by Elise Kova
“This is meant to be a Philosopher’s Box,” Ari insisted again. “You can see it in the casing, the way it opens and closes in place of heart valves here, right here.”
“In place of heart valves?” Florence repeated, confused. She’d always imagined the Philosopher’s Box to be a sort of Chimera-making contraption—like a golden coffin.
“Yes, it’s obvious by the tension in the springs and the way this is drawn to have a circle stopper.”
Florence would have to take her word for it.
“Let’s say for a minute that I believed you on all this.” Ari looked instantly hurt that she would imply any differently. Florence continued, determined. “That this is a part of a schematic for an actual Philosopher’s Box. Why would Cvareh bring it to Loom, to the resistance? Doesn’t that seem like he’s trying to help us?”
Arianna didn’t miss a beat. “He’s doing it to earn their trust. He wants them to think they can trust him.”
“And what if he wants them to think that because they actually can?” Florence shook her head. “If he just wanted to try conning them into belief, couldn’t he have brought anything and said it was a piece of an unfinished Philosopher’s Box? By the time they finished investigating, he could have what he wanted.”
“It’s more realistic if he brings them the real thing.” Ari set the paper back down on the table with a sigh.
“You don’t quite believe yourself…” She stood, taking a step toward her teacher. Florence wrapped her arms around the woman’s waist, resting her cheek in the center of Ari’s back. “You want to, you’re trying to, but you don’t believe the words you’re saying, either.”
“I do.”
“You don’t.”
“How can you say that with such certainty?” Arianna grumbled.
Florence laughed softly. Her teacher, the brash and beautiful. “Tell me this: Does Cvareh still have his head and heart intact?”
“He does.” Though Ari’s tone implied it was a fact she might regret. An error she might be inclined to remedy sooner over later.
“Since when have you spared a Dragon’s life when you thought he was guilty of crimes against Loom? Or even the sincere possibility of committing crimes against Loom?” Florence waited a long second, giving Arianna a chance to grab for straws at an answer she knew she didn’t have. “That’s right, you don’t. So somewhere in you, you must be questioning this. You must be wondering if what he’s saying is true. His actions must have spoken to your heart clearly enough that you know he is not the evil you’re painting him to be.”
“You don’t know him,” Arianna whispered.
“After all we’ve been through? I think I have a pretty good idea. And I think you do too.” Florence rounded Arianna, leaning against the small table for support. The older woman looked down at her tiredly. “Ari, I don’t know what demons you face. I know they’re there, but I promised you I would never ask. Don’t let the shadows of the past smother the possibility for a bright future.”
It looked as though she was going to triumph. Arianna’s face relaxed, but the older woman’s eyes pressed closed, and she took a deep breath through her nose as though bracing herself.
Arianna opened her mouth to speak, when the airship lurched violently. Florence stumbled, off-balance and too hopelessly weak to correct herself. Arianna grabbed her, supporting her as a primal cry rose from outside. They heard the sound at the same time and it washed the gray from both their faces—the magical zip of a Dragon Rider’s glider.
“Bloody cogs.” Arianna was tearing off her clothing, throwing it about the room in a sprint for her harness and coat. “They weren’t supposed to have any idea where we were headed. Do you see now, Flor? The man lies! He’s in cahoots with them.”
“Then why are they hunting him?”
“It’s all a ruse!”
The ship jostled again. Florence gripped the table for support. “This is a pretty deathly ruse.”
“You just stay here.” Ari tightened her harness, feeling for her daggers, running some line through her winch box. “Stay here for now, and don’t be anywhere I can’t find you. I have a feeling we’ll be needing to make an exit before we reach port.”
Florence nodded, looking about the room, already making a list of what she needed to pack. “But find Cvareh too.”
“Oh, I will.” Arianna left with murder in her eyes.
She sighed heavily, leaning against the table. If she could go her entire life without ever seeing another King’s Rider, that would be ideal. Florence leaned back, wondering for a brief moment how she would make that come to pass. Her hand rested on the paper and Florence brought it up for inspection with a sigh.
