Chapter 15 Faithful and Bold
FAITHFUL AND BOLD
DARCY
A rabbit sizzled on greenwood spits. The sunset stretched purple and violet across the sky. Elizabeth sat on the far side of the fire, staring unblinking into the glowing coals or, with her gifts, seeing far beyond.
I chose to honor them.
When I lost both parents in quick succession, boldness came easily. I was ambitious, confident, self-righteous. My father had drilled me in business, and I used his lessons to purge the grotesquery of slavery from our holdings, a moral bankruptcy he had refused to recognize during his life.
The other half of our motto—faithful—seemed easy as well. I devoted my life to Georgiana, a child then, and to protecting our household and estate.
Five productive, stultifying years trickled past. Faithfulness calcified into duty. Boldness thinned into pride. Then I fell in love with Miss Elizabeth Bennet, and it was like a tempest blew the walls from my stifling prison. And, incredibly, she loved me, too.
But when the person you love no longer loves you, what is faithfulness? Is it bolder to press yourself on them, or to walk away?
“Darcy.”
I jerked, guilty for my thoughts. Elizabeth was holding out half the roast rabbit wrapped in a handful of bay leaves.
I had learned her new rules. Never approach her. Never touch her. Do not presume intimacy.
Had I imagined her speaking my name?
“I did not hear you,” I said, hoping she would repeat herself, but her hand hung silently. I took the food, hot juices dripping, and thanked her.
After fighting the crawlers, Elizabeth had declined to ride Escalus—she rarely rode when she could walk—so I led him as we left the woods and then, at the farm, arranged for his lodging and amended my letter to Mary.
Elizabeth had waited in silence. She was Elizabeth to me, but the farmer and his wife were awed and whispered in her presence. Would they tell stories of a wordless, unkempt woman in bare feet? No. It would be the angel.
Now, we were camped on a rocky slope dotted with brush and sketchy trees.
The rabbit, freshly caught, had been laid at Elizabeth’s feet by a ferretworm.
The pair of cream firedrakes had visited for a silent communion, then rose in pearly spirals, more glorious than swans.
Around our camp, an endless pilgrimage of draca watched in a reverent circle.
I tossed a rabbit bone into the fire and broke the silence. “I would not think these fields could support so many draca.”
“Some came a long way,” Elizabeth said, cleaning her fingers on a handful of plucked grass. She had, as politely as feasible under our circumstances, devoured her portion of rabbit. I used to tease her about her hearty appetite.
I tipped my chin toward the ring of draca; there must have been twenty. “Draca did not gather around you before. Before the lake, I mean. Are you more powerful?”
“No.” A line furrowed her brow. “I suppose I no longer forbid it.”
Speaking of the lake summoned a memory: Yuánchi falling like a bloody spear, wings tucked close, then the pillar of spray. The despair I had felt then returned like a chest full of broken bones, even with Elizabeth safe a few paces away.
“Do you remember going into the lake?” I asked, my voice rough.
Her lips pursed. “I remember hugging Yuánchi’s neck, and his wings wrapping me.
I heard us hit the surface—it was a tremendous crash, like breaking stone—then the water rushed in, cold as ice.
We sank like an anvil until his wings opened and I floated free.
I liked that. I wanted to see daylight one last time, but my eyes were ruined.
There were only blurry gleams. Sun shattered by froth and waves.
Then all the light vanished, and I was wrapped round and round in warmth.
” She smiled, bemused. “It felt like a blanket.”
Her smile relieved my remembered despair. “Mary theorizes that draca wrap themselves in the finned form they use for water hibernation, then discard it afterward, like a chrysalis. Could Yuánchi have wrapped you somehow?”
She shrugged. “I cannot say. I only dreamed after that. Dreams from a hundred lives.”
“Was our life one of them?”
Her smile flattened. “Do not ask that.”
I had broken the rules. Still, I had heard no rule against bribery. “What about getting you boots? We could make a stop at Pemberley.” The familiarity of home might restore her.
She thought about it before shaking her head. “Too many people. And I cannot go until I decide about the Blackcoats. About the woman with them.”
The woman in their troop was all that had saved them.
“You can find them whenever you wish,” I pointed out. “You have draca watching them. How long would it take to collect boots?” She gave me a level stare—I already said no—so I changed topics. “Why do you hunt the Blackcoats?”
“They hurt Mary. They are why she called.”
