Chapter 51 A Choice of Destiny #3
“The Britons from the village. Your sister is ignoring her foul sentries, and Wickham’s rabble has set no guards. They will be surprised, but they are a large force. I do not know if the Britons can overcome them. The confusion is our best chance.”
“I will not leave my husband.”
I got to my feet as the argument reached a peak.
Wickham pushed Lydia aside, and she fell to her knees.
I recognized the outraged O of her mouth from our youth—little Lydia, furious at not getting her way.
Soon, she would recall she was not little Lydia anymore.
She controlled a monstrous crawler a dozen yards from us.
Shots rang out from the nearby trees. Wickham’s men in their fake militia uniforms began shouting and running, firing their guns in every direction.
Wickham seemed not to notice. He raised his pistol, the steel muzzle a foot from Mr. Darcy’s forehead. Wickham’s face swiveled to me, his eyes crazed. “Tell him you do not love him!”
What an idiotic request. I could not renounce the purest feeling I had ever experienced.
The earth jerked under my feet. I stumbled. Wickham looked around wildly, his arms outspread for balance.
The ground shuddered like a wooden bridge crossed by an iron carriage. Confused cries of Cannon! rose from the men in the meadow. But I had heard no cannon.
Like ice and flame together, a silver dagger pierced my heart. My breath jammed in my throat. I folded at my waist, hands clutching my chest to hold the wound. But there was no blood. No pain. Slowly, I straightened, unseen silver radiance filling me.
A silver thread drew my eyes to the distant hills.
By Pemberley lake, a patch of sun streaming between the clouds flicked to shadow. An instant later, it was bright again.
“Say it!” screamed Wickham. Shots blasted to my right. A bullet whined past. But Wickham’s eyes were fixed on me. The gaze of a man I hated.
The sunlight filling a nearer field turned dark, then relit.
“Kill me instead,” I answered. “For I would sooner die.”
CHILD.
The word sang in me, vibrating through the silver cord, shaking my bones like a colossal church organ.
CLOSE YOUR EYES.
The voice was ancient thunder in my mind. I closed my eyes.
My eyelids lit red, then blazed white. A tempest slammed me. My ears were overcome. I tumbled and landed on my hands and knees, my fingertips sunk into wild grass and clover.
I opened my eyes as the wind diminished. Wickham’s militia rabble were sprawled across the meadow, arms thrown over their faces or fingers digging at their eyes.
I got to my feet. By habit, I smoothed my dress. My fingers came away wet and sticky. My dress was sprayed with blood.
Fear cut my heart. Wickham had shot my husband. The roar was the gun.
Terrified, I spun.
Mr. Darcy knelt alone, his eyes closed. He was untouched. He opened his eyes, and his astonished gaze met mine.
The guards that had held him were gone. Wickham was gone.
Where Wickham had stood, three parallel gouges were torn through the grass and earth. I recognized the pattern. Those same claw marks had decorated my collarbone after our drake landed on my shoulder. But this claw spanned the better part of two yards.
A matching set of three cuts tore the ground where the guards holding my husband had stood. A hat remained, and a broken belt with a sword, and a sleeve with a flesh-colored glove. No, it was a hand.
Wickham’s boot lay on the ground at my feet. The heavy leather was sheared off ankle-high, as if by a huge razor. The boot was not empty.
Heat was scorching my forehead. I looked up.
The meadow beyond, which had held twenty armed men, was scoured to burning bedrock that glowed like coals.
The brook had vanished. Water burbled over a rim of smoking turf then hissed into violent plumes of steam.
Where the wagon had stood, a smoking puddle of golden liquid flowed lazily over slumping rock.
“What happened?” I asked.
Lydia pushed to her feet, not far from where Wickham had stood. Her ferretworm dangled from one hand like a child’s toy, squealing in protest.
Lydia’s face turned to the sky. “Oh. I feel him. He is beautiful.”
The silver thread had drawn my eyes upward. The clouds were swirling—burning away like steam vanishing from a kettle. The blue sky opened.
Higher than clouds, scarlet wings soared in a slow curve. The silhouette was delicate and long winged, more like a drake than the muscular solidness of a wyvern. But so far above us. So large.
“A dragon,” I said. The myths were true after all.
Child.
The voice was gentler now. The sense of wisdom and age was overwhelming, but it was not loud in the mundane, human sense of the word.
