The Dragons of Nova (Loom Saga #2)(40)

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.”

“Why? Why not? What if it runs out? What if you are a week away from not having any water and you don’t know it? There could be a large glacier that has been melting for hundreds of years, trapped in some far mountain valley, and it’s soon to be exhausted.”

“I doubt it.” Cvareh shrugged. “Lady Lei gives the Dragons all we need to survive. She wouldn’t have our water run thin before the end of days.”

“Lady Lei, the Caregiver.”

He looked honestly surprised she knew the Goddess’s title, meriting a turn of his head.

“I’ve been talking with Cain.”

“So it would seem.” Cvareh tugged on the boco’s reins, pulling left. The creature banked away from the mountains and toward the sloping hills that flattened across the island. “Hearing him start to speak of you was a surprise.”

“I had to speak to someone or I was liable to go mad.” Arianna bit her tongue, holding in the rest of her thought: she was driven to speak to Cain because Cvareh had not come to visit her once. She would not sound so desperate.

“The surprise came more from knowing he was speaking to you in return. He holds no love for Fenthri and even less for Chimera. And, from what I hear—and saw first-hand with a dagger at my forehead—you have done little to endear yourself to him.”

“And why would I?” She snorted. “I gathered we weren’t going to be friends from the first time he laid eyes on me.”

“You seem friendly now.”

“Apparently the word ‘friends’ does have a different meaning on Nova and Loom.” She would describe her and Cain more like begrudging allies in their current state.

Cvareh chuckled. “Do you prefer his company, or mine?”

“I haven’t had much of a choice in the matter,” she reminded him.

“Even still?”

“Yours.” There was little thought in the answer, even despite the confusion and annoyance Cvareh had caused her across the past few months.

It sparked a pulse of delight in his magic that set the palms of Arianna’s hands to tingling.

Honestly, talking with Cain for the past few weeks had been nearly as thrilling as cutting off her own hands the night before. Arianna flexed her fingers, instantly regretting the analogy. They still felt strange, like phantom limbs given substance.