Chapter 22 The Memory
THE MEMORY
MARY
The needledrac alighted on my outstretched finger. I lifted her near my spectacles. Her four crystalline wings tilted, tiny sails balancing in the breeze from the observatory’s open window.
Her two legs were tiny but muscled like a draca’s, not shell-wrapped like an insect’s.
The lapis and jade colors came from gleaming scales wrapped around her body like miniature plate armor.
Her claws gripped the skin of my knuckle.
Each foot had three foreclaws and one hooked rear claw, all as black as night, as fine as needles, and long enough to inflict a bloody scratch as I had discovered in yesterday’s encounter.
Or perhaps she made the discovery; today her grip was feather-light.
Needledrac consumed only nectar from the draca breath flower, so the claws were defensive, like a bee’s sting—
I realized I had given her my right hand as a perch, so I could not write notes. “Drat,” I whispered. Her wings flicked, compensating for my breath.
This needledrac had hatched from the infested broad bean I treated with draca essence.
The other broad bean, untreated, hatched a winged foul crawler.
That meant crawlers were some brethren of draca, so I had moved the crawler to a larger container and given it water and food, but it died in less than a day, the mayfly-like wings shredded and the segmented body desiccating amid dozens of curling legs.
The needledrac I let fly free, but she returned daily. I did not know why. I had hoped to see her again and gathered fresh draca breath flowers as a lure, but she ignored them. Draca breath had bloomed riotously this spring, so she found food easily enough.
Lizzy’s communication with draca extended to needledrac, although she said their tiny minds rendered it simple. Still, as I watched this gem-like creature leave my finger and explore the observatory, hovering to study her distorted reflection in the telescope lens, I envied my sister’s gift.
I had other, less whimsical projects than visiting with needledrac.
On the table, four medical syringes lay in a row.
Syringes were simple copper tubes with a plunger and nozzle.
We used them to suction liquids or apply ointment, but any person who handled one learned, sometimes comically, that they could spray the width of a room.
I had filled these syringes with draca essence and sealed the tips with wax—sealing wax, in fact, in the Darcys’ shade of burgundy. If I had correctly translated a thirteenth century scrawl I found in the Loch bairn journal, I had created my own defensive sting.
One project frustrated me: my lost memory about the third great item, the flute fashioned from a claw of the mysterious, missing third dragon.
I was certain I had forgotten some fact about the flute, but I had not found the trigger for recollection.
Idly, I looked around the observatory, testing unusual objects, but no revelation leaped to mind.
“Miss Bennet!” a young man’s voice called outside the window, “we found one!” I waved acknowledgement to Thomas Digweed, then grabbed a steel-wire bird cage and a syringe and hurried for the stairs.
“It is a huge crawler,” Thomas said breathlessly as we exited into the south-west garden toward the stables. “As long as my foot!”
Two gardeners armed with rakes were pointing excitedly at one of the baits, a putrid dead chicken. Crawlers were attracted to carrion, the rottener, the better, and while I would not harm sentient animals, spoiled chickens discarded by the kitchen were convenient for science.
We arrived, and the gardeners lifted their rakes in a salute to me, like guards with poleaxes. The story of Georgiana and me summoning song draca had flown through the household. Their respect reminded me of the power that had stormed through me, and I savored a tingle of pride.
“Do not harm it,” I reminded everyone. Before, I had considered crawlers the worst of mindless vermin, but the needledrac’s emergence promoted them to moral ambiguity, creatures either derived of draca, or draca’s precursor, or draca diseased.
Keeping the syringe in my right hand, I set down the cage, borrowed a rake from a gardener, and gave the chicken carcass an awkward, left-handed prod. Flies buzzed up, and the shell of a squirming, olive-green crawler came into view.
It was a big crawler. Moral arguments aside, the twining segments raised hairs on the back of my neck. The armored body was nearly as wide as my wrist, the jointed legs as long as my ring finger. It looked too large to be concealed by a chicken. Perhaps it was stout but short.
A year ago, a crawler this large would have been a fictional horror, but since Fènnù’s return, crawlers had grown. Even ignoring the monsters serving the invading army, six- or eight-inch lengths had been spotted on Pemberley’s grounds.
A large crawler complicated this test. They moved faster. Their stings killed quicker. I patted my reticule, feeling the stoppered bottle of draca essence I carried as a last recourse.
