“Why?”

Crier took a breath. “I want to learn about you.”

“I’m not a book,” said Ayla, ignoring her own traitorous heartbeat. How it quickened. “Palms aside. You can’t read me once and know everything.”

“Then I will read you again and again,” said Crier. She seemed to catch something in Ayla’s expression, seemed to realize that wasn’t the right answer. “I know,” she said. It sounded like she was choosing each word very carefully. “I know you’re not a book. I know I can’t know everything. I know it is important to you that I do not. Or perhaps that no one does. But . . . if there is anything you want to give. One story. One solitary point on the map of yourself. One star in the constellation, one door unlocked. I will accept it, and be honored, and I will not forget.”

“I don’t think you’ll like my stories,” Ayla told her. She thought of the stories Crier had woven for her on the night of the Reaper’s Moon. Not that long ago. Princesses and foxes, bears and snow-choked passes and peace treaties. In the forest: Hana and Winter, a soul sinking into the mountains, another iteration of forever.

“I’m not . . .” Crier gazed into the fire for a moment, at the black heart of it, where the flames were born and died. She took a while to answer, as she often did. During pauses like this Ayla tried to imagine what it looked like inside Crier’s head. What it looked like when she gathered her thoughts, sifting through heaps of words until she found those flecks of gold. “You keep comparing yourself to a book. That is not how I see you. If I want to learn about you, it’s not for . . . pleasure, or leisure, or the desired mastery of a subject. I am not trying to learn you like a language. I am trying, Ayla, to learn you like a person. Like people do, with the knowledge that I will never know everything. That it is impossible to know everything.” Despite her words, she sounded a little put out about it, in a way that made Ayla want to laugh. Not unkindly. “Because you deserve to be known, in whatever capacity you wish. I am trying to become a person who deserves to know you. I want that. More than anything.”

“My history is bloody,” Ayla told her. “It is tied to your own.”

“Mine?”

The time had come, then. For the full story. If Crier wanted to know her, she had to know this first.

“I come from a village to the north,” Ayla began. It felt impossible: telling this story to this person, after so many years. “When I was nine, Sovereign Hesod’s men raided my village. They burned it to the ground. Almost everyone was killed. Including my parents. I was one of the only survivors.”

Crier was holding very still. She wasn’t breathing.

“After that day, I managed to make my way down the coast to the village of Kalla-den. But I was starving and weak, and it was winter. I collapsed in the street. I should have died. I would have—but someone found me. Her name was Rowan.” She took a shaky breath, steeling herself against the rush of memories that accompanied that name. “She took me in. She did that often—found the lost children, saved them, let them into her home. Benjy—my friend with the curly hair—grew up with me there. It was Rowan who found us work at the sovereign’s palace. At my request.” She caught Crier’s look. “Why did I want to work for the man who killed my parents?”