Crier's War

by Nina Varela

  Ayla realized a beat too late that he was waiting for her to jump in. “Yes,” she said, trying not to cringe when seven pairs of eyes bored into her. “From the moment we enter through the music room, we probably have about fifteen minutes. Benjy will lead you to Kinok’s study in the cellar to steal the safe with the compass in it. Meanwhile, I’ll—I’ll take care of Crier.”

  “That’s distraction two,” said Benjy. “That’ll keep the guards away from Kinok’s study. We get in, we get the safe, we head back to the music room. We wait for everyone until midnight. Then we run.”

  “What of you?” said Idric, directing the question at Ayla. “Are we waiting for you?”

  “Until midnight.” Out of the corner of her eye, Ayla saw Benjy shift his weight from foot to foot. He still hated this part of the plan, and Ayla knew there was a part of him that thought she wouldn’t be able to do it. To kill Crier. “If the clock strikes midnight and I’m not in the music room, you run. You leave me behind.”

  Yoon opened their mouth to protest, but seemed to think better of it. Everyone else merely nodded, or did nothing at all. There were no illusions here. They weren’t friends, not with Ayla and not with each other, and there was a good chance that tonight would claim all their lives. They would leave her in a heartbeat. Ayla didn’t blame them one bit. The only wild card was Benjy.

  Benjy, who was squaring his shoulders. “Two minutes,” he said. “Before we go—before it all happens, before everything goes mad—remember that tonight we’re forging a new future. Remember that we’re on the right side. The leeches killed our people. They burned our villages. They poisoned our wells. They slaughtered our children in the streets.”

  He was barely speaking above a whisper, but he might as well have been shouting. Even the sea wind had gone silent to listen. The seven faces in the circle ranged from grave to anguished to furious, everything in between.

  “The leeches think they can look down on us from their marble thrones and control us with an iron hand. They think we are no better than mindless cattle; they think we won’t fight back. Tonight, we prove them wrong.” He looked around the circle one last time, meeting everyone’s eyes again. “Are you ready?”

  Seven nods, seven hisses of yes.

  “Are you ready?” he said more quietly, just for Ayla.

  She nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

  “All right,” said Benjy. “It’s time.”

  Seven became four when Yoon, Tem, and Idric peeled away, melting back into the shadows of the orchard and the gardens beyond. Ayla, Benjy, and the others waited breathlessly under the sun apple tree, watching the dark expanse of the palace grounds. Seconds crawled like ants across Ayla’s skin, each minute lasting a thousand years, until—there.

  A glow.

  A flicker of orange light in a sea of black.

  Then, a moment later, the flicker became an inferno as the oil-soaked roof of the stables caught fire. It happened so quickly: practically between one breath and the next, Ayla watched the fire spread across half the roof, then all of it, pale smoke billowing up into the night sky, obscuring the stars. She could smell it in the air—like a thousand oil lamps burning at once. The horses would already be panicking. Ayla kept her eyes on the stables until she saw it: a flash of light at the western corner of the burning building. Yoon’s tiny hand mirror catching the firelight.

  “There,” Ayla said, nudging Benjy.

  The mirror flashed once more. The distraction had worked; all the nearby guards were rushing to the stables to free the horses and put out the fire.

  “Follow me,” Ayla said. She didn’t wait for a response before leaving the relative safety of the sun apple trees and heading straight for the palace. That morning, when she was late reporting to Crier’s door, it was because she’d opened one of the windows in the music room. Just a crack: not wide enough that anyone would notice. Just wide enough that it could be opened the rest of the way from outside. The six of them, Ayla and Benjy and the housemaids, skirted along the edges of the west wing until they reached that window. Benjy, the tallest among them, pushed it open, and helped Ayla and then the others get a leg up and over the sill. Then, silent as cats, they slipped one by one through the window and into the dark, empty music room.

