by Nina Varela
“Ah. Which book?”
“A collection of essays on economic structure,” she said. “Specifically, the intersection of market structure with physical or geographical environment.”
Kinok’s eyebrows lifted. “I see.” To Hesod, he said, “Such inherent curiosity. Perhaps it is best that she has not yet attended a meeting of the council. I think, given an hour, she would take over as head.”
Crier preened, until she saw Hesod’s jaw tighten.
“On the contrary,” he said. “I believe attending next week’s meeting will be an invaluable experience for her. Perhaps it will give her pause the next time she is tempted to voice her own opinions on how to run a nation.”
Crier glanced at Kinok. He gave her a small, crooked smile. “It will be an honor to have her there.”
Which meant he would be in attendance as well.
She remembered what her father had told her: that Kinok was not a threat to Hesod’s hold on Rabu and the other territories. Not if he joined a family. Not if he submitted to Traditionalism.
It seemed Hesod trusted him enough to include him in the affairs of the Red Council now.
In the nearly fifty years since the War of Kinds, Crier’s father had made great efforts to coexist peacefully with the humans of Zulla. With the formation of the Red Council, he had successfully gained control of all the human settlements not just in Rabu, the main territory of Zulla, where they lived, but even in the tiniest fishing villages dotting the coast of Tarreen.
Zulla was like an Automa’s heart, he’d once explained to her—it had four layers, the same way Automae had the four pillars of Reason, Calculation, Organics, and Intellect. In Zulla, the layers were, from the north down: the Far North, Rabu, Varn, and Tarreen. Along the western coast of Rabu and winding up into the north stood the Aderos Mountains, which hid the Iron Heart somewhere in their jagged peaks. A few leagues off the eastern coast: the Golden Isles, neutral territory, populated mainly by seabirds and wild pigs.
The queendom of Varn blocked access between Rabu, to its north, and Tarreen, to its south. As a result, Tarreen was known for being a lawless wilderness, not structured and civilized like Rabu. Hesod’s efforts to control it, to govern its people and make use of its few resources, had been one of his greatest challenges during the course of Crier’s lifetime.
Even in wild Tarreen, Hesod had attempted to preserve the humans’ way of life wherever possible. He fostered a genuine appreciation for their food, their music, their strange ceremonies; he found all of it very entertaining, and Hesod loved to be entertained. His dedication was admirable—especially because many other Automae, Kinok included, did not regard human culture with such an open mind. Though perhaps Kinok was more intensely anticohabitation than most because, in addition to being a former Watcher of the Iron Heart, he was a Scyre: part of an elite guild that studied the Four Pillars in order to further advance Automakind.
Crier tried to keep her eyes on her hands, her lap, her empty, red-rimmed teacup, but she could not help stealing another glance at the man who was to become her husband.
Kinok was her future, and her future was dressed in fine black brocade. The crest of the Iron Heart flashed at his throat, a reminder of his former Watcher status. A reminder that he was a mystery.
After the meal ended, Kinok caught up to Crier on her way to the libraries for her first lesson of the day. His feet were so silent on the flagstones that she did not hear him approach until he was already touching her shoulder.
“Scyre,” she said. It was the term he preferred.
“Leave us,” he said to the guards stationed at the end of the hallway. They looked at Crier for approval and, nonplussed, she nodded. Kinok waited until their footsteps had faded before speaking, leaning in close to her. “My lady,” he said, and from his black brocaded coat he withdrew a roll of yellowed parchment tied with twine. “You must be eager for more information on Midwife Torras, so I hope you do not find my actions offensive. But through a personal connection I was able to obtain several of the Midwife’s private correspondences and Designs.”
Crier waited, hyperaware of how little space there was between their bodies, the way he bent his head to speak softly in her ear.
“One of them was yours,” he went on. “Your Design, my lady, as commissioned by the sovereign.”
“My—?” She stared at the roll of parchment in his hand. “That is my Design?”
