as it pertained to the responsibilities of their Towers. She didn’t have Kaylin’s visceral and instinctive animosity because she didn’t have Kaylin’s experience. She couldn’t have had it; Dragons couldn’t be hunted by Ferals unless they wanted to be, and in the end, it was the Ferals who would suffer.
Dragons had wings; they could leave the fief anytime they wanted to. Even now, Bellusdeo couldn’t put herself in danger here unless she ambled into the Tower.
Kaylin pulled her thoughts up short. While they were all true, they were irrelevant. Bellusdeo had not had Kaylin’s life—but the life she’d had, the life she’d lost, was in some ways worse. Part of the reason Kaylin hated the fiefs was that they made it so easy to slide back into patterns of thought that she hated. Envy was the worst of it.
That life had led to this one. This one, she wanted. What other people had—or did not have—was irrelevant.
Bellusdeo didn’t take to the skies again. Although she retained her more martial form, she now walked from one end of the Ravellon border to the other. “We cross the border zone here,” she told her companions.
* * *
The border between Durant and Farlonne was, as zones went, similar to the zones they had already crossed. Shades of gray leeched color out of buildings that otherwise seemed a continuous stretch of low-rent dwellings. Bellusdeo had, in her other forays into that zone, moved away from Ravellon; this was the first time she had entered the border zone that skirted its edge.
Kaylin wasn’t certain this was smart.
“I want to prove something to myself,” the Dragon replied.
“And that is?”
“You’re intelligent; you figure it out.” When uttered by Dragon throat, with its rumble and its accompanying visual signals—mostly orange verging on red—this sounded far more condescending than it should have.
Kaylin bit back any knee-jerk reply and grudgingly did as asked because she did have questions that the Arkon hadn’t answered. She’d assumed he was incapable of answering them. Bellusdeo was vastly more suspicious. Suspicion had once been a way of life. Practically the only way of life.
When they reached the nearest gap between buildings that faced Ravellon, she turned toward the fief that had defined Bellusdeo’s adult life. She saw gray. Gray buildings. A gray street. That street continued into the heart of the last of the fiefs—the one that mandated the existence of the other six.
From this vantage, if she closed her eyes and spun in place, she couldn’t tell that the heart of all Shadow—anchored to every world in existence in some fashion—was Ravellon at all. It might have been the way to Farlonne. She turned to look over her shoulder; the Tower of Durant rose above the gray buildings. In the border zone, it was unaltered, except for color.
There was no similar Tower in the heart of the fiefs. The buildings that led there, in theory, were like the Durant buildings. Or the buildings that characterized the other fiefs.
“What do you think would happen if we tried to walk those streets?”
“You catch fire.”
“Did I forget I was with you?”
“Clearly.”
“Okay. What do you think would happen to someone who didn’t have you as a guard if they tried to walk down that street?”
“I imagine they’d walk down the street and when they passed it, they’d be food for Shadows. In the best-case scenario.”
“Yes, but—”
“Yes?”
“But it doesn’t seem like Shadows have much purchase here.”
“No, it doesn’t, does it?”
“I am not certain that Shadows can travel through the border zone,” Severn said. “I haven’t tested the supposition extensively.”
“Or at all?” the Dragon asked.
“Or at all.”
Kaylin frowned her way through the rest of the border zone, and the expression remained fixed to her face when she entered Farlonne.
* * *
Farlonne was, on the edge of Ravellon, quite different than any of the fiefs they’d seen so far. Where the border in the other fiefs was characterized by mostly deserted, flimsy buildings—with the exception of Tiamaris, and the lack of desertion there was new—Farlonne was occupied by a bristling array of fortified stone. These buildings were occupied, and the occupants did not seem to be terrified of either the Hawk, which was expected, or the Dragon, which was not.
Most of the people who therefore came out of these stone buildings, all too large to be simple dwellings unless their owners were monied, were alert, armed and human. They were, however, accompanied by Barrani. Armored Barrani.
Although Bellusdeo was alert as she all but ordered Kaylin and Severn to stand back,