  Benjy was the last to enter. “Stars and skies,” he murmured, staring in something almost like awe at the instruments around them, and Ayla remembered her own shock and wonder the first time she’d been in here. At night, the music room was eerily beautiful. Moonlight fell over the instruments, and something about the elegant lines of the harp, the piano, the violins, made them look less like things and more like people: like marble statues in a garden, pale and frozen but full of expression.

  Ayla shook herself.

  Thoughts like that were poison tonight.

  She faced Benjy and the others, trying not to think of anything at all. “You remember the way to Kinok’s study?”

  A housemaid with a shaved head nodded sharply. “Been there every damn day for a year. Fetched him a sea’s worth of ink and heartstone. I could walk these halls blindfolded.”

  “Right.” Ayla swallowed hard. “Remember—out the window at midnight. No matter what.”

  The housemaid nodded. After a moment, Benjy nodded too.

  “Go, then,” said Ayla. “And good luck.”

  They headed for the door, but Benjy lingered behind. “Give us a moment,” he said to the housemaid with the shaved head. She gave him a short look and then closed the door to the music room behind her, leaving Ayla and Benjy alone.

  “Benj,” Ayla managed, “we don’t have time—”

  “Ayla.”

  He was closer than she’d thought. Closer than they’d been since the night of the feast, the night they’d danced together in the sea cave. His eyes searched her face, and part of her knew what he was looking for, and the other part of her wondered if he was finding it.

  “We couldn’t have done this without you,” he whispered. “This never would have happened without you. You know that, right? Everything you’ve done, all the information you gave us, no matter how small, all of it was vital. Remember that. People are gonna know your name. Ayla, the handmaiden. The spy. The girl who lived with leeches.” He grinned, a flash of white, and then his fingertips were under her chin, tipping her face up. “You’re making history, Ayla.”

  It was time. They had to go.

  “You know, it’s not even really killing,” Benjy said almost soothingly, “not if she was never alive to begin with. You’ve trapped your butterfly, little spider. You know what to do next.”

  Never alive. Living things were born, not synthesized. Living things grew. They stretched upward or curled into themselves, into the center of themselves—the core, the heart, the old shriveled seed-bit—and turned brown and gave off that sweet wet rotting smell and turned at last, again, to dirt. Living things grew and rotted and grew from the rot. That was how it worked. Leeches didn’t rot. When Crier died, her body would just sort of go stiff like petrified wood, and they could dump her in the ocean or a grave or string her up for the crows to eat, and she wouldn’t rot and the crows wouldn’t eat her anyway because her skin wasn’t made of skin.

  “It’s time,” said Benjy, eyes huge in the darkness. “Are you ready, Ayla?”

  Was she ready?

  All she had to do was open her mouth and say yes.

  Why couldn’t she do it?

  Why couldn’t she move?

  “Okay,” said Benjy. “Okay. Run it back one more time. I take the safe. And you . . .”

  “I go straight to Lady Crier’s room,” Ayla rasped. “At five to midnight—”

  “You stab her in the heart.”

  Benjy’s face was so close. His eyes were so strange in the moonlight, like the eyes of a ghost. His hands were on her jaw.

  “See you on the other side, Ayla,” he said, and then he kissed her.

  It lasted only for a moment, his mouth hard against hers,
an instant of heat and pressure, his big hands holding her steady. Then he pulled away, staring at her, still searching. Always searching.

  Ayla didn’t have any answers for him.

  It had been so long since she’d felt sure of anything, anything at all.

  “Be safe,” said Benjy. And then he was gone, the door to the music room closing behind him. Ayla hadn’t breathed since he’d kissed her. (Twice she’d been kissed. One so different from the other. One had awakened her, one had felt like—like closure.) She glanced at the battered old pocket watch she’d swiped from one of the other servants. It was fifteen minutes to midnight.

  There was a knife hidden in the waistband of her handmaiden’s uniform. It was cold against her hip.

  11:46.

  At some point, she must have started moving, because she blinked and realized she was no longer in the music room. She was creeping through the white marble hallways, her soft leather boots silent on the flagstones. Nobody tried to stop her. She passed only one pair of guards, and they paid no attention to a human girl in a handmaiden’s uniform even at this hour. Ayla was invisible. She slipped through the dark palace completely unnoticed.

