Darcy’s gaze met his cousin’s, conveying a gratitude that needed no words, before it returned to his sister. “Allow me to add my own voice to Richard's, Sister. His praise is entirely deserved.”
The tears still glistened on her lashes, but the light in her eyes hardened into a steely determination. “Yes,” she said, the word an unwavering commitment, “I will do whatever is required.”
Darcy then turned back to Wickham, his expression once more serious. “It remains only to hear from you, Wickham. Are you willing to try? To put aside your past grievances and join us?”
Wickham looked from Darcy’s face to Georgiana’s tear-streaked, yet hopeful one, then, finally, with a searching gaze, to Elizabeth. A crooked smile touched his lips.
“You know, Darcy,” he said, “it seems you and your remarkably persuasive new wife have finally concocted a scheme even more harebrained and more potentially disastrous than any I ever managed to devise. And coming from me, that is truly saying something. But yes, I will join you. God help us all, for I suspect we shall sorely need the assistance of the Almighty.”
And in that moment, in that gloomy inn parlour, amidst the lingering scent of stale tea and the oppressive shadow of the Blight, something new was forged.
An alliance of disparate magics. A concord of flawed, wounded, yet undeniably, stubbornly human souls.
The best answer they could offer to a dying land.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The new alliance brought a frantic energy to their preparations. Wickham led them to a place of his own finding: the remains of an abandoned coal mine, where the magic felt raw and elemental. “No priests or rituals here,” he said with a grin, “Just the land’s own magic, smothered in Blight.”
There, amidst the slag heaps and rotting timbers, they began. As a baseline, Darcy and Elizabeth first established their own connection. It was now a familiar comfort, an easy fusion of his will and her power.
They had mastered the known. The next step was to attempt something for which no rules existed, an act without precedent in any recorded magical history.
At Darcy’s nod, they extended the invitation to Georgiana to join them. For Elizabeth, her sister-in-law’s magic was an intuitive second language, a gentle, healing flow that her own senses understood immediately.
Darcy’s power was a commanding presence, and for a moment, Elizabeth felt her theory proven true. Defying allknown principles, his will reached for his sister’s to lend it direction. It was an attempt to form a bond, to give her power a foundation of his own unshakeable strength and control. But her magic, a gentle thing, shied away from the immense force. It recoiled, and his power, finding no purchase, simply flattened hers under its oppressive weight. A sharp gasp escaped Georgiana as the connection failed.
Darcy grimaced, his jaw tight with self-reproach. “Forgive me, Georgiana. I have been too forceful.”
“No, Fitzwilliam, you must not say so,” she insisted immediately, “It is only that my own gifts have grown so weak.”
For a fleeting moment, Elizabeth was amused. In their earnest, competing claims of fault, she saw a shared familial tendency, that solemn Darcy need to bear all responsibility, regardless of who was truly to blame. The thought was almost endearing…but the feeling was instantly overshadowed by wearying disappointment.
It had failed. Her audacious hope, her grand theory that Darcy could exert some control over Georgiana’s magic, had collapsed at the very first test.
Darcy, and centuries of arcane theory, had been right after all. The fundamental tenet held. One mage could not wield another’s power.
But this feeling…she had felt it before. As her resonance registered the jarring, painful resistance between brother and sister, a sense of familiarity shot through her. She and Darcy had once failed to light a simple candle together.
And then, abruptly, it was not just a stray feeling, but a truth that settled into her bones.
Her magic, her resonance, couldreadtheirs.
She felt the dissonance between brother and sister, a feedback loop of Darcy’s blocked, frustrated power and Georgiana’s soft retreat. They could not find harmony becausethey were too busy apologising for the discord, each convinced they were the source of the poison.
It was all there for her to read, just as she could read the feel of the land and the trees and the stones. Just as she had always felt the hum in all things. She had felt it from the dying oak at Longbourn, from the corrupted ley lines, and now she felt it from them. She could feel the sharp, rigid frequency of Darcy’s will clashing with the soft, flowing vibration of Georgiana’s healing. They were out of tune, creating that dissonance that was preventing them from connecting.
If this jarring sensation was the nature of failure, what, then, was the essence of their success? She called to mind the memory of the Peaks, the seamless, effortless confluence of their power. And then, even more recently. The night just past, here in this cold inn. The feel of his arms around her, the whisper of her name against her skin. She remembered their shared magic awakening as a dance of light and warmth that filled the room. In that moment, when he had come to her, she had felt a connection so complete it was as if their magics had resolved into a single, beautiful song.
What was the distinction between that perfect harmony and the discord she had felt in the lesser library and that she felt now?
And then the truth presented itself, not as a sudden flash, but as an inexorable epiphany in her mind.
It had beenher.
She had been wrong, she realised, to think it had ever been as simple as Darcy controlling her magic, as if she had been nothing but a passive reservoir of power. All this time, she had, however unconsciously done,madeit into something he could understand.
And she could do that now.
