Crier's War

by Nina Varela

  You wouldn’t know it from the looks of her. She had one of those faces where you couldn’t quite tell how old she was—the only signs of age were her silver hair and the slight crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes—and she was short, even shorter than Ayla. She looked rather like a plump little sparrow hopping around, ruffling her feathers. Sweet and harmless.

  Like so much else, it was a carefully constructed lie. Rowan was no sparrow. She was a bird of prey.

  Seven years ago, she’d saved Ayla’s life.

  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.

  It was comforting.

  She was so cold, and so tired of being alone. So tired of hurting. The last thing she’d eaten was a scrap of half-rotted meat three days ago. Maybe four. Time kept blurring, rolling over itself, going belly-up like a dead animal. Ayla wasn’t hungry anymore. Her stomach had stopped making noises. Quietly, it was eating what little muscle she had left.

  There was a patch of darkness up ahead. Darkness, which meant something not covered in snow. Ayla stumbled forward, the ground tilting in strange ways beneath her feet. Her eyes kept falling shut against her will. She forced them open again, head pounding, vision reduced to a pinprick of light at the end of a long, long tunnel. The darkness—there. So close. Gray, a stone wall. The dark brown of cobblestones.

  It was a tiny gap between two buildings. A sloping roof caught the snow, protecting the ground beneath. Ayla dragged herself into the dark snowless space and her knees gave out. She hit the wall sideways and fell hard, skull cracking against the cobblestones. And there she lay.

  “Hey.”

  Her eyes were closed.

  “Hey! Wake up!”

  No. She was finally warm.

  “Wake up, you idiot!”

  A sound like striking an oyster shell against rock; a sharp, stinging pressure on Ayla’s cheek. Heat, for a moment. Someone was talking, maybe, but they were very far away, and Ayla couldn’t make out the words. The exhaustion closed over her head like water, and she let go.

  It was only later that she learned just how far Rowan had dragged her body to warmth and safety, before nursing her back to health.

  Back then, Rowan’s hair had still been brown, streaked silver only at the temples. But her eyes were the same. Deep and steady. “You were ready to die,” she had said.

  Ayla didn’t answer.

  “I don’t know what happened to you, exactly,” said Rowan. “But I know you’re alone. I know you’ve been cast aside, left to die in the snow like an animal.” She reached out and took Ayla’s hands, held them between her own. It felt like being cradled: like being held all over. “You’re not alone anymore. I can give you something to fight for, child. I can give you a purpose.”

  “A purpose?” Ayla had said. Her voice was weak, scraped out.

  “Justice,” said Rowan. And she squeezed Ayla’s hands.

  “The moon is full,” said Rowan now, looking straight ahead, in the hushed, coded tone Ayla had come to know so well.

  The three of them moved easily through the crowd of humans, used to dodging people and carts and stray dogs. The chaos of the Kalla-den streets was a strange kind of blessing: a thousand human voices all shouting at once meant it was the perfect place for conversations you didn’t want anyone to overhear.

  “Clear skies lately,” Ayla and Benjy said in unison. Nothing to report.

  It was Rowan, of course, who had taught them the language of rebellion. A sprig of rosemary passed between hands on a crowded street, garlands woven from flowers with symbolic meanings, coded messages hidden inside loaves of bread, faerie stories or old folk songs used like passwords to determine who you could trust. Rowan had taught them everything. She’d saved Ayla first, Benjy a few months later. Took them in. Clothed them. Taught them how to beg, and then how to find work. Fed them. But also gave them a new hunger: justice.

  Because they should never have needed to beg in the first place.

  “What news?” Benjy asked.

  “A comet is crossing to the southern skies,” Rowan said with a smile. “A week from now. It will be a beautiful night.”

  Benjy took Ayla’s hand and squeezed. She didn’t return it. She knew what the code meant: an uprising in the South. Another one. It filled her gut with suspicion and dread.

  They turned onto a wider street, the crowd thinning out a little. They spoke more softly now.

