me to the physician immediately. And please keep this between us—my father is quite busy with our guest and he does not need any added stress.”
“Yes, Lady Crier.” They let go of the girl and she stumbled forward a little, straightened up. She glanced at Crier just long enough for Crier to see that her face was blank, her emotions tamped down, but her eyes: they were anything but blank. They were shocked and confused and furious (at the guards? at Crier?) and dark, and when the moonlight hit them at just the right angle they stayed dark and heated and terribly, impossibly human.
What was she doing out here, all alone in the dark?
Crier supposed she could be asked the same question.
“Now, please.”
Crier was escorted back to the palace.
The girl stayed behind, her silhouette melting into the night. Crier looked back at her once and then did not look again.
When the guards delivered her to the physician, Crier paused in the doorway and said, “Wait.”
Crier really should report her.
“The human from the bluffs,” she said. “Get me her name.”
Ayla.
Ayla.
Crier let the name turn over inside her mind, studying every angle and curve of it, as she sat on the window seat of her bedchamber early the next morning, a book in her lap, watching the sun break from the horizon with a flash of gold.
Her hands ached. There were nasty scrapes on her fingertips, the skin peeled raw. Marks from where she had scrabbled desperately at the rocks yesterday, searching for a handhold as she fell. After Crier had been released from the physician, her handmaiden Malwin had drawn her a long, soothing bath; together they had watched the dirt and blood stream off Crier’s body and disappear, hidden by the swirls of soap and steam. The physician had given her a salve that would have fixed the imperfections on her skin just as easily as it closed up the gash on her wrist. Within hours, Crier would be left with unblemished fingertips and one less physical reminder that she had, in fact, fallen. That she had been saved.
She had not yet applied the salve.
Instead, she picked at the wounds, keeping the scrapes open. Tiny beads of blood welled up on her skin like jewels. Automa blood was not so dissimilar to human blood, except that the color was different. Where human blood was red, Automa blood was darker, bluer, almost violet. Crier stared at her own blood now, shining in the light, and let out a breath. Violet. Inhuman. Flawless.
And yet.
The first blush pinks of dawn filtered through the window, coloring the stacks of books and maps upon Crier’s writing desk and canopied bed. There was a silk tapestry on the far wall of her bedchamber. Tiny, interwoven threads of silver and gold shone brightly in the sunlight, standing out against the deep, colorful background.
Unlike most tapestries in the palace, this one was very simple. There were no Automa hunters chasing a wild boar on foot, their human servants trailing behind with the dogs. No depiction of the Iron Heart, no jewel-studded castle, no ships tossed on a blue-silk ocean. There was only a woman. Dark-haired, brown-skinned, beautiful, she stared out at Crier’s bedchamber from her place on the wall. Her dress was saffron yellow, her mouth madder-root red. Her eyes were stitched with gold.
Kiera.
The first of their Kind.
In the sunlight, her eyes almost glowed.
When the knock came at the door, Crier sat up straighter, her book shifting against her thighs. She shoved it aside.
“Enter,” she said, and Ayla (Ayla) stumbled into her bedchamber.
She looked the same as last night—red uniform, messy dark braid, big brown eyes. She carried the same intensity about her, like heat waves rising from her skin, even though she was just standing in the doorway and not currently in the middle of saving Crier’s life.
Like she was more than a human girl.
Like she was a summer storm made flesh.
Ayla’s arms hung at her sides, her fingers twisted in the hidden folds of her uniform. Crier felt like she had managed to capture a butterfly in her cupped hands, and now it was frantically beating its wings.
“You summoned me?” said Ayla.
Her voice was low, a little raspy.
Perhaps the butterfly was actually a wasp.
Crier had been stung by one, once. She grasped at the memory, suddenly longing to remember how it felt.
“Ayla,” said Crier, the name slipping between her lips. “I summoned you here because I must ask you something.”