by Elise Kova
“Yveun no doubt plans to use the guise of the Court to cut down our forces, and I have every expectation he will encourage dozens of duels against my person.”
“Myself and countless others will step forward for you.”
Petra snorted. “It is just us, Cain. You have no need to prove your loyalty to me and I know better than to demand it of you with words. I am a far more competent fighter than you.”
He gave no rebuke.
“The more duels I can take, the better for all of Xin. It will send a message to Yveun that my claws are the ones he need fear above all others, while saving most from death in the pit.” Petra rolled her shoulders, already beginning to mentally prepare for the beating she knew she would endure in the coming month. She tried to keep herself in shape, but general upkeep and preparation for a Court were two wildly different things. “I need you to gather the most competent fighters and train them well.”
“Understood.”
“And Cvareh,” Petra added. “At night, as you have done before.”
“No one will see him fighting.”
Petra didn’t want her brother to be challenged. The longer he was seen as a useless Ryu, the longer she could move him with relative ease, free of suspicion. But it was foolish to think he would escape public challenge during a Court on Ruana. And if a challenge came to pass, Petra wouldn’t step forward for him. As much as she wanted to keep all skills he possessed both in and outside the arena secrets, she needed his position to remain unquestioned.
“I could step forward,” Cain spoke, as if reading her mind.
“I will think on it,” Petra relented. She didn’t have a good answer yet, but had some time to figure one out. “For now, know that when there is a call, I want House Xin to speak first against Rok, always. I don’t care how insignificant the grounds for a duel are; it’s a Court. Most things pass and Yveun knows it.”
“Understood.” Cain stopped walking as she did, pausing at one of the intersections.
“Send Cvareh to me,” Petra finished dismissively. “I will need to speak with him about all this, and we will need to start assembling the grand pit for the Court.”
“I will tell him to seek you out first thing when he returns.”
Petra stopped. “When he returns? Where has he gone?”
“He left early in the dawn. With our… guest.” Mere mention of the Chimera still made Cain uneasy, despite Petra’s endorsement of Cvareh’s decision to saddle them together.
Cvareh went off with the Chimera. Petra swirled it in her mind like wine in a glass. “Where did they go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then it would be rather hard to find him.” She shrugged nonchalantly. “The moment he returns, tell him his Oji commands his presence.”
“Gladly.” Cain gave a low bow, but Petra paid it no heed. She was already turning over the notion in her mind. It seemed her brother was mending some of the tensions born of her first meeting with the Chimera. Perhaps something good could come of the day yet.
18. Arianna
She was more stable on the boco the second time around. It also helped that she had a lot more faith in the man controlling the mount. Her hands rested on Cvareh’s hips, her legs tensed alongside his for stability, flush against the taut muscles in his thighs. They moved far more effortlessly together than she and Cain did, a sort of innate understanding between them that she didn’t expect to be there but knew better than to question by now.
The two fingers on her left hand had been tied together. It was a bit of a trick to get a grasp on illusions, quite literally. It was a new sort of magic, slithering and amorphous—like trying to form and harden steam into diamonds. The magic was all in the hands, and she found that so long as she held her fingers in a particular position, she could maintain the illusion. Eventually, the bones inside would snap from the strain. Based on what she knew of magic, Arianna suspected that if she forced it long enough, the fingers would begin to rot and die. It would be a fine line to walk, but she’d tight-roped thinner.
So she’d trained the fourth and fifth fingers on her left hand—her less dominant hand—to hold the illusion. Then, once she had it, she fashioned a simple splint to hold them in shape. It was freedom born of binding, and Arianna quickly forgot about the lack of mobility in part of one hand altogether.
Ruana spilled out beneath her as the boco gained height like a bright splotch of paint atop the canvas of clouds below. Arianna tried to use the height of their trajectory to her advantage. There was a possibility that the glider was still in that alcove, unmoved. She suspected a few locations, but it was hard to make out the exact path she and Cain had taken between the mountain peaks when they’d gone to the manor.
“Where does the water come from?” Arianna leaned forward, her chin resting on Cvareh’s shoulder to speak over the wind.
“The water?”
“I assumed ‘water’ to mean the same thing on Nova as it does on Loom.” She spoke the word for water in Royuk for emphasis.
“I know what water is.” Cvareh pushed back into her in exasperation, their bodies flush for a brief moment. “We drink from the streams and rivers.”
It was her turn to nudge him. “I meant, where does it come from to feed the rivers?”
Cvareh was quiet for a long moment. She knew what he was going to say before he said it. “I don’t know.”
“No one has investigated?” Arianna pointed to a tall waterfall that poured from the side of a far cliff. “If we went in there, where does the water come from?”
“A spring, I presume.”
“And what feeds the spring? How does it not run out of water?” She was suddenly reminded of speaking to young initiates in the guild as they struggled to grasp the most obvious of concepts, teaching them to learn through questioning.
“I don’t know.”
“How do you not know?” she asked incredulously.
“I’ve never looked.” He glanced over his shoulder, seemingly equally confused by her line of inquiry.
