by Nina Varela
All of a sudden, the sounds came to her mind. The ones she’d heard through Queen Junn’s door tonight. The moaning, soft and sweet, flecked with gasps. How the idea of it had made her shudder and grow warm.
“Why did you come here?” she asked quietly.
“I—I can’t sleep,” Ayla said, and then pressed her lips together like she had not meant to say anything at all.
Crier nodded. “I am familiar with that affliction.”
“Really?” Ayla didn’t sound curious. She sounded angry. And exhausted.
She considered it. “Yes. I sleep barely one night out of ten.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. This was a rare kind of interaction, Crier realized: they were together, but it was unscheduled. Like the evening by the tide pool. There were no tutors, no tasks, no upcoming meals. Crier had already bathed. Ayla was not even supposed to be here for another few hours. Until dawn, they could do anything. They could visit the music room or the library. They could sneak into the kitchens and Ayla could eat the bread she liked, the kind with nuts and fruits baked in. They could go to the gardens to see the night flowers blooming in the moonlight, or they could go up to the rooftop and look at the stars, or they could even walk all the way out to the bluffs and watch the waves crash against the black rocks.
Crier looked at Ayla’s face. The shadows under her eyes. There was something terrible in her, something clawed and angry and afraid and sad. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she did. The truth of Ayla, the pain of her, was like a song you could feel vibrating on the air, even if you didn’t know the words. It was a hum, low and throaty and full of sorrow.
“Come,” she said. “You need more sleep than I do. And my bed is softer than anything in the servants’ quarters.” She patted the bed beside her.
“I—I’m fine. I shouldn’t be here,” Ayla said.
She said she shouldn’t be here . . . but she didn’t move to leave.
Another lie. This one better than the last, though.
“Stay. There’s plenty of space.” Crier wasn’t sure where the words had come from; she knew only that something had possessed her, making her behave differently around this one person than she would around any other. She could only replay the teasing way Ayla had plunged into the tide pool, so many nights ago now, the way a single drop of water shone like a pearl on her lower lip.
The way the thought of Junn and her human adviser together had made Crier think of one thing only: Ayla.
“You need to sleep,” she said, because it was true. “A lady needs her handmaiden to be at the pinnacle of health, you know.”
Slowly, almost hesitantly, Ayla circled around to the other side of the bed. She stood there for a long moment, just breathing. Crier held so, so still. And then the bed dipped beneath Ayla’s weight.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Her voice wavered, and Crier felt that wavering all through her body.
It was a big bed, and there was plenty of space between them, yet it felt like there was very little space at all. If Crier reached out, her fingertips would brush the curve of Ayla’s shoulder blade.
Even with the fire and the moonlight, it was so dark.
“What do you do when you can’t sleep?” The question came out of Crier low and hushed.
“When I was younger,” Ayla whispered, “my mother would sing to me.”
Crier’s first thought was, I don’t have a mother.
It surprised her. She had never thought about that before, and did not want to start now. “What would she sing?”
“Lots of things,” said Ayla. “Lullabies. Folk songs. War songs, sometimes.”
“Is that why you love music?”
Love. The word sat on her tongue, turning over itself.
It made her want to lick her lips.
Made her want to speak more, to ask Ayla more questions until the sun rose.
But Ayla didn’t answer.
“Which was your favorite?” Crier tried again, tangling her fingers in the bedspread to make sure she didn’t do anything else with them. But there was the compulsion again—to behave differently. To reach out to Ayla. To take her hand. To turn Ayla’s face toward her own.
She and Ayla were both on top of the blankets, which was how Crier always slept, but now she was wondering if Ayla would prefer to be under the blankets, in the warmth. If Ayla rolled over, would her hand stretch across the empty space between them? Thoughts and images crowded Crier’s head, a thousand different scenarios—the potential—
In the next second, her mind went white.
Her thoughts vanished like dancing sparks.
Because Ayla started singing.
