She was holding Yora’s heart.

19

Ayla stood in a corner of the grand ballroom, which had been turned into an armory of sorts. It was crowded with maybe two hundred people dressing for battle. Kinok’s forces were marching on the palace. Queen Junn’s guard and their allies, Automae and humans from all corners of Zulla, had gathered. There were Rabunians and Varnians, easily recognizable, and then a scattering of humans that had to be from Tarreen: they had the same brown skin and dark hair as Ayla, but their clothes were designed for hot, humid jungle, not the northern cold. They wore loose, light fabrics in earth tones, ochres and browns and greens and clay reds, and Ayla kept seeing a motif of interlocking blue circles, woven or stamped onto their clothes, painted onto their bare skin. Tiny blue stones dangled from their ears; blue stone pendants hung at their throats and wrists. Of course—Dinara’s mysterious blue stone had been discovered in Tarreen, after all. It seemed as sacred to the Tarreenians as heartstone was to the Automae, or silver and gold to the humans of Rabu and Varn.

No wonder you’ve kept to yourselves all this time, Ayla thought, stealing another glance at a pair of Tarreenian women through the crowd. It wasn’t that the sovereign had scared them all into hiding. It was that the Tarreenians were hiding something of their own. Cave systems full of blue crystals with enough destructive power to sink a nation. Hesod couldn’t have known about it—he would’ve sent armies into Tarreen by the thousands, closed borders with Varn be damned.

The true miracle was that Kinok hadn’t gotten there first.

“Hey. You’re Ayla, right?”

She startled, tearing her eyes away from the Tarreenian women. Standing before her was the golden-haired prisoner from the Iron Heart. The last time she’d seen this person, they’d been lying half conscious in the caravan with the other prisoners, a physician slathering a poultice over their raw, blistered skin. They looked much better now. They were upright, for one thing, but it was more than that—it was the light in their big brown eyes, the way their face no longer looked grayish and stiff. Their hair had been washed, falling in loose curls instead of matting to their skull with sweat and grime.

She nodded. “That’s me.”

“I was told to bring you these,” they said, holding out a pile of what looked like armor, the sort all the humans were wearing: a shirt and pants of thick, padded wool, a chest plate of hard leather.

“Oh. Thank you.”

“Courtesy of the queen,” they said, grimacing a little, like the word queen had an unpleasant taste.

Ayla raised an eyebrow. “Not her biggest supporter?”

They huffed, blowing an errant curl out of their eyes. “Well, I owe her my life and I want the Scyre of Rabu dead, so for the time being I will fight under her flag. But I don’t approve of monarchs.”