Chapter 13 Discoveries #2
Shell. Not a grub’s translucent skin.
Two pairs of delicate, insect-like wings opened, and it churred into the air. Heads ducked as it sailed in a clumsy arc and plunked heavily among the overgrown bean plants. Muffled, angry buzzes sounded, like a wasp trapped against a window.
Surprise turned to excitement. “A grasshopper!” “Too many legs.” “Not a crawler, not with wings!” “Chunky bastard, whatever it is… your pardon, ladies.”
My eyes were on the tangled greenery. A tenth of an acre, five hundred square yards, infested with crawlers. But not like the grub from the plums. Mature crawlers, ready to emerge.
I caught Mr. Digweed’s eye. “The field must be burned. Quickly.”
“Yes, surely.” He pursed his lips, looking toward Pemberley’s barns, out of view and a mile away. “Shall I ride to bring men?”
The angry buzz became overlapped buzzes. The plants shivered, and wet pops snapped as pods split. A winged form lobbed head-high and dropped deeper in the field, then a dozen followed. The buzzing swelled explosively, suddenly louder than swarming bees.
A thumb-sized shape flew from the tangled bean plants and plopped at my feet. It was unquestionably a crawler, a pair of pinchers on the head, and a pair of insectile legs on each shiny body segment. Only the wings, webbed and transparent like a mayfly’s, were unusual.
The twin stingers at the rear vibrated like greedy needles. Then a lustrous blur skimmed by my ankles, leaving a puff of transparent blue flame inches from my toes—draca flame. Even that tiny breath radiated heat. The crawler’s wings crisped to ash. Its body writhed and crackled.
More crawlers lofted from the field, passing between us and over our heads. Mr. Gastrell shrieked and flailed his arm, then stomped on the ground. A crawler flew toward me but was intercepted midair by a swerving song draca breathing fire. The crawler fell, a smoking cinder.
The men shouted warnings as a twisting column of crawlers seethed up like an airborne snake.
The mass fell on a horse, swarming like hornets.
The horse screamed and threw itself to the ground.
Men dodged, cursing, as a thousand pounds of desperate animal rolled, saddle and all, then Mr. Berrycloth was back, swinging his bundled coat at the throng.
Amid that, Georgiana was trying to untie her panicked horse—so it could run; it was too maddened to mount. Crawlers streamed between us, and fear for her cut my breast.
That fear brought clarity. “Call draca!” I shouted to her over the deafening buzz.
She turned, her face pale. “I cannot. It is Lizzy who commands…”
I pulled her to me, wrapping our hands together, and sang my summoning song, that excerpt from my first fantasia. The song for that little draca from London. My draca.
And through the cries and insectile whir, answers came. Woodwind whistles joined my voice, some as melody, some in harmony. Then Georgiana’s confident soprano rose with mine. Our eyes locked over our clenched hands, hers sapphire and bright, and the mesh of our fingers tightened.
The music expanded my senses. I heard the tune of the living hillside around us, the water and sun singing their endless duet, night and day performing their ageless round, and woven through that, the call and answer of hundreds of draca voices.
It was profound. Ecstatic. A joining with something vast.
Jewel-bright wings swirled, fifty song draca in that group alone, and blue flame snapped out in a furious storm.
A pillar of crawlers rose, wide and ponderous as cold smoke from smoldering leaves.
We sang, the world sang with us, and the crawlers were encircled by spiraling song draca.
A hundred small flames met, together so hot that my skin flushed as the pristine blue fire turned dirty orange and black with exploding vermin.
The crawlers were all around us, leaping, flying, scurrying, darkening the air.
The draca pursued them. Thousands of bird-like forms raced, unfathomably agile.
My next snatched breath came tainted with the bitter citrus of crawler venom, and I broke into hacking.
Georgiana’s tones held though, and I found the tune again, my eyes smarting.
Slowly, the dark madness subsided. The buzzing faded and stopped, leaving crackles from a hundred small fires. Song draca whirled triumphantly over the field in shifting, fabulous murmurations.
Synchronized by our touched fingers, Georgiana and I ended our song in unison. For a few breaths, we stared at each other. Georgiana’s cheek was soot stained and smeared where she had wiped her watering eyes. Smoke and sparks floated between us. The air had a foul stench.