  11:49.

  She touched her sternum, the place where her necklace should have been, and once again felt the loss. A physical pang from somewhere deep between her lungs. Not just the loss of an heirloom, now; the loss of lives, stories. How many other memories were held in that strange red jewel? She would never know. Her own history, her family’s history. Gone.

  11:50.

  The knife was cold against her hip.

  She turned a corner and there was the door to Crier’s bedchamber. Ayla had opened that door countless times over the last two months, opened it and stepped across the threshold and stoked the fire and filled the room with warmth and light.

  The hinges did not creak beneath her touch.

  (That day. That first day on the bluff when Ayla’s necklace had fallen out of her shirt and Crier’s eyes had caught on it. For a split second Crier had been distracted enough to let her mask slip. Her hard mouth had gone soft, her flat eyes wide and scared. She’d gone from leech to girl, just girl. And Ayla knew then that she couldn’t let this girl die.)

  But she’d hated Crier.

  She still did. It wasn’t a lie. She had to remind herself of all the reasons: Crier was naive and arrogant, fool enough to think she could help them, could help Ayla. She was clueless and hardheaded and stubborn and the daughter of the sovereign and promised to Kinok. And she was a leech, a fucking leech. She represented every miserable thing about this miserable world—death and pain and a white dress hanging from a post, shoes swinging below a sun apple tree, a traitorous sister torn apart and howling with grief. Crier represented burning villages, ruined families, lost brothers. Ayla hated her. She hated her so goddamn much. It wasn’t a lie.

  It just wasn’t the whole truth.

  11:52.

  She was standing over Crier’s bed—shocked that Crier hadn’t heard her come in, when sometimes she could hear so much as a breath from all the way down the hall. She must have been in a deep sleep state.

  Ayla stood, staring, wondering.

  The knife was in her hand.

  The handle, which was carved from dark wood, was cool to the touch.

  At five minutes to midnight she would stab Crier in the heart. Three minutes left. Crier was sleeping on the left side of the bed, the side closest to Ayla; she always slept on that side. Something about preferring to face the door. Her head was pillowed on her arm and the actual pillow had been tossed carelessly to the floor and she was sleeping on top of the blankets like she always did, which was something Ayla knew and did not know how to unlearn. Crier’s hair spilled across the mattress like seaweed. It was a miracle that she was sleeping. Ayla had been half expecting to find her wide awake at the window seat, buried in a book.

  11:54.

  Crier shifted in her sleep. Ayla’s breath froze in her lungs, her grip tightening on the knife, but Crier just shivered, brows furrowing a little, and did not wake. Her body was a curve above the blankets, an open parenthesis, the beginning of a sentence. She’d shivered; she was cold. It took a lot to make a leech get cold. The fire had gone out; the room was dark and cold and silent as a tomb, no crackling hearth fire, no warmth. Crier was cold. There was a space behind her on the bed, at her back, a curving space the size of another body. Where another body could bend and fit against her, and press their face to the notches of Crier’s spine.

  Inside her chest, in the core of her, Ayla felt her heart stretch and swell and take root.

  11:55.

  Making it quick is a kindness, even.

  But Crier hadn’t killed Ayla’s family.

  That terrible, truthful thought poured into her like water.

  11:55.

  Ayla raised the knife.

  11:55.

  One single downward movement. A piercing of the flesh, the same way Crier had pierced her own thumb with the nib of a pen. Not so different. A kindness. Maybe it wouldn’t even hurt.

  (Crier’s eyes on her in the carriage. Ayla’s mind was somewhere else, lost in foolish, half-imagined ideas of southern heat, a white shore, blue water, belly full of fish, never cold, never afraid, never exhausted, and Crier’s eyes on her the whole time. Crier’s gaze not cold, but warm, a patch of sunlight on Ayla’s skin.)

  11:55.

  (That kiss. The way her entire body had lit up, everything inside her coming awake.)

