As another breath began, I laid the flat of my bare palm against her nose. It fit easily between her nostrils; I could have placed both hands side-by-side. The heat under my skin was fevered. The scales were sharp as roughly stacked blades.
I pressed hard, like I would prod a reluctant cow. There was no give, not the suppleness of mammalian skin, not yielding muscle, certainly not retreat. An animalistic fear unnerved the muscles in my arm. This was an adamantine colossus, as old and massive as the pyramids, a creature whispered of in myths of fallen cities.
Her eyes flickered, turbid with spectral hints, each a roiling jewel. But changing. Brightening with beautiful gossamer hints of gold.
“You are aware,” I whispered. “The injured mind thirsts even more to comprehend. My sister has seen your past. She told me you rise in vengeance against wrongs. Remember what you were. It is the corrupt and powerful who covet and steal. If you overcome her—if you overwhelm her—you pollute yourself. The memories you treasure would diminish toignes fatui. All you value would become mockery.”
So abruptly that I staggered, the muzzle withdrew a yard, then farther. There was a gargantuan wheeling of gleaming black and the metallic grind of rubbing scales, then a blasting wash of fetid, acrid odor, and she was gone.
My outstretched arm hung, shaking. My ankles and feet were freezing. I clenched my fingers, feeling as if my heart had stopped and restarted, then turned.
Lizzy stood, eyes closed and face uplifted, her attention distant—her pose when sharing a draca’s vision. Yuánchi’s vision. His head was a few yards above hers, his gaze on me.
Yuánchi’s thought came.The will of a great wyfe has power.
Lizzy whispered, “You are shining, Mary.”
“What?” I said. How like my sister that sounded.
“It was you at the ball. The fourth great wyfe. But your aura is different. It stretches like a rainbow to the north. Toward Pemberley.”
Fragments of facts fluttered past my mind’s eye, like when weeks of research first hint at connected meaning.
“Lizzy,” I said, “at the performance tonight. At the musical event for the royal court. I had planned... I hoped to show you a truth about me.”
Her eyelids opened, and she smiled through pale lips. “Show me then. Nothing will keep me from your performance. I have another day, at least.” She picked up her leather cap with its funny, round goggles and began hauling herself up the harness ladder.
A tiny movement caught my eye. A few feet from my frosted boot, the thick hilltop grass had eroded where the black ichor dripped. A small, segmented worm emerged from the ebon-stained, freshly barren earth. It was the length of my little finger, with dozens of pairs of legs, and pincer stings at the rear. A foul crawler: mundane, small, and deadly. That tiny sting would kill me as surely as the titan I had touched.
All the strangeness affecting our family began when Jane rode to Netherfieldto visit our handsome new neighbor, Mr. Bingley, and was stung by a foul crawler. Like the crawlers that answered to Lydia when she drank their venom.
Again, fragmented facts teased my mind. A flickering page from our family journal. The history of the Bennets reached far back. Even the name of our family estate, Longbourn, was a corruption of old lore:loch bairn, Child of the Lake.
But no image assembled in my mind’s eye. Like the composition of a painting, an image requires clarity of comprehension. Pieces of the puzzle fit, but I did not comprehend the whole.
40
TOGETHER
LIZZY
My feet sankinto the damp winter soil of the Briton village clearing. I rested my gloved palms on Yuánchi’s side, feeling wobbly after two hours in the air, and thought,Thank you. Then I took a bracing breath and turned.
Darcy stood a dozen yards away, one hand firm on the neck of his wild-eyed gray stallion, frightened by proximity to a dragon. Behind him, Mr. Needham and the girl harnessers huddled, apparently attempting to sink into the earth.
From the air, I had seen Darcy wheel his mount when we glided overhead, then gallop like a madman to where we would land. Now, he was rigid and unmoving.
I wet my lips. “Love, I had to. They had captives. Mary’s friend was taken. After what I did, I could not go on—”
He rushed forward and trapped me in his arms, then whispered, “You are an insane fool. You are a miracle.” That was encouraging, and relief flooded me. I let myself be held, cheek resting on his chest and his heart thumping hard in my ear. He added more sternly, “Never leave me again.”
After hours of frankness with Mary, it was a shock to remember I had not told him of my illness. Guilt for my silence and anger at fate’s injustice filled me, but there was less fear this time. The rescue of those women had softenedit. Perhaps this was how soldiers survived the specter of death. Count those that you save.
Still, I swallowed, and guilt turned my voice foolishly bright. “About that…”
“Whatabout that?” he said suspiciously, but then Mary clambered to earth, puffing in frank relief. He stiffened in my arms and said to her angrily, “You terrified Georgiana!”
“No more than myself,” Mary muttered.
