Crier's War

by Nina Varela

  “I like it,” said Crier, ever the good daughter.

  Then she turned—just in time to nearly collide with the very person she was looking for. Kinok stood before her, calm as ever, his red waistcoat the color of human blood.

  “My lady,” he said. “Will you join me for our first dance?”

  All the guests around them were looking at her now; the dance floor was emptying out. A space cleared just for Crier and her fiancé. Her bound life. Body to body, blood to blood.

  “Yes, Scyre,” she said, and let him pull her into the middle of the ballroom.

  Everyone was watching, including her father. On the surface, it looked like he was continuing his conversation with an envoy from the Far North, smiling jovially, charming her, charming everyone, but his eyes were on Crier. Which reminded her: in all the chaos of the planning and the ceremony, she had nearly forgotten that in just three days, she was to attend her very first council meeting. It was something to look forward to, at least.

  Smiling, Kinok drew her close. One of his hands rested on the small of her back, the other entwined with her own hand. Their fingers slotted together like stitches on an open wound. Crier put her free hand on Kinok’s shoulder, keeping her touch as light as possible, unwilling, still, to press into him.

  A strain of harp strings.

  A low, deep drumbeat.

  Alone in the center of the ballroom, countless pairs of eyes tracking their every move, Crier and Kinok began to dance.

  It was a waltz. Yet another human tradition, one her father was particularly enamored with: he often brought human dancers into the palace and bid them to perform for him, slow waltzes and fast, wild numbers that looked more like fighting than dancing, and he watched it all with dark, fascinated eyes. “Look,” he would say to Crier, ordering the dancers to repeat a certain movement or sequence of steps. “Look at the fluidity, the grace in each transition. They make it seem effortless. But see for yourself: their muscles are trembling. It is not effortless at all.” Once, he had said: “If there exists a type of human capable of dismantling our world, it is the dancer.”

  Crier thought of this as she turned around the floor with Kinok. Thought, too, of her new handmaiden. Did Ayla know how to waltz? Probably not. And even if she did, she’d certainly never dance with Crier, never place her hand at Crier’s waist and steer her through a ballroom the way Kinok was doing, spinning with the music, their bodies close together and yet separated by two inches of tense space. Close enough to feel the rhythm of her human breath.

  No. Ayla would never dance with her.

  And yet: Crier recalled the look of surprise on Ayla’s face when she’d given her the key to the music room this evening. For some reason, that surprise had pleased her.

  “You must be in good spirits,” Kinok said, and Crier realized she had been smiling to herself. “Tonight has gone well.”

  “I think my father will be satisfied,” she agreed carefully.

  “And what about you? How do you feel?”

  “I . . .” She glanced up to find him gazing down at her, eyes intent. “I feel that our union is good for the future of our country.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would it matter what I feel?” She pushed into the next step of the waltz perhaps a bit too quickly.

  Kinok matched her steps easily. “Lady Crier, there is no need to keep secrets from me.”

  “Secrets?” She glanced up at him and was met with his steady gaze, brown and piercing. It was intimidating, but her curiosity won out. He seemed to know so much about her—she wanted to balance the scales. “It seems you are the one with secrets, Kinok.”

  A smile revealed his perfect teeth. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “You’ve been a guest in our home for nearly a year, coming and going as you please, involved in your private studies and building up your Movement. You seem to take an interest in my political views and essays, but what do you share of your work?”

  The smile remained. “I’m happy to tell you anything you’d like to know.”

  “What do you spend so many hours researching, then?”

  “History. Connections. The work of Thomas Wren.”

  “The first Maker?”

  “Creator of our Kind,” Kinok said with a nod.

  “A human genius,” Crier added.

  He twirled her around. “As a Scyre, I studied the Makers who were part of the Barren Queen’s academy. Thomas Wren gets a lot of credit—but I’ve found that tends to diminish the true richness of the history.”

  “The richness of our history.”

  “Indeed.” He stared at her for a moment. “It’s beautiful, really. There is quite a bit of complexity in how we are Made. Each one of us is a little different. Though of course, there are limits to how different.”

