by Nina Varela
The door of the queen’s chariot opened, and the Mad Queen Junn climbed out. Her feet were light and soundless even on the muddy ground. Like her servants, she was wearing a white mask over the lower half of her face, though hers was painted with a red mouth. Her skin was the same brown as Ayla’s, but like most Varnians her hair was lighter, honey-gold.
She didn’t look like a soul eater.
Hesod stepped forward. “Well met, Your Highness,” he said, and gestured at his own servants to collect the queen’s belongings. The queen greeted him with a nod, and in front of Ayla, Crier had bowed her head in deference—and oh, everyone else was bowing too; most of the humans were kneeling, their noses inches from the mud—and the queen was saying something, and Ayla was supposed to be bowing, but she couldn’t move. Her legs weren’t working. Her ears weren’t working.
Because someone else had stepped out of the chariot behind the queen.
He was tall. Unlike the queen and most of the other servants, his hair was dark. He was wearing the colors of Varn and his face was mostly covered by a white mask and he was tall (taller—three feet taller, at least) than the last time she’d seen him, but stars and skies, oh gods, there was that scar over his left eye, shaped like a starburst, pale with age but still recognizable. From half a courtyard away, recognizable. She’d seen it a thousand times. He’d gotten it at three years old after tumbling face-first into the corner of the stone hearth. A stupid wound, a child’s wound. The scar had never faded.
Ayla knew it like she knew the ache of sadness in her bones: the man standing at the Mad Queen’s side was her long-dead brother, Storme.
As if she’d called his name—as if her shrieking thoughts were so loud that he could actually hear them—Storme’s eyes found her through the crowd of leeches and servants. He glanced at her and then away again, and then his eyes skittered back to her face, and all of Ayla’s lingering doubts disappeared.
Storme looked like she had just sunk her fist into his stomach. Only his eyes were visible above the white mask, but that was all she needed. When Storme saw her, those terribly familiar eyes went huge. He stopped dead. One of the other servants bumped right into him and still he did not move, not for a long, aching moment, not until he seemed to realize that the queen was crossing the courtyard without him, and then he finally dropped his gaze and kept moving. More than anything, that single moment of eye contact confirmed it. This man was her brother.
If she’d had any remaining doubts, they disappeared within hours, because Storme wouldn’t stop watching her.
She knew, because she’d been watching him.
Once, so long ago that sometimes Ayla wasn’t sure whether it was a real memory or just something she’d dreamed, her father had showed her a Maker’s notebook. It was filled with drawings of funny mechanical trinkets: music boxes; clockwork birds; sundials the size of a fingernail; a spherical silver puzzle with a different solution for each phase of the moon. The designs were detailed, intricate, drawn with black ink on paper so thin it was half translucent. When you were looking at one page, you could see through to the next. Two images atop each other, one difficult to make out but still there.
That was what it felt like looking at Storme.
Every time Ayla dared to glance over, she saw two Stormes superimposed on top of each other: one was the Storme she was actually seeing, the Storme who was sixteen years old and dressed in jade-green wool, everything about him strong and shining and rich, luxurious, like he’d wanted for nothing in the past seven years. Then there was the Storme Ayla knew (had known), the nine-year-old boy with eyes too big for his face, all his bones showing because he was growing too fast. The Storme who had shoved her into the outhouse and left her there, and died. She’d seen it. Heard it, at least. Believed it to be true. But that scar.
This Storme—the Storme who followed silently behind Queen Junn—bore the same scar. The exact same one, down to the cleft in his eyebrow.
Because he was alive.
He was alive, and real, and here, somehow, somehow, after so long.
What happened to you? Ayla thought desperately, as she wrenched her eyes away from him for the thousandth time in the past few hours. How did you survive? How did you make it out of our village? How did you end up in Varn?
Why did you leave?
She’d heard him die. Alone in the terrible dark. She’d found his body. What she thought was his body.
