Crier's War

by Nina Varela

  “I see.” She shifted, catching the faraway scuffle of a rabbit in the underbrush. The shadows dappled Kinok’s face and shoulders like a horse’s coloring. He was still looking at her, the last remnants of that smile still playing at the corners of his flawless mouth. “I wish you luck with your fox, Scyre,” she said, preparing to track down the rabbit. “Aim well.”

  “Actually, I wanted to congratulate you, my lady,” he said suddenly. “While we are out here, away from—from the palace. I heard you convinced Sovereign Hesod to let you attend a meeting of the Red Council next week.”

  Crier bit her tongue, trying to hide her excitement. After years of near-begging, her father had agreed to let her attend a council meeting. After years of studying history, philosophy, political theory, reading and rereading a dozen libraries’ worth of books, writing essays and letters and sometimes feverish little manifestos, she would finally, finally be allowed to take a seat among the Red Hands. Maybe even to share her proposals for council reform. As daughter of the sovereign, the Red Council was her birthright; it was as much a part of her as her Pillars. She was Made for this.

  “I think you’re right, you know,” Kinok continued. “I read the open letter you sent to Councilmember Reyka. About your proposed redistribution of representation on the Red Council. You are correct that while there is a voice for every district in Zulla outside of Varn, there is not a voice for every system of value.”

  “You read that?” Crier said, eyes snapping up to his face. “Nobody read that. I doubt even Councilmember Reyka did.”

  She couldn’t help the note of bitterness in her voice. It was foolish, but she had thought Councilmember Reyka, of all people, would listen to her. Her argument had been that in places with higher-density human populations, the interests of those humans should be somehow accounted for in the Hands who sat on her father’s council. Though she had to wonder if when Kinok mentioned her phrase, “systems of value,” he was more interested in his own values—those he was attempting to spread through the land, via ARM—than those of the human citizens.

  Still, it flattered her that he’d read it. It meant her words had more power, greater reach, than she’d realized.

  She hoped Reyka had read it too, but with no reply, she’d been left to believe the worst. That Reyka thought her naive and foolish. Sometimes, Crier wondered if maybe her father thought that, too. He’d refused her for so long.

  But Reyka had always shown something of a soft spot for Crier. As the longest-serving member of the Red Council, Reyka had always been a fixture in Crier’s life. She’d visited the palace quite frequently. When Crier was younger, Reyka would bring her little gifts from her travels: vials of sweet-smelling hair oil, a music box the size of a thumbnail, the strange dark delicacy that was candied heartstone.

  Crier had come to think of her the way human children in storybooks thought of their godmothers. She couldn’t say that to Reyka, or to anyone. It was such a weak, soft-bellied idea. So she just thought it to herself, and it made her feel warm.

  “Well . . .” Kinok stepped forward a little, light sliding across his face. His footsteps were silent amid the blanket of dried leaves. “I read it twice. And I agree with it. The Red Hands shouldn’t be based on district alone; it leads to imbalance and bias. Have you mentioned this issue to your father?”

  “Yes,” Crier said quietly. “He was not incredibly receptive.”

  “We can work on that.” At her look of surprise, Kinok shrugged one shoulder. “We are bound to be married, are we not? I am on your side, Lady Crier, as you are on mine. Right?”

  “Right,” she found herself saying, staring at him in wonder. What new opportunities might come to her in this marriage? For months now she had thought of it as nothing more than a prolonged political maneuver, unpleasant but ultimately bearable, like the stench of rotting fish in the sea air.

  It had not occurred to her that she might be gaining an advocate, as well as a husband.

  “And if we are on the same side, there is something you should know,” said Kinok, lowering his voice even though they were entirely alone, no living things around but the rabbits and the birds. “There was a scandal in the capital recently. I know only because I was with Councilmember Reyka when she learned of it.”

  Crier almost questioned that—it was no secret that Councilmember Reyka hated everything about the Anti-Reliance Movement, including Kinok himself. But another word caught her attention. “A scandal?” she asked. “What kind of scandal?”

  “Midwife sabotage.”

