Crier's War

“There are whispers, daughter,” Hesod went on. “I hear them in the corridors, in the kitchens. The servants of this palace are under the impression that their lady has become attached to the human girl who serves her.”

Crier shook her head. “They are mistaken, Father.”

“I know,” Hesod said gently. “I know that no child of mine, no child created by my hand, would commit such a heinous betrayal against their own Kind. I know the servants are mistaken, daughter. But humans, once convinced of an idea, are difficult to persuade otherwise. Their minds are not complex and malleable like ours. And you do not want them to continue spreading such dangerous lies, do you?”

“No,” Crier whispered.

“Then I will offer you a deal,” said Hesod, “because I believe that you are telling the truth, even if no one else does. I shall give the handmaiden one last chance. She will be allowed to remain at your feet, serving you.” He paused. “Unless, of course, there is another incident. Then she will be removed.”

“Yes, Father.”

“In the meantime, you will wear the black armband that symbolizes the Anti-Reliance Movement. As a gesture of goodwill, peace, and tolerance between Traditionalism and Anti-Reliance.”

“Yes, Father,” Crier said numbly. “I will do as you’ve asked.”

Hesod finally looked at her again, and his eyes glinted in the firelight. “I am pleased,” he said, “to have raised such an obedient child.”

Crier didn’t let herself second-guess the message she had penned the moment she left her father’s side. She would not marry Kinok. Nor would she abide her father’s decisions any longer.

The words flowed out of her pen with little effort, even the coded names coming easily.

Once satisfied, she stared at the wet ink for a moment, blew lightly across the page to dry it, then slipped a green feather into the envelope, sealed it with wax, and gave it to one of her father’s messengers.

“Deliver it well,” she said with a smile, picturing the sly look that would appear on Queen Junn’s face when she received it upon her arrival in Varn—when the queen realized that she had an ally. That together, they were going to take down the Wolf.

Friend—

You said to me that Fear is a tool of survival.

I hope that you are right.

There is indeed a Wolf among us, and we must work together to hunt him down. If he kills again, there are three who will share in the spoils. Two will be found with red blood on their hands. To find the third, look foerward; he is closer than you think.

La st we spoke, you said, “It only takes One clever fox to best a thousand men.”

I confess, I wish to be that fox.

These days, the Sha dows are long. Soon, the nights will Sta rt to swallow us whole. There is always a part of me that dreads the winter. Now more than ever.

—Fox

“Do not be ashamed of your fear, Lady Crier,” said Junn. “If you were not afraid, I would leave this room and never once look back. But you are afraid. That is why I trust you, and why I’m asking for your help.” Her expression softened. “And I really am only asking. I will not force your hand, my lady. Nor will I beg.”

“I need time,” Crier said. “I need to think.”

Junn nodded, leaning back a little. Without the smell and warmth of her, it was a little easier to breathe. “Of course,” she said. “I wish I had more time to give you, but my company leaves at dawn. If you decide you want to help me, take this and slide it under the door to my bedchamber.” She held out a green feather. “In Varn, the color green symbolizes alliance. We use it to communicate.”

“. . . We? Who’s we?”

“Those who wish to take sides against the wolf,” Junn said, and smiled, all teeth.

“As you may have noticed, he is drawn to any whiff of power. His supporters are vocal, but his base is small. In order to truly push his agenda, he must ally himself with an established force. But I admit that even I was intrigued at first. For the whole of autumn, his ideas seemed to glitter inside my head. He spoke of a glorious future for our
Kind, and I wanted so badly to help him create it. But it was a tangle of lies, Lady. A fox’s trick.”

At Crier’s confused look, she continued. “It’s from an old human story. Once, during a long and terrible winter, Fox and Bear were afraid that their children would starve. Their milk had dried up and they were both too weak to hunt. Everybody knew that Fox was the cleverest animal in the whole forest, so Bear went to her and begged for help. ‘My children are hungry,’ she said. ‘I can hear their bellies at night. What should I do?’ And Fox told her, ‘Last week, Brother Wolf attacked the farm on the edge of this forest. He killed one sheep and two fat hens. Now the humans are scared. Go to them peacefully and tell them that in exchange for one fresh hen per day, you will guard their hens and livestock from the wolves. You are weakened, but your body is big and your teeth are sharp. Brother Wolf will not cross you.’