  “Crossing south,” Ayla repeated. Her heart sank. “And how many stars will be out in the southern skies?”

  Rowan didn’t pick up on her skepticism. “Oh, I’ve heard around two hundred.”

  “Two hundred,” Benjy repeated, eyes gleaming.

  Two hundred human rebels gathering in the South.

  “High time, loves.”

  Rowan was gone as swiftly as she had appeared, leaving only a crumpled flyer in Benjy’s hands—a religious pamphlet, something about the gods and believers. Ayla knew it would be riddled with code—code that only those in the Resistance could decipher.

  Part of Ayla worried that Rowan was still harboring hope for these uprisings, for what she called “justice,” because of her grief for Luna and Luna’s sister, Faye. After all, they’d been two of Rowan’s lost children, just like Ayla and Benjy. It was known within the village that any orphan kid could find food and comfort with Rowan. Ayla remembered when Faye and Luna had come to Rowan’s after their mother had died. Ayla had taken to Luna immediately, a girl with shy smiles and sweet questions. Faye had been pricklier, distrusting, far too much like Ayla for the two of them to get along. But still, they’d grown up around each other. And Ayla knew that Rowan’s soft heart grieved for the two sisters. Those two girls she’d tried to save.

  Two girls who, in her mind, she had failed.

  And in that grief, Rowan was willing to send more innocents off to find more of her “justice.”

  Over the years, they’d received word of a few uprisings here in Rabu, but each one had been bloody—and quelled quickly. The Sovereign State of Rabu was controlled by Sovereign Hesod. His rule had come to extend to all of Zulla except for the queendom of Varn. Though he claimed he did not hold all the power, as the Red Council—a group of Automa aristocrats—was supposed to share governance of Rabu, Ayla hardly believed that to be true. Hesod was enormously wealthy and influential. He was also power-hungry. It had been his father who led the Automa troops in the War of Kinds. It was he who first declared humans should be separated from their families. And it was on his personal land, the vast grounds of his seaside palace, that Ayla, Benjy, and four hundred other human servants lived and worked.

  The Red Council was cruel, merciless, and worst of all, creative. That was part of the reason the Revolution was so slow-going—people were just so damn terrified of the Council and its ever-tightening laws. Even Ayla had to admit their fears were well founded. Luna—and her disembodied dress—was proof of that.

  Benjy looked at Ayla as they hiked up the steeply sloping path toward the palace, his eyes full of hope and excitement. The message was clear: he wanted to join. Even after the disastrous uprisings of last year.

  She shook her head. No. He knew better. He knew she couldn’t leave now, tonight. Not when she was this close to the inside of the palace. And Crier.

  Benjy’s smile vanished. “Ayla.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not going.” Did she want what he wanted? Did she want the leeches dead? Of course, but not like this. Not when it only meant a trail of human blood, not when it was doomed to futility. She was not ready to lose anyone else. The last time there had been an uprising in the South, it was quashed almost immediately—and that uprising had been massive, with near
ly two thousand humans marching through the streets of the city Bram, armed with torches and saltpeter, aiming to take the heart of the city where the most powerful Automae lived. They had been defeated in a single night. The Automa who had led the counterattack—who had destroyed them—became a decorated war hero. A household name, a household monster. Kinok.

  Benjy fell silent, but Ayla could finally feel his anger—could tell that it was now directed at her. His strides grew long, determined, as they reached the narrow path that curved up toward the palace. She could see the peaked roofs of the palace towers now in the distance.

  She hurried to catch up with him, panting in the heat. By now they were farther from the crowd. She grabbed his shoulder, and he stopped walking so suddenly she nearly crashed into him.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” he said through gritted teeth.

  Ayla struggled to catch her breath. “You could always . . . watch the comet without me.” The words grated in her throat like she’d swallowed a mouthful of salt.

  His dark-brown eyes locked onto hers. The breeze danced in his messy hair. He’d grown taller than her, and broader too. She held his gaze.