I remembered the others. “Is anyone stung?” I called.
Mr. Digweed stood with two of the gentlemen, coughing and well back from the smoke. They shook their heads, and one said, “The draca protected us.”
Mr. Berrycloth did not answer. He was kneeling by his fallen horse.
I knelt beside him as the mare wheezed a shuddering breath. Her body and neck teemed with the paired pricks of crawler stings, already bloating.
“Are you stung?” I repeated, soft but insistent.
He shook his head, then said in a cracked voice, “Have you draca essence at Pemberley?” He was petting the suffering creature. Comforting her.
“We do. That would treat one sting, or two. But this… this is too much.”
Mr. Berrycloth choked out a sob and nodded. He fumbled for the pistol and powder hanging from the saddle.
I stilled his fingers and returned them to his horse’s shoulder. “There is no need. She is gone.” Her last sigh had passed. Mr. Berrycloth’s grayed head bent, and he sobbed freely.
I rose to let him grieve. I understood mourning from the hospitals, and a strange woman was no comfort to a weeping man. He might have ridden his horse for twenty years, a deeply personal connection.
That left me facing the other gentlemen. Song draca flitted around and over us, several hundred still. At the peak, it had been far more. Fire flashed as they scoured the infested field and burned the blighted plants. The last beanstalks were collapsing, wilting into a blackish mire.
The bold song draca from London landed on my shoulder.
As if that were a signal, others arrived, landing in a loose semicircle around and behind me, filling the bushes and blanketing the ground where they hunted restlessly, prodding any burned or crushed remains of a crawler.
It was like I wore a living train of brilliant feathers and jeweled muzzles.
The memory of the song spawned from the hillside hung in my mind, an existence that dwarfed flickering human lives.
Mr. Gastrell was sniffling in blank, rotund shock. Two pudgy fingers picked aimlessly at a silver button.
Mr. Spragg though, the younger man, watched me steadily. I met his scrutiny easily enough. The nerves that jumbled me before had been burned away as thoroughly as the crawlers.
“I do not know what the Britons say,” he said, “but I have heard what they call you in London. Mary Bennet. Great Wyfe.” He folded his arms. “My mother kept the old ways. When I was a child, she visited Pemberley for the Britons’ celebrations.
She brought me, too. Dragged me—as a boy, I had no patience for anything but riding and shooting.
Then a fever took her in my sixteenth winter, and that door closed.
” He unfolded a hand toward the smoking field.
“You said we must coordinate our efforts. What do you propose?”
Returned to Pemberley House, I sought solitude in the observatory looking out over spring-green hills.
Inspections were underway at the neighboring estates. One infected field had been found, but there were no reports of mass crawler eruptions. With luck, the broad beans had been the most advanced infestation.
Why here, though? Why Derbyshire?
I remembered my desperate winter flight with Lizzy to recover the dagger. I had confronted Fènnù on a London hill. When black ichor dripped from her diseased wings, crawlers rose from the earth.
Fènnù had haunted Derbyshire for months while Lizzy lay beneath the lake. Somehow, that was the cause. History had no mention of foul crawlers before the black dragon was driven mad. Before the dragons’ song was broken.
For once, recalling my meetings with dragons did not make me feel insignificant. Georgiana had said, “You are powerful.” The strength of our song filled me, and at last, I believed her.
Still, I had not solved the puzzle that led us to sing Fènnù’s song. My memory of the flute remained a nagging flutter beyond conscious reach.
A muffled, irritated buzz sounded from the bookshelf. I had no appetite for discoveries, but, wearily, I walked over.
The untreated bean pod had split. An ugly crawler circled futilely in the jar, delicate wings fraying. The sight brought an acid distaste to my throat, and I considered how best to kill it.
In the other jar, the bean pod I treated with draca essence flexed. Morbidly curious, I watched until, with eerie exactness, it split. No, it was cut, as if by a miniature razor from within.
Gleaming with nacreous lapis and jade, a dragonfly-like needledrac emerged. She perched on the cut pod, airing her wings, a beautiful, perfect little draca.