Crier's War

by Nina Varela

Still disoriented, Crier scrambled after them. She paused only to hide the pendant in her drawer, where she’d hidden the key to the music room, and then she was racing out the door and down the corridor. The guards hadn’t gotten far at all, not with Ayla weighing them down. “Stop!” Crier called out, as harshly as she could, and to her relief they actually obeyed. One of the guards turned to face her, his eyes flashing gold in the light from the wall sconces. He was the one who had shoved Ayla’s face into the flagstones.

  “My lady,” he said in a monotone. “We are under orders from the sovereign. Please return to your chamber. The physician is on the way.”

  “I am not injured,” Crier snapped. “I am completely unharmed, and Ay—the human has done nothing wrong.”

  “We are under orders from the sovereign,” the guard repeated. “Should Lady Crier be placed in any danger, any and all humans in the vicinity are to be delivered to Scyre Kinok for questioning.”

  The ice in Crier’s veins shattered. She reeled, trying not to show the fear and revulsion on her face. “To Kinok? Why? Why not to my father?”

  “We are under orders from the sovereign.”

  She stared at him. He stared back, impervious.

  “I am your lady,” she tried. “You answer to me as well as my father.”

  “The sovereign’s orders take precedence above all.”

  Crier opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She had no idea how to proceed from here. How to make them release Ayla, Ayla who had done nothing wrong, Ayla who should not be taken anywhere near Kinok, not without Crier there to—protect her, watch out for her, something.

  The guards sidestepped her neatly, and with Ayla still slumped between them, limp, they marched down the corridor and were gone.

  She stood there for a few moments, wide-eyed and barefoot and frozen with shock, the remnants of a burning city still flickering at the edges of her mind—a burning city that she knew was real. It hadn’t been a nightmare. Everything made sense now: Ayla’s strange paranoia about her necklace, the way she wore it always even though she seemed terrified of anyone discovering it.

  The locket was a memory keeper, activated by blood. Crier had heard of similar objects, in the records of the old Makers, in estate auction papers she’d seen, listing the wide array of alchemical trinkets and gadgets for sale that were now forbidden to humans—silver models of constellations that, when activated by the crushed bones of birds, could fly in circles around your head in the exact patterns of the celestial bodies. Glass eyeballs that rolled in the direction of whatever you were searching for.

  But this object was not just any Made object. It was Ayla’s, and the memories stored in it were, in some way or another, memories of the history of Ayla and her family. Whoever had worn it before Ayla—the man in the chaos, amid the fires, the man called Leo—had allowed his memories to be recorded by the locket, and now they were trapped within it.

  She didn’t know what it meant, only that Ayla’s history was full of violence and sadness.

  And now, her future would be too, if Crier didn’t do something about it.

  She turned on her heel and ran in the opposite direction of the guards. She tore down the dark hallways, the wall sconces smearing in yellow parallax, and did not slow down until the door of her father’s chambers loomed before her through the gloom. She was running so fast that it was hard to stop; her feet actually skidded on the flagstones. Then she was scrabbling at the door, shoving it open, tumbling inside. “Father!”

  He was already awake. He was standing by the hearth, gazing into the flames.

  “Father,” she gasped, “Father, they took her, the guards took her but it wasn’t her fault—”

  Slowly, he turned to face her. “You speak of the handmaiden. The human.”

  “Yes, yes, but she didn’t make my chime go off, it was me, I was distressed, and the guards—”

  “Daughter.”

  Her mouth snapped shut.

  “First Guard Lakell reported to me that when his men entered your room, the human was in your bed. Is that true?”

  A hot, prickling flush spread from Crier’s face all the way down her body.

  “Father, I—”

  “Was the human in your bed?”

  Mute, Crier nodded.

  Hesod turned away, looking into the flames again. “You nearly fall to your death, and the human girl is there. You have some sort of—fit—in the middle of the night, and the human girl is there in your bedchamber, in your bed. Are you trying to tell me that it is a coincidence? That your chime only goes off in her presence?”

  So he knew about what had happened at the cliffs, too. Even though she’d begged the guards not to tell him.

  He knew everything, it seemed.

  But he couldn’t know what was in Crier’s mind—how she felt. And he didn’t know about her Flaw. Not yet, anyway.

  We were just sleeping, Crier wanted to say, but she didn’t even know what she was defending herself against. We weren’t doing anything. What would they have been doing?

  The flush grew deeper.

  “The handmaiden has never harmed me,” she insisted, as calmly as possible. “She has never touched me. I was awake, thinking—about the queen’s visit—and became distressed.”

  “What thoughts could cause such distress?”

  “The queen is . . . very commanding,” she stalled, trying to come up with an excuse.

  “Well, you can be reassured, then. The queen and her entire retinue have already departed. It is a good thing, too, as this situation would have caused quite the scandal had she been around to witness it.”

  The queen was gone.

  And Crier had missed her chance to deliver the green feather. To take her side.

  “There are whispers, daughter,” Hesod went on. “I hear them in the corridors, in the kitchens. The servants of this palace are under the impression that their lady has become attached to the human girl who serves her.”

  Crier shook her head. “They are mistaken, Father.”