  Crier’s eyes widened. “What do you mean, sabotage?” she asked. Midwives were an integral part of the Making process. They were created to be assistants to the Makers themselves, a bridge between Maker and Designer. They helped newly Made Automae adjust to the world. “What did the Midwife do?”

  “Faked a set of Design blueprints for a nobleman’s child. It was a disaster. The child was Made wrong. More animal than Automa or even human. Their mind was wild, violent. They had to be disposed of for the safety of the nobleman’s family.”

  “That’s horrible,” Crier breathed. “Why would the Midwife do such a thing? Was it madness?” She knew the condition plagued some humans.

  “Nobody knows,” said Kinok. “But, Lady, there is something you should know.”

  There was something strange in his voice. Warning? Trepidation?

  “This was not her first Make,” Kinok continued, meeting Crier’s eyes. “She had been working with the nobles of Rabu for decades.”

  A pit seemed to open in Crier’s belly, but she was not sure why.

  “Who was she, Scyre?” she asked slowly. “The Midwife. What was her name?”

  “Torras. Her name was Torras.”

  Crier gripped her bow so tightly that the wood creaked in protest. Because she knew Midwife Torras.

  She knew it, because that was the Midwife who had helped Make her.

  As soon as the Hunt was complete—two rabbits and a quail ensnared—and their party had returned to the palace, Crier retired to her chambers, poring again over the Midwife’s Handbook, a thin, leather-bound booklet she’d come across in a bookseller’s stall in the market last year and bought with so much enthusiasm that the stall owner seemed a little alarmed. She reassured herself that an infraction of the kind Kinok had mentioned was nearly impossible.

  There was no way her own Design had been tampered with, of course. She was far too important.

  And besides, if there were something off, something Flawed, something different about her, she’d know it already . . . wouldn’t she?

  It is the duty of the Human Midwife to care for the new-Made Commission as they would for their own Human offspring.

  It is the duty of the Midwife to provide the new-Made Commission with heartstone as Human child bearers provide Human offspring with milk.

  It is the duty of the Midwife to ensure that the inner workings of the new-Made Commission have been Made correctly and without Flaw. The new-Made Commission must contain within its breast the Four Pillars: Reason, Calculation, Organics, and Intellect. Much like the Human Temperaments, these Four Pillars are the basis of the Automa individual and the Society as a whole.

  It is the duty of the Midwife to ensure that the new-Made Commission was Made according to the Commissioner’s Design; if discrepancies are discovered, the Midwife must report the discrepancies in detail to the Head Commissioner and the Head Midwife and continue to care for the new-Made Commission until a decision is made.

  It is the duty of the Midwife to place the continued existence of the new-Made Commission above their own.

  It is the duty of the Midwife to place the continued existence of the new-Made Commission above all.

  In the rare case of an Order of Termination ordained by the Sovereign, with the unanimous support of the Red Council, only then shall the Midwife bend to the Law and allow the Flawed Commission to be terminated.

  —FROM THE MIDWIFE’S HANDBOOK,

  BY
MIDWIFE HALLA OF MIDWIFERY RM437 OF THE SOVEREIGN STATE OF RABU

  2

  Luna was killed in a white dress.

  A week had passed since her death, and the dress that had been stripped off her body and dangled from the tallest post was still fluttering in the faint breeze. It was some kind of symbol, or warning. By now the dress was soaked through with rot and rainwater, but there were still some parts white enough to catch the sunlight. Catch the eye.

  Ayla could not stop glancing over, and every time she did, she felt the gut-punch of what had happened to Luna all over again. And now, days later, the reminder rippled through the other humans like the dress itself rippled in the summer wind. No one even knew what Luna had done. Why the sovereign’s guards had killed her.

  Ayla continued on her way through the marketplace. She usually worked in the orchards at Sovereign Hesod’s palace, sowing seeds and collecting bushels of ripe apples, but one of the other servants was practically delirious with fever and Ayla had been ordered to fill in. For the past week she’d joined the group of exhausted servants who left their beds halfway through the night, just so they could make it to the closest village, Kalla-den—a good four leagues of treacherous, rocky shoreline from the palace—and set up their wares by dawn. It would’ve been miserable no matter what, but being greeted in the marketplace by Luna’s empty dress made it all the worse. It was like a ghost. Like a pale fish in dark water, flickering at the edges of Ayla’s vision.