“The men who hurt Mary are dead. You are not bound by some fairytale pact.” She eyed me. In truth, I had no idea what drove her, but I forged on. “You are Elizabeth Darcy… or call yourself Elizabeth Bennet, even. Whichever name, you always chose your own path.”
She hugged her knees and leaned nearer the fire. “Fènnù’s anger chews at me. Her fury… it is like jaws around me. I must rid myself of it. Spend it, so she does not take me.”
“The Blackcoats are vile enough, but they are mere thieves and bullies. War rages in the south. Why does that not interest the wyfe of war?”
That straightened her back. She looked flustered. “Are you suggesting I go to war?”
“I wish to understand what you want.”
“I waged war enough in my dreams.” Her words came quick and fierce.
“I lived a hundred women’s lives, all shattered until, in fury or desperation, they chose to fight.
But the wars all turned out the same: bloody, then forgotten, then a generation later, fought anew.
Two thousand years only heightens the futility of it. ”
That passion was Elizabeth’s. The words were uncanny, the speech of an angel. A god.
“Then why chase Blackcoats?” I said.
She blew a frustrated laugh. “Were you always so annoyingly persistent, or am I only noticing now?”
“I was. And I am certain you noticed before.”
She stood, restless in the dusk. “I was destined to bind a mad dragon. If I had bound her, I would have been overwhelmed long before this. Like the wyves of war before me.”
“If you were destined for the black dragon, then fate intervened. You bound Yuánchi instead.” I hesitated, wondering if this would violate a rule. “We bound Yuánchi.”
She did not notice my presumption. “And Fènnù’s poison corrupts that binding. That is why I must purge her fury. If I break—if she takes me—I will see war soon enough.”
“Fighting the French and the slavers?”
She shouted, “Destroying it all!” in a cracking cry, her hands clenched, knuckles white.
I was standing as well, so close I could have gathered her to my chest with the slightest reach. “You would not do that. I know you. You would never be overwhelmed by Fènnù’s madness.”
Her trembling shoulders calmed. She gave me a sardonic glance like when we bantered at breakfast, and I said something overly sentimental.
I ached to hold her. But I had concealed love for Elizabeth Bennet before, and I could do so again. I clenched my fists, knuckles aching.
Try something simpler. Bribery. “What about Longbourn? Did you leave boots there?”
She turned away, but it was to look up at the darkening sky. The circle of watching draca cowered, pressing their bellies to the earth.
Yuánchi’s colossal form exploded from behind the ridge, the wind of his passage flattening the flames of the fire, then drawing them into an envious swirl. He landed a hundred yards behind us.
“I have boots there,” she announced abruptly. “We will go to Longbourn tomorrow.”
My sleep was tossed by evil dreams of war and thunder.
Dawn had the chill of a late-spring morning, cold but soon to warm. Elizabeth was awake when I opened my eyes, standing in her black gown and watching the distant forest. The ever-present ring of draca had vanished. The fire was dead.
Her pose had the stillness of a long wait.
“Did you sleep?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Time to go.” She walked from the camp, her eyes over-bright, her posture brittle.
I had left my meager equipment with Escalus at the farm, keeping only sword and pistol. I strapped those to my belt and strode after her.
Yuánchi waited at the top of the ridge, his sightless head aligned to the rising sun.
In the rose light, his mismatched colors were garish—scarlet simmering like hot coals beside swaths of midnight.
His scales, whether black or red, were glossy, and they shimmered with the motion of his tremendous breaths.
The pair of cream firedrakes watched me, one perched in a tree, the other atop a boulder a few paces from me.
“You mount first,” Elizabeth said crisply. Perhaps I had imagined her over-bright eyes. She added, “If you fall off, I do not want you dragging me with you.”
I looked up at the dragon’s towering form. “I have never touched him. Will he speak to me?” He had done that in the past, or at least let me listen when he spoke to Elizabeth.
“He no longer speaks. Not since he rose—” Her voice caught.
Was that due to Fènnù’s corruption of their binding? Or was it a symptom of a more profound change, that blackness spreading over Yuánchi’s hide?
I placed my palm on the front of his wing.
Seen in the sky, Yuánchi’s silhouette looked as delicate as a firedrake, his wingspan more than twice his body length.
This close, the rounded bone leading his wing was like a ship’s mast, eight inches across.
