11. Arianna

“Which one do you like the best?” She nearly startled Cain out of his skin when she spoke. He stared at her as though her illusion had melted away like ice in the sunlight of a summer’s day. “You always pause here. Which do you like best?”

“The one on the far left is Lord Xin.” He motioned to the painting of a veiled figure wielding a sword.

“That’s not what I asked.” It didn’t matter which one he liked or why. But time had whittled away at her. Time, and silence, and more time. It persisted, encasing her mind insistently and eroding her resolve to hate Cain. She was stuck with him and he with her, for the foreseeable future. They may as well put aside the determination to be at each other’s throats.

He seemed to have arrived at much the same conclusion over the past week.

Cvareh had proved himself worthless, and a Dragon to the core. He’d not returned with hands nor a glider to bring her back to Loom. Arianna shouldn’t have expected differently. So she waited, and bided her time carefully.

“Isn’t it though? I am of House Xin.”

“And that dictates your favorite will always be Xin?” Arianna asked incredulously.

“Would it not?”

Arianna laughed and shook her head. “You Dragons accuse Loom of being mechanical, but you are nothing more than automatons competing for the distinction of being most suicidally loyal.”

“Gird your tongue.” His jabs had been slowly losing their edge with each passing week.

“Cain, we both know we’re at a stalemate. You’ll do nothing to me because you can’t—I’m too precious to your House. I’ll do nothing to you because, even if I could take you down, I’d never get out of here alive.” She gave him an opening to refute the claim, which he didn’t, because he couldn’t. “Drop the bravado already. I’m not questioning your loyalty. I’m merely asking for your opinion.”

He looked back at the paintings with new consideration.

“The one of Lord Xin is magnificent. It truly is… However, I find the one of Lord Pak calls to me more.”

“Lord Pak?” Arianna studied the painting to the right of the veiled god. It was done entirely in grays. If she tilted her head to the side, she could perhaps make out a face, not quite Fenthri, not quite Dragon. It was familiar and unknown, a depth that threatened to embrace but never relinquish.

“The Dark-wielder,” Cain clarified. “I was born under his month.”

Before the clouds had been breached, Loom had no concept of sun or moon. The idea that a glowing orb of light floated across the sky was still unnerving to Arianna each morning she rose to look upon it. The large moon was no better in its pale and contrasting glow.

Beneath the clouds, the light was muted, diffused. Once in a rare while the clouds thinned enough to betray a potentially circular source of light, but what it was had every Guild guessing for hundreds of years. That said, Loom still knew of the moon’s cycles. There were periods of bright nights and periods of dark nights. Arianna remembered the first time she’d looked upon sketches of the moon’s phases, thinking about the inexplicable sense it made for some sort of hanging heavenly body to change its shape.

As a result of the “dark nights,” the evolution of Loom’s calendar had developed a similar pattern to Nova’s. Twenty cycles of the moon making up twenty months in a year, the end and beginning punctuated by a full day of light.

On Loom, the months were merely numbered—a simple, logical system of ordered progression. On Nova, the months were named like everything else, difficult to remember and seemingly random.

“What number month is that?” Arianna asked.

Cain regarded her cautiously, as if the question could have some sort of veiled meaning. “The tenth.”

She grinned madly.

“What?” Cain frowned, obviously expecting her to make a joke of some aspect of his culture.

“You and I share the same month.”

“We have the same Patron?” Cain seemed aghast at the notion.

“That seems to be the case.” Arianna delighted in his discomfort about them having anything in common. “What day were you born?”

“The tenth.”

She inwardly cursed: couldn’t have been lucky enough to have the same day. That would be enough to drive the man mad for months. “The seventh.” Perhaps it was a mark of the overall improvement in their relationship that she didn’t lie to him. They began walking again and Arianna let the conversation shift. “Why are there only three Dragon Houses, if there are twenty possible patrons?”

“There were more, thousands of years ago. But the others were killed off until only three remained. House Tam proposed a system to keep things equal among the Houses with one overseer and two Houses to keep them in check. A sort of peace treaty,” Cain explained. “Once every decade or two, some bold upstart works up the notion to have his own House, supposedly called to task by some Patron.”

“But the three in power never let that happen.”

He gave her a nod of affirmation, and silence passed between them once more. She began to steer them in a new direction. Each day she’d used the conversation to distract him long enough to let them wander somewhere new. They strayed from what she’d come to suspect was the “approved path,” into new areas of the Xin Manor. Arianna had yet to find the glider, but she would eventually. And, once she knew the route, she would not be long for Nova.

“How did you learn Fennish?” They had yet to speak in the Dragon’s tongue. It served Arianna better for him to think she couldn’t understand his whispered Royuk to servants about her and her care, or the conversations she could pick up as they passed through the halls.

“Petra’Oji wants all Da and higher in the House to be educated in the ways of Loom.”

Arianna snorted, earning herself a sour look. “If you are as ‘educated’ as Cvareh was before he came to Loom, then your understanding of Fenthri ends at a rough attempt at our language.”

Cain considered her a long moment. Arianna held his golden gaze, unafraid and challenging. Let him try to dissuade her. Let him speak one word counter to her point.

But he remained silent and—dare she say it?—thoughtful.

Shortly after, Cain realized they’d strayed from the course and promptly returned her to her room. No further words were exchanged on the way, but Arianna had learned enough. Judging from the scent, the halls they’d traversed were near the kitchen, and that was not what she was looking for. She needed to pick up the metallic tang of gears and oil. But perhaps that was looking for something that couldn’t be found on Nova. They seemed to have everything but workshops and laboratories.

“Is there something else?”

Cain lingered after he’d released her illusion. Two of the fingers in his hand had broken from holding the magic for so long and they were slowly knitting back into place. “Why have you not yet tried to escape?”

“Escape to where?” If he had a genuine answer to her question, she wanted to hear it. “I can’t fly, I have no glider, no boco—”

“You escaped your room the first day.”

“Only to be returned here.”

“Then you escaped again.”

“Only to be returned here again,” she reiterated.

“I took you for bolder.”

Was there genuine disappointment in his tone? “I’m merely biding my time,” she threatened with a smile.

He faltered. That was the thing about effective threats: they must possess a grain of truth. In this case, it was completely transparent.

“Whatever you’re planning, it will not get past me.”

“Like you didn’t let me escape either of the other times?” Arianna bared her teeth at the man.

His claws shot out but retracted just as quickly. She’d punched a nice nerve. “You no longer have that machination. You will need to depart through the door—a door I guard.”

“You should pray to each of your twenty gods that’s not the case. Because if it is, it will only mean that yours will be the first heart I cut out when the time comes.”

Cain growled. Arianna’s hand was limp at her side, ready to summon her dagger to her palm. If he wanted a fight, she would give him one while there were no others to interfere. His magic flared brightly, assaulting her senses with the smell of wet earth.

But it diminished quickly, fading into nothing more than frustration and a fearsome scowl. The Dragon retreated, slamming the door behind him like a petulant child. Arianna sighed heavily, turning to the window.

She had yet to tire of staring at the sun. For all it hurt her eyes and seared her vision, she was fascinated by its circular presence.

It was also a reminder: Arianna was very far from home, and understood little of the world surrounding her.