or guilty or betrayed or any of it, she was all of it, all at once, her emotions mixing like oils in bathwater, impossible to separate and define. “You’re not her servant,” she said, trying to work through the things she’d been obsessing about all day. “You’re—she doesn’t treat you like a servant. You’re her adviser. How did that happen, Storme?” She stared at him as if the answer would show itself on his face. “What happened to you?”
“I want to tell you,” he said. “Later. Not now. Not where anyone could hear.”
“Later,” Ayla repeated slowly, still in shock. “But how long do we have? Where have you been? What’s happened?” she asked again.
He sighed. “It’s complicated, Ayla.”
“Don’t say that like you’re older than me,” she hissed. “Don’t you dare say that like I don’t know the world is complicated.”
“There are things you don’t—”
“Understand?” She reared back, so shocked she almost wanted to laugh. “You’re damn right there are things I don’t understand. Here’s one: I don’t understand why you spent the last six years, what, living in Varn? Worming your way into the queen’s graces, while people are dying here in your home country, every day, the raids never stopped, and—I was here. I was here, and you didn’t come back for me. You’re right: I don’t understand.” Horrifyingly, her voice cracked on the last word.
“Lower your voice, Ayla,” said Storme. “Stars and skies, control yourself.”
She stared at him.
Took a deep breath.
“I have been controlling myself,” she said. “Everything I do is about controlling myself. How do you think I ended up here, in this palace? How do you think I became a—a leech’s handmaiden? Every single thing I have done over the past five years has all been working up to this.”
“Working up to what, exactly?”
Should she tell him? It was already tumbling out of her in a torrent. The Resistance. The spying. The Iron Heart.
Revenge.
Storme stared at her in silence for a moment. She remembered when she used to be able to read those silences; now it was like an unbearable weight. “I don’t think you should be interfering with Kinok, Ayla. Not on your own like this. It’s not safe.”
She scoffed. “As if you have any right to tell me what’s safe anymore.”
“Do you even know what the Anti-Reliance Movement is all about? Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?”
“I know enough.”
“Oh gods, Ayla. You know nothing. ARM may seem innocuous on the surface, but there is nothing but darkness below. If you’ve got any sense at all, you’ll stay far away from anything to do with it.”
Ayla just barely stopped herself from yelling, You can’t tell me what to do! like a child throwing a tantrum. Part of the problem was that, despite herself, his words were sinking in. What did she know about ARM, really, that wasn’t straight from Kinok’s mouth?
“You were gone, Storme,” she said, shoving her doubts aside. If there was one thing she was certain about, it was her anger. “You were gone. And now it’s too late. You have no control over me. I’ve made promises. Nothing you can say will stop me.”
He sighed. “That’s always been your style, hasn’t it? Little Ayla. Always planning something. Have you already forgotten the rats?”
“That has nothing to do with this,” she said. “That was—I was a child.”
“It’s the same thing at the core.”
“It isn’t.”
“Think about it, Lala.”
“Don’t call me that—”
It was summer, hot and muggy, everyone sweating, the whole village crusted with salt and swarming with horseflies. The air smelled like rotting seaweed. Ayla was six, maybe seven, old enough to know certain things—we are poor, we are hungry, something bad lives on the northern cliffs, Mama and Papa are scared, there are whispers of raids—but too young to know what was coming, or how bad things really were, or how close they were to death, always, every hour of every day.
But Ayla wanted to help.
She wanted to make bread.
It was a simple idea. The whole village was on rations for pretty much everything: grain, salt, butter. Ayla hadn’t eaten bread for months. They’d been living on salted fish.
She knew how to make bread: mix the flour with water and let it sit; she knew how to roll the dough and salt it and slash it and how long to let it sit in the hot ashes of the hearth.
So, for weeks, she snuck a single spoonful of flour from the grain rations every fifth night, such a small amount