  Despite herself, Crier was intrigued. Not only did Kinok seem to know something she didn’t about Thomas Wren, but it was surprising that he was so fascinated with the subject to begin with.

  “Lady Crier,” he said quietly, interrupting her thoughts. “I know your secret.”

  It took everything inside her to keep dancing, to keep her face pleasantly impassive even as her blood turned to ice. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Scyre.”

  “I saw your Design.”

  Her stomach lurched and her mind raced. He had looked? He knew? “I don’t—”

  “Please don’t misunderstand. I mean you no harm, my lady.” He bent his head, whispering in her ear. To the onlookers, it would appear intimate. It was intimate, she realized. “I won’t tell anyone that you are . . . Flawed.” The word whispered across his tongue and yet it stung like a snake’s bite. “Your secret is safe with me. We are bound, aren’t we?”

  He was offering her comfort, solidarity. And yet . . .

  “We are,” Crier breathed. Her heart was pounding so rapidly that she half expected her chime to go off. “We—we are bound.”

  “So, I will help you. And I’m sure you will do the same for me.”

  “Help me? How?”

  His fingers flexed on her waist. “The sovereign has been unable to find any information on the Midwife Torras. Anyone who has done this to you, and perhaps others as well, deserves to be punished.” He did not elaborate, which was probably for the better. If Kinok thought he could unearth information beyond the sovereign’s reach, he had to be operating outside the law. Usually, Crier would discourage him. But if there was anything about Torras that could help Crier, protect her reputation, protect her father . . . she had to use it.

  “Do it,” she said shakily. “Find her. Do whatever you must. Just—don’t tell anyone.”

  “Of course,” he said. “We are bound. It’s you and me, Lady Crier.”

  There was one last pluck of the harp, a high, thin note wavering in the air, and the waltz came to a close.

  They let go of each other and stepped back. Crier’s hands fell to her sides, empty.

  “You and me,” she said.

  The Maker Thomas Wren built a child that fit the queen’s requirements: ten times stronger than the strongest human ever recorded. Ten times faster on foot. This child required no food, no sleep; it could hear whispered conversation from a distance of one thousand paces and see in the dark like a cat; its mind worked through even the most advanced mathematical and metaphysical equations at fifty times the speed of human experts; it never tired, never weakened, never succumbed to illness.

  Wren named the child Kiera and delivered her to the capital. Queen Thea was so overcome with joy that she adopted Kiera as her daughter and heir before the sun set that same day. She gave Wren his promised gold and a seat at the right hand of the throne, and for the next seven days the queen sent caravans of bread and honey to the farthest reaches of Zulla, celebrating her newbuilt daughter.

  Kiera.

  Wren’s greatest creation had only one flaw: because she was not alchemical magick, not automaton, not flesh and bone, bu
t a combination of all three, she was not perfectly self-sustaining. There is a law in this universe. One cannot create something from nothing. Because she was created for and bound to the queen, Kiera required the queen’s blood to survive.

  —FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE AUTOMA ERA,

  BY EOK OF FAMILY MEADOR, 2234610907, YEAR 4 AE

  8

  Far above her head, even through thick layers of stone, Ayla could hear the noise emanating from the grand ballroom: music, echoing conversation, the rumble of several hundred voices all talking at once. Up there it would be bright and loud and warm. Down here, in the underground corridors below the ballroom, it was dark, silent, freezing cold. The wall sconces, delicate baubles of blue glass with candles flickering within, gave off the very strange effect of being underwater.

  Ayla moved quickly through the darkness, ears straining for any sounds of footsteps or voices as she made her way through the hallway. This was her chance to explore and see if she could find any information on Kinok. She’d encountered two guards on routine patrol, but all she had to do was murmur “Errand for the lady” and they let her pass. Lady Crier’s name was like a secret password. A skeleton key.

