by Elise Kova
“The tenth month, Lord Pak, the Dark-wielder.” Cvareh laughed into the open air. “That would suit you.”
“What month are you?” Arianna hardly believed in legends having any bearing on her day-to-day life.
“Eleven. Lord Agendi, the Lucky.” Cvareh nodded his head forward. “And tonight, his temple is where I am taking you.”
“A temple sounds like serious business.” She’d had enough Dragon customs today for a lifetime.
“I will be surprised if anyone is even there.” Cvareh soothed her concerns. “The supreme gods—those who are house Patrons—and elder gods To, Veh, Soh, and Bek, have oft-frequented temples. But Lord Agendi is too far down the pantheon and too far out of the way for anyone to make the journey regularly.”
She certainly wouldn’t have called the trip convenient. But Arianna was in a good mood. Her body still felt afire from the fight, her imbibing, and their lovemaking. The night air was crisp on her mostly naked form, charging her skin with a pleasant icy sensation.
Cvareh tugged on the boco’s reigns, leading it to a wide landing platform connected via a stone walk to a small temple with a pointed roof and lined with columns at the opposite end. He dismounted, reaching a hand to her. Arianna ignored it, helping herself off the boco. Some things were never going to change, no matter what came to pass between them.
“It’ll start soon.” Cvareh looked up at the sky. “We’ll only be waiting a short while.”
“For what?” she asked.
“You’ll see.” Whatever it was, he was so excited about it that she forgave his cryptic nature and didn’t press. “Come, let’s wait in the shade of the temple.”
Around the pathway, and the entire island, were long stalks with some sort of egg-shaped growth on the end. They swayed in the breeze, leaves whispering quietly between each other. It seemed no other plants would survive on this particular rock.
Cvareh reclined on a wide step at the entrance to the temple. Arianna poured magic into her eyes to cut through the darkness and peer within, but was generally disappointed in what she saw. There was a statue of a Dragon man holding a box of silver, a crown of flowers atop his head. Coins and other offerings were piled into his little treasure chest, but not much else adorned the space.
Satisfied, Arianna sat next to Cvareh.
“Might I ask you something?”
“You just did,” Arianna pointed out, as though he were a child making such an error for the first time in his life.
“Will you answer it if I ask?” he rephrased.
“That depends entirely on the question. Maybe I will, maybe I’ll rip off your tongue.” She wasn’t used to her threats earning laughter. She wasn’t used to being called out when her words were bark with only a tiny possibility of bite.
“Very well, I shall take my chances.” Cvareh paused, sobering once more. “The woman you loved…”
Arianna stiffened and Cvareh hesitated. She wondered if he was waiting to see if she lashed out for him even mentioning Eva. She wondered why she hadn’t yet.
“Eva.”
“Eva,” Cvareh proceeded delicately. “You and she… you two…”
Arianna sighed heavily. She didn’t want to talk about Eva. But somehow, she felt as if she owed it to the man sitting next to her. The man in whose pleasures she’d delighted in for hours had perhaps earned that much truth. If she was going to talk about Eva, she was only going to do it once. She would tell him everything he wanted to know.
She pulled off the splint, releasing her illusion. The island pulsed with the quiet sort of vibration that all of Nova had. But, like Cvareh had suspected, she didn’t sense the presence of another magical being anywhere.
Seeing her skin exposed in the night was instant discomfort. It was her flesh, not the illusion. But it was also flesh Cvareh had seen, that his mouth had worshipped.
“She kissed me, for the first time, here.” Arianna held out her wrist. Upon it was inscribed: 20.9.1078. So much had happened in a mere three years. “She was vivacious, full of life and challenge and heart. She loved like a dream and she fought like a sea monster.”
“What happened to her?”
“I killed her.” Arianna stared out into the vast sky as if the truths she’d been searching for would be there written in the stars. Stars she never could have seen if she’d never met Cvareh. More likely, the truth would be found in the man sitting next to her. Arianna stared down at the hands she’d recently acquired.
“Arianna, I don’t think you should blame—”
“I slit her throat, Cvareh.” It wasn’t some misplaced blame. It was fact. “We met in the last rebellion. She worked with me on the Philosopher’s Box. A gifted Alchemist and one of Loom’s experts on Chimera research. She was the best of all worlds and somehow loved me.”
Ari leaned back onto her elbows, tipping her head back and drinking in the darkness like sharp liquor. It would fuel her words and make her brave. It already had for years, if Cvareh’s gods were to be believed. “She favored Sophie at first. But we were far more well-matched in mind...and in heart.”
“Do all Fenthri favor their same sex?” Cvareh asked with as much delicacy as he could muster.
Arianna laughed as a Dragon would, tipping her head back and pouring forth her amusement without reservation. “We prefer what we prefer.”
“But loving one you cannot have a child with is futile. You can’t continue the family…”
His words trailed off as he saw the look she gave him. She wanted him to figure it out. She would wait as long as he needed, but she would judge him past a certain point if he couldn’t come to the right conclusion.
