hair, ironing her dress, painting her mouth with soft rouge. At least it would have kept Ayla moving, kept her hands busy, kept her mind off Nessa. Kept her from staring, paralyzed with indecision, at the basket of food that had been delivered earlier by a very suspicious maidservant. Bread and honey, salted fish, soft yellow cheese, sun apples, a parcel of candied nuts. It was more food than Ayla usually saw in a week. She didn’t want to eat it. She was starving. Her belly was rolling over itself. But eating would be like giving in. Like admitting something, some need. Right?
Crier had allowed Ayla to stay. Had given her the day off. She’d never had a day off before—not since working here. She hated the stillness. Guilt gnawed at her, same as hunger. A quiet, private, relentless kind of torture. Revenge had left her hands bloody, but it wasn’t the right blood.
She knew what she should be doing. She should be trying her best to find Kinok’s private study. If he kept any secret documents pertaining to the Iron Heart, anything that would be useful to the Revolution—a map, blueprints, a heartstone ledger, information about the trade routes—it’d be there, in the safe Malwin had mentioned.
And yet every time she set foot near the doors to the palace, a horrible chill flooded through her—dread. The memory of Nessa’s handkerchief. Her shoes.
Maybe I should just give up now.
But if I give up, then what have I even been living for?
Alone, she watched the sunlight slide across the walls of servants’ quarters. Four hundred empty beds. Everyone else was out in the fields, the gardens, the orchards, the palace. The Reaper’s Moon—marked by the last crescent moon of the harvest season, the moon shaped like a harvester’s scythe—meant that weeks of laboring in the fields had come to a close, and it was time to settle in for the winter.
When Ayla’s parents were growing up, the Reaper’s Moon was celebrated with three days and three nights of festivals and dances and parties that lasted till dawn, huge feasts in the village square, neighbors eating and laughing and singing with each other, their faces painted gold. When Ayla and Storme were young, there weren’t any big celebrations—not with the constant threat of raids. But Ayla’s mother had always braided golden ribbons into Ayla’s hair, and her father had sung harvest songs and moon songs and love songs, and the fire had been so warm, and they’d all been smiling.
Ayla’s cot was cold and uncomfortable. She didn’t usually feel the aloneness quite this much. But it was harder, this time of year, to ignore the graveyard in her chest. Harder still when it had just grown by two bodies.
The sunlight slid down the walls and turned from pale yellow to old gold to orange with sunset. In another life, Ayla would be dancing right now. In another life, she’d be dressed in rich colors and her face would be painted and her hair sleek with oil, and she’d be dancing in the village square, and her feet would hurt and it would feel so nice, and there wouldn’t be any weight on her shoulders. No hatred, no fear, no death.
In this life, she closed her eyes.
And opened them barely a minute later when someone poked her hard in the forehead.
“Benjy,” she snapped, shoving his hand away and ignoring his grinning face. “What do you want?”
“You think I’d let you sleep through the feast?” he said, plopping down on her cot. “No way. Look at you, all your bones showing. You need this just as much as the rest of us.”
That meant the day of work was over. The servants would forgo their dinners to set up for the secret celebrations, deep in the woods or somewhere far from the immediate grounds. The council meeting was a perfect cover, sending Hesod, Kinok, and Crier away for the full day.
But Ayla couldn’t stomach even the idea of a celebration. “I’m not going.”
“Oh, come on, it’ll be fun. It’ll get your mind off—you know.” He pushed gently at her shoulder. “There will be wine. Remember last year?”
“Yes. You drank too much and got sick in the ocean.”
“Don’t you wanna be there to watch me embarrass myself?”
“No, Benjy,” she said, staring at a tiny piece of straw poking out from the mattress, willing her eyes away from his. “I’m not going, not this year. You have fun.”