He’d made these inquiries, had acquired her Design, in a week’s time. It led her to wonder just how extensive his connections throughout the territory were. The Midwifery where she’d been Made was nearly a full day’s ride from here. And for proprietary reasons they were generally on strict advisement to keep all Designs confidential.
“Yes. I thought—with the scandal—you might be interested.”
“Scyre Kinok,” she breathed. “May I . . . ?”
But instead of handing the roll to her, he took her hand. “Crier,” he said, low and steady. “I give this to you for another reason. I know—I know you have been . . . reluctant about receiving my courtship over this past year. I know you still have reservations, though I have endeavored to show myself as a favorable asset to your cause and—ambitions. I hope that this will serve as a gesture of my faithfulness to you, should you choose to accept it.”
She looked at him. His chiseled face. His eyes, dark and unreadable. She didn’t know what to think, or to say.
“Thank you.”
“Of course,” he said, pressing the papers into her hand. His eyes were fixed on her face, almost concerned. “Remember, you can trust me. We are on the same side.”
And then he was gone.
Crier couldn’t get outside fast enough, the rolled-up Design light in her fist as she pushed through the northeast doors to the gardens.
Her father’s gardens were huge and sprawling, starting at the east wing of the palace and stretching out to the edge of the bluffs, where the Steorran Sea crusted everything with salt. Nearly every evening after finishing her studies—Crier’s days were occupied by a series of tutors in history, the sciences, economics, complex mathematics—she escaped to the gardens and the cool air and the smell of growing things. Rarely did she stray this close to the cliffs. But she wanted to look through the documents in private. Whatever she would find there, she wanted to find it alone.
The gardens were arranged carefully by type and color: fruit and flowering trees near the east wing, so one could look out the window at sweet sun apples and fat ripe plums. Dayblossoms beyond that, white and pale yellow, and beyond that, salt lavender and walnut. Beyond that, wild seaflowers, which were plucked and sold in nearby villages. Beyond that, the sea.
Then, if you followed the rise and crash of waves down to the south, if you sailed along miles of cragged and rocky shoreline, there was Varn. The queendom ruled by Queen Junn. The only place Crier’s father could not touch. There were more rumors about the queen than about Kinok and the Watchers of the Heart put together. Whispers at every gathering: that Queen Junn was mad. That Varn was rife with infighting due to her progressive policies. That she was arming Varn against the rest of Zulla. That she was ruthless.
But Crier had always thought that the stories of Junn spoke of power and strength, of a girl ascending to the throne at just sixteen after her father, the king, was killed.
She readjusted the strip of red cloth tied around her upper arm, the mark of one betrothed, and continued to move through the gardens.
Everywhere the gardeners did their work—feeding and watering and trimming and arranging, cutting off the dead flowers when they curled into themselves and went brown. Unlike most other humans, the gardeners did not shy away when Crier came near. They had grown accustomed to her presence.
Crier had always been fascinated by humans: by their hot dark eyes and the strange songs they sang at night, in the gardens and the fields and the black shores where they dived for oysters; how sometimes they moved like there was something else inside
them, something too big and tooth-gnashing for the soft human skin to hold inside. Once, and only once, she had mentioned this fascination to her father. She told him all about the songs, and how they sounded either like whale songs or like wobbly speaking, and how the humans sang frequently of love and hate and loss.
Her father said he did not completely understand all the different forms of human love, but that he had thought carefully about it and that perhaps, beyond his fascination with their history, their little cultures, he did love humans. In his own way.
Like how they loved dogs, he said, enough to feed them scraps of meat.
Crier continued to walk until she found a deserted corner of the gardens, a tangle of tall rosebushes with thorns the size of her fingernails. Here, hidden from sight, she finally untied the string and unfurled the thick bundle of pages. Her hands were not shaking, but it felt like her heart was, or her teeth, or her inner workings. She could not remember ever experiencing this much dread. It will be fine, she told herself, eyes adjusting to the tiny, cramped writing on the first page. Everything will be normal. Who would dare to sabotage a Design from the sovereign?