“Hasn’t anyone?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why? Why not? What if it runs out? What if you are a week away from not having any water and you don’t know it? There could be a large glacier that has been melting for hundreds of years, trapped in some far mountain valley, and it’s soon to be exhausted.”
“I doubt it.” Cvareh shrugged. “Lady Lei gives the Dragons all we need to survive. She wouldn’t have our water run thin before the end of days.”
“Lady Lei, the Caregiver.”
He looked honestly surprised she knew the Goddess’s title, meriting a turn of his head.
“I’ve been talking with Cain.”
“So it would seem.” Cvareh tugged on the boco’s reins, pulling left. The creature banked away from the mountains and toward the sloping hills that flattened across the island. “Hearing him start to speak of you was a surprise.”
“I had to speak to someone or I was liable to go mad.” Arianna bit her tongue, holding in the rest of her thought: she was driven to speak to Cain because Cvareh had not come to visit her once. She would not sound so desperate.
“The surprise came more from knowing he was speaking to you in return. He holds no love for Fenthri and even less for Chimera. And, from what I hear—and saw first-hand with a dagger at my forehead—you have done little to endear yourself to him.”
“And why would I?” She snorted. “I gathered we weren’t going to be friends from the first time he laid eyes on me.”
“You seem friendly now.”
“Apparently the word ‘friends’ does have a different meaning on Nova and Loom.” She would describe her and Cain more like begrudging allies in their current state.
Cvareh chuckled. “Do you prefer his company, or mine?”
“I haven’t had much of a choice in the matter,” she r
eminded him.
“Even still?”
“Yours.” There was little thought in the answer, even despite the confusion and annoyance Cvareh had caused her across the past few months.
It sparked a pulse of delight in his magic that set the palms of Arianna’s hands to tingling.
Honestly, talking with Cain for the past few weeks had been nearly as thrilling as cutting off her own hands the night before. Arianna flexed her fingers, instantly regretting the analogy. They still felt strange, like phantom limbs given substance.
She had yet to confront Cvareh about their origin, but she let the matter stew. There was time yet. Now that she had freedom on Nova, she had more time for everything. Not much—Florence still needed her—but time enough. The fact that he produced hands that matched her ears connected a few dots for her all on her own, however. She was closing in the lines that explained how he’d even known of, not to mention acquired, her schematics. It meant the man who took them was somewhere close.
Arianna bared her teeth at the notion. The Dragon known as Rafansi was so very near, and she would find him.
Cvareh hissed loudly, jolting forward. “You have claws now.”
She retracted them, not even realizing she’d unsheathed them at the mere thought of the man who had betrayed her and the last resistance. “That comes with the territory of having Dragon hands.”
“Yes, well…” She saw Cvareh’s profile as he considered her hand on his waist. There was a note of recognition, a familiarity in the way he regarded it. He continued before the questions about its origins could spill from her lips. “I suppose it also comes with the territory to know how to pull your claws. You will attract unwanted conflict if you go waving them about, or digging them into people’s sides.”
“Are you going to duel me, Cvareh’Ryu?” she teased. Cain had told her in various brisk snippets—as most of their conversations went—about the importance of Dragon duels.
Cvareh laughed. It was loud and seemed to echo off the hills below and swirl like raw color in the wind. It was a different sound than he’d had down on Loom. Arianna regarded the man thoughtfully. She certainly hadn’t acted the same on Nova as she would on Loom. She was out of her element and outnumbered—an unwanted person in a foreign land. It would make sense he would’ve acted strangely on Loom in the same circumstances.
Which begot a new curiosity. What was he like here on Nova? What was the real Cvareh, and which did she favor?
“Cvareh’Ryu?” His mirth was uncontrollable.
“That is your name.”
“It is, but twenty gods, I never thought I’d hear you address me with any formality.”
“I was hardly being formal.” She’d used the title for ironic emphasis.
“That much was obvious. Still, a strange treat to hear it from your lips.” A smile was in his words, one Arianna didn’t quite understand.
“Where are we headed?” She changed the topic as the landscape beneath her began to give way to smaller towns that only grew against the far horizon.
“That down there is Abilla. They’re known for their millineries and cobblers. Some of Nova’s finest textiles come from their looms.”
The rooftops were shingled with wood, the houses made in all shapes and sizes. Arianna saw large windows and small. Bridges stretched between some; over others, ivy crept across to create a leafy walkway. The streets were cobblestone, or gravel, or packed dirt, winding like gnarled roots around the homes.
They were each coated in plaster and washed in some kind of ink, or paint, or clay. Yellow houses stood against purple ones, trimmed in vermilion or edged in ruby. The gears of her mind created smoke that clouded her head as they tried to find a pattern or logic in it. But if there was some rhyme or reason, it eluded her. It looked as though a child had spilled an architect’s models across a mossy surface, then proceeded to draw tall, thin, trees between the shorter balls of foliage connected by spindly trunks.
“See, look there.” Cvareh pointed to a river on the edge of town that had flowed down mightily from the mountains they’d started in. “They’re washing the inks from the fabrics.”
“I know what it looks like to wash ink from cloth.” Arianna rolled her eyes dramatically.
“Really?” He sounded genuinely surprised.