For seven years, she’d thought he was dead. That was the only possible explanation. Because—because if he hadn’t died, he would have come back. He would have come back for her.
He would have.
Ayla trailed listlessly behind Crier as they accompanied Hesod, Kinok, and Queen Junn through a tour of the palace, the gardens, the grassy bluffs. She didn’t even try to pay attention, just kept her eyes on the back of Crier’s head and concentrated on not losing her footing in the mud. She and Storme were the only humans in their small party. Vaguely, Ayla remembered one of the head scullery maids trying to make Ayla stay behind with the other servants, and Crier saying, “The handmaiden will remain at my side.”
So the handmaiden, shadowlike, caught between memory and reality, remained at her side.
There were certain things you heard when you grew up in the streets of human villages. With the gutter rats, the whisperers. Stories of the Mad Queen, the Child Queen. Some said she’d killed her own father to take the throne. Some said she bathed in human blood. She was a legend, or a horror story. But now that the Mad Queen was in front of her, Ayla wondered how those stories had even begun. As much as she hated to admit it, the Mad Queen didn’t act like a monster. She did not seem cruel, arrogant, or violent. When she spoke to the humans in her company (and they weren’t just servants—the queen had human guards, and Storme) her voice was commanding but respectful, almost soft. During the tour of the palace, she kept Storme close. When she saw something she deemed interesting, like the hunting tapestries in the great hall or the library dedicated to Hesod’s vast collection of human books, she pointed it out to him and waited for his murmured comments. Like she cared. Like they stood on equal ground.
A single afternoon spent in her presence, and Ayla could tell that the queen of Varn was a mess of contradictions. She wore power like a crown of pure gold, impossible for anyone to ignore, and yet she hadn’t once used it to wound or punish. She was young—barely older than Ayla—but carried herself like an aging warrior-queen. She was fierce but gentle, unpredictable in her lack of cruelty. She looked like she could duel anyone in the kingdom and win, but also like she’d rather outsmart them instead.
She wasn’t like the stories. Ayla looked at her and couldn’t really imagine her bathing in a pool of human blood. Crushing bones between her teeth.
As the tour dragged on, Ayla began to realize that she wasn’t the only one watching Junn a little too closely. Crier kept stealing glances, too. For a leech, Crier really wasn’t very good at hiding her thoughts. She was looking at Queen Junn with something past curiosity, past intrigue. Almost like awe.
The tour took them through the west wing and to the east wing, where the queen would be staying. The east wing was much airier than the west, some of the big corridors lined with windows to let in the pale, post-rain sunlight, the white marble walls almost glowing with it. The procession’s footsteps echoed on the marble floors, a seemingly unending parade of sound. All of it was human—the queen’s men. The Automae were moving in perfect silence, like ghosts. A gesture of deference.
Crier watching the queen.
Ayla watching Storme.
Maybe Storme had been captured, she reasoned. It was uncommon for leeches to take prisoners during their raids, but it happened. Probably. Maybe he’d been captured and somehow ended up in the queen’s court and had never, not even once in seven years, had a chance to escape and come find the sister who believed he had been killed.
A wide, windowed corridor led them back into the bowels of the palace, where the marble h
alls were not so bright and unassuming. Lamplight flickered across the walls here, creating strange, leaping shadows. It was dim even in daylight. The procession’s footsteps still echoed, but the sound was duller, emptier. Somehow deadened. Ayla strained her ears to catch Hesod’s words as he told the Mad Queen about the history of these halls, the famous Automae who had built this palace and lived here since the War of Kinds. Power breeds power. She was only pulled from her daze when Crier paused in front of a single door, unnoticed by the rest of the party, and beckoned at Ayla to come closer. Ayla did, frowning.
“I want to show you something,” Crier said quietly, nodding at the dark wooden door. “I think—I think this will mean something to you. It used to be empty. But as of yesterday, it is empty no longer. Guess who has taken up residence.”
“I don’t know,” Ayla said, shaking her head.