  Ayla’s knuckles were white like raw bone. The knife was quivering, catching the moonlight. She had to do this; Crier’s chime had to go off. The second distraction. Somewhere else in the bowels of the palace, at this moment, Benjy must be searching Kinok’s study for the safe.

  11:55.

  (That night inside the cliffs, sharing the story of the hare and the princess, the way Crier told it with such intimacy, told it knowing how terribly the story would end, but changing it—promising Ayla happiness and peace, pretty lies, kind lies, because it had never been written that way. Because some things were just impossible. How the whole time Crier spoke, her words like honey in the darkness, Ayla had wanted to taste that voice forever.)

  A flash of gold. For a horrible moment, Ayla thought Crier had woken up. But no, it wasn’t her eyes. It was something in her hand, tucked into the hollow of her throat. Gold.

  The necklace.

  Crier was holding Ayla’s necklace. The chain was twisted around her fingers, the pendant held between finger and thumb. The same way Ayla held it. So carefully, Crier held everything so carefully—books and maps and teacups. It was infuriating. Ayla wanted to see her break things, wanted to see her broken, wanted to watch her break apart, wanted to be the cause of it, wanted to make her shudder again, make her breaths come fast.

  She’d gone to sleep holding Ayla’s necklace.

  11:56.

  The knife slipped from Ayla’s fingers and clattered to the floor.

  Crier’s eyes snapped open.

  No. Ayla gasped a curse and scrambled to pick up the knife. She held it up again, her entire body trembling, poised to strike, to slash the knife across Crier’s throat, stab her in the chest, the belly, wherever, but she was shaking, she couldn’t—Crier was just staring up at her, lips parted in shock, and the worst part was that she didn’t even look afraid, she just looked confused.

  “Ayla?” Crier breathed.

  And Ayla ran.

  23

  Crier was on her feet in an instant, adrenaline shrieking through her veins. “Ayla!” she half screamed, the name strangled out of her, but Ayla was already gone, Crier was alone, and then she wasn’t—a dozen guards burst through the door of her bedchamber, half of them immediately spreading out to search the room, the other half forming a protective circle around Crier.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded, gasping when one of the guards put a hand on her shoulder, forcing her down onto the bed. “Don’t touch me! What’s going
on?”

  “We need you to stay put,” said the guard who had grabbed her. “The palace is not secure.”

  Crier shoved his hand off her shoulder. There was a loud noise over by the window and she leaped to her feet again only to see two of the guards sweeping all the books off her bookshelves and desk, maps and loose papers drifting through the air, a jar of quills upended, a pot of black ink hitting the floor and shattering, ink spilling everywhere. “Stop!” she ordered, almost hysterical. Her books, her maps, some of them ancient and priceless and precious, years of her life spent tracking them down and bargaining for them. “Stop, please stop! What are you doing?”

  But the guards ignored her. Another ripped the tapestry of Kiera off the wall as if he thought a human rebel might be lurking behind it.

  “We don’t know how long they’ve been planning this attack, my lady,” said one of the guards. “They might have planted weapons, firebombs.”

  “On my bookshelf?”

  Nobody responded. Crier sank to the bed and pressed both hands over her mouth, trying to calm down, but it was impossible. Ayla. Ayla, standing over her, that terrible look on her face, the knife.

  She was going to kill you. Crier curled over her knees, squeezing her eyes shut. No, Ayla wouldn’t, she wouldn’t, but what other explanation was there? Slipping into Crier’s room in the middle of the night, a silent shadow, the knife glinting in her hand. Ayla was going to kill you.

  She’d read about heartbreak in a hundred different human stories. Had always thought it was a metaphor, poetry about pain. But as she sat there in the dark, the guards destroying her books and her own mind torturing her with the image of the knife in Ayla’s hand, Crier felt like she was actually breaking. Cracks forming in her heart, pain leaking out like spilled ink, midnight black and poisonous. It hurt, she had never felt anything like this, not even when she experienced Leo’s anguish in the locket memories—that had been an echo of someone else’s pain. This was her own, real and unrelenting, and it hurt.