The Cogsmith's Daughter (Desertera #1)
Kate M. Colby
To my parents,
Thank you for trusting my ambition
and never saying that writing isn’t a “real” career.
CHAPTER ONE
Aya Cogsmith awoke, as she did every morning, to the croaking of the mechanical frog next to her bed. Reaching across the pile of blankets and pillows, Aya grabbed the frog between her thumb and forefinger. If she didn’t pick him up first thing, he would hop all the way across her little room in five leaps and run into the wall. Aya didn’t have the money to fix him again.
Riibbuuuutt.
She rubbed the frog’s smooth metal belly with her free hand, keeping her fingers clear of his still-jerking legs. She peered through his side to examine his center cog, ensuring its nine golden teeth were connecting properly with the other gears. She listened carefully to his croaks, counting the seconds between them and trying to gauge the volume.
“You’re sounding older every morning, Charlie.”
Aya turned the winder on his back, and Charlie’s legs slowed their jerking. He let out one final croak before going still. Aya placed Charlie back on the floor next to her bedding and watched him as if he might move again. She remembered when she was a little girl—how she would leap out of bed and hop along the floor behind Charlie. When she caught up to him, she would grab him with both hands and frog-leap back into her bed. There, she’d either let Charlie hop along the blanket until he got caught in the pillows, or she’d place him under the covers, holding them high over him like a tent, and let him hop around in his “froggy cave.”
After a few minutes of this, Aya’s father would peek his head in through the door and tell her to let poor Charlie get some rest. She would sigh until her father mentioned whatever warm breakfast he had prepared. At which point, she would unwind Charlie and place him back on the floor next to her bed.
Aya yawned and patted Charlie’s head with her forefinger. “At least I’ve still got you, buddy.”
Charlie didn’t move, which she took as a sign that he wouldn’t leave.
Aya stretched her arms out wide, wincing slightly at a twinge in her lower back. Even after ten years, her body refused to adjust to sleeping on the floor with only a few pillows for cushioning. She got up and took a few steps to her window, relishing the feel of the warm morning wind on her face. The window was about six inches wide, installed when the previous owner put his fist through the wall during a fight. Aya had tried to give it some dignity by covering it with scraps of red fabric from her favorite skirt. Some carpenter or other had ripped the skirt one night at work, and she couldn’t bear to let the silk go to waste. If the skirt hadn’t brought her any dignity in its life, maybe it could bring her misshapen window sophistication in its death.
The streets of Sternville were relatively empty, meaning that the men were still at work pumping the wells, and the women were either tending their children or sleeping off their nights’ works. Aya craned her neck to look over to the palace. The sun hovered just above the starboard railing, meaning that it was not yet lunchtime. She looked the other way toward Kalinda and Jasmine’s hovel. She couldn’t see anyone moving behind the windows, and there was no smoke from a fire.
Good. I won’t be the last one to the wells.
Aya took the few steps to the other side of her room and opened her old steamer trunk. The brass buckles and hinges were still cold from the night air, and they groaned as she lifted the lid. She pulled out a plain brown dress with matching corset, a green cloak, and her tough leather shoes. If she intended to walk all the way to Bowtown for water, her slippers wouldn’t do.
Once dressed, Aya went into the hovel’s small common room. Dellwyn was not there, but Aya heard faint snores coming from Dellwyn’s room. She crossed the common room quietly, lifting her cloak so it wouldn’t rustle on the dirt floor. The common room held nothing more than a small wooden table, two chairs, a storage trunk, a basket of dried cacti husk and tumbleweed for kindling, and an iron wood-burning stove. Aya knew they were lucky to have the stove, as most of the girls and families in Sternville only had fire pits—one of the many perks of Dellwyn gathering noble admirers at work.
Atop the table sat a five-gallon glass jug and a black urn. Aya opened the urn’s lid and reached inside, wiggling her fingers around in the ashes until they found their target: two gold coins. Aya pulled out the coins and dusted the ashes from her fingers back into the urn. While treating her father’s remains like a safe made her skin crawl, his urn was the only place Madam Huxley wouldn’t search when the madam decided that Dellwyn and Aya were “skimming” from their earnings.
Aya tucked the coins between her corset and the side of her left breast. Carrying anything in her pockets was too dangerous. When she’d first come to Sternville, she had learned that lesson the hard way, losing over a dozen gold coins to grubby-handed children before she reached the Rudder. She grabbed the glass jug and placed the leather strap tied to its handle over her shoulder. It wasn’t much, but the strap helped distribute the weight across her body.
Aya opened the hovel’s door and was instantly greeted with a gust of hot air and dust. She pulled the hood of her cloak over her hair and face, tucking in her brown curls and trying to shade her already tanned skin from the sun’s unforgiving rays. She couldn’t afford to get dirty, as her next bathing allowance from Madam Huxley wasn’t for at least two more weeks. She knew the long walk to the other side of the palace would make her sweat, but she could wipe most of that off with her cloak, and Dellwyn still had some wildflower extract from Lord Derringher that she would let Aya borrow to freshen herself up.