by Elise Kova
Arianna opened the door with a disapproving glare in Cvareh’s direction. He looked up at her, barely stopping short a dramatic roll of his eyes. Arianna’s fingers twitched for her daggers but remained at her side.
“You’re corrupting my pupil with your tales of Nova,” she seethed. Florence had a clever mind, too curious for her own good, and she always saw the best in people. Arianna knew that just a taste of Nova was likely to leave the girl wanting more, no matter how many times Arianna told her that Dragons were not to be mingled with.
“I think it’s fascinating.” Flor smiled.
And that was what kept her from sewing Cvareh’s mouth shut. He had begun to endear himself to Florence. No matter how much Arianna hated him, she wanted Florence to smile even more. So she would do as she’d always done with Florence. She’d linger in the shadows, hovering in a place not even the girl could see her. She’d give her pupil the freedom to spread her wings, fly, be curious and inquire, experience the thrill of feeling on her own. Florence would work with the fear of falling because Arianna believed that fear was necessary to grow, but she’d always be hovering nearby, ready to pick up the girl if necessary.
“If architecture and fashion are corruption, perhaps Loom could use a bit more corrupting.” Cvareh’s mouth curled upward and his lips spread.
The expression was strange. He wasn’t baring his teeth at her. Their points remained hidden behind his bottom lip. It was…a smile. A Dragon smile. It unnerved her endlessly.
“We need to move,” Arianna announced. “First, Flor, I need the grease pencil.”
“You’re going to do it?” Florence blinked.
“I’m out of options. Our prior disguises aren’t going to work where we’re going.”
Florence was clearly curious, but she produced the grease pencil kit from her bag. Arianna sat at the stool, passing the tin to Flor to hold like a mirror. Florence stood patiently while her mentor collected herself. The mark would wash off; it was not a tattoo. But every time she put it on her cheek, it felt like forfeit.
Arianna shifted her feet, her coat draping over her thighs. She swallowed the lump in her throat, pulling her cheek taut with her left hand and steadying her right. Her hand was skilled from thousands of hours of schematic creation, and it moved smoothly over her ashen colored skin as she penciled in the symbol of the Rivets.
Coat and harness resumed, she was again the White Wraith: more than Fenthri, more than Chimera, more than Dragon. She cast aside ethical whims and personal grudges. She was the extension of her benefactors’ will, and she would work for them even after they were long dead.
15. LEONA
Leona let out a rallying cry as her magic surged through her palms, into the golden handles of the glider, and across the golden accented wings to propel the contraption upward.
The wind bit her cheeks and whipped her braid behind her. The brisk morning air tasted like freedom, a new dawn heralding a new day—her day. She had no choice but to scream and cry and shout and snarl, because she was the Master Rider. She was a dog let off its chain. She was the untamed storm. And she had been unleashed upon Loom below.
Bending her knees and leaning forward, Leona banked her glider, casting a glittering rainbow across the Rok Estate. She wanted to give Yveun Dono one more taste of her magic. To write it across the sky like a promise that she would not fail him.
Her cries were echoed by the two Riders just behind her on either side. Their screaming vessels tore through the air in formation as they banked heavily down off the side of one of the floating islands of Nova. The Rok Estate dominated the top of Lysip, its main hall and gardens expanding out in all directions as far as the eye could see. At its edge stood smaller buildings of state, chambers provided for Rok’Kin and Rok’Da. Further still were accommodations for To and Veh in society. They all basked together in the sunlight like jeweled turtles on river rocks.
Beneath, the island extended downward. Society’s lower rungs lived in the shade of their uppers. Leona had been born in one of those suspended towers, reaching for the clouds rather than the heavens. She’d played in the honeycombed parks between them and worked her way up to the sunlight above. With Sybil dead, the only time Leona would see this shade now was when she descended to Loom.
Sybil. Her sister’s magic had been strong and Leona could still feel it in her veins, burning through her. It was fading quickly, but she’d relish in the ghostly resentment that tried to turn her stomach sour. But nothing could spoil this day, for it was the first day that dawned after she had known Yveun Dono.