  “I know,” Hesod said gently. “I know that no child of mine, no child created by my hand, would commit such a heinous betrayal against their own Kind. I know the servants are mistaken, daughter. But humans, once convinced of an idea, are difficult to persuade otherwise. Their minds are not complex and malleable like ours. And you do not want them to continue spreading such dangerous lies, do you?”

  “No,” Crier whispered.

  “Then I will offer you a deal,” said Hesod, “because I believe that you are telling the truth, even if no one else does. I shall give the handmaiden one last chance. She will be allowed to remain at your feet, serving you.” He paused. “Unless, of course, there is another incident. Then she will be removed.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “In the meantime, you will wear the black armband that symbolizes the Anti-Reliance Movement. As a gesture of goodwill, peace, and tolerance between Traditionalism and Anti-Reliance.”

  “Yes, Father,” Crier said numbly. “I will do as you’ve asked.”

  Hesod finally looked at her again, and his eyes glinted in the firelight. “I am pleased,” he said, “to have raised such an obedient child.”

  Crier didn’t let herself second-guess the message she had penned the moment she left her father’s side. She would not marry Kinok. Nor would she abide her father’s decisions any longer.

  The words flowed out of her pen with little effort, even the coded names coming easily.

  Once satisfied, she stared at the wet ink for a moment, blew lightly across the page to dry it, then slipped a green feather into the envelope, sealed it with wax, and gave it to one of her father’s messengers.

  “Deliver it well,” she said with a smile, picturing the sly look that would appear on Queen Junn’s face when she received it upon her arrival in Varn—when the queen realized that she had an ally. That together, they were going to take down the Wolf.

  Friend—

  You said to me that Fear is
a tool of survival.

  I hope that you are right.

  There is indeed a Wolf among us, and we must work together to hunt him down. If he kills again, there are three who will share in the spoils. Two will be found with red blood on their hands. To find the third, look foerward; he is closer than you think.

  La st we spoke, you said, “It only takes One clever fox to best a thousand men.”

  I confess, I wish to be that fox.

  These days, the Sha dows are long. Soon, the nights will Sta rt to swallow us whole. There is always a part of me that dreads the winter. Now more than ever.

  —Fox

  16

  The guards had led Ayla into the bowels of the palace: into the maze of the west wing and then through a wooden door and down a flight of white marble steps that seemed unending, the air growing cold and dank the farther they descended. They were taking her underground. Ayla couldn’t stop her hands from shaking, just a little. They were so far underground that she knew she could scream and the noise would just be swallowed by the rough, ugly stone walls and the darkness.

  Were they leading her to her death, right here, right now?

  She thought of her crime—curling up beside the lady of the house. In her own bed. What had she been thinking? In the moment, all the fury of her fight with Storme, all her fear and confusion, had simply led her there without thinking, without questioning. She’d been drawn to Crier.

  Maybe it was because Crier had been the object of her thoughts, her obsessions, for so long. Since long before she’d become her handmaiden. And now, the obsession had begun to morph and change in the light, no longer as simple as a desire to kill, now colored, in certain moments, with a desire for something else.

  A desire Ayla simply could not name.

  The guilt and shame of it exploded in her gut, and she almost doubled over, sick with it, except that the guards held her, kept leading her forward into the darkness.

  At least, she reminded herself, she’d gained something from last night.

  Crier had mentioned something important—something potentially very important.

  Kinok had a “special compass.” If it were anyone else, she’d think nothing of it; a compass was a compass; it pointed north and that was it.

  But a special compass carried by a Watcher of the Iron Heart was another matter entirely.

  They turned a corner toward another set of stairs. One of the guards let go of her arm in the narrowness of the stairwell, and instinctively, she reached for the familiar weight of her necklace, but her fingers found nothing but skin.

  Frowning, she felt all around her throat. Then her hair, it sometimes got tangled in her hair while she slept, and then around the collar of her uniform. Nothing. She checked her underclothes. Nothing. It wasn’t caught on the inside of her shirt, either.

  If fear was cold water, paranoia was ice. It spread across her skin like frost on a windowpane.

  It was missing. The simplest explanation, and the most horrifying. Her necklace was missing. The one item she owned that could get her (Benjy) killed, and it was gone. She’d lost it. When? In Crier’s bedchamber just now, when the guards had dragged her out of bed? In the halls before that?

  If someone found it.

  If they traced it back to her.

  Benjy.

  Lost in her thoughts, Ayla almost walked straight into a guard’s back when they finally reached the bottom of the steps. It was so dark, the torchlights spread far apart on the damp stone walls, that she didn’t see the stone door until someone was unlocking it, pulling it open from the inside.

  Kinok had lit a single lamp, and Ayla just barely managed to bite back a surprised curse—she’d been expecting a prison cell, but instead they’d brought her to Kinok’s study.

  The room Malwin had mentioned.

  The exact place she needed to find.

  Somewhere in this study, she knew, lay a safe, that could hold Kinok’s secrets. Information about the Iron Heart.

  Maybe even the compass Crier had mentioned.

  As sick and terrified as she felt, there was something too perfect about where she’d ended up.

