Chapter 20 Miss Bates #2
John, though, was staring at the roseworm in my arms. Others were also; Mrs. Otway was wide-eyed.
A wyfe with strong affinity might handle her bound tykeworm—they were unusually tame—but holding a roseworm was exceptional, almost myth.
A roseworm was dangerous. One tended to forget that after meeting dragons.
“The truth will out,” Mr. Elton said idly. “The Emperor has cleansed the English Church of centuries of corruption. God’s Truth is revealed so that our hands may wield His strength for the Empire.”
That sounded highly un-English to me. Also, very unlike Mr. Elton’s usual preaching. In services, his rare moments of rhapsody had been to praise donations to the vicarage roof repair fund.
He clicked his fingers, a hunter summoning a dog, and the gray-clad soldier dragged his wyfe forward. John and the others gave the crawler behind her a wide berth.
Something unpleasant was scritching at the back of my mind, but my nerves obscured it. I breathed through closely pursed lips, a calming exercise I had practiced with Mr. Darcy, and bindings became visible.
The black linkage between Augusta and the crawler was thick but ill-formed, a coarse mimicry of the elegant connection between draca and wyfe.
The crawler’s binding looked like a greasy rope twisted from dirty rags.
It also looked like the seeking tendrils that had emerged from the back of Hartfield house.
That was what John hid in the house. Unbound crawlers.
But that was not what had raised shivers on my neck. The binding between Miss Bates and the roseworm crackled and seethed with unhealthy energy. That was the effect of crawler venom—it strengthened a wyfe’s binding. It was also intoxicating, addictive, and eventually deadly.
Whatever escape Miss Bates had planned depended on using that strength to command her draca.
The roseworm was squirming, so I set her down.
She hunted around our feet, dashing in one direction then another, then screeched at the crawler, who hissed threateningly. Draca and crawlers were mortal enemies.
“Time for business,” the Overseer said with an ugly grin. He took the rope tied to Augusta, then shoved her at young Caroline Otway, who was cowering by her mother. “Test her first.”
“No,” Mr. Elton interrupted. “Her.” He pointed at me.
“She’s bound,” the Overseer protested. “Can’t bind her twice.”
“We shall see,” Mr. Elton said with a hair-thin smile.
“That is foolish,” John blurted out. His eyes darted between me and Mr. Elton. Had we reached a crime he could not stomach? More likely, he lacked the courage to watch. He plucked at his waistcoat, frowning. “She is a Woodhouse, not chattel. The perfumer will want her.”
Augusta wobbled toward me, her face shadowed.
The crawler, though, refused to follow her.
It seethed in place, thin legs tapping the dirt.
Its insectile eyes were impenetrable, their direction impossible to gauge, but watching it, I felt a flickering connection, much like I felt with a draca when our gazes met.
But where a draca would have been attracted, the crawler redoubled its resistance, rearing in a knot of clattering shell segments, torn between obeying Augusta and fear of me.
“Make it move!” the Overseer snapped at Augusta. He pulled his long coat aside, revealing a short, coiled whip fastened to his belt. She cringed, but I felt the black binding between her and the crawler harden with command.
The crawler advanced a foot, then stopped again, twitching. Impatient, the Overseer stomped on the segmented body with his hobnailed boot. He pressed down. One of the jointed legs was caught at an awkward angle, and it broke with a snap. The crawler hissed pathetically.
“Do not hurt it,” I cried. Everyone, English or not, looked at me like I was mad.
Miss Bates burst out a triumphant laugh, and her binding to the roseworm lit like a coral sunrise.
The roseworm heard her command and darted forward, chest swelling.
Blue flame shot from her mouth. It was not aimed, or at least it struck nobody, just a spray of ferocious heat that incinerated lawn and left smoking earth.
The soldiers scattered, cursing, but the Overseer laughed and kicked the crawler, sending it flopping toward the roseworm. “Make it fight,” he ordered Augusta.
The crawler had landed in burning grass a few feet from the roseworm.
It hissed, scrambling out of the flames, then whipped its paired stingers up and over its head.
A spatter of venom almost hit the roseworm.
She retreated, her graceful motions turning jerky.
The mere scent of crawler venom was enough to stun a draca.
The soldiers whooped and gathered to watch, leaving Augusta ignored, a pace from me.
I yanked off my glove and dropped it, then caught her wrist in my hand, skin to skin.
Her pain burst into me—pain twice over, horrid whip cuts on her shoulders and back but also the crawler’s injuries through their binding.
I was close enough to make out Augusta’s face inside her overhanging bonnet.
Her cheeks were blotched and tear-stained, her hair a greasy mess, her teeth bared in an endless grimace.
The impotent, enslaved fury of the crawler climbed my arm.
The binding, rough-made and twisted, filled my consciousness.
But it was not the perversion it had appeared at a distance—it was infected, ugly like illnesses could be, like the sores on Papa’s legs or little Nessy coughing blood before the healing strength of Lady Anne, the prior great wyfe of healing, had briefly filled me and saved her.
I had no power to heal, though. Augusta’s injuries and the crushed leg and burns on the bound crawler were beyond me. But the binding… that was intriguing. It might be a shadow of a true draca binding, but it was still a living connection pulsing with jealous, desperate strength.
The illness I sensed, the flaw, was where it touched Augusta.
A draca’s binding flowed gracefully into the bound wyfe, as organic as a stem to a flower, but this binding was lodged in her chest like a barbed hook.
That was different. That mattered. This had been forced without consent, and without consent, a binding was not pure. It was a violation.