  For a full minute, he said nothing. They just stood there, breathing hard, looking at each other. Thinking the same thing: it was too soon.

  Ayla wanted to say: Don’t leave me.

  Ayla should have said: Leave me. Because maybe it would be better that way.

  Benjy’s anger seemed to transmute into sadness, his lips parting. Finally, he said, “I won’t do that. I won’t go without you, and you know it.”

  She did. And that scared her more than anything. He wouldn’t leave her. It made her heart rage. Leave, she wanted to scream. Don’t stay for me.

  But then another part of her, buried so deep it had almost, almost, gone silent, knew she couldn’t do this—do any of it—without him.

  His lips were still slightly parted, as though there was more he wanted to say. She knew how badly he needed this. Revolution. Blood. Change. She waited for him to keep going, to try again to convince her. But he also knew how much she wanted what she wanted: Lady Crier’s blood on her hands.

  So in the end, Benjy just sighed. More and more servants began to pass them on their way up the narrow path, and Ayla put a few paces between herself and Benjy, kept her eyes on the rutted path as they marched the rest of the way back to their quarters in silence, the past piling into her thoughts like shovelfuls of dirt.

  After what Ayla had come to think of as that day, the day that changed everything, the splitting point in her mind, the thing that cracked her life into a before and after, the waking nightmare, the bloodstain, the splintered bone that would not heal, that day, Ayla had allowed herself one week to mourn.

  Even at nine years old, she’d known that it was all too easy to drown in grief—get pulled under and never come back up. One week, she told herself. One week.

  One week to mourn the deaths of her entire family.

  Mama. Papa. Her twin brother, Storme, who had loved Ayla more than anything else in the whole world. Who had been wrenched away from her, trying to protect her from Them. Storme, who, from the sounds of his screaming cut short, had met his end then and there, just beyond the walls of what had been their home.

  You couldn’t depend on much in this world, but you could depend on this: love brought nothing but death. Where love existed, death would follow, a wolf trailing after a wounded deer. Scenting blood in the air. Ayla had learned that the hard way.

  Now she was sixteen, and everything she wanted was just inches from her fingertips.

  When Rowan had first rescued her, Ayla only had her pain and her anger.

  But one day, about a month after being with Rowan, a group of nomadic humans had come into town. Rowan had given Ayla a choice. Leave with these traveling humans, leave all of her pain and her memories behind and start anew. Or stay under Rowan’s wing. Rowan would care for her until she could find work. And Ayla would learn to fight, learn to live, and plan for justice.

  Ayla had chosen the latter. And Rowan, keeping her promise, had found Ayla work as a servant of the palace.

  Hesod. The leech who’d ordered the raid of Ayla’s village.

  It was Hesod’s men who had broken into Ayla’s childhood home, who had murdered her family just because they could.

  Hesod prided himself on spreading Traditionalism throughout Rabu—the Automa belief in modeling their society after human behavior, as though humans were a long-lost civilization from which they could cherry-pick the best attributes to mimic. Family was important to Sovereign Hesod, or so he and his council preached. The irony was not lost on Ayla.

  And now she worked for him. It disgusted her, every second of it, but it was the only way she could get close to Hesod. She’d come so far. She was not going to throw it all away for some doomed dream of revolution.

  Rowan had always told her that justice was the answer. And for a long time, Ayla had believed her. She’d believed that revolution was possible, that if humans just kept rising up, refusing to submit, they could really change things. But Ayla knew better now. Over the years, she’d seen how hopeless Rowan’s dreams were. Every uprising had failed; every brilliant plan had been crushed; every new maneuver just resulted in more human death.

  Justice was a god, and Ayla didn’t believe in such childish things.

  She believed in blood.

  3

  Crier’s father and Kinok were already seated in the great hall for breakfast when she arrived, dressed in a new gown this morning. Her father’s and fiancé’s heads were bent toward each other in a discussion that broke off as soon as Crier entered.