“So Bear did as Fox said. That night, she left her cubs in their den and traveled to the farm on the edge of the forest. She knocked very gently on the farmer’s door and said, ‘I come peacefully. Please let me in.’ And the farmer opened the door only to sink his hunting knife into Bear’s heart. He thought it was another attack, you see.”

Crier watched Junn’s face as she spoke. Junn’s eyes were focused on something that did not seem to exist in this room, something visible only to her.

“What happened next?” Crier asked. “Did Fox steal the farmer’s chickens?”

“No,” said Junn. “Fox waited until Bear’s children died of
starvation. Then she ate them. The meat of two bear cubs was enough to last Fox and her kits through the final weeks of winter. She had hunted without ever lifting a paw.”

“So she killed Bear on purpose.”

“Weren’t you listening?” asked Junn. “Fox didn’t kill Bear. The farmer did. When the other animals discovered what had happened, they all blamed Bear for going mad. ‘Walking right up to the farmer’s door,’ they said. ‘What a fool.’ And Fox nodded along with them, and nobody ever found out what she had done.”

She looked at Crier closely, searching her face.

“So Kinok is the fox,” Crier said. “Clever and deceiving.”

The queen smiled. “No, my dear. Kinok is the wolf.” She paused and stared at Crier for a moment. Then she said, “I want you to be the fox.”

“I never imagined I’d get a chance like this,” she admitted, meeting Rowan’s steady gaze. “I dreamed of being assigned to something inside the palace, but—I thought I’d be in the kitchens, or a nameless maidservant . . . I’m a handmaiden. The handmaiden to Lady Crier herself. It’s got to be a sign.”

“A sign of what?” asked Benjy.

“A sign that—” Ayla dropped her voice even lower. “Killing Crier wouldn’t be true revenge. Not the way I’ve always wanted it. If I want to destroy Hesod, really destroy him . . . I have to kill everything he cares about.”

He huffed, frustrated. “What do you mean?”

“Killing his daughter is one thing, but for Hesod? For men like that, Automa or not, there’s nothing so dear to them as power. Blood and gold and precious stones—it all comes in second to having a seat on the council, command over an army. To having control. The only way to really destroy Hesod is to take away his power.”

“So it’s still about revenge for you,” said Benjy, almost annoyed. “Not revolution.”

Ayla stared at him. How did he not understand? She turned to Rowan, beseeching. “You understand, right?”

“I do.” Rowan reached out to ruffle Benjy’s hair, smiling when he squirmed away, and then she ruffled Ayla’s for good measure. “Benjy, love, this is revolution. The sovereign is the head of the great beast. We all have our own reasons for wanting to cut off the head. All that matters, in the end, is that someone does.”

Kinok. The war hero. Lady Crier’s betrothed.

He’d quelled human rebellions and was responsible for the deaths of many. Still, when dealing with monsters, Ayla almost preferred that kind of frontal attack over Hesod’s insidious tyranny, the way he professed his appreciation for humankind with one breath and ordered massacres with the next. The way he made laws pretending they were for the “good” of humans. Like the one that banned any use of large storage spaces: places where grains or dry goods could be kept for the drought and cold seasons were explicitly banned under the guise of caring for human welfare. Hesod—and the Red Council—said it was because humans might hoard. They might let their food rot and spread disease. But the rebellion knew better. Rowan had told Ayla and Benjy that the Automae were worried that any large storage spaces could be used to meet in secret or hide weapons. And in their fear, they sentenced many families to almost starve to death during the winter seasons.

Self-defense was something Rowan had insisted on teaching them, whether it was with a knife or just their fists. Rowan was a strict but fair teacher. She’d make Ayla and Benjy practice a single move over and over again until their arms were aching, their muscles trembling, the
calluses on their palms split open and bleeding, but she always praised them afterward and rewarded them with a hot, hearty dinner. She rubbed ointment on their sore muscles, tended to the broken skin on their knuckles and palms.

One afternoon, she’d pulled Ayla aside after a particularly brutal round of training left Benjy sulking by the hearth fire, nursing a sprained wrist.