The King had not explained himself—not last night, not with the dawn. She suspected he never would. He didn’t have to. He had made it apparent that he would take what was his. And Leona was nothing if not that.
She adjusted her grip on the handles, the clouds nearing. Throwing a look over her shoulder, she checked that Andre and Camile were still with her. Camile had the face of a cat; her curious amusement at Leona’s mood was apparent. Andre wore a grin that was half snarl. This man and woman were more her blood than Sybil had ever been.
Lysip was shrinking further and further behind them. When she returned victorious, she would seek Yveun Dono’s blessing to duel Coletta’Ryu. The woman was sickly, and would prove an easy kill. But to challenge a Ryu required the Oji’s blessing. After last night, and after she brought home Cvareh’s head, she suspected she may have that unprecedented blessing.
Before the first Fenthri broke through the clouds, the Dragons had called the seemingly impenetrable barrier the Gods’ Line, as it separated their world from the next. Boco, the bird-like creatures they used to fly between the islands of Nova, lost control of their wings as they neared the speeding winds that always wove through the clouds. Every Dragon who tried to descend on the back of a Boco fell violently through the line and was never seen again.
Certain death by falling into the afterlife had made attempts to descend unappealing. And for hundreds of years, no Dragons tried. When the Fenthri barely broke through the clouds, only to be shortly torn asunder by the winds themselves, Nova learned that it was not the afterlife on the other side of the line but another world entirely. Curious Dragons—fools—attempted to cross once more at the site of the first breach, but fell to their deaths. It was their corpses that provided the organs that led to the first Chimera being pieced together by the Alchemists.
Once the Fen had magic, the God’s Line was nearly obsolete. They still struggled, scraping together enough power to cross. But the technology they developed was finally in Nova’s grasp—a technology Dragons had been meant to have in their talons all along.
Leona re-centered herself on her glider, the bottom of her boots connected to the platform with magic and sheer will. She had descended a few times, though it never gave her much cause to be fond of the process. The wind was deafening, the clouds blinding. She pointed her glider nose down and plummeted forward.
Gravity was her friend. It fought vertigo and, in free-fall, she didn’t need to exhaust magic on keeping herself airborne. That magic was better spent holding a thin corona around her and the vessel to protect herself from the winds. Her fingers froze; her braid felt like it would rip from her scalp.
Magic cracked, reaching a crescendo as she pushed through, parting the clouds and opening Loom to her like an abysmal present.
The echoes of two more descents reverberated through the mountaintops that surrounded Dortam. Leona trusted Andre and Camile to be where they were supposed to be. If she couldn’t count on them to make a descent, she had brought the wrong Dragons as her left and right.
The blackened, pointed rooftops of Dortam reminded Leona of a porcupine’s spears. It was a sad, stinted world beneath the clouds. The people were smaller, the plants brittle and hard compared to the lush greenery of Nova. Fen were made of the rocks they cherished so much. Whereas Dragons… they were made of life itself.
“There!” Camile called over the wind.
Leona followed her fin
ger to a broken rooftop. The second they got close, Leona could smell it. She could practically see gold on the ground.
“Xin are built like porcelain dolls. Little Cvareh bleeds from falling off his glider,” Camile jabbed.
Leona let her subordinates put down the annoying Dragon House. She even partook from on occasion, delighting in the verbal jabs. But this time, she stayed silent. The smell of blood was faint. It had long since disappeared on the wind. The trace that was left was little more than enough to make a mark.
She hated Cvareh. She hated House Xin. And she still fantasized about all the ways she could pull out Petra’s lying teeth one by one. But Leona wasn’t going to let it blind her. Sybil had underestimated her foe. Petra was nothing less than a monster, and if Cvareh was cut from the same cloth, he shouldn’t be written off lightly. All his appearances at the Crimson Court could be just that—appearances. Who knew what truly lay beneath.
