in the south. To throw herself headlong into the vision of justice she believed in.
Rowan wasn’t here to comfort her, but Rowan was the reason Ayla knew what she had to do.
After all, she had learned something today. That Kinok had a study, separate from his rooms. And in that study, there was a safe.
A flock of birds took to the sky, crying out at the dawn.
She’d come this far. And she knew:
There wasn’t any going back now.
9
There was a strange cast to the dawn light the morning after her father’s men murdered a woman and hung her shoes in the sun apple trees.
By daybreak, when Ayla was meant to come wake her, Crier had already heard about the killing—from a terrified servant no less, who’d entered her bedchamber to stoke the hearth fire; not even from her father. Crier stood in the center of her bedchamber, unmoored, shaking from a sick mixture of horror and rage and wrenching grief. She knew things like this happened, sometimes, elsewhere, but her father hadn’t ordered such an extreme punishment in years—and never one like this, for such a senseless reason.
Crier pressed a hand over her mouth, trying to calm down. Maybe Hesod hadn’t ordered it at all. Maybe the guards had gone rogue. She knew it wasn’t possible, but—the alternative made her sick. To know that her father was capable of something like this.
Thoughts roiling like the sea, Crier waited and waited and waited for Ayla’s knock.
But Ayla never showed up.
The sun rose, and Ayla never showed up.
More than anything, Crier wanted to find Ayla. To track her down in the servants’ quarters and make sure she was all right. But there was no way Crier would be late to her very first council meeting. All she could do, in the end, was catch a maidservant and instruct her to deliver a full breakfast—bread, fruits, cheeses, a bowl of honey—to Handmaiden Ayla, wherever she was, and to inform her that she was relieved of all her duties for the next two days. The maidservant must have been confused, but she was trained not to show it on her face. She just nodded, murmured, “Yes, Lady Crier,” and hurried off in the direction of the kitchens.
It wasn’t much. It wasn’t nearly enough. But if Crier could not see Ayla, at least she could make sure Ayla’s belly was full. At least she could go to the council meeting. At least she could fight against this, propose and draft more laws for the protection of humans, make it forbidden to kill a servant, or a child, something, anything. At least she could do everything in her power to make sure this never happened again.
For now, that would have to be enough.
The carriage ride took upward of three hours, and left Crier too long to think about what had happened at the palace—and what would happen when they arrived at the council meeting. The first time Crier caught a glimpse of the Councilroom, she was barely more than new-Made. It had taken weeks of pleading with her father before she was allowed to accompany him to the capital, and even then, she was expressly forbidden from entering the Councilroom. She was permitted only to sit beside her father in the caravan, watching the rocky hills slide by outside the windows, giving way to wider trading roads and bigger villages and then towns and then finally the capital city itself, Yanna, the pearl of Rabu, teeming with people, glittering in the spring sun. It was the first time she’d ever seen a city. It was also the first time she’d seen humans who were not her father’s servants. She still remembered how they walked with their backs bent, their eyes on the dusty street. Their clothes were old and sun-faded, their skin streaked with grime and oil and dust.
“We do so much for them,” Hesod had said. “Beneath us, they thrive. Before us, there was chaos.”
Crier had pressed her small hands to the window and peered out at the crowds of humans, watching how they parted around her father’s caravan. How they mixed and swirled together like silt in water, all colors. She saw a human girl who looked about her age with spindly arms and pale, tangled hair. Her feet were bare and dirty. Two streets over, all the buildings were tall and lavish, the streets free of litter and waste and other human detritus, the shops run by Automae. The difference between the human