“There!” a man cried. “Look what she does!”
Elizabeth did not mean to move. She did not mean to answer the pressure building inside her. Yet the earth beneath her boots seemed to harden, then shudder, as if resisting something that demanded passage.
Darcy tightened his grip.
“You will cease threatening her, Lady Catherine,” he said, and there was no politeness in it. “You are driving the crisis!”
Lady Catherine’s chin lifted a fraction. “You mistake defiance for devotion,” she replied. “The land does not belong to appetite, Darcy. It belongs to lineage and restraint. Stand aside.”
The men behind her shifted again, emboldened by her presence. One took a step forward. Another reached toward Elizabeth’s cloak as though to seize it.
Elizabeth felt the strange, wild forces that had shielded her before falter—no longer gathering around her in fierce defence, but scattering, confused, as though her proximity to Darcy had altered their allegiance.
The torches guttered. Then flared. Then bent sideways in a wind that did not touch her hair.
“She’s doing it again!”
“Take her—take her now—”
The torches flared and guttered in the same breath. One dropped from its holder’s grasp and hissed out in the damp grass. The sword embedded in the earth vibrated once more before toppling flat.
Another torch swung too wide and caught the sleeve of a man behind it. He shouted, beating at his own coat. A horse reared, nearly crushing a boy who stumbled beneath its hooves.
“Stop,” Elizabeth whispered. She did not know to whom she spoke. “Stop—”
Darcy’s breathing shallowed, and he coughed… blood.
“Seize her!” Lady Catherine cried. “Remove her from him! You see what she does! Stand idle, and she will ruin you all!”
Hands lunged. Darcy shifted to shield her, and she felt the cost of it in the tremor that ran through him. The ground beneath them gave a sharp, splitting crack—not wide, not deep, but enough to unbalance the men nearest them.
Then Elizabeth saw a child near the road’s edge—fallen, scrambling as another horse shied. If the surge came again… If it struck blind…
Someone could be killed. And she would destroy Darcy.
“No!” she cried aloud.
And something in the air collapsed. The torches burned straight. The water stilled. The iron lay inert in the mud.
The force withdrew.
Simply gone.
For the first time since the inn yard, she stood unguarded. Hands seized her arms, tore her sleeves, pulled the cloak from her shoulders.
Darcy tried to wrench her back, but the strength was no longer in him. She felt him almost withering beneath her fingers as they were torn from him. Someone struck him across the shoulder. Another shoved him aside.
“Do not!” she cried, twisting. “Leave him be! I am the one you want!”
Behind her, Darcy stumbled, caught himself as his knees hit the earth.
“Darcy—” she began, though she did not know what she meant to say.
“You see it,” Lady Catherine said, not to Elizabeth but to the men who held her. “You see the disorder she breeds. Even now, it falters and surges at her whim. Would you have this upon your fields? Your children? She is a demon. Unnatural!”
A murmur answered her—fear finding sanction.
“You will come to Kent,” Lady Catherine informed him, as one pronounces a conclusion long settled. “You will restore what you have unsettled. This spectacle is the consequence of your indulgence. You will not compound it.”
