This was not the simple, unified horror of Buxton's fiery inferno. Compared to this, Buxton had been a single, snapped string. The ground beneath them shuddered, and a groan echoed from the quarry walls. Without Darcy’s control, wild, undirected power erupted from around them, scorching a patch of nearby earth. The air reeked with the rotten scent of sulphur.
We must hold together, she thought, a frantic plea against the rising tempest.
But amidst the storm of their clashing powers, she felt the venom sharpen. Through their bond, Elizabeth felt the Blight's seductive whisper, the dark temptation to seize Pemberley.
She saw Wickham squeeze his eyes shut, his jaw tight, a man wrestling with a serpent she could now feel whispering in his ear.
Through the splintered thrum of their magic, a cascade of images bled through their connection — not her memories, but his. The gaunt faces of starving children in the alleys of Newcastle. Georgiana, stopping to press a few coins intoa desperate mother’s hand. She heard the bitterness in his pragmatic argument: ‘This is not Pemberley, Ana! We do not have a bottomless purse to give away!’ And she felt the simple goodness behind Georgiana’s reply: ‘We have what we have. And tonight, they are in greater need than we are.’
The air became a screaming funnel of power, not of the Blight’s making, but of their own. Brutal wind gales clashed with furious rock and ice.
Another bright image followed: the gritty, triumphant aftermath of a skirmish won. She felt the sting of dust in his throat, the ache in his muscles, and then the overwhelming roar of his name being cheered by others. A sensation so unfamiliar it was almost painful. It was the feeling of being valued.
But before she could even process the fragile hope in that feeling, it was violently undercut by a surge of fear from Darcy. His grief and guilt ripped through her, and she saw the vision the Blight was forcing upon him: the inferno at Buxton, but it was her, Elizabeth, trapped in the heart of the flames, screaming his name as the fire consumed her.Your control is an illusion, the Blight hissed at him.You failed to protect your sister. You will fail to protect your wife.
The sky was ripped open by a flash of green, sourceless lightning that cast their struggling forms in skeletal relief. The ground buckled, fissures of raw power rupturing from the earth.
Darcy’s paralysing terror slammed into her, so sharp and selfless that it cut through her own. But what it aroused in her was not fear in return.
It was anger.
A protective fury stirred within her, fury at the Blight for daring to touch him, for daring to use his love for her as a weapon against him.
She saw him in the firelight of their sitting room, his eyes intrigued with possibility as she first proposed a new way ofworking together. She recalled the ghost of his beautiful smile after their first success in the Peaks. She heard the amusement in his voice as he teased her about billiards.
She felt the brush of Darcy’s hand against hers as he turned the pages of her music, the solid warmth of his body as he held her in the cold inn at Newcastle, the tenderness in his eyes as he had handed her his mother's book of poetry.
Most vividly, she remembered the breathtaking sweetness of his kiss, the whispered reverence of her name on his lips, the feel of his body against hers. She remembered the magic between them responding in kind, shattering its confines, no longer a simple line connecting them but a soft mantle of warmth that filled the room. She felt it everywhere, a delicious heat not just where his fingers touched her, but on every inch of her skin, a possessive claim she had answered with a fierce joy.
These were the truths that mattered now. The visceral emotion overwhelmed her own fears. The memory of the cradle did not vanish, but it lost its power, its mournful whisper drowned out by the roar of her love for him.
Wrenching free from the Blight’s despair, Elizabeth threw all of her magical force into the fray, not as an attack, but as a desperate, binding agent, trying to weave the tearing, flailing threads back together.
But the storm still raged. Her individual victory was not enough to quell the chaos.
Not when Darcy, the core to their power, was still in its thrall.
Their magics, still untethered from Darcy’s iron will, lashed out into the physical world. Waves of searing heat and frosty cold pulsed outwards in succession. A spasm of power sent spires of rock tearing upward. From the cracks in the ground, Georgiana’s healing magic bled outwards as bursts of impossibly vibrant flowers that withered to ash as soon as they bloomed.
The strain was excruciating; she felt the dissonance as a physical shearing in her own mind. And worse, she could feel their clashing powers ripping into ley line below. The ley line screamed in her mind; she felt its agony as a physical tremor, a death rattle that vibrated up from the soles of her feet.
William,she groaned, her senses screaming,I need you.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The Blight’s triumphant glee filled the void. It poured its malice into the cracks, waiting for them to shatter, hungry for them to unleash a force that would sunder the land from the sky. The bond was a heartbeat from catastrophic, irreversible collapse.
Then, through the agonising chaos, came a whisper of warmth.
Darcy.
He had heard her call, and he had fought his way back to her.
She felt him set himself, with a will forged in the heart of his terror for her. He stopped trying to withdraw from the agony of the vision. He let it in. He let the terrifying, all-consuming power of what she meant to him break over him. He seized upon that love, and used it as a fixed point in the storm.
It was the same ardent love he had confessed in the carriage, the love that had survived her brutal rejection, the love he had tried so desperately to master and contain. But it was a love now answered and understood, a truth learnt not in words but in the heart, in a carnal language more ancient than mankind’s firstfire.
She felt it as a clean fire that roared to life within their bond, a blaze born of the force of a husband's absolute devotion. The icy horror the Blight had inflicted upon him was reforged into a white-hot resolve. The promise he had made to her —Buxton will not happen again— became an iron-clad vow that slammed into place, instantly stabilising the tearing energies. His authority was a deep, soothing current of pure will, reassuring and bolstering.