  The engagement ceremony had already ended, making it easy for Ayla to slip away, but she had no idea how long Kinok would linger at his own party. All she could do was hope that he planned to stay in the ballroom all night, greeting his admirers. Whenever she passed a door, she tried the handle. All of them swung open immediately, offering views of nothing more than dark washing rooms or larders or once a wine cellar, until she began to doubt herself. Perhaps she’d seen wrong. What could Kinok possibly be doing housed down here? But then, finally: one of the doors didn’t open.

  She dropped to her knees, squinting into the tiny gap between the door and the doorjamb. The lock wouldn’t be too much trouble. Her brother had taught her how to deal with locks. She reached into the pocket of her uniform, retrieved the hairpin she had stolen from Crier’s room earlier, and inserted it carefully into the keyhole. There was no real finesse to lockpicking, not for her. Her brother, Storme, though—he had been the real expert. He’d been able to pick the lock on their family’s cottage in ten seconds flat. Ayla’s style was more of the “jimmy the doorknob and rattle things around for a while and see what happens” variety. She bit her lip, poking the hairpin around inside the keyhole, and—click.

  Then she took out a handkerchief—the one Nessa had lent her earlier, to clean her bloodied nose—and used it to prevent any trace of fingerprints or skin oil when she turned the doorknob, pushing the door open gently. She was still kneeling, and that was the only reason she saw it.

  A hair, silently drifting to the flagstones from the door’s latch.

  Her body went cold. It wasn’t an ordinary booby trap, the kind she and Storme used to prank each other with—a pitcher of water above the front door, a string that, when inevitably tripped over, would cause the teakettle to clatter to the floor. Those traps were obvious, used to scare an intruder away. To signal a warning.

  This trap was different. Only the person who had placed the trap would know that it had been disturbed, that someone had been in the room. Kinok didn’t want to scare his intruders. He just wanted to know if they existed. Somehow, it felt so much more sinister. Ayla shuddered and picked up the hair, placing it carefully into her pocket so she could replace it when she left, the same way Kinok must have done. Then she slipped inside.

  The bedchamber itself was almost the exact twin to Crier’s. There was a bed just like hers, big and four-postered with a linen canopy. A mirror, a bathtub, a large wooden chest in one corner. Kinok did not keep a fire going in the hearth, though, so the room was so cold that Ayla was shivering in her thin handmaiden’s uniform. And there was only one tapestry.

  She searched methodically, starting in one corner and going from there, looking for any maps, drawings, symbols, or books that might contain information about the Iron Heart. Think like him, she told herself, wrapping the handkerchief around her hand again, fingers skimming the lid of the wooden chest. Think like an Automa.

  Nothing in the chest but clothing and loose coins. Nothing in or around the bathtub, the mirror, the half-empty bookshelf, the hearth. . . . Ayla checked every surface, every nook, every shadow. The bedding, the bathing screen, the curtains; she even crawled beneath the bed to see if there was anything tucked up in the bed frame . . . nothing.

  Disappointed, and growing more nervous as the minutes ticked by, Ayla finally turned to the tapestry. It was beautiful, a woven scene of musicians playing to a little girl with golden eyes. Ayla felt around the edges of the tapestry, lifted it up off the wall to check the back—but when she lifted it, she didn’t see the expected stone wall. She saw paper.

  Heart in her throat, she grabbed the tapestry with both hands and held it above her head, trying to see the entirety of what had been hiding beneath it.

  At first Ayla thought it was a map. But then she realized that no, it was too sparse—there was no land, no blue ocean. A star chart? She squinted through the darkness, trying to make out the design.

  And her breath caught.

  Kinok wasn’t charting stars.

  He was charting people.

  There, sketched out in perfect detail, were human faces. Hundreds of them, each rendered in black ink, no bigger than a copper statescoin. It took only a moment for Ayla to see a face she recognized: Nessa. And there, a hand’s length away: Thom, Nessa’s husband, who tended the orchards. There was Laurel, Gedda, Rie, from the kitchens. The drawing of Rie even had the deep, pockmarked scar where her left eye used to be.