As if my thoughts were hands, I grasped that weakened point. I tugged it with no effect, then yanked with no more success, then—distantly, I heard a scream tear through my throat—my entire being sank into it, saturating it. Healing it.
The binding lodged in Augusta disintegrated. Whip-fast, a fizzing erasure sizzled back the entire length to the crawler, like a fuse I once saw at a fireworks display in Sydney Gardens.
Augusta drew a massive, surprised breath, then fainted. Her wrist tore from my fingers as she fell. My own scream had wrung the air from my lungs, and I staggered, head spinning.
The fight between the roseworm and crawler had continued while my mind was in the realm of draca.
The soldiers were cheering as if a deathmatch between two creatures were sport.
The roseworm had lost—she was a limp, pathetic shape caught in a loop of the crawler’s body.
The crawler’s poisonous spines were at her small, rose-hued throat, ready for a deadly strike.
The spines hung, glistening with venom. The Overseer strode closer, his eyes crazed. “Get on with it!” He kicked the crawler. The segmented body rattled but did not respond. He turned to us and yelled, “Make it…” then stopped. He had seen Augusta, collapsed on the lawn.
His fevered glee broke in stages: surprise, confusion, then his lips parted in fear. “Shoot it—” he cried. The word stopped with a grunt. He looked down.
The crawler had whipped its venomous tail high, sinking both curved prongs their full two-inch depth into the Overseer’s thigh. The tail arched once, quivering, then the paired stingers relaxed and withdrew.
“Ya got to shoot it,” the man muttered. He grabbed the arm of the staring comrade beside him. “Ya got to…” Above his bushy beard, his face blanched like paper, and he tipped woodenly to the ground, his muscles spasming.
The other soldiers pulled pistols. I caught a glimpse of skittering, greenish-brown shell, and another man screamed, falling and kicking, the crawler wrapped around his calf like a python. A pistol fired. Another.
Searing heat lit the garden as draca fire blew a laurel bush into roaring flames. The roseworm? No, she lay where she had been dropped by the crawler. Miss Bates was dodging panicked soldiers to pick her up.
Two other small draca had entered the garden. They were not prestigious breeds, probably ferretworms or broccworms, but they moved with a draca’s predatory exactness.
My spinning head had eased. I knelt by Augusta and wrapped her wrist in my fingers. I could perceive her health—alive but unconscious, more from exhaustion than any new harm—but my thoughts fluttered oddly. Some reservoir within me had been drained by breaking her binding.
Then I recognized the real danger. Her sleeve cuff was undone.
I fumbled to fasten it, but the button had torn off. Broken cotton threads hung in a hideous tangle. I felt in the dirt, finding only pebbles, my panic growing as gleams of miasma bled from the earth.
The heat of draca fire flooded my side amid more yells.
A pair of hobnailed boots ran up, nearly stomping on my seeking fingers.
I looked up at a furious gray-coated soldier.
He shouted, “Go inside!” just as a garden shovel clanged the side of his head.
He keeled over, leaving Mr. Knightley, holding the shovel like a club.
“We must run!” he shouted.
“I cannot leave her,” I said, pinching to keep her sleeve closed. “I cannot find her button!”
He cursed and hauled her out of my grasp, the ruined sleeve ripping from my fingers. He slung her over his shoulders like a yoke for hauling buckets, then grabbed my hand and yanked me to my feet.
Miss Bates dashed by, shouting unintelligibly but pointing, the Otways behind her. The miasma spilled in vile pools in their footsteps. Mr. Knightley followed, dragging me and oblivious to the danger. I cried out, pointing to the shimmering puddles, terrified that he would step in one.
We entered the trees, the east path. Shots fired behind us, and a bullet buzzed overhead, snicking off a branch.
“Where to?” Mr. Knightley shouted. Someone answered, and he ran, Augusta bouncing on his back.
His pace was slow, and I followed him easily enough, trapped between the seeking miasma ahead and the pursuit behind.
More bullets whizzed, clipping leaves or hitting trunks with loud whacks.
Mr. Knightley stumbled; this time, I caught his arm. His eyes were grim.
We almost collided with the others, who had stopped cold. Everyone had escaped: the Otways, the Westons, Miss Bates. But the older people were spent—Mr. Weston had sat down in the dirt, his head hanging. Anne was panting while clutching their squalling child.
But two new women were here, elderly widows from the poorer north district of town. I knew them, but I had to look away, their clothes were so disarranged. Everyone’s were. I fixed my eyes on a gnarled root instead and pulled off my remaining, asymmetrical glove, discarding it behind me.
The shouting behind us grew louder, joined by the baying of dogs.
“Do not stop.” Mr. Knightley begged the group, but he was bent almost double under Augusta’s weight, his legs shaking.
Miss Bates’s face was locked in a drugged rictus of a smile. She gasped, “Kent,” as if that was an answer. “The widowed wyves of Kent have come.”
A majestic, gray-haired woman stepped around her. Her clothes were not patched and worn. Greedily, I fixed my eyes on perfect silk seams.
Lady Catherine de Bourgh saw me and offered a regal nod. “Miss Woodhouse. I do not forget a face. I am, however, disappointed in Surrey. It has become far less tolerable.”
Her bronze wyvern trotted up beside her, sparkling in the dappled sunlight.
The miasma had caught us now, and it poured down, condensing from every forest leaf, but the drops vanished in the shine around the wyvern.
Her prismatic eyes met mine, and through the closing walls of my exhaustion, words chimed:
healer. you must bind for strength
She spread her wings, and with a spray of leaves, launched herself low to the ground. Her powerful, compact wings steered her between tree trunks, deft as a hunting goshawk, and she vanished toward the pursuing shouts.