Crier's War (Crier's War, #1)

by Nina Varela

What would happen if the wrong person—if any person—discovered that the heir to the sovereign of Rabu had been sabotaged by her own Midwife?

They were disposed of. Would she be disposed of? Or, no, no no no, what if someone tried to use her against her father? This was perfect blackmail.

The heir, the sovereign’s daughter, a mistake. It would bring shame to her family.

Crier was Flawed. She was broken.

All this time she’d been treated like the jewel of the sovereign’s estate, a glorious creation, but no. She was an abomination.

“Is it true that humans collect shiny objects? Like magpies do?”

“Have you ever taken any lessons?” She hadn’t meant to ask that. Ayla’s nose scrunched up. She did that a lot. “No. I don’t . . .” “Don’t what?” “Read, my lady. I can’t.”

Somewhere along the line, she’d forgotten how it felt to begin.

“Yes,” said Ayla, and refrained from adding, Your customs are similar because your entire culture was stolen from ours. Because you have no history or culture of your own.

Marriage among servants wasn’t illegal, but you never knew when the laws might change, or what ways the Automae would think of next to punish their own staff, to send ripples of fear among the humans.

This was Crier’s model number. The first six numbers identified her as Crier of Family Hesod. The second four indicated the year of her creation. It was one more reminder that the creature before Ayla, the creature laced into this rich, beautiful dress, the creature who prowled the bluffs at night—this creature was not human.

“Look,” he would say to Crier, ordering the dancers to repeat a certain movement or sequence of steps. “Look at the fluidity, the grace in each transition. They make it seem effortless. But see for yourself: their muscles are trembling. It is not effortless at all.” Once, he had said: “If there exists a type of human capable of dismantling our world, it is the dancer.”

Kiera. Wren’s greatest creation had only one flaw: because she was not alchemical magick, not automaton, not flesh and bone, but a combination of all three, she was not perfectly self-sustaining. There is a law in this universe. One cannot create something from nothing. Because she was created for and bound to the queen, Kiera required the queen’s blood to survive.

For years Ayla had tried her damnedest to keep Benjy at arm’s length. She knew that even friendship made you weak, made hard decisions only harder to make, in a world where you had to look out for yourself first.

As for love? It was worse than a weakness. Love broke you.

She couldn’t help but notice that her face was the only one on the chart that had just the one thread connected to it. The rest of the ink faces had threads of all colors branching out from them—friends, siblings, lovers.

What color did you get when you were connected to a corpse?

Unless . . . unless he was using human relationships against them in some way, to keep them in order, to keep them in line.

Because Luna hadn’t done anything wrong. Luna’s death had been a punishment for something Faye did. That was what this chart was for. To find human weaknesses—and exploit them. It was beyond cruel, beyond sick. It was the work of a master manipulator.

She ran past the gardens. The orchards. And then she saw it. There, hanging between two trees at the entrance to the orchards. Where everyone could see. There, strung up like a lantern. Nessa’s shoes. And her handkerchief.

It wasn’t much. It wasn’t nearly enough. But if Crier could not see Ayla, at least she could make sure Ayla’s belly was full. At least she could go to the council meeting. At least she could fight against this, propose and draft more laws for the protection of humans, make it forbidden to kill a servant, or a child, something, anything. At least she could do everything in her power to make sure this never happened again. For now, that would have to be enough.

It was also the first time she’d seen humans who were not her father’s servants. She still remembered how they walked with their backs bent, their eyes on the dusty street. Their clothes were old and sun-faded, their skin streaked with grime and oil and dust. “We do so much for them,” Hesod had said. “Beneath us, they thrive. Before us, there was chaos.”

Her Kind lived in luxury while humans starved at their feet.

When she was younger, she liked to imagine her father strolling through the city and the palace gardens and the long halls with the stained-glass ceilings, thinking about exactly what kind of daughter he wanted to create.

There were no more chairs open. It took an embarrassingly long amount of time for Crier to realize that she was meant to stay posted in the doorway like this for the entire meeting, like a guard. Or a servant.

In all her fantasies—when she had dared to let herself imagine this—she had been sitting in the spot that Kinok had taken. Sometimes, she even imagined herself at the head of the table. In her fantasies, all the Hands had greeted her, bowing their heads in deference, and she was wearing deep scarlet robes, and when she spoke the whole room listened. She had never once imagined herself standing awkwardly in the doorway, completely removed from the actual meeting. A pointless, invisible observer.

“Proper governance applies to our Kind, not the humans. There is no governing a rabid beast. They are violent, and they grow more violent—and more organized, more powerful—each day. Humans are dangerous. We may wish to believe that they could never harm us, but they can; they have. There is no shame in acknowledging a threat—and removing it.”

“My apologies,” Hesod said, addressing the room at large. “My daughter thinks herself wise beyond her years.” A smattering of laughter.

“Perhaps she’s finally joined the humans,” said Councilmember Shen. “That’s where she belongs, is it not? Always arguing on behalf of the humans, always so concerned about humankind. I would not be surprised if she renounced her own Kind, took up a servant’s uniform, and went to work in the fields.”

And that was the last thing Crier heard. Her head was filled with wordless, rushing noise, like the ocean, or like the first roll of rain in a thunderstorm. She stood there, swaying like a boat unmoored.

It was more food than Ayla usually saw in a week.

“Sometimes I wish I remembered nothing,” she whispered, stepping back, her throat burning. “Sometimes it seems like that would be so much easier.”

“It means I saw the way your Lady Crier looks at you,” said Storme. “It means I saw the way you look at her. The way you spoke to her. The way you almost touch her, sometimes.”

She’d read about heartbreak in a hundred different human stories. Had always thought it was a metaphor, poetry about pain. But as she sat there in the dark, the guards destroying her books and her own mind torturing her with the image of the knife in Ayla’s hand, Crier felt like she was actually breaking.

Cracks forming in her heart, pain leaking out like spilled ink, midnight black and poisonous. It

and that was how Crier learned that pain was not finite; there was no limit to woundless hurt. And she was mute.