“Listen for my voice across the wide, storm-dark waters,” she sang under her breath, so quiet it was barely a tune. “Listen for my voice, let it guide your way home. . . .” She shifted, curling further into herself as she continued. Then after another minute, she stopped as abruptly as she’d started, cutting the last note short.
Silence.
Crier felt like a harp. All her strings plucked. Her whole body humming.
“Thank you,” she said, breathless.
Ayla didn’t reply for a long time. When she finally spoke, it had nothing to do with the song. “You need to stop giving Faye special treatment.”
“What?”
“Faye. The special room you gave her, and special privileges. I don’t know why you did that, but you need to take it away.”
Crier frowned into the darkness. “That doesn’t seem fair.”
“No, it’s not. Nothing about this is fair, my lady. But you’re not helping her like this. All you’re doing is singling her out.”
“To whom? The other servants?”
“The other servants. Your father. The Scyre. Everyone. It’s not a good thing. It’s—it’s dangerous.”
For some reason, Crier felt stung. “I was just trying to help,” she whispered. Because you were worried about her. You were worried about Faye. I wanted to help you.
“I know,” said Ayla, sounding defeated. “I . . . I actually believe you. But you can’t just help one human, Crier, not like this.” The sheets rustled as Ayla turned over, slowly, until she was facing Crier, her body curving toward the center of the bed. “The only way to help Faye is to help us all.”
Crier looked at Ayla in the darkness. “Then how can I help?”
There was a long pause. Crier could hear Ayla breathing, soft like the distant rush of the ocean. But so much closer.
“How serious are you?” Ayla asked finally. “Because—because this could get me killed. This isn’t a game, Crier. This isn’t a faerie story in one of your books. This is life and death.”
“I’m serious,” Crier said. She propped herself up on one elbow, finding Ayla’s eyes in the darkness. “Let me prove it to you.”
They stared at each other. Ayla’s eyes glinted in the moonlight—not golden, not like Crier’s. Deep wells. Swallowing the light.
Did Ayla trust her? No, not yet. Crier could see that. But that didn’t mean it was impossible.
“How much do you really know about Kinok?” Ayla whispered, as if she were suddenly afraid that Kinok might be listening in.
“Not much,” Crier whispered back. “I’ve been trying to learn more. I know he’s more powerful than I ever expected. I know he’s experimenting with heartstone. I know he has a special compass. I don’t know why it’s special, but the Red Hands certainly did. And they looked . . . jealous.”
A slight rustle, Ayla nodding her head against the pillow.
“Find out what he’s really up to,” she said. “That’s how you can help.”
Ayla hadn’t given her anything, hadn’t opened up, not really. But she’d asked her for something.
A thrill moved through Crier, and it stayed in her, keeping her alert and awake and alive, even as Ayla began to quiet, to nudge toward Crier, to move toward her warmth as if forgetting who—and what—she was. An enemy. An Automa. Instead, in the dark
ness between and around them, Crier was just a body. She could feel the moment when Ayla sighed, breaths slowing, sinking deeper into sleep. The fathomless depths of sleep, the dreaming place only humans ever experienced.
And at some point in the night, it happened. Ayla, who had shifted onto her back, rolled over into the middle of the bed. and in the process flung one of her arms over Crier’s waist. Crier froze, instantly awake. More than awake. She lay there, perfectly still, everything inside her narrowed to the soft weight of Ayla’s arm on the curve of her waist, that spot of warmth. She had to remind herself to breathe. Ayla preferred it when she breathed.
Breathe for Ayla.
The smell of her hair, like soap and sea lavender.
Breathe.
Midnight.
Moonlight.
In this new position, Ayla’s cheek was pressed into the crook of her own elbow. Her mouth was open slightly, soft-looking in a way Crier hadn’t really seen before. When Ayla was awake, her mouth was often a thin, displeased line, her jaw set. Crier tried to imagine what it would look like if Ayla’s eyes were open, if she were awake and her mouth was still so soft and open, her lips parted, her gaze dark and heated, her arm around Crier’s waist on purpose, with intent, and—Crier’s heart was so loud. A pounding in her chest, an ache in her lower belly. That not-hunger.