Makerwork Design by Commission, Ideation Final, Year 30 AE:
Crier of Family Hesod, Model 9648880130
She read the pages quickly, her nerves subsiding. Nothing out of the ordinary. There was a letter from her father, faded and yellowed after seventeen years, in which he formally stated his desire to create a child, as his forebear, Sovereign Tayol, the first sovereign, had done before him.
There were a series of blueprints he and Midwife Torras had Designed together—the first, third, eighth drafts of Crier’s form. They balanced her four pillars based on Hesod’s requirements for a potential heir. They Designed her inner workings and her outer appearance, the color of her skin and hair and eyes, the measurements of her body, putting meticulous consideration into everything from the shape of her nose to the exact length of her fingers. As she read, hardly noticing the night falling down around her, Crier could not help but compare the documents to her actual physical body. She touched her nose, her throat; she wiggled her long fingers and studied the faint lines on her palms.
The last page was the final draft of her Design, the one that the Makers would have used to actually create her. Unlike the previous drafts, this one had only Torras’s neat, blocky handwriting—none of her father’s scrawl. But that made sense. Torras was the Midwife, not her father. Crier gave a quick once-over to the ink drawings of her body, the cross section of her inner workings. She was more than ready to return these documents to Kinok and forget all about her ridiculous paranoia.
But there was something off about this page.
Crier held it up to the moonlight, frowning. The proportions of her body were all the same. None of the numbers had changed. What was—?
There. The cross section of her brain. A small portion of it was redrawn to the side in greater detail: the portion that represented her pillars. They were not physical elements of her body, but metaphysical elements of her mind, her intelligence, her personality. Each blueprint had shown four pillars in her mind, balancing out like scales.
Intellect. Organics. The two human pillars.
Calculation. Reason. The two Automa pillars.
In this blueprint—only this one—there were five. Inside the Design of Crier’s mind was another little column drawn in deep-blue ink. A fifth pillar.
Passion, it was labeled.
Passion.
Crier, the daughter of the sovereign, had five pillars instead of four. It was unheard of. Everyone knew Automae were created with two human pillars and two Automa pillars. Crier had never imagined there could be one with three human pillars. And that was what Passion was, without a doubt: human.
The papers were shaking in her hands. No. Her hands were shaking. Suddenly paranoid, Crier glanced around to make sure she was truly alone in this corner of the gardens. What if someone sees?
What would happen if the wrong person—if any person—discovered that the heir to the sovereign of Rabu had been sabotaged by her own Midwife? What would happen to her? She shuddered, thinking of Kinok’s words back in the forest during the Hunt. They were disposed of. Would she be disposed of? Or, no, no no no, what if someone tried to use her against her father? This was perfect blackmail.
The heir, the sovereign’s daughter, a mistake. It would bring shame to her family. Worse, it could cause the political scandal of the century. People could call for Hesod to step down as sovereign. They could use Crier to threaten her father. Through him, they could gain power over the entire Red Council. Over all of Rabu—and more.
Crier was Flawed. She was broken.
The thought shook her deeply. All this time she’d been treated like the jewel of the sovereign’s estate, a glorious creation, but no. She was an abomination.
This was too much—this evil, sickening truth about herself, was too great to take in.
With nowhere to go, nowhere else to be alone to process this, she sank right down where she was, in the middle of the gardens, as the sun bled out behind the brush, and closed her eyes.
[the Barren Queen] desires what—a homunculus!—an alchemist’s creation!—a Devil!—she knows not what she asks of us, and she dares to offer such a ludicrous prize, dangling it before us like meat before a pack of starving wolves—she might as well offer the damn’d throne to the first man who brings her the ocean in a thimble.
I could be hanged for writing such things, but the Barren Queen knows not what she asks.
