Chapter 1
Breathless
Fire. There was nothing else. It seared his chest, blistered his throat, and scorched his mind. Fear blinded him. His ears were deaf to all but a throbbing roar. He could not breathe; he could not move. He knew only fire—until oblivion extinguished even that.
Pain roused him as mercilessly as it had quelled him. Ferocious, terrifying pain unlike any he had ever known. An almighty thudding shook his mind inside his skull and beat its rage against his ribs. He fought to ease it, strained to fill the vacuum in his chest, but a sickening scrape arose, and no air penetrated his constricted throat. His lungs screamed their protest. He would have screamed also, had he any breath to spare.
He feared the pressure would rupture him somewhere and trembled at the thought. Waves of panic ebbed and flowed, the troughs of sweet numbness between them growing everdeeper, ever wider. The agony of hollow lungs became less than the torture of attempting to fill them. He ceased the attempt.
The rushing in his ears intensified, thrumming louder, murmuring, calling to him. Its words were unclear, but the tone of it—urgent, unyielding, familiar—caught him and held him just shy of obscurity. The harder he struggled, the more insistent grew the voice, compelling him to fight until, abruptly, icy air touched his burning lungs. Reflexively, he gulped for more.
“Short, shallow breaths. If you struggle, it will be worse.”
The words kept their meaning greedily to themselves and left him to gasp in confusion and futility for another breath. He opened his mouth wide as though the sky might pour its contents into him. It did, and he choked on it—a gurgling, excruciating spasm that abraded his already fraying consciousness.
“You have been injured, sir! You must take shallower breaths.”
He hauled leaden arms to claw at his throat and loosen whatever devil gripped him there, but his fingers discovered only more pain. Something took hold of his hands and moved them away. A gentle weight alit upon his breastbone.
“Concentrate on the rise and fall of your chest.” The weight lifted. “A little up.” A lighter pressure returned, forcing non-existent air from his lungs. “A little down. A little up. A little down. Dwell not on the pain, Mr Darcy. Think only of the rise and fall.”
Mr Darcy, he thought.I am he! I am he.
When the weight lifted off his chest, he pushed his ribs after it, chasing the contact. And though his swollen gullet raged against the incursion, air trickled past in a wretched pretension to breath.
Consciousness came and went, delivering him in and out of torment. Whenever the darkness receded, so resumed his struggle. On and on, heartbeat after heartbeat, he battled to answer the furious demand for air. Now and then, he was buffeted by the world: a touch to his face, a limb rearranged, the muffled drone of words in his ear. Nothing obtruded sufficiently to rouse him to full awareness. All he knew was the effort to keep breathing.
If he lay still enough, if he inhaled with adequate caution, he found he could manage it. Enough to stave off the myriad bursts of light that coalesced before his unseeing eyes with each missed breath. Whenever the pressure grew too great, he was recalled to the gentle but emphatic instruction to think of the rise and fall. The echo of it was all that remained. The voice itself had been absent for some time. The only sound to be heard was a hideous, wet rattle that seemed to come from inside his own head and coincided disconcertingly with his arduous respirations. Fear flooded him. It roiled in his gut, awaiting each moment stupefaction waned enough to promise a glimpse of lucidity, then arose to usurp all reason and tear up his composure.
There were no words of comfort left in the air, and what little connexion he retained to the world had become distinctly less human in nature. Absent were the touch of hands and warmth of breath upon his face. In their place were icy flicks of falling sleet, appalling coldness seeping into his bones, and unrelenting pain. Dread tightened its noose about his neck, forcing a crescendo in his rasping breaths. He was grievously injured—dying, mayhap—and he was alone. He cried out, though it made no sound. His mute scream only convulsed his tongue and churned his stomach.
An ephemeral glimmer of light seized him from the brink of despair. A faint arc of luminescence that swept by and fleetingly revealed a towering fortress of black trees and a thousand tumbling snowflakes. It passed over him again, and once again, before it ceased its beacon blink and became a constant glow. The trees reared up over him again. He heard shouting, briefly, before it receded beyond his ken and took the light with it. The trees shrank back into darkness. Something disturbed the snow by his shoulder; cold flecks spattered his cheek. A muted voice—“I am here!”—then no more.