Such a tiny thing had caused so much drama in what had been going so smoothly.
It was then that she noticed a small area that Arianna’s fingers had covered the first time she’d shown the page to Florence. Her eyes looked over it once, twice, three times. A few notes were scribbled on the paper, ripped off in the corner where the drawing had been taken from a larger schematic.
Florence didn’t even read what they said. She was too obsessed with the way the ‘h’ curved in the script, the weight of the ‘a’, the overall slant and clarity of the letters. The penmanship was unmistakable.
It answered the question of why Arianna had been so upset—how she had known so much about the paper—at least enough that Florence could now make educated guesses. But those only created deeper questions. Questions she had sworn never to ask. Questions about Arianna’s history.
Why was the woman’s handwriting on a schematic she claimed Cvareh had acquired with malicious intent? Why was her penmanship on anything that could even closely resemble the Philosopher’s Box?
32. LEONA
They had been zipping across Loom for weeks now. By all measure Leona should be exhausted. But the moment the airship had emerged from the starless sky, like a shining beacon heralding her triumph, there was nothing but power under the wings of her glider. There was nowhere for them to run. No sea to mask their scent, no Underground to crawl into like rats.
She had been expecting to face them in Keel. After all the Wraith’s precision and care in their travels, Leona expected them to think of some other way to cross the last of the distance to the Alchemists’ Guild. Some way that wouldn’t trail their scent through the air in all directions.
She didn’t rule out the possibility that it was some kind of trap or attack. After all, the Wraith could make seemingly any situation work to her advantage. If she could turn a prison break into a victory against three of the King’s Riders, she could somehow turn an airship into a floating fortress.
So Leona wasn’t taking any chances. She wasn’t interested in being elegant or tactful in her approach. She wasn’t going to imagine herself above the Wraith. She was going to fight in the most underhanded ways she knew how. And she was going to finally bring victory for Yveun Dono.
Strapped over her back was a large weapon. It was cumbersome to wield and awkward to feel, but the Revolvers had assured her it was capable of an explosion like no other. Leona stabilized her glider and planted her feet. She looked over to Camile who did the same without needing to be told.
“Let’s clip its wings.” Leona reached for the weapon.
“Leona’Kin, there are members of House Rok on that vessel.” Leona smelled them, too. Not many, but a few mixed among the bland stench of Fenthri and haze of other Dragons.
“No half measures, Camile.” She tracked her weapon over the wing. “If they are strong enough, they will survive.”
It wasn’t too tall of an expectation. Dragons were hearty and House Rok was the strongest of them all. If any emerged, Leona would see them to whatever business they had on Loom personally.
Camile did the same with her gun. Leona had to hold in laughter at the sight. Her companion looked ridiculous with a weapon in hand. Though the same could be said of her. It had been Sybil and her pack that ran with guns. Leona and her ac
olytes always preferred the Dragons’ traditional means of destruction: claws.
Still, when on Loom she would fight as the Fenthri did if it served her means. The thinking was a very Xin approach. But to kill a Xin, she conceded, one needed to think like a Xin. Terrifying as that might be.
Leona leveled her weapon and gripped the trigger. The Revos had given them only one canister each, insisting they wouldn’t need more. When Leona pushed back, delicately and not so delicately, they still did not come up with more canisters, saying that the chemicals and powders required simply weren’t kept in stock.
Leona forced her magic into the long gun. The second she did, runes lit up along the handle and barrel. Once activated, she had no choice but to keep feeding it. They leeched magic from her hungrily, siphoning it out through both hands. The runes glowed in the darkness so brightly they drew their shapes with beams of light in the hazy night air around her. The last rune on the barrel sparked, joining the rest.
Leona wasted no time and pulled the trigger.
A bolt of magic shot forward in a straight line and missed the wing by a small margin. Leona screamed in annoyance. She was sure it was her sister’s heart that lingered somewhere in the depths of her magic that cackled hellishly, scolding her for all the times she’d skipped shooting practice.
