in a starving puppy—surprised that Rowan let her keep it, under the condition that she never let it out of her sight. But one night, the puppy had whined and clawed at the door so piteously, she finally let it out. She never saw the puppy again. She cried to Rowan, saying she’d only wanted to be kind. It had seemed so desperate, so determined to go outside and breathe the fresh air. But Rowan had reminded her: the world outside was dangerous. It was always better to do what you knew was right than what was kind.
She thought of Rowan’s words now, as she picked her way through the sovereign’s endless flower gardens. The heat of the day had faded; the sea breeze was blessedly cool against her face. Across the gardens, she could just barely make out leech guards stationed around the palace, tall shadows against the white stone walls. Metal sheaths glinted at their hips, catching the moonlight.
The guards were, what, three hundred paces away? Which meant that if Ayla so much as blinked wrong, they could reach her in . . . She brushed a finger over a stalk of salt lavender, doing the math. Six seconds, maybe.
And some other human would have to wipe her blood off the flowers.
To the east, the ocean swelled and burst open against the cliffs like thunder. Every so often a black cloud would drift across the moon, and the whole palace would be plunged into darkness.
Darkness.
Ayla had been spared only because her brother, Storme, had heard them coming. Her brother, who was dead.
Storme grabbed her hand and pulled her out the back door as They came through the front.
It was their father who screamed first.
Storme led her to the outhouse even as Ayla begged for him to stop, no no no please no, let go of me, that was Papa, let me go help Papa. He forced the plank of wood up and pushed Ayla down into the dank, shallow hole. She fell on her knees, her arms and legs covered in mud and shit and piss. The smell was unbearable. She looked up at Storme and pushed back against the wall to make room. It was then that she realized the space was only big enough for one person.
She watched, mute with shock, as her twin brother replaced the wood and disappeared.
Darkness.
His screams came next. Then her mother’s.
For hours, Ayla hadn’t moved. She’d barely even breathed, even though after a while she couldn’t smell the stench. Couldn’t smell anything at all.
The raids had begun at dawn. By what must have been late afternoon, she finally deemed it safe enough to climb out.
Inside the house, the knife wound in her mother’s chest had clotted, darkened, and congealed. Ayla stared at her mother, and her mother stared back. She’d died with her eyes on Ayla’s father, whose head had rolled a mere inch away from her mother’s body. The rest of him was gone.
At the front of the house was another body. It was burned beyond all recognition, but Ayla could tell its head was turned in the direction of the outhouse.
Storme.
Now, Ayla picked her way along the rows of seaflowers, heading in the direction of the rocky bluffs that overlooked the Steorran Sea. Her boots left wet imprints in the soft, dark soil.
The palace was laid out like a giant compass rose with spokes pointing north, south, east, and west. The center of the compass was the palace itself, all white marble and glowing windows, and the spokes were the groupings of outbuildings that served to separate the sun apple orchards from the seaflower gardens, the pastures, and finally, the grain fields. At the outer edge of the northernmost spoke sat the servant quarters, and to the end of the eastern spoke, just past the storage house, lay the sea, frothing and angry and always cold.
Ayla walked right up to the edge of the bluffs. It was slippery here, the black rocks wet with sea spray. Treacherous, especially at night. She reached into her pocket and grasped the knife she’d stolen from a leech in the market at Kalla-den nearly a month ago, the first time she’d ever gone to sell flowers.
Her first opportunity. To get a weapon.
She had been so overwhelmed with the adrenaline of getting away from the sovereign’s palace that she’d just—slipped her hand into the folds of a leech girl’s skirt and taken it, hidden by the swarming crowd.