“It could be better and you know it.” He made it too easy for her to push right on his soft spots. “You’ve been away from the Ravens’ Guild proper for a while. Getting sloppy, Will.”
“Sloppy? You’re one to talk.” Will breathed on his hands, looking out at the magic discharge. “Thought you were supposed to be some great White Wraith, master thief, super sneaky.”
Arianna arched her eyebrows, not even dignifying him with a response.
“I overheard you and Florence. I know what you gave her.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Arianna looked him in the eye, challenging him to call her on her bluff.
To her frustration, he did. “Sure. Well, then I heard some other Arianna through a crack in a wall talking to some other Florence about some other copy of a ledger she made of something she stole in Ter.3 before leaving the five-tiered hall.”
“You were sent to spy on me?” Arianna mentally cursed herself for not inspecting more carefully the rooms surrounding her laboratory.
“Louie likes to know what’s going on.”
“That he does,” she agreed, training her expression to be void of emotion. “Too bad any reports he gets would be from a bored Raven with an overactive imagination.”
“Be careful, Ari. I wasn’t the first and won’t be the last.”
“The irony of you telling me that.” She’d been in dangerous situations longer than he’d been alive.
“Fine, ignore me.” Will shrugged. “Just saying that if it had been anyone else in Louie’s crew, you would’ve been outed.”
“Anyone else? Including Helen?” Arianna wondered if she was hearing between his words correctly.
“Helen has her eyes on inheriting all of Louie’s operations. She’ll do anything to suck up to him.” Will had the tone of a friend who’d been chapped by some rather cold treatment.
“Why are you telling me this?” Helen and Will were a matched set. In no world could she imagine Will doing anything that would separate them.
“Because when she does inherit Louie’s kingdom, we’ll need a champion. I hear he has a pretty good one he’s been working with. Don’t want to see Helen burn any bridges we may need to drive over.”
Arianna snorted with laughter at the idea of taking orders from either of the children. But still, fair was fair. The warning he gave her was valuable, almost adult-like, and she appreciated it. “Play your cards right, and maybe you’ll be so lucky. If you can pay.”
“The business is pretty lucrative.” Will glanced through the window into the deck cabin.
“Have you heard anything else?” Arianna asked when they both confirmed no one was observing their clandestine meeting.
“Anything else?”
She didn’t know if he was being coy, or just stupid. “Why did Louie want the ledger in the first place?”
Will’s mouth turned into a frown. “I don’t really know. But I know he speaks to someone on Nova with the red-eared one, Adam.”
Red ears. Arianna’s instincts went off again as they had the first time, apprehensive at anything that resembled Rok.
“Do you know who?”
“That’s all I know . . . for now.”
“For now?”
“Like I said, I want to work with you.” Will shrugged again. Arianna didn’t know what she’d done to endear herself to the boy, but she wasn’t going to challenge it. The fact that he hadn’t gone to Louie—or at least claimed he hadn’t—was good faith enough. “Except, can we please do this in the future where it’s not freezing? I think I’ll brave the vicar and his corrections over losing my fingers.”
“It’s not that cold.”
“Ari, my fingers are turning blue.”
Before she could even comment on where, when, why, or how he thought it was acceptable to refer to her as “Ari,” Will had pulled open the heavy door to the top-deck cabin and disappeared within. She looked back down at her own hands and realized she wouldn’t be able to tell if her fingers turned blue.
Even out of his element, Louie could still be a problem . . . She needed to tread carefully and learn what game he was really playing.
It was, in total, a two-day ride from Ter.0 to Ter.3, thanks to Arianna’s contributions with magic, Will and Willard working together on improving the engine, and Helen’s keen insights on charting their course.
Thick palm fronds branched out overtop each other. Stronger trees that preferred dryer climates quickly disappeared as the land became more marshy and wet. The bogs in the forests to the south of Garre held dark waters, caged by tree roots.
Garre itself was known as the clockwork city.
Tethered by her cabling and winch box to the heavy door behind her, Arianna crouched atop the cabin roof for the best vantage the airship could offer. She dug her knees and fingers into the metal grooves for stability, but the wind threatened to rip her away. The city of her childhood grew from a speck in the distance to the towering mechanical marvel that rivaled any in the world.
The capital of the Rivets was entirely the guild hall. There were no other elements to the city itself; there were no visitors without specific business for the Rivets.
Even late in the year, humidity crept beneath her coat and made her hair cling to her neck. It was an omnipresent citizen of Garre, rising up from the marshes under the city’s stilts. A mechanical haven built atop water, destined to fight an endless war against rust and corrosion. It was the worst place possible for the Rivets to have attempted to build, and it was all the more perfect for the fact.
The airship banked and began its descent.
Closer up, the movements of the guild could be seen. Slowly rotating upper walkways ticked around cores like odd-faced clocks, counting down to something unknown. Steam billowed in jets, piped from the depths of the all-metal guild hall. Giant gears showed their teeth proudly on the outside of walls, perpetually churning against equally sized counterparts within.
Arianna had never seen her guild from the air before, and it was quite the sight. There was an undeniably breathtaking quality to its spectrum of metallic colors and carefully constructed pathways and structures that formed one tight, singular city. A city that changed before her own eyes on their descent, as walkways moved with the groaning of gears and various windows and doorways opened and closed.
It was also a vantage by which she could clearly see the remnants of the Dragons’ attack—wounds that could not be healed with the limited hands available. An entire wing seemed to have been hit hard, the metal jagged and oddly bent, pulled apart by blasts that Arianna could still imagine the echoes of.
The whole of Garre was spotted with such damages, but it persisted.
The airship looped three times before finally finding a landing that would fit their wingspan. As soon as they touched down, Arianna leapt from the roof, tumbling into the metal below with a clang. She sprinted for the doorway into the guild.
Locked.