Strings of lanterns swayed along the streets of Thalen, a glowing path through the darkness, leading from the gates to the festival itself in the heart of the city. Ayla and Benjy were swept along by the crowd of revelers, the sea of green and white ribbons, white roses, and white masks, some shaped like long, white beaks. Green feathers fluttered everywhere: they were braided into long hair, woven into bright pluming crowns and shining, iridescent capes. Ayla felt like she’d stumbled into the middle of a royal menagerie, a city of magnificent birds. She kept seeing Automae in the crowd, unnaturally beautiful, glossy hair tumbling down their backs or twisted into crowns, and every time her heart stopped before she realized it was normal here. For humans and leeches to share a festival, to celebrate among each other. For humans to attend a festival not as servants but as guests. Not equals, never equals, never truly safe, but closer to it here than they ever were in Rabu. Despite all the sovereign’s posturing about Traditionalism and respect. Ayla couldn’t reckon with it, couldn’t wrap her mind around it. She didn’t know if she was more shocked about Automae wanting to mingle with humans or humans just . . . letting them do it.

Don’t you know what they do to us? she wanted to shriek at them. Don’t you know what they’re capable of? Don’t you know they’re just waiting for any excuse to hurt you? Don’t you know some of them don’t need an excuse?

Her skin prickled. She was sweating, even in the chill of winter. This place wasn’t a menagerie. It was a pit of snakes.

Queen Junn’s palace lay at the northernmost point of the city. Ayla heard it before she saw it: the roar of thousands of festivalgoers, all those rivers of people converging in the same place, laughing and singing and cheering; the wild rhythmic crash of what sounded like a hundred lutes, and drums, and horns. The buildings lining both sides of the street began to thin out the closer they got to the palace, granaries and cobblers and masonries and other little shops and sharehouses replaced by manor houses, the buildings becoming larger and more ornate. More Automa. Still, the streets were lit with lanterns signaling the way. This wasn’t forbidden territory. This wasn’t like Yanna, the capital city of Rabu, where humans starved on the streets in plain sight.

As Ayla and Benjy continued, even the manors fell away, the street spitting out everyone into a massive square—a white stone courtyard that could have easily held the entirety of one of Sovereign Hesod’s sun apple orchards. The courtyard was filled to the brim with people, lanterns and firepits lighting the crowd with a flickering orange glow, banners emblazoned with the queen’s phoenix and Thomas Wren’s insignia—the alchemical symbols for salt, mercury, and sulfur: body, mind, and spirit—flying overhead. Smoke billowed up into the night sky, obscuring the stars. Ayla took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the smells of frying fish and frying dough and something almost sickeningly sweet, wine and cider and the copper scent of liquid heartstone, the charcoal-and-grease of a roasting pig, and rising above it all the delicate fragrance of white roses, bushels of them. Ayla saw people wending through the crowd, passing out crowns of white roses. Past the smoke and banners, she could just barely make out the palace itself on the far side of the courtyard. The white walls, a smaller version of the walls ringing the city. The gates.