  For a moment, she stared at her father—the man who’d commissioned her. Hesod was a masterpiece of Design. He was Made to be powerful, influential, brilliant even for an Automa, respected by everyone in Zulla. When he spoke, people listened.

  What would he say about Midwife Torras’s betrayal?

  She hadn’t told him yet.

  Was afraid to, really.

  Kinok had mentioned the scandal a week ago, during their Hunt, and yet she’d kept it to herself.

  She sat down at the table across from Kinok. The great hall, in the east wing of the palace, could easily seat fifty—it was huge, airy, with a high, arched ceiling and a massive banquet table made of well-sheened pine. But despite its vastness, most days it saw only Crier, Hesod, and a handful of servants. And, over the past months of his courtship, Kinok.

  “Good morning, my lady,” said Kinok. Crier nodded in greeting, gaze averted.

  “Daughter,” said Hesod, and Crier managed to look him in the eyes.

  “Father,” she murmured.

  A serving boy came in carrying a golden platter, and with it, liquid heartstone.

  The subterranean jewel, carefully mined, was the source of the Automae’s strength. It ran through their veins, their inner workings, not like human blood but like ichor, the blood of the old gods in all the human storybooks. Something closer to magick, alchemy, than anything natural.

  Crier sat up straighter in her chair.

  The liquid heartstone was served in a teapot shaped like a bird skull, with a long handle carved from heartstone itself. Steam leaked from the bird’s eye sockets. Crier tried not to look eager when she pushed her teacup forward.

  She needed this. Especially after what Kinok had told her last week. About the Midwife’s scandal, the Design that had been tampered with. It made her stomach harden and twist inside to think there’d been even the slightest risk to her own Design. She hadn’t slept since.

  Automae did not require nightly rest like humans did, but it was recommended that they sleep for at least six hours every three days. Sleeping let their organs slow and reset, let their bodies repair any internal or external damage. Crier was usually very diligent about getting the proper amount of sleep—she found it almost pleasing, curling up in the soft blankets and watching the moon rise outside her window, letting her thoughts
drain away like bathwater.

  It felt like playing human.

  But ever since Kinok had returned to the palace, Crier had found it more and more difficult to empty her mind enough to sleep.

  The serving boy filled Crier’s cup last. The liquid he poured was a deep, dark red, the color of heartstone dust steeped in water. It was less concentrated in this form but easier to consume, and besides, Hesod took pleasure in mimicking human customs such as drinking tea in the morning. Unlike some other members of the Red Council, he thought Automae could stand to learn from humans. Human culture had been, after all, the basis of stabilization across Rabu: Organization, System, Family. Hesod’s core values. We must never forget, he said, that for thousands of years the kings of this land were all human. And the human kings began their days with tea.

  Crier reached for the cup, but in her haste, her hand shook. A splash of the liquid spilled.

  “Apologies,” she murmured, picking up her napkin to wipe it away.

  Hesod’s hand came over hers, stopping her. “Don’t. This is what they’re here for.” He snapped his fingers at the serving boy.

  Crier lowered her eyes.

  When he was done, she picked up her cup again, careful to balance it. One sip of liquid heartstone, and Crier felt power spread through her. It was like stepping into a patch of sunlight, slipping into a hot bath—a slow, pleasing sensation that warmed her from head to foot. Any negative side effects from the lack of sleep were gone now. Crier felt stronger all over, like she could run straight out of the great hall and not stop until she hit the Aderos Mountains five hundred leagues away. Even her brain felt stronger, clearer. She hid a satisfied smile behind her teacup.

  “Is there something you find amusing, Lady Crier?” Kinok said, staring at her curiously.

  Of course Kinok had noticed. He noticed everything. He was looking at her now over the rim of his own teacup, his lips stained slightly red.

  “It is not important,” Crier said, a little flustered by Kinok’s unwavering gaze. “I merely thought of a book I was reading last night.”