Crier smiled. “It’s Faye.”
Ayla stared at her. “I’m sorry, why does Faye live in the east wing?”
Crier looked almost proud. “I requested it.”
“But why—?”
“My lady,” said another servant before Crier could answer. “Your father has noted your absence and requests that you rejoin him at the head of the party.”
“Of course,” Crier said smoothly, and turned away from Ayla without another word, following the servant down the corridor toward the tail end of the tour, the last Varnian humans disappearing around the corner. “Come, Ayla.”
But Ayla was rooted where she stood, rooted to the marble outside the door that apparently belonged to Faye.
What have you done, Crier?
Before she could think better of it, she knocked on the door. There was a scuffling sound from within, and then the door opened just a crack. Just enough to show a sliver of someone’s face, a single wide, unblinking eye.
“What are you doing here?” hissed Faye. “What do you want?”
Ayla glanced down the corridor—Crier was standing there at the very end, half melted into the shadows, so still that she might have been an extension of the marble floor, a statue erected in the middle of the hall. She was waiting for Ayla.
“What are you doing here?” Ayla whispered, so quiet that even Crier’s Automa hearing wouldn’t be able to pick it up. “Why did she give you this room?”
“Sun apples,” said Faye.
“What about them? Please just answer me, Faye, why are you here?”
“I don’t know,” Faye said again, and made a low, hissing noise. She still hadn’t blinked. “The shipments he was giving me, they weren’t apples, they—”
“He?” She meant Kinok. “What happened, Faye?”
“I tried to make it right,” Faye was saying, tears streaking her face. “I tried, I wanted to tell, but he found out first and . . .”
“Ayla!” Crier said, her voice echoing off the walls. “You can converse with your friend later. We will miss the rest of the tour. Come.”
Ayla backed away from the door, but couldn’t take her eyes off Faye. Her pulse caught in her throat. What was it Malwin had said? Track the sun apples. Faye had to be talking about the crates of sun apples the sovereign sent out as gifts for the Red Hands, the nobles, the major merchants and traders, anyone in his good graces. Had Kinok taken over those shipments—and then delegated to Faye? Why?
“Ayla. Handmaiden. Come.”
“It’s all my fault,” Faye whispered, and slammed the door.
13
The queen’s tour had exhausted Crier, as if she’d been dragging a weight, a shadow, alongside her through the day. And ever since passing the room full of finery that Crier had specially requested for Faye after learning of Ayla’s concern for her, Ayla seemed to have darkened, gone cold. Crier didn’t understand it—she should have been . . . happy? Relieved? She felt once again completely perplexed by the way a human could swerve so far from their expected response.
And then, on a break between the tour and dinner, Ayla had slipped away, without looking Crier in the eyes. What had happened?
Now Crier was in her room, waiting for dinner. She looked up from her book when she heard a soft knock on the door. She was confused—it couldn’t be Ayla, who always rapped on the door with her knuckles like she was trying to start a fight. She was even more confused when she opened the door to find Kinok waiting on the other side.
“Lady Crier,” he said smoothly. “I am here to collect you for dinner.”
Why couldn’t Ayla do it? Crier wanted to ask, but instead she just inclined her head. She could use this alone time with Kinok, however short it was, to probe for more answers about Reyka.
And of course, the questions she couldn’t ask without revealing that she’d tried to spy on him: Why was the phrase Yora’s heart written everywhere in his notes? Who was the secret woman mentioned in his entries on Thomas Wren?
She wrapped herself in a thin shawl and let him take her arm. They walked slowly through the hallways, passing scullery maids and errand boys. Crier waited until they reached a relatively empty stretch of hallway. Then, before she could lose her nerve, she said, “On the night of the bonding, you said we were in this together. You said you’d keep my—my secret. Yet the moment you stood before the council, you spoke of Flaws and passion. How could you?”
“I only said that to provoke you.”