The magic ray continued forward, striking the ground far below. In a reverse chain reaction, the beam exploded backward, fanning out in all directions. The edge of the magic clipped the wing she had been aiming for, which had already moved well ahead, and disintegrated the edge of it on contact. At least she’d taken out some of the gold helping keep the airship aloft.
Leona threw away the weapon and grabbed the levers of her craft with a heavy sigh. The Revos hadn’t been lying to her. Despite all her boasting and arrogance, it had taken a lot out of her to make such a shot. Bruises dotted her skin where blood vessels had broken. She focused on nothing more than keeping her glider aloft, letting her magic slowly replenish through the fatigue.
Her attention was pulled left as another shot exploded from across the airship. Camile’s magic burned a slightly different color from Leona’s, but it was just as large. Even better, it hit its mark. Leona howled with bloodthirsty joy at the sight of the beam of magic cutting through the wing of the airship.
Magic glittered across its surface, hungry for sustenance. It consumed the wing whole, and the side of the airship when the beam expanded. Even better, the shockwave clipped the delicate balloon helping hold the ship aloft. It expelled air with a mighty wheeze and the vessel lurched through the air, swaying and dropping precipitously with only one wing to support its flight.
Leona looked at the triumphant smile Camile wore and rolled her eyes. “Don’t you start bragging.”
“The one thing Sybil was good for!” Camile called back.
“You practiced shooting with Sybil?”
“Someone under you needed to know a little about Loom’s weaponry. I thought it would pay off eventually.” Camile winked.
Pay off it did. Leona vowed that when they returned to Nova, she would see Camile rewarded handsomely by the Dono. She would figure out later what that reward would look like. For now, she would remain focused on what would get her back to Nova: killing Cvareh.
Men and women ran around the airship, shouting and screaming. Just a tiny little act and their peaceful night was thrown into delicious madness. Leona rounded the airship, watching them sprint to the back balconies in confusion. She caught glimpses of crowded hallways and utter chaos within.
But she didn’t see Cvareh or the Wraith.
She would remain on her glider until she had visual confirmation of them. And, if she must, she would hand-pick them from the airship’s rubble. On the lowest balcony in the back, a crowd was beginning to amass. They tripped and stumbled over the pitching of the airship as it continued to fall through the sky. Small gliders were being loaded frantically. Dragons stepped forward to man each of them, their magic more certain to provide sustainable lift or flight than any Chimera’s.
Leona made an involuntary gagging motion at the sight of it. Dragons helping Fenthri. It was disgusting. She wanted her kin aboard those tiny fliers, certainly. But Fenthri? Let them all die; there were far too many of them anyway.
Still, she hung back. She waited. She would not charge in hastily. She would let her plan unfurl like a banner of victory on the winds she had called up beneath her wings.
Leona was taking another loop toward the front of the airship when she felt the characteristic snap of magic across her mind. Time resumed itself normally—there had been only a second of stillness. The Fenthri moved as normal, completely unaware of what had happened. But the Dragons all looked at each other blearily.
She frantically searched the decks for the source of the time-stop. A commotion summoned her attention, men and women shouting in panic at a group of three that had pushed their way onto a tiny emergency glider. The young Fenthri—Florence—shouted at her master, who was fending off others from getting on their emergency escape. In the back was Cvareh, looking like the complete idiot he was behind the relatively simple handles.
This was what she’d been waiting for. Leona dove, landing her small vessel hard atop the heads of Fenthri, crushing them into a bloody smear on the deck beneath her. The other Fen scattered and pushed on all the edges of the deck in panic. More rescue gliders launched. The Wraith’s girl pulled a few others onto the platform where she and Cvareh stood.
Leona charged.
“Cvareh—go!” the Wraith screamed.
“Ari!” Florence cried.
“Go, go now if anything you ever said to me was true.” There was a bitter pain in the Wraith’s voice that hadn’t been there before.
“I’m not letting you go anywhere!” Leona lunged.