—FROM THE RECORDS OF GRAY ÖLING, HEAD MAKER, E. 900, Y. 7
4
It was late evening and Ayla had a break from the fields. She hadn’t been called back to the market in Kalla-den, thankfully, since last week. Instead of taking supper, like the other servants, she was using her fleeting moments of rest to practice. To hone. To train. She had to be ready, for when her time came.
Ready to take what she’d come for, what she’d waited years for.
Her muscles ached but her body craved release. She had to find somewhere private, somewhere hidden. And besides, she couldn’t sit next to Benjy for another night in a row. Though nearly a week had passed since they’d spoken to Rowan in Kalla-den, Benjy was still angry with Ayla. Truthfully, she didn’t blame him. She knew how badly he wanted to join Rowan in the South, to fight, to aid the revolution, and she’d convinced him to stay here and be useless.
Right now, Ayla suspected Rowan was preparing to pack her bags. Benjy could still go with her. But Ayla knew he wouldn’t.
Ayla was caught between relief that Benjy wasn’t in danger and self-loathing because of the relief. He was a liability; he was a weak spot in her armor.
She hated to think of him like that. But the last time Ayla had a weak spot, it had destroyed her. Her family’s death had left her not a person but a ghost, a ruined shell, a carcass. The parts that had survived would be tainted forever.
She didn’t want to see him hurt. And yet she knew: better to do what was right than to be kind.
It was a lesson she’d learned herself, when she was thirteen. She’d taken in a starving puppy—surprised that Rowan let her keep it, under the condition that she never let it out of her sight. But one night, the puppy had whined and clawed at the door so piteously, she finally let it out. She never saw the puppy again. She cried to Rowan, saying she’d only wanted to be kind. It had seemed so desperate, so determined to go outside and breathe the fresh air. But Rowan had reminded her: the world outside was dangerous. It was always better to do what you knew was right than what was kind.
She thought of Rowan’s words now, as she picked her way through the sovereign’s endless flower gardens. The heat of the day had faded; the sea breeze was blessedly cool against her face. Across the gardens, she could just barely make out leech guards stationed around the palace, tall shadows against the white stone walls. Metal sheaths glinted at their hips, catching the moonlight.
The guards were, what, th
ree hundred paces away? Which meant that if Ayla so much as blinked wrong, they could reach her in . . . She brushed a finger over a stalk of salt lavender, doing the math. Six seconds, maybe.
And some other human would have to wipe her blood off the flowers.
To the east, the ocean swelled and burst open against the cliffs like thunder. Every so often a black cloud would drift across the moon, and the whole palace would be plunged into darkness.
Darkness.
Ayla had been spared only because her brother, Storme, had heard them coming. Her brother, who was dead.
Storme grabbed her hand and pulled her out the back door as They came through the front.
It was their father who screamed first.
Storme led her to the outhouse even as Ayla begged for him to stop, no no no please no, let go of me, that was Papa, let me go help Papa. He forced the plank of wood up and pushed Ayla down into the dank, shallow hole. She fell on her knees, her arms and legs covered in mud and shit and piss. The smell was unbearable. She looked up at Storme and pushed back against the wall to make room. It was then that she realized the space was only big enough for one person.
She watched, mute with shock, as her twin brother replaced the wood and disappeared.
Darkness.
His screams came next. Then her mother’s.
For hours, Ayla hadn’t moved. She’d barely even breathed, even though after a while she couldn’t smell the stench. Couldn’t smell anything at all.
The raids had begun at dawn. By what must have been late afternoon, she finally deemed it safe enough to climb out.
Inside the house, the knife wound in her mother’s chest had clotted, darkened, and congealed. Ayla stared at her mother, and her mother stared back. She’d died with her eyes on Ayla’s father, whose head had rolled a mere inch away from her mother’s body. The rest of him was gone.
At the front of the house was another body. It was burned beyond all recognition, but Ayla could tell its head was turned in the direction of the outhouse.
