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 reminded 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.”

“So you are new to the upper side of the isle.” The woman smiled, flashing her teeth.

Arianna was new to Nova. She was still attaching textbook learning to practical meaning. But she knew when someone was trying to intimidate her. She smiled wide in return and wondered if she’d made her canines long enough in the illusion she’d crafted.

Apparently she had, as the woman broke eye contact first and turned back to Cvareh. “A personal Anh, I take it?”

“Indeed.” Cvareh had yet to remove his hand from her person and Arianna was ready to remove it herself. The only thing that prevented her from doing so was the determined grip he had, the swell of his magic at her side that felt as if it were trying to engulf her.

“You are so lucky, Ari’Anh.” Arianna instantly didn’t like the way her name sounded in the woman’s mouth. “To have been noticed by the Xin’Ryu.”

Arianna said nothing. She just kept smiling. And drinking her wine.

“How long will you be in Napole?” the woman asked.

“The night.” Cvareh guided Arianna inside, earning himself a questioning glare. He didn’t change his demeanor. “I trust you have lodging?”

“For you? Always.” The woman smiled, thinner, subservient to Cvareh.

They were led down a long hall. A swirling ribbon carved into the wood on either side of them created a dizzying pattern from one end to the next, breaking away from the wall to become the banister for a wide stairway. Arianna stretched her fingers against their binding. Her fifth finger had gone completely unresponsive, the bone likely shattered to dust from magical exhaustion.

“Will this be suitable?” The innkeeper opened a wide door that had the motif of a bird painted across its surface.

The room itself shone like freshly oiled clockwork. Wooden floors were polished to a mirror shine, reflecting light off the many portals that had been bored into the far wall. Silver lined them, curling like tiny serpents that seemed to wriggle in the sunlight, connecting every window to a grand mirror on the ceiling—of all places. A perfectly square bed jutted against the unnecessary curves of the room, its linens softening the hard lines of its wooden base. Arianna narrowed her eyes at the furniture.

“It will do.” Cvareh hardly seemed impressed.

“Do let me know if you need anything.” The woman bowed, her breasts hanging erotically.

Arianna kept her eyes anywhere else. The woman had a nice figure, certainly. But such a sight should be earned. If given to everyone, it held no excitement and therefore lacked interest.

“I will, Xillia.” Cvareh dismissed the woman, shutting the door in haste. He turned to Arianna, and they shared a long look. “I thought you might need to relax your illusion and rest a moment.”

Her whole body tensed instantly at the notion. He had preempted her status. Arianna placed her wine down on a nearby table, grabbed for the splint, pulled it off, and let the illusion fall away with the same gritty feeling as a rain of sand. “Could you smell it in my magic?”

“Smell what?” He seemed confused.

“The illusion beginning to turn.” Arianna held up her hand. Her fifth finger was completely limp, almost like gelatin encased in flesh; bruising turned the blue of the hand dark. Her fourth finger hung at a painful angle. She snapped it back into place with a small grimace.

“No, your magic didn’t smell any different than it normally does.”

“Then how did you know?” Arianna needed to dissect the weaknesses in her illusion. While she was confident in her ability to take on most Dragons, especially now with claws at her disposal, she didn’t want to be put in a position where she had to.

“Call it intuition.” He shrugged.

Arianna scowled at him.

“And what have I done to offend you now?” Cvareh chuckled lightly.

That only served to sour her mood more. “‘Intuition’ makes no sense. Intuition is merely a collection of past evidence compiled in your subconscious. There’s a reason you thought that. Just like there’s a reason for, for this.” She motioned to the windows.

“For what?”

“For why they’re spaced oddly, and circular—do you have any idea how much effort it is to make a circle that perfect architecturally?”

He appeared to be really considering it, as if for the first time. “They’re prettier that way.”

She was going to literally tear out her hair. Arianna spun on her heel and stalked toward the bed. Her magic was exhausted and recovering slowly while her fingers finished knitting. She grabbed a fist full of pillow and threw it over her shoulder.

“Now what?” Cvareh leaned against the door, an amused pull at the corner of his lips. She was going to carve that look off his face if he kept it up.

“I’m told there’s a bed under here.” She continued to cast aside the offending cushions. “I intend to make use of it so my magic recovers faster.”

“It’s more comfortable if you actually sleep on the pillows, you know.”

Arianna paused with a dramatic sigh. “Cvareh, no Dragon, Fenthri, Chimera, or creature on Loom or Nova or anywhere else needs this many plush objects to sleep upon. A glass doll would call it excessive.”

“However you like it.” He held his hands out in a motion of forfeit, but his magic still sparked with amusement.

She turned her eyes away from him, not wanting to see the shine that seemed to almost visibly spark around him. Magic held no light, unless channeled through gold. She really was losing her mind in this backwards land if she began to believe otherwise.

“Yes, remember that.” She fell on the bed with purpose. “For I am going to sleep just long enough to recover my magic, and then you shall show me this Napole in earnest.”

“If it pleases you, Ari.” His voice was nearer. The mattress, in all its softness, betrayed his weight as he sat on the edge of the bed.

Arianna wanted to tell the Dragon that his encroaching presence was unwelcome. That despite whatever kindness he showed her, whatever familiarity his magic held, whatever warmth she could find in the tones of his voice, she simply did not want him there. She had not given him express permission to share her bed. But she couldn’t see to bring herself to deny him either.

She wanted to lash out at him ferociously. But her magic was more exhausted than she gave it credit for. Her eyelids felt heavy and the bed—even the remaining pillows—were more comfortable than she’d anticipated. She heard Cvareh settle among his cloud of cushions, the plush articles creating a barrier between their bodies. Arianna closed her eyes and did nothing to remove his familiar presence from her side.