“I still don’t think that makes you weak,” said Crier. “And I’m not just saying that because it was me at the other end of your knife.”

Ayla shook her head, blinking back tears. “I—I can’t agree with you. Maybe someday, but not yet.”

“Then I will wait for someday,” said Crier.

I want to know you.

The thought was clear and bright as starlight.

I want to know you, too.

That night, they slept in the same bed. Crier fell asleep almost immediately, or at least faked it well, but Ayla lay awake for hours. She listened to Crier’s slow, even breathing beside her, less than an arm’s length away. If Ayla were brave, she would have closed the space between them. She would have crawled over and tucked her face into the hollow of Crier’s throat and breathed her in and wrapped an arm around her waist and tangled their legs together under the blankets. If she were brave, she would have done that.

But she wasn’t brave. She kept to her own side of the bed, her own pillow. When she did sleep, it was fitful and plagued by wild, howling nightmares: Ayla dreamed of her mother’s face, her father’s, Storme’s, all their faces smearing together like melting wax, devoured by green fire, then the fire was seawater, a frothing, roiling maelstrom, a series of tiny wooden huts smashed apart by the waves and sucked down, down, down to the bottom of the sea. Ayla dreamed of Queen Junn, of bloodied swords, of a war—legions of humans, starved and skeletal, up against a battalion of Automae in shining silver armor like molten moonlight, like ice. She dreamed of the Iron Heart, and in her dreams it looked like a massive cave, a mouth, a gaping maw, so dark it could have been a hole pierced into the fabric of the universe. As she watched, the darkness seemed to move. First it was shadows come to life, pouring out of the cave mouth, then it was flames again, black this time, swallowing the light. Licking at her ankles, her clothing, her flesh, too hot, too hot, she was burning, she wanted to scream—she tried to run and found she couldn’t move. The flames were heartstone red now, more liquid than fire—the ground tilted beneath Ayla’s feet and she was sliding down a slick, muddy riverbank toward the crashing river below, but the water was red, it was red and there was something else wrong, the texture was off, it didn’t look like water, it looked like—

Blood.

Ayla woke with a jolt right before she fell into the river of blood. She shoved the blankets off and lay there, trying to catch her breath, worried she might be sick. The sky was still black outside the windows.

Dawn was a long way off.

14

They left Lady Shiza’s estate the next morning with a pouch of heartstone dust and directions to the hunting grounds to the west, where Shiza said she’d seen blue smoke rising over the trees. Two leagues west would lead them into the foothills of the Aderos Mountains. That was where Kinok was headed, so that was where they would go. It was easy traveling at first, walking through shrubland and yellow grass. Then the hills began to rise up, wooded and rockier than Crier had experienced on her journey from the sovereign’s palace down to the southern estates, to Lake Thea.