Disturbing, shapeless dreams sloughed away to reveal the loud clattering as a nightmare very much of the waking world. Would that his teeth not so forcefully bang together, nor his limbs so violently shake, for every tremor inflamed his agony, yet he was perishingly cold. Every arduous breath dragged icy air into his raw windpipe and could not have hurt more had he swallowed shards of glass. He drew ever smaller breaths, perfectly willing to forfeit consciousness in exchange for respite.
His little boat rocked and rocked until he feared it would tip him into the lake. His cousin, returned to boyhood, skimmed a pebble from the bank. It skipped across the water, growing larger the nearer it came, and hit Darcy in the chest, no longer a pebble but a boulder. It crushed him, squeezing the air from his lungs and forcing his eyes open.
There was movement, though no boat or lake, nor anything so reassuring as his cousin’s youthful visage. Something beneath him did rock and sway. It matched the pitch and heave of his jagged breathing. He was not averse to it; it afforded something on which to concentrate other than fear and coldand hurt. Pitch and roll, inhale, exhale, pitch and roll, inhale, exhale.
A sudden lurch threw his arm sideways into mid-air. His head lolled violently in the same direction and pain exploded in his neck as it was wrenched askew. A cry he had no power to withhold slammed mutely against the obstruction in his gullet and all that escaped him was an agonised wheeze, followed by the wet clack of his ruined throat as he tried in vain to drag the lost air back in. His pulse raged in his ears.
God help me!He prayed and dared any deity to hear him over the cacophonous din of his breathing.
His arm was lifted back to his side. Something touched his face, gently rolled his head back into alignment, and held it there.
“Shallow breaths, sir. Concentrate on small, shallow breaths.”
Darcy had no wish to concentrate on the torture of respiration. He attended, instead, to the heat of the hands that held his head steady and the familiar, feminine voice that assured him, against all obvious reason, that he would be well.
She was not usually so compliant. Her conversation was more commonly punctuated by enigmatic smirks and the challenge of a raised eyebrow. He regarded her, standing by the pianoforte, eyes flashing, and wondered if he might draw a rise were he to suggest they dance a reel. He could not ask, for the walls of Netherfield’s drawing room wavered to such a degree as to impede his path to the instrument. The room creased and bunched itself out of existence. Elizabeth was tucked away within its folds and Darcy was cast adrift.
His cheeks were cold where the hands had been. There was clattering and banging, shouts, and a horse’s whinny. There was dampness on his face, numbness in his feet, and agony everywhere else. He could make no sense of anythingas he was jostled and tugged roughly about. The voice said something in a vexed tone, making it even more familiar. Then another, deeper voice was raised, and whatever Darcy lay upon was shoved violently forwards. The ground fell away, his arms slipped heavily from his sides to dangle over the abyss, and he gasped involuntarily, fearing he would likewise fall. Pain overwhelmed him and awareness fled.
In a vast, wall-less chamber, his old fencing instructor advanced towards him, arm and practice foil outstretched. Darcy had no foil of his own, nor the ability to move away. The instructor did not appear troubled by his student’s disadvantage and grinned amiably as he slid the blade deep into Darcy’s throat and out the other side. Light flickered all around, glinted briefly off the blade protruding from his neck, then flared blindingly and sent his dreams scattering.
Warmth stung his frozen skin. He forced his eyes open and squinted at the blurry mire of shapes looming over him. They pulled at his collar and poked at whatever lay beneath it that hurt so abominably. Darcy attempted to push them away, but his arms refused to comply. He shook his head—“No!”—then ground his teeth to stop from crying out as the movement tore his throat.
Every breath became harder won, every exhalation cost him a little more strength. Pain and air had become the same thing. The ground beneath him shifted again, and he was tossed about like flotsam on the ocean. He was at Ramsgate, in the sea. Wickham stood upon the quay, gripping Georgiana’s wrist tightly and sneering down into the water. A chain about Darcy’s ankle held him just below the surface. He could swim no higher, he could not reach his sister, he could not draw breath. He could do nothing but drown as the sound of the ocean filled his ears.
