The door was unlocked, the knob turning easily under Ayla’s touch. She pushed it open, and there was Crier. She was sitting on the low bench beside the massive golden harp, and on the surface it could have been the first time Ayla had visited this place, months ago, even the dust undisturbed. Crier must have been lost deep inside her own head—she didn’t seem to notice Ayla’s presence, didn’t even look up until Ayla let the door fall shut behind her, latch clicking into place.

On the surface this Crier could have been the Crier of months ago, except she was wearing plain clothes, not a delicate silk gown. Her hair was loose, tumbling down her back like black water. Her throat was free of jewelry. Her eyes and lips unpainted. And Ayla knew her laugh like fishermen knew the tides. She knew the crooked pull of Crier’s mouth, and the shape of her fingers, and how it felt to slide their hands together and hold on. She knew Crier was the answer to a lot of questions, and not one of them was How can I hurt him? She knew Crier was brave and brilliant, stubborn at the worst moments, funny in a way that wasn’t obvious unless you knew to look for it. She knew Crier wasn’t a book or a map or anything else that could be read once and known in its entirety. Nothing finite like that. There was no beginning to her, no end, no parameters; her body was not the truth of her; Ayla knew that Crier herself was something as wide and endless as the ice fields or the black sea or the evening sky, just as the first stars were beginning to appear. Those first pinpricks of light.

I like knowing there’s certain laws in the universe, Ayla’s father had said once, a very long time ago, before everything. You can’t count on much. Can’t trust most things to stay solid. But there is always some sort of force at work. Even way out there past the sky, so far away that we can’t even imagine it, things work the same. Your mother would explain it better. Everything is just bodies in motion, bodies in orbit, just like here. Pushing and pulling. You know what that’s called? The law of falling.

Crier looked up. “Oh,” she said, blinking at Ayla. Late-afternoon sunlight was drifting in through the windows, turning everything dusty and gold. That window—the same window Ayla had climbed through, followed by Benjy and four other servants, the night she had tried to kill Crier. The night she had failed. “Oh. I didn’t even— Is something happening out there?”

“Not yet,” said Ayla. She didn’t move. She felt carved from wood, like she was just another one of the instruments, still and silent and formed by a gentle hand.

“I have something for you,” said Crier, and Ayla realized Crier was holding something in her lap. A small bundle wrapped in cloth.