“… and that’s not a concern of the Fenthri.”
Arianna tapped the stone next to her like it was a bell. “Ding-ding.” Her sarcasm was too weak to stand against the weight of their conversation. “The Dragons, this notion of family… For over a thousand years we would head to the grounds of Ter.0 and induce fertility, breed as we needed, the best of the best, raise the children in the guilds.”
“It sounds cold and sterile.”
“Families sound limiting and suffocating.”
He huffed in a tired amusement. “Fair enough.” Cvareh looked back to the stars, as though they would give him strength to ask the question he’d been awkwardly shifting around. “Why did you kill her?”
Arianna wished she hadn’t resolved to tell him everything. She pressed her mouth into a thin line, as if she could smother the words, extinguish them like a flame. But the truth remained.
“I didn’t just kill her. I killed them all.” She let out the bleakness of her heart’s truth. “Your people should thank me. I was the hand that crushed the last rebellion against your King.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When we discovered we’d been betrayed, that the Dragon we’d trusted was not a double-agent for us, was not an ally against the King, but a man under the King’s own thumb, we destroyed it all—or tried to.” The smell of burning flesh and reagents gone sour singed her nose anew. Her hands were caked in invisible blood that would never wash away, black and red alike. “I was the only one who could do it. The rest of them had been poisoned. My stomach saved me.”
“So the schematics I carried...” Realization was beginning to take over.
“Shouldn’t have even existed. They were stolen at the onset of our betrayal.”
“Why didn’t you kill yourself?” It was a fair question, based on what he knew of her, what she was.
“You know how hard it is for a Dragon to kill themselves. It’s no easier for me.”
“You really are, then?”
“I’m a Perfect Chimera.” Arianna finally brought her eyes to meet his. She wanted him to feel the weight of the truth. She wanted him to cower in fear or see her purely as a tool. But he did something far more dangerous:
He didn’t change the way he looked at her at all. “More important than overcoming the logistical challenge of killing myself, Eva and Master Oliver asked me to live. She died knowing all our research, everything we’d worked for, was being destroyed. I don’t expect you to understand, but for a Fenthri, there is nothing more horrible.”
“You fled, detaching from everything, and became the White Wraith. You worked against Dragons,” he finished, painfully simple.
“In the hopes that I would someday find my way to the man who betrayed all I loved. In the hopes that it would bring me vengeance.” She felt a sudden wave of guilt. He now knew everything, and she had never even told Florence the beginning of her story. When she returned to Loom, the girl would know the truth, Arianna vowed. The girl—no, woman—had more than earned it.
“The boon?”
“Was an opportunity to find that man.”
“Why haven’t you demanded it of me yet?” Cvareh’s confusion mirrored her own.
She stared at her hands. The moment she’d inhaled their scent—a scent etched on her memory by pure hatred—she knew she was close to finding the Dragon who’d called himself Rafansi. But she had yet to speak on it. She had yet to utter those words, “Take me to the man whose hands these are.” If she did, she would kill Rafansi on sight. Only she now knew he was a Xin, and an ally of Cvareh. It tore at her gut on so many levels.
“I can only ask once,” she whispered. “I want to make sure what I am asking for is what I really want.”
“Boon or not.” Cvareh sat and took her hand. “I will give you whatever you ask, Arianna.”
“Don’t offer me that.”
“Why?”
“Because you know who I am.”
“And that is precisely why I offered.”
For the first time, she was at a loss for words. She didn’t know if she should capitalize on all the closeness they’d shared over the day to have him bring her to the Dragon who had betrayed all she’d loved. She didn’t know if she should cross the remaining distance between them and kiss him. Rusted rivets, the mechanisms that spun her world whirred and Arianna was stuck in place, no longer grasping their logic.
“His name was Rafansi,” she whispered, bracing herself.
Cvareh blinked, and burst out into laughter. Arianna withdrew her hand. She didn’t know what reaction she expected, but his amusement had not been it.
“That couldn’t possibly be his name.”
“I would never forget it,” she insisted.
“Then he lied.”
It was certainly a possibility, one she hadn’t ever ruled out. Yet to affirm that she didn’t even know the man’s name yielded a certain sort of disappointment. “How can you be sure?”
“Because no Dragon parents would ever name their child that willingly.”
“Why?”
“That was the name of Lord Rok’s failed first—and only—attempt at the creation of life. The lore says Rafansi was a deformed and useless wretch of a creature who only earned his existence from Lord Rok’s pity.” Cvareh shook his head. “A life earned by pity would be the ultimate disgrace… What an awful name to even be called in secret.”
“But fitting,” she snapped in annoyance, at both Cvareh’s sympathy for the traitor and the fact it left her without a name for the man.
“Perhaps we could find him another way?” he offered, frustratingly helpful. “Do you know his House? Was he marked? What color—”
“He was Xin.”
Cvareh straightened instantly, putting distance between them.
