress, there was a sliver of deep midnight blue. Crier shuffled forward on her knees, skirts trailing behind her. She reached out and closed her fingers around that piece of blue. It was no bigger than a sun apple but heavier than she’d expected, heavy like a lump of iron. At first glance the surface seemed perfectly smooth. But when Crier looked closer, she saw tiny letters etched into the blue stone.
She had seen this stone before. Never in real life, only in memory. The first time she’d accidentally smeared a drop of blood onto Ayla’s locket and tumbled into the memories of a man who had lived and died years before Crier was even Designed.
She was holding Yora’s heart.
19
Ayla stood in a corner of the grand ballroom, which had been turned into an armory of sorts. It was crowded with maybe two hundred people dressing for battle. Kinok’s forces were marching on the palace. Queen Junn’s guard and their allies, Automae and humans from all corners of Zulla, had gathered. There were Rabunians and Varnians, easily recognizable, and then a scattering of humans that had to be from Tarreen: they had the same brown skin and dark hair as Ayla, but their clothes were designed for hot, humid jungle, not the northern cold. They wore loose, light fabrics in earth tones, ochres and browns and greens and clay reds, and Ayla kept seeing a motif of interlocking blue circles, woven or stamped onto their clothes, painted onto their bare skin. Tiny blue stones dangled from their ears; blue stone pendants hung at their throats and wrists. Of course—Dinara’s mysterious blue stone had been discovered in Tarreen, after all. It seemed as sacred to the Tarreenians as heartstone was to the Automae, or silver and gold to the humans of Rabu and Varn.
No wonder you’ve kept to yourselves all this time, Ayla thought, stealing another glance at a pair of Tarreenian women through the crowd. It wasn’t that the sovereign had scared them all into hiding. It was that the Tarreenians were hiding something of their own. Cave systems full of blue crystals with enough destructive power to sink a nation. Hesod couldn’t have known about it—he would’ve sent armies into Tarreen by the thousands, closed borders with Varn be damned.
The true miracle was that Kinok hadn’t gotten there first.
“Hey. You’re Ayla, right?”
She startled, tearing her eyes away from the Tarreenian women. Standing before her was the golden-haired prisoner from the Iron Heart. The last time she’d seen this person, they’d been lying half conscious in the caravan with the other prisoners, a physician slathering a poultice over their raw, blistered skin. They looked much better now. They were upright, for one thing, but it was more than that—it was the light in their big brown eyes, the way their face no longer looked grayish and stiff. Their hair had been washed, falling in loose curls instead of matting to their skull with sweat and grime.
She nodded. “That’s me.”
“I was told to bring you these,” they said, holding out a pile of what looked like armor, the sort all the humans were wearing: a shirt and pants of thick, padded wool, a chest plate of hard leather.
“Oh. Thank you.”
“Courtesy of the queen,” they said, grimacing a little, like the word queen had an unpleasant taste.
Ayla raised an eyebrow. “Not her biggest supporter?”
They huffed, blowing an errant curl out of their eyes. “Well, I owe her my life and I want the Scyre of Rabu dead, so for the time being I will fight under her flag. But I don’t approve of monarchs.”
“What’s your name again?” asked Ayla.
“Erren.”
“I think you and me will get along, Erren.” She took the clothes and, with nowhere else to sit, lowered herself to the floor to unlace her boots. “Mind helping me into these? I confess I’ve never worn a chest plate before.”
“Yeah, sure.” They crouched down beside her and reached for her other boot, starting on the tight laces. Now that they were regaining their strength and color, Ayla saw they were much younger than she’d thought at first. Maybe just a year or two older than she was.
“How’d you end up in there?” she asked quietly, even though it was so loud in the grand ballroom, so many voices overlapping, that even an Automa couldn’t have heard them from more than three feet away. “In the Heart, in that room. What happened?” Erren’s jaw tightened, and she added, “You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, it’s all ri
ght,” they said, tugging the boot off her foot. “Here, stand up and put on the pants and shirt. Over your regular clothes is fine, it doesn’t matter.” They held out a hand and she grasped it, yanking herself up. They passed her the heavy wool pants. “I was traveling with a group of . . . Rebels isn’t the right word. Accidental rebels, maybe. Most of us were quite young, runaways and orphans and the like, just trying to survive. We took on jobs for extra coin. Delivering messages, guarding supplies, simple things like that.” Their eyes were distant. “We were in the south when Nightshade first started spreading through the region. We didn’t know what was happening—we thought it was a disease, some sort of virus. We didn’t know if it only affected leeches or if we were in danger too—and I wanted to investigate. Our leader said it was too dangerous, so . . . I went alone. I snuck away in the middle of the night. I went to the place we’d last spotted them, I just wanted to get a closer look. It’s a bit fuzzy after that. The last thing I remember is hearing footsteps and turning around to see a Watcher behind me.”
Ayla sucked in a breath. “They attacked you?”
“Yeah. Hit me over the head, I think. Either way, I wound up in that . . . room. I’d sort of wake up sometimes, but it’s mostly a blur.” Their mouth tightened. “I’m sure the group I was traveling with thinks I’m long dead.”
“I’m sorry,” said Ayla. “Maybe . . . now that you’re free, maybe you could find them again?”
“Maybe,” said Erren. “I’m certainly going to try. If only to tell Hook he was right.”