The soft moans she’d heard slip through the wood and stone of Junn’s door rose in her mind like sparks, flecks of gold in the dark. The shuddering breath. The leap and fall of voices. The knowledge of two bodies moving together, lips and skin and . . .
Silver light played across Ayla’s dark hair; her eyelashes made tiny, spiky shadows on her cheeks. Crier listened to her breaths—still slow and even, tidelike. She didn’t know how long they’d been lying like this.
Then Ayla shifted, nosing into the pillow, and something gold fell from the collar of her shirt. The necklace. Without thinking, Crier reached out to tuck it back into Ayla’s shirt, heart racing as her fingertips brushed softly against Ayla’s collarbones—but instead the chain came away entirely in her fingers. The clasp had broken.
There was a short, awful moment in which Crier thought she had somehow broken it, and then she looked closer and realized that the necklace was much older than she’d thought. The chain was dull and grimy, and the clasp had simply worn out.
It was still warm from Ayla’s skin.
And now it was in Crier’s palm, delicate gold chain and a gold pendant the size of a statescoin. Strangely heavy. The center was set with a single bloodred gemstone. It nearly glowed even in the darkness, like cut glass, like a glass of wine held in front of a lantern. Deep, rich color. She ran her finger around the edge of the pendant, admiring the smooth gold. Maybe she could fix the clasp before Ayla woke up, bend the metal back into shape. She brought it close to her face, pinching the clasp between forefinger and thumb—until something nicked her. She frowned, holding her hand up to the moonlight. The edge of the broken clasp must be sharp; something had caught on her fingertip. Blood welled to the surface. A single drop.
Unthinking, she ran her finger over the pendant again, distracted by the unnatural warmth of the gemstone, warmer than the gold around it, almost like there was a tiny source of heat inside—
Then the world lurched.
The familiar walls of her bedchamber melted away.
Crier blinked and the world was burning.
She gasped and then immediately regretted it. Her lungs filled with smoke and scorching ash, her throat lit up in pain.
She was standing in the middle of a street she did not recognize. The buildings on either side were too tall, made of wood and naked stone instead of the quicklime-white buildings of the seaside villages around the palace. The roofs were steep and pointed, piercing the sky, and the outer walls were lined with terraces of twisted black metal, and all of it was burning.
Above her, the sky was a bloody mess of red and yellow and putrid black smoke. Ash fell like snow from the burning rooftops, the buildings buckling beneath the weight of a raging fire—both sides of the street were burning, the fire howling, windows bursting open and raining glass down onto the cobblestones below—
“RUN—RUN, RUN.” Someone barreled past Crier, bare feet slapping the cobblestones, and she realized she was surrounded by humans. There were humans everywhere, a flood of them in the street, their faces streaked with ash and tears.
Crier grabbed at a woman’s sleeve, or tried to, but her fingers passed through it. She shouted at her—“Where am I, what is this?”—but the woman did not look at her. Did not even seem to hear her voice.
This had to be a nightmare. Crier had heard of those, though she’d thought they only plagued human minds, like a chronic disease.
The nightmare city burned, and somewhere in the chaos Crier heard a child crying. The noise made her wheel around. There, across the street, stood a man. Human like the rest of them, with the fair hair common in Varn. His eyes were the pale gray of morning. She could pick out the color even through the smoke.
In one hand, he held the crying child, gripping its tiny arm. “Shh, Clara,” he whispered. It’ll be all right. Mama’s coming.”
He stood still only for a moment, eyes on the roiling sky, the collapsing rooftops. His chest was heaving, his knuckles white around the child’s arm. His mouth was moving but no sound was coming out. At first it just looked like he was screaming, and then Crier realized he was saying something, a single word, over and over again, his lips forming the same shapes. A name.
