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