Nina Varela

From debut author Nina Varela comes the first book in an Own Voices, richly imagined epic fantasy duology about an impossible love between two girls--one human, one Made--whose romance could be the beginning of a revolution. Perfect for fans of Marie Rutkoski's The Winner's Curse as well as Game of Thrones and Westworld. After the War of Kinds ravaged the kingdom of Rabu, the Automae, designed to be the playthings of royals, usurped their owners' estates and bent the human race to their will. Now Ayla, a human servant rising in the ranks at the House of the Sovereign, dreams of avenging her family's death...by killing the sovereign's daughter, Lady Crier. Crier was Made to be beautiful, flawless, and to carry on her father's legacy. But that was before her betrothal to the enigmatic Scyre Kinok, before she discovered her father isn't the benevolent king she once admired, and most importantly, before she met Ayla. Now, with growing human unrest across the land, pressures from a foreign queen, and an evil new leader on the rise, Crier and Ayla find there may be only one path to love: war.

Crier's War

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"Always check their eyes. That's how you can tell if a creature is human. It's in the eyes."

"When light hit an Automa's eyes head-on, the irises flashed gold. A split second of reflection, refraction, like a cat's eyes at night."

Justice was a god, and Ayla didn't believe in such childish things. She believed in blood.

She told him all about the songs, [...] and how the humans sang frequently of love and hate and loss.

She had never really seen a pair of eyes like this. It was like standing in the doorway to a dark room, like balancing on the threshold, holding a lantern up and watching how it kissed somethings gold and left other things in shadow. It was the kind of dark that hid and held a lot of things. A hot fluid dark, a summer tide pool dark, a wild breathless dark.

She carried the same intensity about her, like heat waves rising from her skin, even though she was just standing in the doorway and not currently in the middle of saving Crier's life.

Still: Was there a redness in her cheeks, beneath the brown of her skin, beneath the freckles? Or was that a trick of the morning sun, which had risen like a gasp, like the burst of saltpeter bombs exploding in the night sky, color and fire and light? Crier now felt something burst open inside herself, too. 'Did you see something in me?'

"If there exists a type of human capable of dismantling our world, it is the dancer."

Which was worse, vulnerability or loneliness? The danger of friendship or the safety of total isolation?

"Ayla. It is a gift. It is a memory. And that's one they can't take from you." Ayla felt the strange urge to laugh. A memory was nothing like a gift.

Crier's War quotes

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