“That is your name.”
“It is, but twenty gods, I never thought I’d hear you address me with any formality.”
“I was hardly being formal.” She’d used the title for ironic emphasis.
“That much was obvious. Still, a strange treat to hear it from your lips.” A smile was in his words, one Arianna didn’t quite understand.
“Where are we headed?” She changed the topic as the landscape beneath her began to give way to smaller towns that only grew against the far horizon.
“That down there is Abilla. They’re known for their millineries and cobblers. Some of Nova’s finest textiles come from their looms.”
The rooftops were shingled with wood, the houses made in all shapes and sizes. Arianna saw large windows and small. Bridges stretched between some; over others, ivy crept across to create a leafy walkway. The streets were cobblestone, or gravel, or packed dirt, winding like gnarled roots around the homes.
They were each coated in plaster and washed in some kind of ink, or paint, or clay. Yellow houses stood against purple ones, trimmed in vermilion or edged in ruby. The gears of her mind created smoke that clouded her head as they tried to find a pattern or logic in it. But if there was some rhyme or reason, it eluded her. It looked as though a child had spilled an architect’s models across a mossy surface, then proceeded to draw tall, thin, trees between the shorter balls of foliage connected by spindly trunks.
“See, look there.” Cvareh pointed to a river on the edge of town that had flowed down mightily from the mountains they’d started in. “They’re washing the inks from the fabrics.”
“I know what it looks like to wash ink from cloth.” Arianna rolled her eyes dramatically.
“Really?” He sounded genuinely surprised.
“There’s a science, you know, to getting the right color and getting it to stick to the fibers. I learned it during my basic schooling on Ter.0.”
Cvareh was silent an acceptably somber second following the mention of the demolished Territory on Loom. “I wouldn’t have thought you studied something like dyeing fabric.”
“Why? There’s a practical methodology to it. Furthermore, sometimes you need different colors to mark things like ships or cautionary areas.”
“Practical methodology,” he repeated thoughtfully. “It would be something like that.”
“Let me guess: you do it for these impractical, gaudy rags you call clothes.” Arianna picked at his love of fashion and his clothing in the same breath.
He snorted. “For once, I can’t disagree with you. These are gaudy rags, nearly a full year old.”
She was utterly lost as to why his clothing would have some sort of expiry.
“That’s why we’re headed to Napole!” Cvareh turned forward with elation. The wind swelled beneath them, carrying them higher.
If Arianna hadn’t understood the logic behind the builder’s plans of Abilla, she was utterly hopeless when they arrived in Napole. The hills continued to slope downward to the island’s eventual end, and houses piled atop them precariously in such a way that reminded her of the castle and its ignorance to all form of logic. The structures leaned against each other for support like jolly drunkards, spires drew long shadows across rooftops, and archways reached down to bustling roadways.
As they descended, Dragons paused, shading their eyes with long fingers to peer at the boco headed earthward. A few raised their hands and even more dipped into low bows, the motion barely visible from their height. Arianna glanced at her forearm, worried her illusion had somehow slipped and garnered the attention. It hadn’t.
“Are you that well known?” she asked when Cvareh took note of a genuflecting group.
“I am the Xin’Ryu,” he said it as though it should have been obvious. “The Isle of Ruana is Xin’s. Everyone here is a Xin.”
That was startling. Ariana had been struggling to grasp the notion of family since it had first been introduced on Loom by the Dragons. Two parents rearing a child seemed vastly more ineffective than the communal arrangement of Ter.0 that she had been brought up in. But the size of a single Dragon family now seemed impossibly excessive.How did they even keep track of it all?
“There are red and green Dragons here,” she observed, the colors blurring together as their shadow cut across rooftops.
“There are. A Dragon’s skin color is determined by the island they’re born on, their native House.”
“So two red Dragons can give birth to a blue Dragon?”
“Technically, though I have no idea why two of House Rok would ever move to Ruana.”
“That makes… absolutely no sense.” Arianna’s head hurt already from the lack of reason surrounding her. If she were an Alchemist and possessed more than rudimentary knowledge of biology, she’d likely be having a conniption.
“Why?”
