would make the half-blood forget the forlorn look on my face. It did not. He easily matched my pace.
“Did something happen between you and Mister Itzallion?” His tone was that of a concerned older sibling. I shook my head.
“No,” I denied immediately. “Not besides sleeping in the same room, anyway.”
“Ah.” It was one syllable, but it held the tone of the apology.
I was going to have to assume that something in the drink had made the half-blood a little more rambunctious than usual. I wondered if he had heard me kick the door.
“It’s nothing,” I repeated.
We walked in silence until I noticed a very obvious change in the atmosphere. All of the buildings I had seen in Lahnfabon up to this point, except the inn, were quite drab. They were all painted grays or browns, and had been upheld with no real care.
The houses that flanked us now, however, were covered in bright whites, reds, greens, and golds. The windows were clean; the architecture unique, and the dark-skinned people that milled around the streets were not the homeless squatters I saw in the port.
“Wow,” I said.
The half-blood gave a knowing chuckle.
“Not what you’d expect is it?” he said.
“It’s beautiful here!” I bubbled.
I had never had much interest in the Delfaethans. They had always been so far away, across the sea and a continent. I found myself enraptured with them now and scolded myself for never reading about them.
“Now, if I were a dragon-kin, where would I go?” The half-blood spun around as we walked down toward the center square of Little Oenferia.
I was paying more attention to the buildings than where the kin might have gone, but I was brought back from my observational dreamland when Rio grasped my shoulder and pointed. Following his finger, it was not hard to see a familiar looking set of horns jutting above the crowd.
Most of the Delfaethans gave Levent a wide birth as he walked, which made it easy to follow him through the crowd. I gripped onto the back of Rio’s shirt and he