  Ayla had worked in some capacity at the sovereign’s palace for the past four years. And it had been months since she’d finally made it out of the stables and into the orchard-tending rotation. Some days she was so close to the white stone walls of the palace that she could smell the burning hearth fires within, taste the smoke on her tongue. And yet . . . she still hadn’t managed to get inside.

  Nothing mattered until she got inside. And she’d vowed to do so to exact her revenge—even if it killed her.

  But now Ayla stared out at the marketplace, at the crowd of sleek, beautiful Automae—leeches—and tried to keep the hatred and disgust off her face. Nobody bought flowers from a girl who looked like she’d rather be selling poison.

  “Flowers!” she called out, trying to keep her voice light. It was almost sunset, almost time to give up for the day, but there were still far too many unsold garlands in her basket. “We’ve got seaflowers, apple blossoms, the prettiest salt lavender up and down the coast!”

  Not a single leech glanced in her direction. The Kalla-den Market was a kingdom’s worth of chaos stuffed into an area the size of a barn, and it was so noisy you could hear it from half a league away. The marketplace was vendors’ stalls shoved up against each other three deep, their carts and baskets overflowing with candied fruits, pastries, fresh-caught fish, oysters that smelled like death even under the weak autumn sun. It was leeches huddled around baskets of heartstone dust, dipping the tips of their fingers into the powdery red grains, bringing them to their lips to test the quality. It was whole chickens or goat legs rotating on spits, roasting slowly, smoke filling the air till Ayla’s eyes watered; it was wine and apple cider and piles of colorful spices; it was a crush of grimy, skeletal, desperate humans hawking their wares to an endless stream of Automae.

  And of course, the rows and rows of Hesod’s prized sun apples, gleaming like so many red jewels—nearly as crimson and bright as heartstone itself.

  But the majority of the Automae seemed to treat the market like one of those traveling menageries—Step right up, folks. Gawk for free. Look at the humans. Look at the flesh-and-bone animals. Point and stare, why don’t you. Watch ’em sweat and squeal like pigs.

  The only good thing about the market was Benjy. She looked over at him as she called out Flowers! again. He was the closest thing to a friend that Ayla would allow herself. She’d known him since she was twelve years old and haunted, hollowed by grief. In the thick of it, still.

  Unlike Ayla, Benjy was used to the madness of Kalla-den. He even seemed to thrive in it, his brown eyes bright and sparkling, the sun bringing out the freckles on his brown cheeks. The first day Ayla had joined him here in the market, he’d nearly taken some eyes out while pointing at all the exciting things he wanted Ayla to see—colorful glass baubles, mechanical insects with windup wings, twists of sugared bread shaped like animals. On the second day, Benjy showed Ayla the secret underbelly of the market: Made objects. These were forbidden items created by alchemists—Makers—and passed from hand to hand in the shadows, hidden by the dust and the crowd. Objects smaller than Ayla’s little finger but worth double her weight in gold. For humans, possessing a Made object was forbidden, as Made objects were the work of alchemy and considered dangerous, powerful. After all, Automae themselves were Made. Perhaps they didn’t like any reminder that they, too, were once treated like trinkets and playthings. Made objects were completely illegal, and therefore incredibly tempting.

  Ayla had no use for temptation—except in one single case. The locket she wore around her neck. The only remnant she had of her family—a reminder of the violence they’d suffered, and the revenge she planned to take. She didn’t even know how it worked, if it even did work, but she knew it was Made, and that it was forbidden, and that it was the one thing she could call hers.

  “Are you going to help me or not?” Ayla said now, prodding Benjy in the ribs. He yelped. “I’ve been yelling my head off for an hour; it’s your turn.”

