is sired by me. She will be raised by me as well. H reluctant. Regrets sending the letter, regrets seeing me again. Refuses, sometimes, to let me inside the house; to let me see my own daughter.
[ . . . ]
A discovery.
This could be—it. This could be everything. To think. She was hiding it. That’s why she didn’t want me in the house. She doesn’t care whether I see the child or not. She didn’t want me to see this. For good reason. I think I might be carrying a lifetime’s supply of gold in my pocket. I think I might be carrying my own legacy.
It was the child. A toddler; they get into everything. She kept presenting me with little trinkets from around the house. A pen, a shoe, a little wooden toy. Papers from H’s study. Blueprints. Designs. Thank the gods I looked them over instead of returning them blindly.
Siena.
I don’t know if I will see you again.
But I owe you everything. . . .”
E. 900, Y. 11: T. Wren builds the first prototype of what would later become the Automa. He names his creation: “Kiera.”
—NOTES ON THOMAS WREN, FROM THE RESEARCH JOURNALS OF SCYRE KINOK, FORMERLY OF THE IRON WATCH
Late Fall,
Year 47 AE
12
The Mad Queen arrived with a spray of color and gold.
It had been two weeks since the council meeting, two weeks since the Reaper’s Moon, and the weather on the northwest coast of Rabu had gone sullen and cold. The queen’s retinue, glittering and flamboyant, were an odd contrast to the gray morning.
Ayla had been up with Crier long before dawn, for once accompanied by a few other handmaidens as they all flitted around Crier like honeybees, braiding her hair and painting her face and wrangling her into the kind of gown that one wore, apparently, when meeting a queen—silk the color of dark golden mead, the bodice lined with hundreds of pearls.
To Ayla’s disturbance, Crier had seemed almost . . . giddy. But how could she be? Despite the queen’s youth, she had a reputation for being violent, temperamental. Even the Automae called her Junn the Bone Eater.
For a moment as she was getting ready, Crier had caught Ayla staring at her red, painted lips in the mirror. It was embarrassing, such a foolish slip-up, but the sight of Crier’s mouth had made Ayla think of another moment: the night of the Reaper’s Moon, when Crier had slipped into the tide pool and Ayla, a moth to flame, had followed. Under the moonlight, Ayla could have sworn . . . They’d been standing so close together in the dark water, clothes clinging to their bodies, and Crier’s eyes had lingered on Ayla’s mouth.
Because I could use it, Ayla told herself. Because the closer I get to Crier, the closer I get to revenge.
That was the only reason why.
It had nothing to do with Crier’s beauty. With the way her mind worked, the careful way she used words, the haunting shape of the story she’d told Ayla that night.
It had nothing to do with the key to the music room, or the way Crier seemed to trust her so readily, her voice going thin and tender in Ayla’s presence, her eyes always so watchful, so full of depth.
No. Ayla wouldn’t let herself get caught staring again. For the rest of the morning, she didn’t meet Crier’s eyes even once, ignoring Crier’s searching glances. Then she and Crier joined Hesod, Kinok, and a veritable parade of other human servants in the courtyard to wait for Queen Junn.
The sky opened up with a downpour of rain during the second hour of waiting. There were a few minutes of chaos as the servants were sent rushing off to fetch a canopy, and then the truly miserable portion of the morning began: standing, soaked through, under a leaking canopy, unable to see more than a horse’s length in any direction past the sheets of freezing rain. The leeches were fine—they didn’t seem to feel the cold—but Ayla was shivering, just as she had been the night of the Reaper’s Moon, when she stood in the tide pool with Crier.
Once again, Ayla thought of the way she’d told the story of the princess. The way she’d looked at Ayla in the moonlight . . .
No. She couldn’t think about that.
Perhaps Crier had been right—perhaps Ayla was like a magpie, drawn to the shininess of trinkets. Perhaps Crier was just that—a shiny, distracting trinket. An inconvenience, adorned with a secretive half