“Come now, we don’t have all day.” She waved him on as though he were a lowly unranked. “We have a train to catch.”
Cvareh scooped up the clothes along with the remnants of his pride. He waited for them to avert their eyes. “Are you going to turn around?”
“Oh he’s modest,” Arianna quipped to Florence. “Who knew? I didn’t think anyone who could wear something so gaudy and revealing could have real modesty.”
He was right. She had used the knowledge of his love of fashion against him at the first opportunity. But the two women finally obliged.
“If you think you can attack me while my back is turned, I’ll—”
“I know, you’ll cut me,” he finished dryly.
Cvareh begrudgingly pulled the clothes from his frame, dressing instead in the dull rags that had been forced upon him. This was going to be a long trip to the Alchemists’ Guild hall. A very, very long trip.
7. Leona
Incense hung heavy in the air. Perfumed tendrils of smoke curled through beams of light like the tentacles of a hungry octopus. The windows were shades of blue, folded against splashes of gold and curves of iron. No two were alike. The stone arched over them like waves against a boat and cut each into a slightly different shape. Between them, mosaic was laid in abstract patches of color that had always reminded Leona of fish scales.
“Petra Xin’Oji To will arrive within the hour, Yveun Dono,” a little man reported from her side of a large, circular screen. Wood the same shade as the floor outlined it, a base mirrored at the top and bottom creating the imagery of a sun rising through the clouds.
“See her to the red room,” the Dragon King answered from the other side.
“Understood.” The man gave a low bow before walking briskly from the room.
Leona narrowed her eyes to slits at the man’s back, cautiously regarding him as he left. His skin was the standard jade of House Tam. They were loyal to the King—and generally smart enough not to challenge the fact. But she was always on alert when anyone was around her sovereign. It had been two decades since the last duel against the Yveun Dono, and she would see it to a third.
“Leona.” The King’s strong voice echoed across the space to her. Every time it formed her name, the muscles around Leona’s pointed ears tensed, ever so slightly.
“Yveun Dono?” She bowed at the waist, holding the low pose of respect as he rounded the screen.
“Ease, Leona.”
She stood straight at his command, retracting the claws that had been out on alert the entire time the man had been in her King’s presence.
“Have you any word from your sister?”
She shook her head, a long strand of hair that extended past her bound breast clinking softly as the beads shifted.
“How many hours has it been?” The King walked over to the windows, near where she stood. Near enough that she could smell his skin as much as his magic. Near enough that he could strike her if he so chose.
“Since the theft it has been six, Dono.” Leona stripped all emotion from her voice. She would betray no favoritism, no concern. She had been trained better. She had fought and killed and clawed her way up for twenty of her forty-six years to be the King’s personal guard, and she would not let anything separate her from her lord for the remaining eighty her life should hold.
“Six hours, and three Riders.” The sun lit fire in the King’s red eyes as he studied its progression through the sky.
The Dono was a handsome man. His wine-colored skin brought out the purple tones of his hair that, in turn, contrasted with the brilliant fury of his eyes. He was over sixty-five, Leona knew that much. She suspected he could even be pushing eighty. But he looked not a day past fifty, a man still well in his prime.
“It seems too much to track down one lowly Xin Soh.” He looked over to her, his stare ablaze with the same sort of quiet danger as lightning. Beautiful, enchanting even, from a distance. But it would strike and kill without warning.
“It does, Dono,” Leona had to agree. Her sister or no, the fact was a fact.
“Your sister, Sybil, isn’t it?”
She hated the way her sister’s name rumbled the back of his throat. “Sybil Rok’Anh Soh,” Leona specified for him.
They were both of house Rok, but Leona had the luck to be born of a Soh and a To, an upper common woman and a high noble. Her half-sister had not been so lucky. Their mother had chosen a life-mate who was also a Soh. Acceptable for their stature, but not so much in the way of getting Sybil ahead.
Leona didn’t know who her father was. Her and her sister had both inherited their mother’s crimson tinted skin, as the woman had been the alpha in both relationships. But, whoever he was, Leona thanked her sire silently most mornings as she stood next to the King.
“She seeks to be Sybil Rok’Anh Veh.”