“You’ll see.” Whatever it was, he was so excited about it that she forgave his cryptic nature and didn’t press. “Come, let’s wait in the shade of the temple.”
Around the pathway, and the entire island, were long stalks with some sort of egg-shaped growth on the end. They swayed in the breeze, leaves whispering quietly between each other. It seemed no other plants would survive on this particular rock.
Cvareh reclined on a wide step at the entrance to the temple. Arianna poured magic into her eyes to cut through the darkness and peer within, but was generally disappointed in what she saw. There was a statue of a Dragon man holding a box of silver, a crown of flowers atop his head. Coins and other offerings were piled into his little treasure chest, but not much else adorned the space.
Satisfied, Arianna sat next to Cvareh.
“Might I ask you something?”
“You just did,” Arianna pointed out, as though he were a child making such an error for the first time in his life.
“Will you answer it if I ask?” he rephrased.
“That depends entirely on the question. Maybe I will, maybe I’ll rip off your tongue.” She wasn’t used to her threats earning laughter. She wasn’t used to being called out when her words were bark with only a tiny possibility of bite.
“Very well, I shall take my chances.” Cvareh paused, sobering once more. “The woman you loved…”
Arianna stiffened and Cvareh hesitated. She wondered if he was waiting to see if she lashed out for him even mentioning Eva. She wondered why she hadn’t yet.
“Eva.”
“Eva,” Cvareh proceeded delicately. “You and she… you two…”
Arianna sighed heavily. She didn’t want to talk about Eva. But somehow, she felt as if she owed it to the man sitting next to her. The man in whose pleasures she’d delighted in for hours had perhaps earned that much truth. If she was going to talk about Eva, she was only going to do it once. She would tell him everything he wanted to know.
She pulled off the splint, releasing her illusion. The island pulsed with the quiet sort of vibration that all of Nova had. But, like Cvareh had suspected, she didn’t sense the presence of another magical being anywhere.
Seeing her skin exposed in the night was instant discomfort. It was her flesh, not the illusion. But it was also flesh Cvareh had seen, that his mouth had worshipped.
“She kissed me, for the first time, here.” Arianna held out her wrist. Upon it was inscribed: 20.9.1078. So much had happened in a mere three years. “She was vivacious, full of life and challenge and heart. She loved like a dream and she fought like a sea monster.”
“What happened to her?”
“I killed her.” Arianna stared out into the vast sky as if the truths she’d been searching for would be there written in the stars. Stars she never could have seen if she’d never met Cvareh. More likely, the truth would be found in the man sitting next to her. Arianna stared down at the hands she’d recently acquired.
“Arianna, I don’t think you should blame—”
“I slit her throat, Cvareh.” It wasn’t some misplaced blame. It was fact. “We met in the last rebellion. She worked with me on the Philosopher’s Box. A gifted Alchemist and one of Loom’s experts on Chimera research. She was the best of all worlds and somehow loved me.”
Ari leaned back onto her elbows, tipping her head back and drinking in the darkness like sharp liquor. It would fuel her words and make her brave. It already had for years, if Cvareh’s gods were to be believed. “She favored Sophie at first. But we were far more well-matched in mind...and in heart.”
“Do all Fenthri favor their same sex?” Cvareh asked with as much delicacy as he could muster.
Arianna laughed as a Dragon would, tipping her head back and pouring forth her amusement without reservation. “We prefer what we prefer.”
“But loving one you cannot have a child with is futile. You can’t continue the family…”
His words trailed off as he saw the look she gave him. She wanted him to figure it out. She would wait as long as he needed, but she would judge him past a certain point if he couldn’t come to the right conclusion.
“… and that’s not a concern of the Fenthri.”
Arianna tapped the stone next to her like it was a bell. “Ding-ding.” Her sarcasm was too weak to stand against the weight of their conversation. “The Dragons, this notion of family… For over a thousand years we would head to the grounds of Ter.0 and induce fertility, breed as we needed, the best of the best, raise the children in the guilds.”
“It sounds cold and sterile.”
“Families sound limiting and suffocating.”
He huffed in a tired amusement. “Fair enough.” Cvareh looked back to the stars, as though they would give him strength to ask the question he’d been awkwardly shifting around. “Why did you kill her?”
Arianna wished she hadn’t resolved to tell him everything. She pressed her mouth into a thin line, as if she could smother the words, extinguish them like a flame. But the truth remained.
“I didn’t just kill her. I killed them all.” She let out the bleakness of her heart’s truth. “Your people should thank me. I was the hand that crushed the last rebellion against your King.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When we discovered we’d been betrayed, that the Dragon we’d trusted was not a double-agent for us, was not an ally against the King, but a man under the King’s own thumb, we destroyed it all—or tried to.” The smell of burning flesh and reagents gone sour singed her nose anew. Her hands were caked in invisible blood that would never wash away, black and red alike. “I was the only one who could do it. The rest of them had been poisoned. My stomach saved me.”
“So the schematics I carried...” Realization was beginning to take over.
“Shouldn’t have even existed. They were stolen at the onset of our betrayal.”
“Why didn’t you kill yourself?” It was a fair question, based on what he knew of her, what she was.
“You know how hard it is for a Dragon to kill themselves. It’s no easier for me.”
“You really are, then?”
“I’m a Perfect Chimera.” Arianna finally brought her eyes to meet his. She wanted him to feel the weight of the truth. She wanted him to cower in fear or see her purely as a tool. But he did something far more dangerous: He didn’t change the way he looked at her at all. “More important than overcoming the logistical challenge of killing myself, Eva and Master Oliver asked me to live. She died knowing all our research, everything we’d worked for, was being destroyed. I don’t expect you to understand, but for a Fenthri, there is nothing more horrible.”
“You fled, detaching from everything, and became the White Wraith. You worked against Dragons,” he finished, painfully simple.
“In the hopes that I would someday find my way to the man who betrayed all I loved. In the hopes that it would bring me vengeance.” She felt a sudden wave of guilt. He now knew everything, and she had never even told Florence the beginning of her story. When she returned to Loom, the girl would know the truth, Arianna vowed. The girl—no, woman—had more than earned it.
“The boon?”