You’re stronger than him, Ayla, Rowan had said. You have to protect him.

At the time, Ayla hadn’t understood. Sure, she was quick and wily, but Benjy was physically much stronger. He won their fights eight out of ten times. What are you talking about? she’d asked. Just yesterday he practically tossed me across the room. My tailbone’s still hurting.

But you got up, said Rowan. You fought three more rounds. And here you are again today, even though you’re in pain. Whereas Benjy . . . She trailed off. I wasn’t talking about physical strength, Ayla. I was talking about resilience. I was talking about how you never, ever stop fighting, no matter how much it hurts.

The last page was the final draft of her Design, the one that the Makers would have used to actually create her. Unlike the previous drafts, this one had only Torras’s neat, blocky handwriting—none of her father’s scrawl. But that made sense. Torras was the Midwife, not her father. Crier gave a quick once-over to the ink drawings of her body, the cross section of her inner workings. She was more than ready to return these documents to Kinok and forget all about her ridiculous paranoia.

But there was something off about this page.

Crier held it up to the moonlight, frowning. The proportions of her body were all the same. None of the numbers had changed. What was—?

There. The cross section of her brain. A small portion of it was redrawn to the side in greater detail: the portion that represented her pillars. They were not physical elements of her body, but metaphysical elements of her mind, her intelligence, her personality. Each blueprint had shown four pillars in her mind, balancing out like scales.

Intellect. Organics. The two human pillars.

Calculation. Reason. The two Automa pillars.

In this blueprint—only this one—there were five. Inside the Design of Crier’s mind was another little column drawn in deep-blue ink. A fifth pillar.

Passion, it was labeled.

Passion.

Crier, the daughter of the sovereign, had five pillars instead of four. It was unheard of. Everyone knew Automae were created with two human pillars and two Automa pillars. Crier had never imagined there could be one with three human pillars. And that was what Passion was, without a doubt: human.

The papers were shaking in her hands. No. Her hands were shaking. Suddenly paranoid, Crier glanced around to make sure she was truly alone in this corner of the gardens. What if someone sees?

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? What would happen to her? She shuddered, thinking of Kinok’s words back in the forest during the Hunt. 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. Worse, it could cause the political scandal of the century. People could call for Hesod to step down as sovereign. They could use Crier to threaten her father. Through him, they could gain power over the entire Red Council. Over all of Rabu—and more.

Crier was Flawed. She was broken.

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

Her father said he did not completely understand all the different forms of human love, but that he had thought carefully about it and that perhaps, beyond his fascination with their history, their little cultures, he did love humans. In his own way.

Like how they loved dogs, he said, enough to feed them scraps of meat.

“Is there something you find amusing, Lady Crier?” Kinok said, staring at her curiously.

Of course Kinok had noticed. He noticed everything. He was looking at her now over the rim of his own teacup, his lips stained slightly red.

“It is not important,” Crier said, a little flustered by Kinok’s unwavering gaze. “I merely thought of a book I was reading last night.”

“Ah. Which book?”

“A collection of essays on economic structure,” she said. “Specifically, the intersection of market structure with physical or geographical environment.”

Kinok’s eyebrows lifted. “I see.” To Hesod, he said, “Such inherent curiosity. Perhaps it is best that she has not yet attended a meeting of the council. I think, given an hour, she would take over as head.”

Crier preened, until she saw Hesod’s jaw tighten.

“On the contrary,” he said. “I believe attending next week’s meeting will be an invaluable experience for her. Perhaps it will give her pause the next time she is tempted to voice her own opinions on how to run a nation.”

Crier glanced at Kinok. He gave her a small, crooked smile. “It will be an honor to have her there.”

Which meant he would be in attendance as well.

She remembered what her father had told her: that Kinok was not a threat to Hesod’s hold on Rabu and the other territories. Not if he joined a family. Not if he submitted to Traditionalism.

It seemed Hesod trusted him enough to include him in the affairs of the Red Council now.

Hesod prided himself on spreading Traditionalism throughout Rabu—the Automa belief in modeling their society after
human behavior, as though humans were a long-lost civilization from which they could cherry-pick the best attributes to mimic. Family was important to Sovereign Hesod, or so he and his council preached. The irony was not lost on Ayla.