May you miss me dear each summer

May your bones be stone below.”

13

They pushed on through the forest slowly. Ayla knew Crier was doing everything she could to stay strong and steady, to stay awake. At last, they saw a grand manor house in the distance, and Ayla’s pulse kicked up as they got closer. What if the house belonged to one of the Automae who’d taken Nightshade? This could be a place to sleep for the night . . . or it could be a great way to lock themselves up with a monster.

But the same was true for any nearby estate, and Crier was flagging quickly. They’d just have to risk it.

The estate was small, as estates went, with only a few outbuildings. There was a grassy courtyard lined with trees, the same short twisted trees that dotted the shrubland and the hills of Varn. Beyond that, the manor house, which was vast but simple, built from sand-colored stone. Ayla could see a carriage house and what looked like a garden, fruit trees bowing their naked limbs.

Ayla and Crier paused at the edge of the courtyard. Ayla tried not to fidget under Crier’s gaze. She felt strange in her own skin again, like she’d felt the first day at the queen’s palace, when her trio of handmaidens scrubbed off seven years of grime. Here, on this morning, she wasn’t flushed and soft and gleaming, but she had cleaned herself as best she could and braided her hair into a tight plait. Back at the river, she’d tried to tame the wispy curls at her temples, but that was a losing battle. “What else stands out?” Ayla had asked, kneeling at the water’s edge, cleaning the dirt out from under her fingernails. “What else would someone remember about me?” The goal was to be as unremarkable as possible.

“Your freckles,” Crier had said promptly, and blinked three times very fast.

“There’s not much I can do about those.” Ayla had sighed. “Maybe . . . Maybe I go alone, and you can just wait nearby—”

“No,” said Crier. “If anything, it’ll be the other way around.”

“Have you gone mad? You’re not going alone. You’re a terrible liar.”

Crier raised an eyebrow. “I suppose neither of us will stay behind, then. What is our cover story?”

“Uh. I don’t know. I guess we could be noblewoman and handmaiden, that’s probably easiest.”

“No. Not my handmaiden again.”

“Who says you were the noblewoman in that scenario? Maybe you were gonna be my handmaiden.”

“That’s acceptable,” said Crier.

Ayla coughed. “I— Okay, no, nobody’s a handmaiden. Different story. We’re traveling alone together because we’re—because we’re wives.”

They stared at each other. “It is more common in Varn,” Crier said, her voice completely devoid of inflection. “Between the Kinds.”

“It makes sense.”

“Yes, that is true.”

It was only later that Ayla realized two friends traveling alone together would have also made sense, but by then too much time had passed, and changing the story at the last minute would have just been awkward.