She read him like an open book. She felt the pulse in his magic, withdrawing on instinct, reminding him that this was not a woman he should be involved with. He fought against the pull of his upbringing, though, and took her hands with renewed passion. He held her fingers tightly, his eyes pleading as if she could explain why he was doing what he was. As if she had a neat solution for everything that drove them apart.
“Be careful what you offer me, Cvareh,” she cautioned grimly, with all the sorrow of an ugly reality. “Your house looks to me to be the herald of victory. But I may well still decide to watch it burn.”
“No,” he whispered. “I won’t let you have a reason to.”
Her instant rage at him arguing with her about what she would and wouldn’t do was stilled.
“We will find this man, and then I will see you kill him.”
“You would let me kill a Xin?” She was rightly skeptical.
“A Xin who takes the name Rafansi and works for the Dragon King against our interests should not be alive.” Cvareh smiled the smallest smile of hopeful—foolishly hopeful—encouragement. “I may not be as good of a fighter as you, Arianna. But I have other uses. I can be quite good at finding information. People just say things around me they shouldn’t, like they forget I’m there entirely. I will help you find this man, and I will give him to you for judgment of his crimes.”
Her brows furrowed and her lips parted just enough to let out her speechless shock. The hands he held so fiercely were the very thing that would allow him to fulfill his promise. He was ready to give her everything she’d wanted since her world ended.
But if he did, would she be asking him to sacrifice one of his own ideals? Would their relationship survive her asking him to deliver one of his own for slaughter? She was afraid it wouldn’t, despite his earnest insistence. Arianna stared into Cvareh’s eyes, shining bright and gold against the darkness, and saw something that might just be worth more to her than her vengeance.
Those eyes were oblivious to her struggle, and easily swung away, looking to the field. “It’s starting.”
“What is?” Arianna looked as well, but her answer didn’t come from Cvareh.
As the moon reached its apex, the whispering reeds they’d walked through to the temple slowly straightened. Their egg-shaped ends peeled away, unfurling long pedals of red, lined in gold, from within. Their wavy edges tapered to points that curved opposite their center.
A fine mist, like the afterglow of neon, clouded the air above them as the plants’ superfine pollen was released into the wind. The rock before her was awash in light and magic. It soothed her weariness from the day; it gave her strength. She felt as though she could live forever if she laid among them.
Arianna stood.
“What are they?” she breathed, stepping toward the blooms. There was no mistaking it.
“The flowers of Agendi.” Cvareh was at her side, but he may as well have been back on Ruana. Arianna’s mind was moving a thousand veca a second, whirring with new possibilities. “They’re particular about where they can grow… So they’re found only here and on Lysip. They’re said to bring good luck. Do you like them?”
Arianna stepped into the cosmos that floated before her, a dance of magic turned into a fog of the whole spectrum of light. They were unmistakable. Their power even more potent than the last time she’d seen them.
“Like isn’t the right word…” Arianna trailed off into her own thoughts.
He would take her mannerisms as awe or wonder, and Arianna would let him. It was a safer assumption than the truth that now confronted her. Did she ask Cvareh for the heart of the man who had betrayed her past, at the risk of it damaging all they were, and especially when she now knew he could get her the resources she needed for the box?
Or did she give in once more and let herself dream, and perhaps even look to the possibilities of the future?
35. Florence
The door to her room slammed open, waking Florence with a start. Powell stood in the frame, his dust-colored hair seeming to fray at the ends with stress. Panting, a mess, he crossed to the bed in a long stride.
“Florence, we have to leave.”
“What? Why?” She shied away from his grip, uneasy in the man’s presence. She’d avoided and outright ignored him for two
days since he had shown her the Dragon harvesting rooms. She didn’t know how she could feel about someone who seemed to revere Dragons for saving the world and endorse treating them worse than livestock in the same breath.
“There aren’t many trains left and they’re filling.” He reached for her upper arm, yanking her from the bed.
“Trains?” Florence ripped herself from his grip. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you must be seriously confused.” She stood her ground, pointing at the still gaping door from where he had entered. “Now leave my room.”
“They’re going to blow the guild.”
“What?” It was as if she had half the powders needed for a canister and he was expecting her to produce a complete shot.
“We have to get out before they do. There’s not much time.” Powell reached for her again and she sidestepped away. He cursed loudly. “Pitchforks and sickles, woman, if you want to stay, then fine. I didn’t have to come for you anyway.”
He started for the door. Florence stared at his back in a daze. Even if she didn’t fully understand what was happening, she knew desperation when she saw it. She knew what fight or flight looked like in someone who was struggling to fall into their training rather than chaos and cowardice.
Whatever Powell thought was going on—right or not—he really believed they were all in danger.
“Powell, wait.” Florence grabbed the back of his shirt. She regarded him with a glare, hoping to make it clear that she was still very aware of the uneasy terms they were on despite their situation. “When you say they’re going to blow the Guild…” she tried to speak slowly and evenly, coaxing him into some sense of calm that could bring order from what seemed to be a tempest of thoughts raging in his mind.
