13. Cvareh

Florence hadn’t said a word for two hours. She’d argued with Arianna for a short five minutes, then slumped against the wall on her stool, staring at nothing. Cvareh might only have known the girl for about four days, but it had been a long four days mostly spent in close quarters. He could read her, if only just.

Cvareh had studied the people of Loom all his life. He’d learned of the Five Guilds and the specialization of each of them. He’d studied Fenish, the language of the people. But being on the ground itself was a surreal experience. It was like he knew the notes, but he couldn’t hear the melody that was being sung. He could say “Rivet,” but he didn’t understand what that really meant—and every look from Arianna over the past few days had confirmed as much. But nothing made it clearer than Florence’s expression.

The girl was in distress. A line marred the space between her brows, her young face twisted in a scowl. Cvareh understood the plan Arianna had laid out—more or less. He knew of Ter.4.2, and the Underground seemed like a logical enough choice to move quickly without being discovered. He understood the word “prison” in the sense that his mind could come up with a definition, the equivalent word in Royuk, but somehow he wasn’t speaking their language yet. The gravity he felt at the idea of a prison break was a weightless cloud compared to the lead in Arianna’s eyes and, so plainly, Florence’s heart.

He wanted to help. Petra had made him smile thousands of times when he was sad. His sister knew exactly what to say to encourage him. But he only had four days of knowledge to draw from when it came to the young Fenthri.

“Florence?” Arianna gave him a cautionary look the moment her pupil’s name crossed his lips. The girl was oblivious to her teacher’s protective urges, but her eyes came into focus slowly at the sound of her name. Cvareh put his pride aside and sought an absolution from his ignorance from someone who was twenty years his junior. “Can you explain to me how your revolver works?”

“What?”

“Your revolver. I watched you oil it on the train, and then you used it in the scuffle. I know you’re not a Chimera and don’t have magic… So how did you manage a shot like that?”

“You want to know about guns?” she asked timidly.

“If you’ll teach me.” Cvareh prayed he hadn’t misread the hopeful note in her voice incorrectly.

Florence was moving again. Spurred back to life, she rummaged through her bag on the floor, pulling from it a small red tin that Cvareh recognized instantly as her gun care set, another medium-sized box where she kept her powders, and her weapon. She moved off her stool to sit in front of him on the floor.

Cvareh lusted after the empty stool that would insulate him from the grime and dirt, but he made no motion. His clothes were ugly and dirty, and the stool was really no cleaner. It certainly wouldn’t be comfortable. Plus, Florence had already set up shop in front of him, and this was for her.

“Well, it’s not that complicated.” She put the revolver between them, pointing to different parts. “You have the hammer, the cylinder, the trigger, the barrel and the muzzle. The hammer cocks back, engaging the trigger when you’re ready to fire. It strikes against a canister in the chamber and that exchange of force causes a chemical or magical reaction—a small explosion.” Her voice lifted on the last word. “That explosion is sent through the barrel and out the muzzle, propelling a bullet. Or whatever else is in the canister.”

She held up a small chunk of metal. It was pointed on one end and flat on the other. Cvareh accepted it from her to inspect, pleased the action delighted her.

“The bullet sits on this end of the canister, near the primer—that’s what the hammer hits.” She produced a long hollow tube that, sure enough, the bullet could be fitted into. “What I fill the canister with, and how much, determines the type of shot.”

“But how does magic come into play?” Cvareh passed back the canister and bullet to Florence and picked up the gun. The hammer and muzzle were gold. Poured into the side of the barrel were golden shapes he vaguely recognized, but couldn’t place. He peered down the barrel and noted the inside was gold as well.

Florence’s fingers wrapped around the barrel, pulling it away from him. “Never point the muzzle of a gun at something unless you’re ready to shoot it.”

“But it’s not loaded.” Cvareh didn’t appreciate being treated like a child.

“It isn’t now. But it could’ve been. It’s just good practice. Every young Revolver learns that.”

“Ah, Flor, if he wants to point guns at his face, why don’t we let him? It’s not like the shot would kill him. Maybe he should learn the hard way and have to sit around a few weeks like a blob while he grows back part of his brain,” Arianna quipped unhelpfully.

“If he wants to learn, he should learn the right way.” Florence turned to look at her master and Cvareh followed the girl’s stare.

He opened his mouth to retort with equal sarcasm, but the look on Arianna’s face stilled him. She looked past Florence, who continued on about something, and stared straight at him. Her rounded face was relaxed, her lips forming a thin line that he would almost dare call an appreciative smile. Cvareh gave her a small nod, swallowing down the bitterness her verbal jab had filled his mouth with. Arianna shifted her eyes to Florence, and made him question entirely if he’d read the expression wrong.

“In any case,” Florence continued, turning back to him, “the magic lies in the runes. It’s something the Alchemists developed, similar to tempering metal. A Chimera, or Dragon I suppose, charges the metal with magic. Different shapes hold different types of magic.”

She cocked the hammer back, showing him the striking point. Sure enough, there was a rune there that mirrored a similar one etched onto the flat end of the canister. Cvareh turned the canister over once more, staring in wonder. Magic that could be used to manipulate the physical world. For half of his life, for centuries on Nova, it was something that couldn’t be done. Magic existed only in the mind, the realm of the ephemeral. It couldn’t be used to make explosions, lift gliders, turn wheels or do half the other things the Fenthri had been able to devise. For as strong as the Dragons were and had always been, there were things that eluded them—things the Fenthri could do and they could not.