“The trail goes cold,” Leona noted. Tracking Cvareh wasn’t going to be that easy, or even someone as incompetent as Sybil wouldn’t have failed. “We head for Mercury Town.”
“Oh, gross,” Andre balked. “It smells rancid there.”
“And where else do you think we’ll find talk of Cvareh?” Leona grinned. It was intended to be playful, but her smile was wide enough to show her teeth. She was the leader and it never hurt to reinforce that fact.
“Lead on. If we are to dredge up the worst, we must go to the worst.” Andre motioned a cherry colored hand for her to continue and Leona spurred forward.
If there was a Dragon in Dortam, talk of it would get to Mercury Town. Leona didn’t think for a second that Cvareh would get very far before a harvester set eyes on him. It seemed her sister had the same idea.
“I think it’s an improvement.” Andre tilted his head to the side, assessing the rubble and carnage that was left to rot.
Leona sighed, lowering her glider to the ground, crushing dead Fen underneath. Sybil had no tact, no reason. She reaped chaos, but it was too easy for things to be lost in chaos.
“Anything would be an improvement.” Camile toed one of the fallen Fen’s heads, rolling it from side to side. “They’re at least quieter when they’re dead.”
“That’s part of the problem. Dead Fen don’t talk.” Leona looked through the silent streets. The usually busy Mercury Town had been reduced to death and stillness. She tried to think like her sister, wild. If she landed in Mercury Town with Sybil’s disposition… She’d reap destruction wantonly. “Camile, with me. Andre, that way.”
“Follow the trails of destruction?” The man preempted her expectations.
“See what you find,” Leona affirmed. “Whisper to Camile if there’s anything.”
Andre and Camile faced each other, cheek to cheek. They each spoke a series of sounds, nonsense with no meaning, into the other’s ear. Leona felt the whisper link establish between them. Now, the moment one of them said their activation word, they could speak with the other across any distance—as though one was whispering in the other’s ear.
“So I set the whisper link, hmm?” Camile hummed as they began to follow the trail of destruction that wound in the direction opposite Andre.
“I have a whisper link back to Lysip to report.” Leona barely contained a smirk. Yveun Dono’s activation word had been a flesh chilling, guttural growl that she would gladly scream to have echo through her again.
“I wonder with who? You’re quite cheerful for someone who just killed her sister.”
“Don’t play me for a soft fool. I am not Tam.” She brushed off Camile’s not-so-subtle inquiry. Whoever the woman suspected, she was wrong.
“That you are not.” Camile grinned gleefully. “Tell me, how did her heart taste?”
“Like a cherry, and it exploded much the same in my mouth.” Her triumphs were never something she would hide.
“Sybil would—”
Leona held up a hand and Camile was instantly silenced and on alert. The wind had picked up for just a moment. On it she had caught the hint of a familiar scent.
“This way.”
Camile kept up easily with her bounding strides. The further they got from the epicenter of Sybil and the prior Riders’ destruction, the more Fen were about. They scattered like rats, not one putting up a fight before the Dragons once more in their midst.
The smell nearly overwhelmed her as Leona rounded an alleyway. To the eye, there was no sign of the fight that had taken place, but it had surely been bloody. Camile’s talons unsheathed slowly.
A Rider had died here. They both recognized the scent. Layered atop it, almost triumphantly, was the brisk smell of wood smoke, a distinctly Xin smell. Cvareh.
Leona walked through the empty dead end. Magic burned under her feet and hung in the air. A silent memorial for months to come to the Dragon who had lost his life in the spot. She knew the essence of the Rider, Cvareh was easy enough to take note of… But there was one more.
“The third, what is it?” Leona asked Camile.
“It’s…floral? House Tam?”
“Not quite…” There was a heavy floral note, almost like honeysuckle on a hot summer night. But mingled with it was a sharper smell of cedar, like one of House Xin.
Sybil had mentioned Cvareh had help, but she said nothing of another Dragon from House Tam or Xin. That would make this a very different hunt. Leona continued to try to dissect the smell, fighting to peel back its layers. But there was only a trace amount, and the heavy rose smell of the House Tam rider who had perished overpowered the rest of them.
