Iron Heart
Contents (34)
Dedication
For anyone and everyone
who needs a little hope
Map
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Winter, Year 47 AE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Summer, Year 48 AE
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Nina Varela
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Copyright
About the Publisher
It is impossible for a tree to grow without roots. The same law applies to civilization. No society is conjured from thin air; it is the nature of societies to grow, Organically, from that which came before. To reject all forms of Human society is to reject centuries of knowledge, of accumulated thought, of triumphs we could learn from and defeats we could avoid. Yes, we have touched the stars—but we are still connected deeply to the earth. We must not forget. We must not deny our roots in the existence of Humankind; instead, we must take that existence and improve upon it. Is that not the reason for our Creation? Is that not why we were Made?
—FROM THE TRADITIONALISTS,
BY RONAN OF FAMILY TERRA, 2263120905, YEAR 17 AE
Winter,
Year 47 AE
1
It was barely midmorning and Ayla had already cheated death twice.
Maybe that was dramatic. More accurately, she’d already been this close to getting caught by two different members of the royal guard—but then again, it was the same result in the end, wasn’t it? Ayla was a stowaway and a human. Either crime was often punishable by death.
Thalen, the capital of Varn, was a glittering white city surrounded by high white walls. Like Sovereign Hesod’s palace in Rabu, Ayla’s home country, it was seated on the coast, on the shores of the Steorran Sea. But Thalen was a good hundred leagues south of the palace, and here the sea wasn’t an icy black expanse; there were no cliffs of sharp black rock, slick with ice, just waiting for someone to take a wrong step, slip off the edge, and be swallowed by the freezing water below. Here, the sea was jewel green and almost warm. Instead of cliffs, there was a beach of coarse yellow sand heaped with piles of washed-up seaweed, and farther up, short sloping bluffs of gray rock spotted with green moss and beach grass. The bluffs formed a crescent-moon curve around the port that Ayla and her best friend, Benjy, had managed to smuggle themselves into. After they’d fled the sovereign’s palace. Fled Rabu, the only home they had ever known, in the hold of a cargo ship, hidden among casks of grain. The journey had been brutal: Benjy seasick the whole time, Ayla fine at first and then, after the grain was switched out for barrels of rotting sardines, violently ill. She remembered that week and a half at sea in sweaty, nauseous flashes, head spinning, stomach lurching.