The scales, two inches long, were dry and textured, not slippery like a fish.
I had seen how Elizabeth mounted at the lake, so I stepped onto the knurl of his wing joint and, like balancing on a log, walked up the wing’s front, the tip of my scabbard clicking his scales when I crouched too low.
At his shoulder, I waited for the lull in the bellows of his breath, then stepped onto his back.
The center was decorated with a series of knobby ridges as tall as my boots, but a six-foot span near the base of his neck was smooth.
I sat there astride, bracing my back against a ridge and leaving as much room in front of me as possible.
Like thunder from an ancient storm, Yuánchi’s voice filled my mind:
The broken song corrupts me. Save your wyfe. I cannot.
Rattled, I wet my lips and twisted to see Elizabeth. Her eyes were narrowed impatiently. She had not heard him.
“Yuánchi no longer speaks?” I asked her.
“No,” she said tightly.
Did he choose not to speak to her? Or could the wyfe of war no longer hear the scarlet dragon of healing?
She mounted. Her lithe ascent would have mocked mine except it was too effortless, a master horseman who sweeps into the saddle without breaking stride because he has forgotten how else to mount.
She walked casually around me, stepping over my leg, and settled into the natural saddle at the base of Yuánchi’s neck.
That left two feet between us. She frowned over her shoulder. “If we dive, you will slide forward across the scales. That direction cuts.” Her gaze settled where my crotch straddled Yuánchi’s back. “I imagine that would be unpleasant.” She slapped directly behind her. “Sit here.”
Apparently flying relaxed the rules. I waddled forward, rocking on my rear to avoid shredding my trousers. When there were inches between us, she pulled my arm around her waist. “Closer. Hold tight. Or fall off now and get it over with.”
Her back settled against me. We had touched more intimately than this every day of our wedded life, but her slim figure made my heart pound.
Without petticoats, her dress was a single layer of fine linen.
I could feel every contour of her skin. Elizabeth had always been fit, a tireless walker, but now her waist was ridged with muscle.
Tense muscle. Her back and shoulders were rigid as well. For all her brusque directions, she was as uncomfortable as I.
That made my responsibility clear. I adopted her businesslike tone. “I am ready.”
In answer, Yuánchi stood. Our heads rose level with the tops of some good-sized trees, not unthinkably high but very different from standing on a structure. Yuánchi embodied living balance and inhuman power. It was like being astride a racehorse, but a hundred times more. A thousand times more.
“He is incredible,” I said. “Unbelievable.”
His wings unfolded fifty feet to each side, stretching high while his body crouched, muscles the size of oxen bunching in his haunches.
The two firedrakes shot past arrow-swift, one on each side, then we leaped into the sky.
The wings drove down. Elizabeth leaned with a rider’s anticipation, and I followed her motion.
The world tilted, treetops flashing beneath a stroking wingtip, then leveled.
We climbed toward the forest. The world flattened to a painter’s landscape. Wind sang in my ears and forced my eyes to slits. Elizabeth’s rigid tension vanished. One of her hands rested lightly on a knob of Yuánchi’s neck before her, the other atop my forearm around her waist.
“This is beautiful,” I cried. She did not answer; I was not sure she heard over the wind. But we were flying north, the wrong direction, so I shouted, “Are we going to Longbourn?”
She must have heard that, but she did not answer. Her small frame was warm against mine, as familiar as my own body, and I felt her tension return. Was she afraid to go home?
Yuánchi’s wings stopped their massive strokes. We glided for a minute, then he tilted in a wide turn, his inner wing dipping. Elizabeth leaned, studying the ground, and I followed her gaze.
The forest below was hazed with blue smoke.
Two full acres had been burned to glassy, bare rock.
Patches still glowed sullen red, and a metallic scorch filled my nostrils.
The surrounding woods were gone; there were a hundred yards of cinders before tree trunks resumed, blown down like twigs, the smaller branches and leaves missing.
In that ash and devastation, a strip of lemon yellow fluttered from a broken branch, a charred fragment of canvas from the Blackcoats’ tents.
Elizabeth finished her inspection. She shouted, “We will go to Longbourn.”
Yuánchi’s wings snapped us through a cruel curve, wind tearing and hissing. Weight crushed me into my seat until the southern sky swung into view.
Miles away, a huge black form flapped from a rocky hilltop and followed us—Fènnù pursuing her wyfe of war.