death you could taste it—that this was the puzzle piece she needed.
I can return anytime I wish, Kinok had said. There are ways.
Now all she had to do was get into that safe.
Kinok returned only a few minutes later. Ayla straightened up the second she heard his key scrape in the lock, feeling so much less afraid than before. Even though she still didn’t know why he’d asked about her parents, even though she still didn’t know why or how he’d gotten hold of her locket, even though she still didn’t know what her punishment would be. As long as she could tell someone about the location of the safe, she would be triumphant. She’d win this one—or die trying.
She stared at Kinok, waiting.
“Leave,” said Kinok.
Ayla pulled up short. “. . . Excuse me?”
“Leave,” he said again, slow and drawn out, like he was talking to a horse or a particularly dim child. “I require nothing from you. Leave.”
“I don’t understand,” she heard herself say, even as her entire body yearned for the door and the steps back up to sunlight, to something that wasn’t freedom but was better than this. “I don’t understand, aren’t you going to—?”
“We are done here,” he said, every word from his lips like something heavy dropping to the carpet between them, like he spoke stones.
She wavered for a moment longer, is this a trap is this a trap, but then finally body won out over paranoia and she darted away from him, out the door, up the marble steps, until she was inside the palace again and the air smelled like the sickly perfume of too many flowers.
She hurried toward the exit closest to the servants’ quarters, walking as fast as she could without looking too suspicious, knowing she needed to talk to Benjy—immediately.
But before she could even make her way outside, another servant stopped her abruptly.
“You’re needed in the kitchens. Malwin’s been looking for you.”
Malwin? What could she want? Their last interaction hadn’t exactly been pleasant. She’d not soon forget how Malwin spat at her feet.
But she couldn’t disobey.
Full of a new dread, Ayla made her way to the kitchens.
Upon arriving in the dim, smoky, cavernous room, she was ordered straight to a corner station to begin shucking the papery skin off a pile of onions. She hadn’t spent much time in here, had only been on cooking duty once or twice—humans her age were usually reserved for manual labor.
The kitchens of a leech’s palace weren’t like any human kitchen. The floor was trodden earth and there was a roasting pit, a larder, a few big, rough-hewn worktables, a wall dedicated to pots and platters and knives—but there was also a massive clay fireplace that took up almost an entire wall, the flames occupied by a black cauldron that both Ayla and Benjy could have comfortably curled up inside with room to spare. This cauldron was used for one thing only: brewing liquid heartstone. The white steam rolling thickly into the chimney smelled bitter, metallic. Ayla breathed through her mouth, and still she could taste it on her tongue. There was always a single leech guard stationed by the heartstone cauldron. Startled, Ayla realized that she recognized today’s guard. It was the same one she’d run into last night.
Ayla shifted, hiding her face.
Through the thick curtain of her hair, Ayla watched a kitchen boy stir the contents of the cauldron. Soon, she knew, it would be strained and poured into another cauldron to cool. You could tell who was on pouring duty because their hands and clothes were stained red.
“Handmaiden.”
Ayla looked up.
Malwin stood before her. She didn’t look hateful or angry, as Ayla had expected. If anything, she was peering at Ayla with something like curiosity.
“I’m under orders from Queen Junn’s adviser,” said Malwin, speaking in a hushed voice so the leech guard wouldn’t hear.
Storme.
Somehow, Ayla kept her face blank. “The human, ma’am?”
“Yes. He caught me just before they left.”
So he really did leave. It wasn’t a surprise, but it still stung all over again. Storme was already gone.
So much had happened between their argument last night and her getting caught this morning that she’d hardly had time to think of him again—or to grieve.
Because that was how it felt. It was like another death. Not crueler or more upsetting than the first, but dull and deep and aching.
“What’s that got to do with me, ma’am?”
“Gave me something to give to you. He said you dropped it. He said to tell you, ‘Don’t