“There’s a science, you know, to getting the right color and getting it to stick to the fibers. I learned it during my basic schooling on Ter.0.”
Cvareh was silent an acceptably somber second following the mention of the demolished Territory on Loom. “I wouldn’t have thought you studied something like dyeing fabric.”
“Why? There’s a practical methodology to it. Furthermore, sometimes you need different colors to mark things like ships or cautionary areas.”
“Practical methodology,” he repeated thoughtfully. “It would be something like that.”
“Let me guess: you do it for these impractical, gaudy rags you call clothes.” Arianna picked at his love of fashion and his clothing in the same breath.
He snorted. “For once, I can’t disagree with you. These are gaudy rags, nearly a full year old.”
She was utterly lost as to why his clothing would have some sort of expiry.
“That’s why we’re headed to Napole!” Cvareh turned forward with elation. The wind swelled beneath them, carrying them higher.
If Arianna hadn’t understood the logic behind the builder’s plans of Abilla, she was utterly hopeless when they arrived in Napole. The hills continued to slope downward to the island’s eventual end, and houses piled atop them precariously in such a way that reminded her of the castle and its ignorance to all form of logic. The structures leaned against each other for support like jolly drunkards, spires drew long shadows across rooftops, and archways reached down to bustling roadways.
As they descended, Dragons paused, shading their eyes with long fingers to peer at the boco headed earthward. A few raised their hands and even more dipped into low bows, the motion barely visible from their height. Arianna glanced at her forearm, worried her illusion had somehow slipped and garnered the attention. It hadn’t.
“Are you that well known?” she asked when Cvareh took note of a genuflecting group.
“I am the Xin’Ryu,” he said it as though it should have been obvious. “The Isle of Ruana is Xin’s. Everyone here is a Xin.”
That was startling. Ariana had been struggling to grasp the notion of family since it had first been introduced on Loom by the Dragons. Two parents rearing a child seemed vastly more ineffective than the communal arrangement of Ter.0 that she had been brought up in. But the size of a single Dragon family now seemed impossibly excessive. How did they even keep track of it all?
“There are red and green Dragons here,” she observed, the colors blurring together as their shadow cut across rooftops.
“There are. A Dragon’s skin color is determined by the island they’re born on, their native House.”
“So two red Dragons can give birth to a blue Dragon?”
“Technically, though I have no idea why two of House Rok would ever move to Ruana.”
“That makes… absolutely no sense.” Arianna’s head hurt already from the lack of reason surrounding her. If she were an Alchemist and possessed more than rudimentary knowledge of biology, she’d likely be having a conniption.
“Why?”
“Because children take after their parents. It’s why strong, healthy Fenthri were selected to breed on Ter.0, before the Dragon King mucked up the system and forced this ridiculous notion of families.”
She thought he stiffened at the mere mention of “breeding,” but perhaps it was her imagination reading overmuch into the shift of his body as he navigated the boco onto a wide platform. Other birds milled about, pecking from troughs and cawing at each other in a way only they could understand.
Here, too
, there were silent keepers who materialized from the shadows. They were an omnipresent reminder of the hierarchy Nova steeped itself in—a system that inspired a discomfort in Arianna she struggled to shake. They brought trays laden with fruit and heavy glasses filled to the brim with a liquid the color of Fenthri blood. Cvareh took a glass and refused the fruit. Arianna followed suit, operating under the assumption that Dragons would never willingly drink the blood of a Fenthri.
“Cvareh’Ryu!” A woman strode out from an overhang that was bursting with flowering vines. The sunlight didn’t hesitate to expose the bareness of her chest. Everything was too bright on Nova. “It has been some time.”
“I’ve been at prayer to our Lord in the mountains,” Cvareh kept his lie.
“So the rumors say.” The lie was clearly well known and as flimsy as it sounded, judging by her tone.
Arianna averted her eyes from the exchange, bringing the glass to her lips. She had yet to fully acclimate to the Dragons’ way of dressing—or lack thereof. Even as Arianna had donned the fashion, she felt consolation that the illusion would be placed over top her bare skin. Every breeze was a chilling reminder for all the fabric she didn’t wear. But donning the guise of a Dragon made her feel oddly less exposed.
She sniffed the contents of the goblet. It had a strange aroma, like grape and sulfur, heady, with a sharp edge unlike anything she’d encountered before. Arianna took a sip, and was overcome by an instantaneous coughing fit the moment it burned her throat.
“Dear me, is your companion all right?” the woman asked.
“Fine,” Arianna replied for herself before Cvareh could speak. Royuk was heavy on her tongue, as Arianna was more accustomed to listening than speaking, but her mouth still formed the sounds with the confidence of years of tutelage.
Her accent must have been passable, as the woman didn’t comment. “Is the wine not to your liking?”
“It’s fine.” Arianna had no idea what else to say. She glanced at Cvareh, hoping he’d explain somehow what “wine” was and how she was supposed to respond.
The bastard broke out laughing. “Forgive her.” He took a step closer to Arianna. An arm slipped around her waist, long fingers palming the bare skin of her side. “This is Ari Xin’Anh, and recently, Bek.”