Siena?
A silhouette appeared in the smoke. Like a specter: first a shadow, then a body. A woman, emerging from smoke that looked like a wall of dark ocean, a massive, unstoppable wave. She was covered in pale ash and her head was bowed. Crier could see only a shock of wild hair.
Then she straightened up, and Crier stared. Because she knew this girl. It was Ayla. Caked with ash, blood all over her face, but it was Ayla.
Wasn’t it?
No, Crier realized, as the girl drew closer. No, this person was not exactly like Ayla. Her hair was longer. She was taller, almost as tall as Crier. There was something about the shape of her face that wasn’t quite right. She was not Ayla—but, stars and skies, she could have been Ayla’s sister, or mother, or—
The child wailed and Crier wrenched her eyes away from the Ayla-like woman.
“Siena.” The man took a step toward the young woman, they were barely ten feet away from each other now, eyes locked on each other’s faces, and the woman grabbed his hands.
“Leo, take this. I have to go back for the blueprints. But take this.” The woman—Siena—handed him a large blue jewel, bigger than a fist, glimmering like a giant crystal of heartstone, only as sea blue as heartstone was red.
“No, Si,” he said, holding the shining, cerulean stone in his hands. “Stay with us, stay—”
But the woman had gone again, back into the flames of the burning village, and the child, Clara, cried out “Mama!” and then an explosion in the distance, and—
Something happened inside Crier’s chest. A chasm yawned open.
All her inner workings seemed to stop at once.
She doubled over, gasping. There was something inside her. She could feel it scraping away at her rib cage, rising like bile in her throat. A monster trapped within her flesh. Crier sobbed and realized her vision was blurred. Her cheeks were wet.
Crier clutched at her chest, fingers scrabbling at her shirt, the skin beneath, as if she could somehow rip herself open and remove this thing from her workings. It was too much. It was too much and it felt like poison, an oily black substance inside her lungs. Drowning her from the inside out. She couldn’t breathe around it. She couldn’t breathe.
Calm, she had to be calm. She remembered suddenly, but it was as though her memory was a distant dream—how the necklace had slipped off Ayla’s neck while she slept, how easy it had been to pick it up, to study it in the moonlight, how she’d tried to fix the broken clasp�
�the drop of blood—
Eyes squeezed shut, Crier tried to focus on the weight of the pendant in her hand, soft gold, still warm from Ayla’s skin; she tried to focus on letting go of it—letting go—she was letting go—
Chaos.
It took a second to realize she was in her bedchamber again, because everything was still chaos, but a different kind: instead of fire and smoke and heat and screaming, Crier had slammed back into a world that was dark and cold, and she was lying on a bed, and someone cried out, and—a mass of dark shapes was writhing in the center of the room, and it took a few moments of frantic blinking to realize that they were guards, there were guards in her room, and—
Ayla.
They had Ayla. She was pinned to the floor, three guards holding her down, one pressing her face to the flagstones. Crier leaped out of bed and stumbled, unsteady on her feet. When she realized what must have happened, Crier’s blood ran cold. Had she really been in so much distress that it had triggered her chime? Regardless, her chime had gone off, and the guards had arrived.
And they’d found Ayla, Crier thought numbly.
In Crier’s bed. In the middle of the night when she was supposed to be in the servants’ quarters.
This is all my fault.
“Stop,” she said, “stop, let her go, she did nothing wrong—” But the guards didn’t even look at her. They were already moving, wrenching Ayla off the ground and out of the room. She wasn’t struggling, Crier saw. Her eyes were huge and wild, her teeth clenched, but she wasn’t struggling. She looked up at Crier, silently, and their gazes locked. Crier didn’t know what her own expression was doing, but she thought it probably wasn’t so different from Ayla’s. Shocked, horrified, helpless, confused.
Then the guards dragged Ayla from the room.