I passed the rake to Thomas. “When I tell you, push the chicken aside.”
He nodded, gripping the handle like a spear, then blurted, “Will you call the draca birds?” The gardeners nudged each other expectantly.
“No,” I said. “This is an experiment. I have read that draca essence has an effect on crawlers. It may stun it or slow it.”
“Slow it?” Thomas echoed uneasily. That was less impressive than summoning fire breathing draca.
“Or stun it,” I said firmly. Although early Middle English was not my best language, I had consulted multiple dictionaries and grammars while translating the journal. “If that fails, I will call draca.” Remembering that remarkable summoning lent conviction to my tone, and Thomas nodded, reassured.
I aimed the syringe, then used my free hand to snap the sealing wax off the nozzle. “Move the chicken!”
Thomas gave the chicken a shove. It flopped aside wetly, and a cloud of flies rose.
The crawler unwound, the front pinchers snapping. A dozen more segments streamed out of a freshly dug hole in the ground. It was longer than I expected, as long as my forearm.
I pushed the plunger. Draca essence sprayed in two crooked streams, wetting empty spots of grass. A fragment of sealing wax was still in place, blocking the nozzle.
“Drat!” I exclaimed, forgetting that cursing had been a private experiment. I pried at the broken wax with my thumbnail while draca essence dripped from the nozzle.
Instead of returning to its meal, the crawler advanced toward Thomas and me, the dozens of legs falling in a rhythmic pattern that was viscerally unpleasant—spiderish, but more so. We backed away hurriedly.
The fragment of wax came out. I aimed and pressed the plunger again. A spurt shot straight, then the plunger struck the end of the tube. Empty.
Had I hit it? The crawler was hissing.
“Get behind me,” I said to Thomas. I dug the bottle of essence from my reticle and uncorked it. “Everyone stay back.”
“I could whack it with the rake,” Thomas offered.
“That will make it angry.” Even small crawlers were hard to kill. The shell on this one looked thick.
“It is angry,” he pointed out.
The front three sections lifted in the air, and an unpleasant, slug-like appendage emerged between the pincers. A tongue? It wriggled, as if tasting the air. The body dropped and crept nearer.
I set my feet, held the bottle of essence at arm’s length, and waited.
But I must not use it all. There was no longer a shortage—the Britons were making new batches regularly—but the rest of my supply was in the syringes.
If someone was stung, I would have to dash up four flights of stairs to the observatory—
The crawler shot forward like a striking snake. I yelped and dumped the bottle, dousing my shoe, spraying my skirt, and—I was certain this time—splashing the crawler. I scrambled back and collided with Thomas. We untangled, separating left and right, and he raised the rake like an ax.
The crawler was writhing, the body coiling and twisting in endless figures. That slowed to quivers and a sad rattling sound, then stilled.
I edged closer. The crawler was not completely still. There was a slight, rhythmic flexing. Respiration.
I took the rake from Thomas, hooked a prong under the crawler’s body, and lifted it, dangling, into the cage. I pulled the lid down with the rake, then gingerly locked it.
“It worked,” I said, rather relieved given that not everything went according to plan.
“The essence does affect it.” I knelt on the grass and peered through the steel mesh.
Seeing a large crawler this close was like viewing a specimen under a microscope.
Already I saw fresh details. There were twin rows of pin-prick holes along the body’s shell segments—supplementary breathing?
Tiny flutters affected the legs in unison, like a team of oarsmen.
“Will it turn into a draca?” Thomas asked, kneeling beside me. He had been fascinated by the larva’s transformation to a needledrac.
“I think that unlikely. The larva we treated was in metamorphosis, so the essence could affect its development. This crawler is mature.” The pincers had folded into depressions in its head, but they were beginning to wiggle and click. “The passage I read says the effect is temporary—”
“What are you doing?” Georgiana cried behind me.
I scrambled to my feet, brushing grass off my skirts.
Georgiana had worn no bonnet—her hair was loose—and she had bedroom slippers on her feet. She must have run from the house. Her hands were clenched, the tendons standing like wire.
My stomach tilted with irrational guilt. “Do not be angry.”
“I saw through the window,” she said, angrily. “You could have been killed!” The word rasped. I had never heard her voice break like that.
“It was perfectly…” I almost said safe, but that was untrue. “It was a necessary risk. I needed to test—”
“You did not need to do anything. Not without me.”