I choose you. Loch bairn. The Child of the Lake.
The cool silver of binding flooded my heart and filled the hollows of my chest. And it passed through me. The cord stretched from me to where my husband knelt.
Behind me, a flurry of gunshots rang out.
Some of Wickham’s false militia were pointing at the sky. Others were shooting into the forest. From the foliage, the Britons’ muskets spat puffs of sooty orange as they fired back.
The monster crawler was running on rippling legs toward the forest. Other large crawlers had emerged from rocky areas and were racing behind it. Sent by Lydia to attack the Britons.
A hand touched my shoulder. I turned to Lydia.
“Give him to me!” Her eyes were ecstatic, her mouth grinning. I had not seen her so happy since she was three years old and learned she could unwrap gifts by herself.
Below the joyful smile, the skin of her chin hung in sickly jowls. Her lips had cracked. Dark purple blood stained her teeth. Her gaze wandered across the features of my face, skittering past my eyes.
“He cannot be given,” I said. “Or taken.”
“I can take him!” She cried. “I can be stronger. I will be Empress!”
She raised her ferretworm high and stabbed her knife deep into his neck.
She dragged the blade down, yanking inch by inch to cut the body open.
The dying creature’s curdling yellow blood soaked her hand.
She lifted the twitching remains, steaming flesh dangling, and let the blood fall into her open mouth and over her chin.
“Lydia, stop.” I forced the words through horror and revulsion. “It is over.” Her power was growing, bloated with the false strength of hurt and death, astonishing and violent while it attacked the binding that pierced my chest. But it was a wisp against the strength of the being who bound me.
Lydia lifted her yellow-stained hands to the sky. “Come to me!”
Far above, the dragon had finished his turn and was gliding toward us. Around us, the earth broke as small foul crawlers wriggled out and crawled toward me.
“I am the strongest sister!” she cried. “I will be Empress! I will burn everyone! I—oh.”
Her voice stopped with an arrested gasp. She turned to me, eyes wide.
“Lizzy,” she whispered. Her hand caught mine. She sank to her knees, then fell on her side, her clenched grip pulling me to my knees beside her.
A sword protruded from her back. The hilt jammed against the dirt, propping her at an awkward, splayed angle.
Mr. Darcy was on his knees, bruised and bleeding. His hand was still outstretched.
“I swore I would not hesitate.” His voice shook. “Not when those I love are threatened.”
Lydia’s fingers still held mine. Her grip relaxed.
A memory returned—the last time I sat with Papa in his library. While we talked, his finger had stroked the paper that entrusted Longbourn to me. As if it comforted him.
“I promised Papa,” I said. “I promised to care for our family.”
“She was calling the dragon!” Mr. Darcy’s voice was strained. “You said she was stronger. I heard you.”
“We are bound. She could never break that.” But he would not know that.
The dragon’s glide, so graceful in the distance, became a storm as scarlet wings a hundred feet wide screamed over our heads.
Heat roared behind me, painful on my bare neck and lighting the meadow brighter than sun.
Mr. Darcy threw an arm up to shield his eyes.
Thunder shook my clothes and rumbled in the depths of my chest, then rolled back from the hills around us.
Mr. Darcy opened his eyes. “My God.”
Still kneeling, I turned my head. A swath of meadow ten yards wide and fifty long had become a burning hell. The huge foul crawlers were writhing carcasses in the flames. Smaller ashen humps lay still. Men.
Please stop, I thought. We are safe.
“I failed you.” Mr. Darcy’s fingertips touched my wrist. They were trembling. “I have betrayed your promise.”
Although my body was still, a hidden part of me was screaming. But I was a wyfe. I was stronger than this.
I forced my fingers open. Lydia’s hand fell lifelessly. I fumbled for Mr. Darcy’s hand, and our fingers knotted. I felt his warmth. His life pulsed in mine. My silent cries quieted to a shroud of grief.
“You betrayed nothing,” I said. “My sister was already gone. She died long before this.”
Miss Darcy was helping Lord Wellington, her arm around his waist while she explained the Britons’ draca essence. Good. She would ensure he was dosed.
Lord Wellington turned as the dragon swept over a ridge. His eyes narrowed. Analyzing. Strategizing.
Gently—uncertainly—Mr. Darcy’s arm circled my waist. He helped me to my feet. I pressed into his side, and his hesitancy ended. He pulled me close. Already, we fit together so well. Branches grown together.