The Wraith spun and met her, blade to talon. Leona bared her teeth and the woman did the same. She was truly hideous, flat teeth and gray skin clashing with bright Dragon eyes. But she moved with the speed of a Dragon, and responded with the strength of a Dragon, and she had no hesitation in any of it.
The small glider carrying Cvareh and the Wraith’s girl dropped away. Leona turned her head skyward. She didn’t see Camile, but she trusted the other Rider to respond. “Camile! On Cvareh!”
“Oh, she won’t be,” the Wraith announced triumphantly. “Canisters that can take down Dragons in one shot are rare. I’d been holding onto that one… But I was hoping for you.”
Leona roared, pushing off the Wraith. The woman slid as the deck tilted, the captain struggling to keep the airship as level as possible. She spun in the crimson blood of her fellow Fen that oozed from under Leona’s glider.
She was expecting the Wraith’s barbed whip. And rather than dodging it like a fool, she snatched it from mid air, her hand on the hilt of the golden dagger. It struggled against her fingers, like a bird trying to break free. Leona held it all the tighter. She yanked, trying to catch the Wraith off-balance.
But the Wraith jumped, and the winch box on her hip propelled her to Leona. She stepped off the ground on her toes, twisting in the air over the line to bring her heel across Leona’s face. Leona reeled, releasing the dagger to free her hand. She slashed and the Waith dropped backward, rolling away as Leona tried to shatter her bones with a mighty step.
They matched blow to blow, dodge for dodge as the failing airship plummeted through the sky. Leona knew they were nearing the ground when the Fen began to take their chances jumping for trees rather than meeting the earth with the airship. She growled and threw the Wraith off her, leaping for her own glider.
“I’m not letting you go!” The knife on the end of the Wraith’s line looped around her neck, forcing Leona to fall backward or be choked into submission.
Free of the cable, Leona gasped for air, the bruising in her neck quickly healing.
“If I’m going down, you’re coming with me,” the Wraith declared.
“You’ll die, and I’ll be unscathed,
ready to skin your little pet and Dragon alive.” Leona snarled, still sliding her feet back to her glider. Even if there was a chance for her to survive the carnage, she didn’t want to risk a stray beam or spear of wood carving her through the heart. Not when her glider rested right next to her.
“I don’t think so,” the woman grinned madly. The wind howled through her words, across the deck littered with bodies and carnage from their fight and the chaos that had erupted from the falling airship. “I have a boon to collect. And I’m not going to die before I get it.”
“We’ll see about that.” Leona began sprinting for the woman and, this time, the Chimera didn’t even flinch, boldly standing her ground. There wasn’t another second to be wasted as the airship reached its terminal destination. The Wraith waited for her charge.
They both half sidestepped in weak attempts at dodges. Claws cut through gray Fenthri skin. Daggers tore through Dragon bone and muscle.
And gold exploded on both sides.
Where Leona had expected a heart, her fingers landed on something metallic. All training faded in utter confusion as she ran the pads of her fingers over its square shape. She gasped, blood bubbling up her throat from the dagger in her chest.
“What are you?” She whispered, staring at the place where her fingers protruded from the other woman’s chest.
Gold blood streamed down the Wraith’s garb, identical to Leona’s. She tried to look over the woman’s face time and again. Was she somehow a Dragon in disguise? No, an illusion would’ve faltered by now.
“What are you?” Leona repeated. Her ears howled as she tried to piece together what she had been fighting the whole time she’d been hunting Cvareh on Loom.
“I’m perfect.”
The woman twisted her dagger, once, twice. She spun it in place, pulverizing Leona’s chest cavity. She felt bone shatter under the blade, sinew stretch and snap against its edge. The Wraith stepped away, reaching for Leona’s chest.
She was going to eat her heart.
Leona wheezed. She clung to life, clung to her duty. It was the best death a Rider could hope for, a death while serving their King. She clung uselessly and weakly to the woman’s forearm as the White Wraith ripped the remnants of her heart from her chest, bit into it, and ended the life of the King’s Master Rider.