Her sister said there’d been a Fen and Chimera helping him. Leona had smelled Chimera blood thousands of times from the slaves at the Rok estate. Their blood was black for a reason—it was dirty, muddled, rotten. This was clean and sharp, but unlike anything she’d ever inhaled before.
“Leona, this way.” Camile interrupted her thoughts.
Leona followed, giving up the strange third scent for now. Camile was on the trail of the fallen Rider, no doubt picked up by Fen vultures that were already picking the carcass clean. It led them through winding, narrow back passages into the depths of Mercury Town—into the beating heart of the muddled, rotten blood Leona had just been comparing against.
The Fen man who waited at the door didn’t seem surprised to see them. They made him uneasy; she could hear his heart racing in his chest. But he didn’t run from his post, didn’t avert his eyes. Instead, he greeted them.
“We are expecting you.” He opened the door.
Leona strode in fearlessly, claws out and gleaming. Some Chimera and Fenthri guns posed no threat to two Dragon Riders. The only thing that could bring down a Dragon in Dortam was another Dragon.
“Welcome, ladies!” A tiny man clapped his hands. His white skin stretched over his bones, giving him a disturbing similarity to a walking skeleton. Beady eyes appraised them as though they were meat. “When I heard the glider, I just knew you would come and investigate your fallen friend. I just knew.” He waggled his finger in the air. “You see, the most terrible thing happened. I caught two men dragging the corpse of our King’s noble Rider off for harvesting. Now, I tried to get the corpse from them, but they overpowered my men and used this room to—”
Leona hovered over the weak little man, moving with Dragon speed to clamp her hand atop his mouth. Blood beaded around where her claws dug into his cheeks. She could kill him in seven different ways right now and each seemed more delightful than the last. But that would be the course Sybil would’ve taken: kill first and ask questions later. As tempting as that approach was, it had yet to yield results.
“I am not interested in your lies,” she growled. The alabaster-colored wretch’s men seemed to be caught in limbo, unsure if they should engage or leave their master to fend for himself. Leona peeled away one finger at a time before removing her hand. She sheathed her claws and dragged her fingers across the man’s bloody cheek, drawing lines of crimson across the nearly glowing white of his flesh. “You se
em like a smart man.”
She was lying.
“Tell me what you know, and I’ll let you keep every last organ you illegally harvested, and all your lives. A fair deal, no?”
“Quite fair.” His voice trembled slightly as she dragged her knuckles up and down his neck.
“How did the Dragon die?” Leona asked.
“His heart was ripped out.”
Cvareh then, without doubt. “Who did it?”
“I hear talk of a Dragon running through Mercury Town, blue.”
Cvareh again. This wasn’t new information. Leona’s fingers walked around his tiny neck, ready to throttle. “Where was he headed?”
“No one could find him.” Leona’s hand tensed, causing the man to wheeze. “But I have a theory.”
“Is it a theory you’d stake your life on?” She curled her lips as she spoke, showing her teeth. Her patience was about to run out.
“I hear word of a fight against Dragons at the Ter.5.2 station, three days after your friend died.”
“And?”
The man spoke faster at Leona’s urging. “It takes three days to reach Ter.5.2 by train from here.”
“I already knew he was seen in Ter.5.2. Tell me something I don’t know.”
“What do you know about the White Wraith?” The man smiled at Leona’s immediate reaction.
Now this was certainly new information. The infamous White Wraith of New Dortam had been an annoyance for over a year. They had tried to send Riders down, but one ended up dead, and the rest were made fools of. Yveun Dono eventually deemed it a waste of time to fight an enemy that would not stand up for a duel and only fought from the shadows.
She pulled her hand away for him to continue.
“People say your Dragon ran with the White Wraith through the streets here.” The man adjusted his velvet vest.
Something didn’t add up. “Why would the Wraith help a Dragon?”
“That, I cannot tell you.” The man held out his hands hopelessly. “Have I earned my harvest?”