“She would have killed us all,” I whispered. Tears were wet on my cheeks. “She would have thrown down England.” Lydia would have gifted an army of monstrous crawlers to Napoleon. If she survived the horrible sacrifice of her draca.
Air lifted my hair then whooshed down, billowing my skirts and blowing leaves and stones across the ground.
The dragon landed twenty paces from us, his wings hiding the sky before they closed.
This close, his size was unimaginable. His body was twice the length of a carriage, his tail and neck long and sinuous.
He balanced on two crouched legs, the muscles bunched like knotted oak.
Fastidious, he adjusted his wings until they were neat, then he sat, raising his chest and shoulders high like a dog.
His neck, glistening in a sheath of scarlet diamonds, twined until his head was a few yards from me.
Inhuman eyes shifted through prisms of color.
The border of my mind blurred as I stared into them.
Child of the Lake. I am called Yuánchi.
The reflex of introduction was automatic. “I am Mrs. Elizabeth Darcy.”
“I hear him,” my husband breathed. Miss Darcy and Lord Wellington had backed away. They looked at us in confusion. They had not heard.
You are the wyfe of war. The wyfe of war may not call me.
His claws, like edged ebony pickaxes, cut into the earth. The soles of my feet trembled as bedrock shattered.
I have slain your enemies. But you grieve. The wyfe of war does not grieve. Who are you?
“I grieve for my sister,” I said. “I have killed her.” My husband’s arm stiffened around my waist.
The faceted eyes glittered. Then you are ruthless. You are the wyfe of war.
Pressure pried at my mind. A vibration grumbled in my skull, too deep to be heard. Fire building in a giant’s forge.
“You killed no one,” Mr. Darcy said, his voice by my ear. “I will not permit you to take blame for my actions.”
“I killed Wickham.” I remembered hating him as Yuánchi approached. Condemning him. “If I stopped him sooner, I could have saved Lydia.” But I doubted my own words. I had seen Wickham’s eyes when he watched Lydia. How afraid he was.
Mr. Darcy’s fingers encircled my forearms. He cradled my elbows and drew me around, tearing my gaze away from Yuánchi. The pressure vanished.
I pressed my cheek to his shirt, dusty and damp with sweat. His voice resonated through his chest when he spoke.
“Now it is you who protects someone who did not ask for protection. I made my own choice. And Wickham doomed himself.”
ANSWER. Are you the wyfe of war? Yuánchi’s words were hammer blows.
But the blows skittered away. Unexpected as fury, iron certainty filled me. “No!” I said even as my husband said, “She is not!”
I raised my head. Each crystal facet of Yuánchi’s eyes shone with an aspect of the world—the azure of blue sky, the emerald of a distant hill, the dirty carmine of dying fire.
“I will never be that,” I said. “No archaic verse rules me. My destiny is my own. War is horrible. I will be no party to it.”
Yuánchi’s massive jaws opened, and he huffed with the laughter of his kind.
The Child of the Lake is old and wise.
The grumbling threat of violence faded.
Wickham’s men had thrown down their weapons. The Britons were herding them together. But pairs of captor and prisoner kept stopping, gaping at the scarlet dragon.
I let go of Mr. Darcy but held his hand as I faced Yuánchi.
“What do you seek?” I asked.
My kind live in solitude. We seek what is alien. Love. Passion. But I, Yuánchi, want more. I seek what is shared. Moral right. Sacrifice. Loyalty.
Miss Darcy was helping Lord Wellington toward the Britons. But Lord Wellington stopped and called to me.
“Mrs. Darcy. We must speak about what has happened. It is a matter of urgency.”
I did not answer. Miss Darcy helped him walk away.
Yuánchi stretched across the earth. His moving skin whispered like a bowl of jewels stirred with a finger. His chest and neck lowered to the ground, the scales glowing in the sunlight.
What do you seek, Child of the Lake?
I thought of Mr. Rabb’s opinion of English ladies and their embroidery.
My husband opened schools. Mary wrote music that revealed her soul.
My father had written books. They were on a shelf in his library, covered with dust. Sometimes, while I had exercised my wit in scorn of foolish society, his gaze had drifted to them.
I had never read them.
I remembered Mary’s summary of my life. Complacent.
“I would change the world,” I said.
Hands clasped, Mr. Darcy and I walked forward together.