  There was Yoon from the kitchens, Idric, Una, Jack. Each drawing was connected to the other drawings by different colored threads: red, blue, gold. From a few paces away, it really had looked like a star chart, a night sky full of constellations.

  Nessa and Thom, the not-so-secret lovers, were connected by a red line. Gedda and his closest friend, another stableboy named Ket, were connected in blue. Laurel and her little sister, Edy, in gold. The threads stretched out across the chart, dozens and dozens of them, overlapping, creating a vast, complex web of—relationships.

  With a growing sense of cold, sick horror, Ayla searched the chart for one specific face.

  Benjy.

  There were blue lines connecting Benjy to a couple other servants. No gold lines—no family.

  A single bright, bloodred line. It ran like a vein across the chart.

  The face at the other end of it was Ayla. She stared at the tiny depiction of herself: at her round face, her ink-black hair. The red thread pinned at her throat.

  Ridiculously, her first reaction was hot embarrassment. Kinok thought she and Benjy were lovers? Why? They’d never been anything but friends, they’d never gone further, they wouldn’t. Couldn’t. (There was that one time, when Benjy pressed their foreheads together, and for a moment, Ayla had thought—no.) For years Ayla had tried her damnedest to keep Benjy at arm’s length. She knew that even friendship made you weak, made hard decisions only harder to make, in a world where you had to look out for yourself first.

  As for love? It was worse than a weakness.

  Love broke you. After all, it was love, wasn’t it, that had made Ayla weep for weeks after the death of her family, had made her curl up, unable to move. Love was what made you invite death, wish for it, crave it, just so that you could be freed from your own pain.

  Once Rowan had gotten Ayla back on her feet and given her a new start, Ayla had vowed to herself that she would never let love break her again.

  Ayla shuddered now and leaned in closer, her nose nearly brushing the chart. She couldn’t help but notice that her face was the only one on the chart that had just the one thread connected to it. The rest of the ink faces had threads of all colors branching out from them—friends, siblings, lovers.

  Slowly, as if in a trance, Ayla kept searching for familiar faces. There were so many she half recognized, people she’d glimpsed in Kall
a-den, villagers and merchants. Was Rowan on this chart? Was Faye?

  Was Luna?

  What color did you get when you were connected to a corpse?

  Ayla stood on her tiptoes, searching. There. Faye, with her wild eyes. There was a black thread connected to her. Ayla followed it—but the face on the other end of Faye’s thread had been scratched out. Her black thread led to nothing.

  That must have been Luna.

  Ayla stared at the scratch mark that had once been Luna’s face, willing the truth to not be the truth, but it was too late; she had already figured it out; she knew why the thread was black; it was horrible and sickening and the only explanation that made any sense.

  Why did Kinok keep this chart? What good did it do him to know all of these connections?

  Unless . . . unless he was using human relationships against them in some way, to keep them in order, to keep them in line.

  The thought hit her like a roll of thunder. The answer to the mystery of Luna’s death.

  It hadn’t been a punishment for something Luna did. Wasn’t her, wasn’t her, Faye had said.

  Because Luna hadn’t done anything wrong.

  Luna’s death had been a punishment for something Faye did.

  That was what this chart was for. To find human weaknesses—and exploit them.

  It was beyond cruel, beyond sick.

  It was the work of a master manipulator.

  Gods, no wonder Faye had gone mad. Take me instead, she’d screamed. Kill me instead.

  A creak in the hallway outside Kinok’s door wrenched Ayla back to the present. She dropped the tapestry and leaped away from the chart, pressing herself up against the wall. Luckily, nobody came inside. The footsteps passed, heading down the corridor outside. She wasn’t safe here. Breathless, ears ringing, she slipped out of Kinok’s bedchamber. Replaced the hair in the latch. Closed the heavy wooden door behind her. Then she practically ran down the corridor, away from the freezing room and the dead hearth and the chart of faces, weblike and fragile.

  She turned a corner and headed down a narrow hallway, running blindly for the staircase that would take her up into the light and the warmth, her breath coming in harsh gasps.