  He looked down at her, squinting in the dying sun. “Take it from someone who’s done this a hundred times. The day is over. All anyone’s willing to buy right now is heartstone.”

  Ayla huffed. “You of all people know if we don’t sell every single one of these flowers, we won’t get dinner.”

  “Trust me, I’m aware. My belly’s been growling since midmorning.”

  “You got any food squirreled away back in the quarters?”

  “No,” he said mournfully. “I had some dried plums stowed away in the old gardener’s lean-to, but last time I checked they were gone. Guess someone else found them.” He tugged at his messy dark curls, wiped the sweat off his forehead, fiddled with one of the garlands they had yet to sell. That was Benjy—always in motion. It would make Ayla anxious if she weren’t so used to it.

  “The world is just full of thieves, ain’t it,” Ayla said with a hint of amusement.

  Benjy picked a petal off one of the seaflowers. “Like you’re not a thief yourself.”

  She grinned.

  When Ayla first met Benjy, he had looked more like a deer than a boy. Long-legged and awkward and perpetually wide-eyed, sweet and young and angry, but a soft kind of angry. A harmless, deathless kind of angry. His family hadn’t been killed by the sovereign’s men. He’d never known them at all—his mother had left him on the doorstep of an old temple, still wet from birth. If it were Ayla, she knew she’d be consumed by the need to track them down, to find her birth mother, to ask her a thousand questions that all began with why. But Benjy wasn’t like that. He’d survived under the care of the temple priests for nine years, then ran away. Three months later, Rowan took him in.

  Benjy’s anger was different now—he’d grown, learned more about this broken world, learned about the Revolution. Some bitterness had seeped into him; some passion. But he was still soft. Would always be. For years, that softness had annoyed the hell out of Ayla. Made her want to grab his shoulders and shake him till some fury came out.

  After all, it was fury that had kept Ayla alive all these years; fury that had lit a flame inside her chest and made her keep going out of sheer anger.

  When she had no hearth fire to keep her warm, she’d picture the look on Hesod’s face when his precious daughter lay in Ayla’s hands, broken beyond repair. On the days her belly seemed to crumple in on itself from lack of bread, she’d picture some older, stronger version of herself looking Hesod right in his soulless eyes and saying: This is for my family, you murderous leech.

  Ayla scanned the crowd, feeling horri
bly small and soft, a mouse surrounded by cats. Automae looked human the way statues looked human—you might be tricked from far away, but once you got up close you could see all the differences. Most leeches were around six feet tall, some even taller, and their bodies, no matter the shape or size, were graceful and corded with muscle. Their faces were angular, their features sharp. They were Designed in Automa Midwiferies, each one sculpted to be beautiful, but it was a chilling kind of beautiful. Some sick practice in vanity: How big can we make her eyes? How cutting her cheekbones? How perfectly symmetrical her features?

  There was also something odd about the look of a leech’s skin. It was flawless, sure—no pores, no peach fuzz, no freckles or sunburns or scars, just smooth, supple skin. But more than that, it was the way they looked carved from stone, indestructible. It was the way their skin stretched over their hand-designed muscles and bones. Like it could barely keep all the monster inside.

  The leeches had let themselves forget that they’d been created by the same humans they now treated worse than dogs. In the forty-eight years since their rise to power, they’d conveniently let themselves forget their past. Forget that they were once merely the pets and playthings of human nobility.

  Ayla did not let herself think about her own past, either—the fire, the fear, the way loss lived in the cavity of the chest, the way it chewed her up from the inside out. Thinking like that wasn’t how you survived.

  She and Benjy packed up the stall before sundown, aiming to be long gone by the time darkness fell over Kalla-den. As they took a shortcut through a damp alley, baskets of unsold seaflowers strapped to their backs, someone fell into step behind them. Ayla glanced back and, despite herself, she almost smiled when she saw Rowan.

  Rowan was a seamstress who lived and worked in Kalla-den. At least, that’s what she was on the outside.

  To people like Ayla, she was something else entirely. A mentor. A trainer. A protector. A mother to the lost and the beaten and the hungry. She gave them refuge. And taught them to fight back.