“Walk with me.”
He did so in silence, waiting for her to have the first word. Petra led him into the manor, straying past the main thoroughfares and onto the more private halls. Heavy tapestries draped the walls, overbearing and cluttered, one on top of the next. They splashed bright patterns between careful needlework that depicted the famous temples and landscapes across the floating isles of Nova.
It was Petra’s favorite form of artwork: carefully built with the patience of thousands of single stitches. Delicate in that all it took was one tear to ruin. And surprisingly functional when it came to muffling conversations.
“You have heard?”
“Of the Crimson Court to be held on Ruana?” She nodded in affirmation. “I have.”
“Yveun no doubt plans to use the guise of the Court to cut down our forces, and I have every expectation he will encourage dozens of duels against my person.”
“Myself and countless others will step forward for you.”
Petra snorted. “It is just us, Cain. You have no need to prove your loyalty to me and I know better than to demand it of you with words. I am a far more competent fighter than you.”
He gave no rebuke.
“The more duels I can take, the better for all of Xin. It will send a message to Yveun that my claws are the ones he need fear above all others, while saving most from death in the pit.” Petra rolled her shoulders, already beginning to mentally prepare for the beating she knew she would endure in the coming month. She tried to keep herself in shape, but general upkeep and preparation for a Court were two wildly different things. “I need you to gather the most competent fighters and train them well.”
“Understood.”
“And Cvareh,” Petra added. “At night, as you have done before.”
“No one will see him fighting.”
Petra didn’t want her brother to be challenged. The longer he was seen as a useless Ryu, the longer she could move him with relative ease, free of suspicion. But it was foolish to think he would escape public challenge during a Court on Ruana. And if a challenge came to pass, Petra wouldn’t step forward for him. As much as she wanted to keep all skills he possessed both in and outside the arena secrets, she needed his position to remain unquestioned.
“I could step forward,” Cain spoke, as if reading her mind.
“I will think on it,” Petra relented. She didn’t have a good answer yet, but had some time to figure one out. “For now, know that when there is a call, I want House Xin to speak first against Rok, always. I don’t care how insignificant the grounds for a duel are; it’s a Court. Most things pass and Yveun knows it.”
“Understood.” Cain stopped walking as she did, pausing at one of the intersections.
“Send Cvareh to me,” Petra finished dismissively. “I will need to speak with him about all this, and we will need to start assembling the grand pit for the Court.”
“I will tell him to seek you out first thing when he returns.”
Petra stopped. “When he returns? Where has he gone?”
“He left early in the dawn. With our… guest.” Mere mention of the Chimera still made Cain uneasy, despite Petra’s endorsement of Cvareh’s decision to saddle them together.
Cvareh went off with the Chimera. Petra swirled it in her mind like wine in a glass. “Where did they go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then it would be rather hard to find him.” She shrugged nonchalantly. “The moment he returns, tell him his Oji commands his presence.”
“Gladly.” Cain gave a low bow, but Petra paid it no heed. She was already turning over the notion in her mind. It seemed her brother was mending some of the tensions born of her first meeting with the Chimera. Perhaps something good could come of the day yet.
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.”