“You—!” She clamped her mouth shut when a housemaid turned the corner, waiting until the maid was out of sight. “How dare you? To say something like that in front of the council, just to—to—I can’t believe you.” She couldn’t remember ever being so disgusted with someone before, where only weeks ago she’d truly believed him to be not much more than a philosopher, a thinker, a historian of their Kind. “And everything you said about Thomas Wren on the night of the binding—the beauty of his work, that each of us is a little different . . . I suppose that was, what, another provocation? Just you playing with my head?”
He huffed a laugh. “Not entirely.”
“Then what did it mean? What does any of it mean?” He was such a tangle of studies and experiments and theories, and she suddenly realized she had no idea how they all connected. What did his interest in Wren have to do with ARM, or his past as a Watcher? And what did it all have to do with—“Yora’s heart,” she blurted out. She stopped walking, turning suddenly to face him. “What is Yora’s heart?”
His eyes flared for a quick second. She didn’t even care that she may have just admitted to snooping through his study—she wanted answers, and she was so tired of not getting them, of everyone around her speaking in half-truths and riddles and cryptic puzzles.
“Your curiosity pleases me, Lady Crier,” he said, smiling. “Let me show you something.”
He led her down the hallway the same way they’d come, toward his quarters in the west wing. Crier hung back when he unlocked the door to his room and looked over his shoulder, waiting for her to follow him inside.
“What are you going to show me?” she asked, increasingly suspicious.
“Just come inside,” he said. “I promise, this is something you want to see.”
She trailed after him into the room. She’d never been inside his sleeping quarters before, which were on a whole other floor from the private study he kept on the lower levels, and she felt a moment of caution as she entered. It was a large but relatively barren space, the quarters of a temporary guest, with a bed and a desk and some trunks of clothing and a massive tapestry against the side wall. Crier couldn’t imagine what he would possibly want to show her, unless it was some sort of bauble from his many travels. She waited for him to retrieve something from one of the trunks, but instead Kinok went straight for the far wall of the room.
He pressed his hand to one of the stones on the wall, and a section of the wall shifted under his touch—a hidden passageway. Crier knew there were a few of them in the palace, most intended as escape routes in case of attack, some leading to private rooms like this one.
The door opened with the sound of s
tone scraping against stone, and Kinok looked back at Crier again, eyes glittering. “Coming, my lady?”
She followed him into the hidden room and stopped.
Unlike the bedchamber behind them, this room was anything but barren. It was small, barely bigger than a closet, but it looked like one of the alchemical laboratories Crier had seen illustrated in scientific texts: there were vials everywhere, ranging in size from the length of her little finger to large-bellied glass decanters that could have held half a barrel of wine. Some of the vials were connected with thin glass tubes; some were pouring smoke; some seemed to be empty and others were filled with a deep purplish-black liquid. The walls of the room were plastered with diagrams of human and Automa bodies, cross sections showing the veins, the muscles, the intricate spider web of the nervous system. When Crier breathed in, the air tasted acrid and metallic.
“What is this?” she asked, stunned. Does my father know about this?
“My little experiment,” said Kinok. He stooped down, inspecting one of the vials filled with dark liquid. “Lady Crier, have you heard of Tourmaline?”
“Vaguely,” she said. “It’s a type of stone, right?”
“Yes and no. Tourmaline is also the name of a compound I have dedicated my life to discovering. There are people—Makers, Midwives, Scyres—who believe that it is possible to create a compound that could fuel Automae indefinitely.”
Crier stared at the vials with new interest. “You mean, better than heartstone?”
“Tourmaline would make heartstone look about as effective for our Kind as human wine.” He glanced at her just in time to see her eyes widen, and a thin smile spread across his lips. “Imagine it—you wouldn’t have to imbibe something every day in order to keep surviving. You wouldn’t be dependent on the Iron Heart, on the shipments of heartstone, on those all-too-vulnerable trade routes. This is a substance that could be manufactured anywhere. You would just . . . live. Free of fear. Free of threat. And you would be so much stronger than you are now.”