The outhouse where she had hidden during the raid. When they had stormed in, and taken everything.
Ayla sank down onto a leather bench and tucked her knees up beneath her forehead. She hadn’t realized until now that her whole body was shaking, but in the stillness of this room, she couldn’t stop it. She felt even something essential to the core of her—her revenge—beginning to tremble. It had always been like a hotly burning fire, but now it leaped and fell, leaped and fell, as though its flames had met with a light rain.
It took her a while to realize what this feeling was: uncertainty.
Just before dawn, Benjy shook Ayla awake with a violence that almost, almost, brought her back to that day.
When she opened her eyes, he was hovering over her in the dark. His face was bloodless, his mouth pressed into a white line. He was gripping her shoulder with one hand. The other hand was twisted up in her blankets, fist clenched so tight that it looked as if the bones of his knuckles were about to burst right through the skin.
“Ayla,” he said. “Something’s happened. They killed Nessa.”
Ayla reeled. That’s impossible, she kept hearing herself say. I just saw her in the palace.
Benjy said, “It’s not. They are capable of anything. You know that better than anyone. The others are saying the guards tried to take Nessa’s child, and Nessa fought back, and . . .”
“How could this—have possibly happened—?” Ayla’s voice ripped through her. Her words were choking her. She tried to close her eyes, but when she did, it was the screams of her brother that broke into her mind, shattering the darkness. The smell of burned flesh, of ash. The paralyzing, numbing fear. She opened her eyes. Seeing was better than not seeing.
Benjy’s face was stricken, his hands shaking with fear or anger or something bigger. “Come on. You know I wouldn’t lie about this. People saw her body, Ayla. Thom saw her body.”
“But why—? What did she do—? Why did they want to punish her?”
Benjy’s jaw clenched. “I heard trespassing. Someone said they’d found her handkerchief in the Scyre’s room three days ago. Guess they thought she was snooping around.”
He kept talking but Ayla wasn’t listening.
They’d found her handkerchief in the Scyre’s room.
Thought she was snooping around.
Her mouth tasted of bile, sour and dead and wrong. She could feel it rising in her throat—she was going to be sick, or maybe it was just the guilt, a physical thing inside her, choking her like a weed.
My fault, she kept thinking. My fault. She was the one who’d gone sneaking. Who’d left the handkerchief there like a flag of surrender on the floor, the damning evidence. Now Nessa was dead, Thom a widower, Lily motherless.
Ayla shook her head. “No.”
“Keep your voice down.” Benjy glanced around them.
“I have to go,” she managed, and then she was scrambling away, and then she was at the door, and maybe people were looking but she couldn’t tell, and then she was outside, her dress only half tied at the neck and wrists. In the predawn cool, where the dark tasted like salt.
They found Nessa’s handkerchief in the Scyre’s room. In the Scyre’s room. Why didn’t Nessa tell the leeches that she had given her handkerchief away, that she’d never stepped foot in Kinok’s bedchamber?
Maybe Nessa had told.
Maybe by then it hadn’t mattered—or had been too late.
They’d tried to take her child.
Would they come for Ayla next?
For Benjy?
Ayla thought of her own face on Kinok’s wall. Benjy’s, his hair a curl of black ink. That long, red thread. Kinok knew Benjy was the only person Ayla cared about. If he wanted to punish her, he knew how to do it.
She doubled over, one hand braced against the stone wall of the servants’ quarters, and heaved into the weedy grass, her stomach spasming, though nothing came up but a thin stream of spit. Her stomach was too empty already.
If Nessa had told, Benjy was in grave danger.
If Nessa hadn’t told, then she’d died for Ayla, because of Ayla—
“Ayla?” Benjy called out from behind her, and Ayla ran.
Ran from his face: his freckles, his doe eyes, his black-ink curls.
Maybe it was already too late. The chart. The line connecting them.
She rounded the corner of the servants’ quarters and kept going, her thin shoes slapping against the hard-packed dirt. She ran past the gardens. The orchards.
And then she saw it.
There, hanging between two trees at the entrance to the orchards.