Page 17 of Invocation

He glanced up at her again before he wrote, his eyes lingering on hers. “Have you ever seen other Varai in Ardani?” he asked.

She hated to tell him the truth. But she couldn’t lie. “No.”

He gave her a dark smirk.

“That doesn’t mean it’s impossible,” she added.

“How do you think a Varai would survive outside Kuda Varai?”

“Carefully. With the help of a local. The same way I survived in Kuda Varai.”

He closed his eyes, cheek propped on his hand. Rain drummed against the walls and on the ground outside.

“I would like to see Ardani,” he wrote after a while.

Novikke smiled.

“I dreamed of traveling there, when I was young, before I learned it was impossible. I’ve heard Valtos is so large that all of Kuda Varai could fit inside it. Is that true?”

“No. But it’s still pretty big,” she wrote.“You’ve never been outside Kuda Varai?”

He slowly shook his head.

“There are deserts in the southeast, plains across the middle of the country, and snow-covered mountains to the north.” Her eyes went wide suddenly. “You’ve never seen the ocean,” she wrote.

He shook his head again.

“When we finish this, I’m going to take you to see it.”

He smiled in a way that made her think he wasn’t taking her seriously.

“Why—” he wrote, then stopped. Novikke’s gaze hovered on the word. She raised an eyebrow.

He abandoned that beginning and started anew. ”I’ve done nothing but hurt you, and you’ve done nothing but help me.”

“You protected me when I couldn’t protect myself,” she wrote.

“Not as much as I should have.”

He still regretted the way things had happened when they’d met. But when she thought about it, she couldn’t see any other way that things could have gone. He’d done all the right things to protect himself and his people, and had still been as fair to her as he could. There was a good reason that humans were kept out of Kuda Varai, as had been made clear after they’d run into the Ardanians. That the two of them had managed to protect each other, in spite of so many people working against them, was a miracle.

She turned the page and realized that the next page was the last in the book. They might need that last page for an emergency.

“Sleep?” she wrote.

Dawn light leaked through the cracks of the shuttered window. Aruna nodded.

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