He passed the canister back to Florence and his hand fell to the folio around his waist. That was why he was on Loom. It was that power he sought, to change the natural order and challenge the laws of the world. The power Cvareh hoped could build an army and lead his family to victory.

“But,” Florence continued, “as time goes on the runes can lose their magic, or get worn down.”

“They need to be recharged,” Cvareh reasoned.

“Which is where Arianna comes in.” Florence directed the tiniest of smiles at the gun, rather than her teacher.

Arianna looked weary as she echoed a similar expression, unbeknownst to the girl. “I think I’ll go and work a bit. And figure out what ship is headed for Ter.4.2, and how we’re getting on it.”

Florence didn’t acknowledge Arianna for the first time. She didn’t even turn. The older woman stood, waiting, crumbling under the weight of the silence from her pupil.

Here it is, then. The one thing that could break the White Wraith.

Catching his eyes, Arianna’s face transformed. She shot him a nasty look and stormed out the room. It was a glancing blow, a warning. They both knew the longer they stayed around each other, the more familiar they would become. No matter how hard she tried, he would learn her secrets, at least some.

But that would come in the days leading to the Alchemists’ Guild. For now, Cvareh focused on one task at a time. And there was still unfinished business sitting before him.

“Flor.” He tried out Arianna’s familiar name for the girl. She looked up in surprise, but didn’t scold him for using it. “Why don’t you want to go to Ter.4.2?”

Her fingers ran over her gun kit, as though she couldn’t decide what tool she needed to solve the problem presented to her. When that proved futile, she moved onto her powder box, shifting through the various tins. But Cvareh knew her answers weren’t in there either. He was patient, and waited for her to come to that conclusion on her own.

“I was born a Raven.” Her fingers finally stopped moving when they rested on her cheek. “But I wasn’t any good at it—useless, really…”

“You got a mark,” Cvareh pointed out.

“And I barely passed that test.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have. I had help.”

“Your friends?”

“My friends.” Florence dropped her hand with a heavy sigh. “I wish I could’ve been like Arianna and escaped the mark entirely.”

“Why?” Cvareh didn’t understand. At every opportunity, he donned the symbol of House Xin. It was as much a part of him as his skin color. It signified who he was, where he belonged. No matter how far he went in the world, being Xin would always be etched upon his identity. Who wouldn’t want that?

“Because then I could’ve been truly free.” She sighed wistfully. “People wouldn’t look at me and see a Raven, they’d see me.”

“You mean you could be a Revolver.”

“I could be anything I desired,” she corrected.

Loom had a backwards system before the Dragons. People going wherever they wanted, doing what they wanted. For a society that Cvareh had been always taught favored logic, it didn’t seem based on reason.

“When it came time for the second test, I knew I wouldn’t pass. Half of us wouldn’t. But we knew more then. We knew there were days before the Dragons when people studied as they wished. When you could be more than where you were born and what you were born into. So we escaped.”

“Anyone caught running from the guild can be put to death.” The laws the Dragons put into place suddenly seemed less sensible when he stared in the face of someone perfectly capable who would be lost from the world were they strictly upheld.

“Anyone who fails the first or second guild test is put to death with certainty. If you run, they may just jail you in an effort to persuade you to come back before killing talent… That’s what happened to my friends.”

“But you’re not dead or imprisoned.”

“I’m not.”

“How?”

Florence was silent for a long time. She focused on selecting canisters from the ones she had made, and made one or two new ones. From time to time, she’d look at him from the corner of her eyes, expectant. Cvareh rested the back of his head against the wall and waited. He wouldn’t repeat himself, and didn’t need to. He just needed to be patient enough that she’d be out with it on her own.

“My friends and I escaped through the Underground,” Florence said briskly. “Seven died, three of us made it out. Two were caught in Ter.4.2.”

“How did you—” Cvareh already knew the answer to his question. He knew who got Florence the rest of the way into obscurity: the only woman in the world who seemed to evade all capture, all pursuit.

“She saved me.” Florence smiled, seeing him put it together. “I wouldn’t be alive if Arianna hadn’t smuggled me with her onto that freighter.”

Dots connected, one after the next, forming a time line that spanned across blanks in history. Arianna met Florence, took her to Ter.5. They made their way to Dortam and she set up a name for herself as the White Wraith, enemy of all Dragons. But why? Everything before her meeting Florence was still wrapped in the enigma of chaos.

“Was she living in Ter.4.2?” he ventured.

Florence shook her head. “I don’t really know. And before you ask, I don’t know where she may have came from. I don’t really know much more than you do. She’s a Master Rivet—”

That was news. He hadn’t known she was a master.

“—and she hates Dragons more than anything. Her first rule in taking me with her was that I would never ask anything else.”

“And you never did,” he observed.

“And I never did. It doesn’t matter who she was. It matters who she can become…” Florence’s hands paused on one of her boxes, pausing mid-close. She spoke only for herself, barely more than a whisper. “If only I could make her see that.”