  She followed a guard through the stone door and into a small room lined with so many carpets and maps and tapestries that almost nothing of the floor and walls was visible.

  To muffle sound, Ayla thought, and clenched her teeth.

  The guards shut the door behind her, and she was alone, with Kinok.

  He sat behind a large desk against one wall, the surface heaped with papers, books, more maps. A pot of ink, a quill. Beside it a bookshelf filled with leather-bound books. All of them fat and ancient-looking, the spines emblazoned with gold-stamped titles, long strings of words that Ayla couldn’t read, and—

  This time, Ayla really did curse.

  Because that was her necklace.

  Her Made object. It was sitting in plain sight on Kinok’s bookshelf, between an odd little glass ball and a bunch of used nibs.

  How did he get it so quickly, when she’d only just noticed it was missing? It seemed impossible. That his reach was so swift, that it was everywhere.

  She tore her eyes away, but not fast enough. When she looked at Kinok he was already looking back at her, his own gaze flicking between her face and the bookshelf.

  He knew. That’s why he brought her down here. This is a death sentence. Between the necklace and getting caught in Crier’s bed, she was as good as dead.

  Or if not her, then Benjy. The chart. The red thread.

  Her heart skittered in her chest as she met Kinok’s eyes, waiting for the sentence. For the noose, the knife, the great blade of the guillotine, the thing lurking in Kinok’s eyes. Whatever he said, she would fight it. Whatever he wanted to do to Benjy, she would stop it. She would—

  “Where were you born, handmaiden?”

  She didn’t answer. Couldn’t, not yet. Her body was tense as a harp string, blood pounding at her temples.

  Was this a game?

  Kinok snapped his fingers, a crack of sound, and she jolted.

  “I asked you a question, handmaiden. Where were you born?”

  “The village of Delan,” Ayla said. Her voice came out hoarse. “To the north.”

  “You grew up there?”

  Her stomach twisted. Yes, and no. She nodded.

  “When did you first come to the palace?”

  Her mind reeled. What was this line of questioning? Why are you doing this, she wanted to say, Why are you drawing it out, just get it over with, but instead she tried to calm down. Deep breaths.

  “I came here five years ago,” she said.

  “As a child, then.”

  “No.” She hadn’t been a child anymore. That had been robbed from her long before.

  His eyes flickered. “I see. And your family? Your parents—did they come with you? Do they work here as well?”

  “Dead.”

  “What were their names?”

  “Why?” Ayla countered. “What does it matter?”

  “I don’t think it’s your place to ask the questions.”

  “Their names were Yann and Clara.”

  “And your parents’ parents? What were their names?”

  “My mother’s parents were Leo and Siena,” said Ayla. “But—my parents didn’t speak of them. Most in my village were like that about the past.” She tried and failed to keep the bitterness from her voice. “I’ve never known a bloodline that got out of the War unscathed. Never known a family tree that wasn’t missing most of its branches.”

  “Humans don’t keep records?” He seemed casually intrigued, like they were at market discussing the rising prices of tea. “You don’t copy down your own history? Your own blood?”

  “We did,” said Ayla. “And then Sovereign Hesod burned my village to the ground.”

  She and Kinok met each other’s eyes and neither of them blinked.

  “Very well,” said Kinok. He still looked perfectly pleasant, but his jaw was perhaps a little
tighter than it had been before they started talking, and that fact made a wicked tendril of satisfaction break through the fog of Ayla’s suspicion and fear. It seemed that whatever he was looking for, he hadn’t found.

  What would he do now? Dispose of her? Refer to his handy chart and trace the line straight to Benjy? What if this was her only chance?

  “I was wondering something,” she said boldly, trying to keep her shaky voice still. “I hear you were a Watcher. But Watchers never leave the Heart, do they?”

  It was more than bold. It was ridiculous. The desperate act of someone who knew she was at her last shot.

  He smiled. “I don’t remember granting you permission to ask any questions.”

  “I only meant, you must be special . . . ,” she pushed on. Keep it together, Ayla. Don’t give up now.

  The smile grew. There was nothing warm in it. “I have no answers for you, Handmaiden Ayla.”

  “Why?” she challenged him. “Were you thrown out?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “I can return anytime I wish.”

  Ayla felt another rush of satisfaction. Automa or not, Kinok was not so different from a human man. His pride was his weakest spot.

  “But I thought it was impossible to get back once you leave,” she said, pretending to frown in confusion. “I thought it was impossible to retrace the route through the mountains.”

  His eyes flickered sideways for a split second.

  A split second that she watched carefully. Automae weren’t the only ones who knew how to spot what they were looking for. “There are ways,” he said, and then stood up. “We’re done for now. Stay here.”

  Then, moving with just a little more speed and grace than a human could have, he left the room. The door clicked shut behind him before Ayla could really even process the fact that right before he’d left, he had grabbed the necklace from the bookshelf.

  It was gone again.

  And she was alone.

  She forced herself to wait an entire five minutes, counting the seconds, before she felt certain Kinok wouldn’t be returning immediately. Then she leaped out of the chair and headed straight for the corner of the study—the spot where Kinok’s eyes had flickered just for a moment.