was in her bedchamber again, because everything was still chaos, but a different kind: instead of fire and smoke and heat and screaming, Crier had slammed back into a world that was dark and cold, and she was lying on a bed, and someone cried out, and—a mass of dark shapes was writhing in the center of the room, and it took a few moments of frantic blinking to realize that they were guards, there were guards in her room, and—
Ayla.
They had Ayla. She was pinned to the floor, three guards holding her down, one pressing her face to the flagstones. Crier leaped out of bed and stumbled, unsteady on her feet. When she realized what must have happened, Crier’s blood ran cold. Had she really been in so much distress that it had triggered her chime? Regardless, her chime had gone off, and the guards had arrived.
And they’d found Ayla, Crier thought numbly.
In Crier’s bed. In the middle of the night when she was supposed to be in the servants’ quarters.
This is all my fault.
“Stop,” she said, “stop, let her go, she did nothing wrong—” But the guards didn’t even look at her. They were already moving, wrenching Ayla off the ground and out of the room. She wasn’t struggling, Crier saw. Her eyes were huge and wild, her teeth clenched, but she wasn’t struggling. She looked up at Crier, silently, and their gazes locked. Crier didn’t know what her own expression was doing, but she thought it probably wasn’t so different from Ayla’s. Shocked, horrified, helpless, confused.
Then the guards dragged Ayla from the room.
Still disoriented, Crier scrambled after them. She paused only to hide the pendant in her drawer, where she’d hidden the key to the music room, and then she was racing out the door and down the corridor. The guards hadn’t gotten far at all, not with Ayla weighing them down. “Stop!” Crier called out, as harshly as she could, and to her relief they actually obeyed. One of the guards turned to face her, his eyes flashing gold in the light from the wall sconces. He was the one who had shoved Ayla’s face into the flagstones.
“My lady,” he said in a monotone. “We are under orders from the sovereign. Please return to your chamber. The physician is on the way.”
“I am not injured,” Crier snapped. “I am completely unharmed, and Ay—the human has done nothing wrong.”
“We are under orders from the sovereign,” the guard repeated. “Should Lady Crier be placed in any danger, any and all humans in the vicinity are to be delivered to Scyre Kinok for questioning.”
The ice in Crier’s veins shattered. She reeled, trying not to show the fear and revulsion on her face. “To Kinok? Why? Why not to my father?”
“We are under orders from the sovereign.”
She stared at him. He stared back, impervious.
“I am your lady,” she tried. “You answer to me as well as my father.”
“The sovereign’s orders take precedence above all.”
Crier opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She had no idea how to proceed from here. How to make them release Ayla, Ayla who had done nothing wrong, Ayla who should not be taken anywhere near Kinok, not without Crier there to—protect her, watch out for her, something.
The guards sidestepped her neatly, and with Ayla still slumped between them, limp, they marched down the corridor and were gone.
She stood there for a few moments, wide-eyed and barefoot and frozen with shock, the remnants of a burning city still flickering at the edges of her mind—a burning city that she knew was real. It hadn’t been a nightmare. Everything made sense now: Ayla’s strange paranoia about her necklace, the way she wore it always even though she seemed terrified of anyone discovering it.
The locket was a memory keeper, activated by blood. Crier had heard of similar objects, in the records of the old Makers, in estate auction papers she’d seen, listing the wide array of alchemical trinkets and gadgets for sale that were now forbidden to humans—silver models of constellations that, when activated by the crushed bones of birds, could fly in circles around your head in the exact patterns of the celestial bodies. Glass eyeballs that rolled in the direction of whatever you were searching for.
But this object was not just any Made object. It was Ayla’s, and the memories stored in it were, in some way or another, memories of the history of Ayla and her family. Whoever had worn it before Ayla—the man in