Chapter 25 Nearing London #2
A hundred yards away, her scaled feet untucked, and her hooked rear claws, the longest, caught the earth like a pair of razor-sharp plows.
Dirt and rock exploded in her wake, a barking cacophony that shook the ground.
The colonel shouted something inaudible and fell.
The horses screamed. I had one heartbeat to think I was wrong; we are dead and then her feet flashed past, bracketing us with the roar of twin landslides.
I threw myself down, shielding my head as gravel and rocks stung and dust coated my throat with grit.
There was a meaty thump and a smash of wood and glass, then a hurricane blast as her wings carried her up. Each gust slid me across the torn dirt.
Coughing and spitting grime, I struggled to my feet. Colonel Fremantle and the driver were shrugging off inches of debris. Two massive furrows had been ripped down the road, strewing rocks, soil, and boulders…
The horses were unrecognizable gore splattered among the wrecked flinders of our coach. The iron scent of blood joined the dirt in my nostrils, and unpleasant scenes filled my mind’s eye: a mid-thigh amputation I had observed with clenched teeth; the violent death of Joane Rees.
My rational mind was reeling. Despite her devastation of London, I had invented a delusion that Fènnù, named a deity of death in the broken records of ruined civilizations, was somehow… fond of me? Tame? Harmless unless commanded by the dagger?
The driver was gibbering, pointing at four thousand pounds of gutted horse and the remnants of the carriage. Then he broke and fled, tripping and stumbling to the north.
Across the fields, Fènnù’s wings angled as she turned to return.
I screamed—at the air, at her—“Why kill horses?” Our transport was destroyed, my supplies gone, but the horses seemed… arbitrary. Spiteful. “Why?” I shrieked.
“Run!” the colonel cried. He was pulling me, his arm linked through mine as if we were on promenade.
“I will not.” My error, my blithe trust and naiveté, had turned to anger. I scrambled to a less ruined patch of road. The colonel followed, tugging with aimless resistance.
Fènnù hung in the air, black and growing.
My lips were too crusted with dust to whistle, so I sang the summoning song.
The song draca returned to my shoulder, settling his feathers as if nothing were wrong, then another winged in from the field beyond, and then another.
Those others did not land but circled in the air around and above us. More joined them.
Fènnù’s awareness caught my mind again, cajoling me with whispers of vengeance and death. I sang an answer, fitting makeshift words to my little tune, “I am no wyfe of war. You do not tempt me.”
Her wings flared, darkening half the sky.
Leaves stormed, turned white with frost, and my skirts twanged and shivered like sails in a tempest. She settled fifty yards away.
The furor stilled. Her scaly head descended, and her faceted eyes reflected red hues from the sky.
Black bile dripped from sores on her jaw.
The reek of her corruption, acidic and biting, burned my eyes, and I recognized volatile scents shared with crawler venom.
Dozens of song draca circled the colonel and me, a flowing shield high and low, too many to have been in the local fields—they must have followed from Pemberley.
Fènnù’s head twisted, tracking their motion, then the turbid swirl of her gaze fixed on mine.
Maddened visions entered my brain: Lizzy floating in the depths like drowned Ophelia, then Lizzy’s face with brown skin decorated with Egyptian kohl, then Lizzy nude and writhing in passion.
Words came, stuttered and uneven: Where is my wyfe of war?
“Gone,” I cried. “Escaped.”
A vise crushed my mind. Yield! Where is my queen?
I could not force words through that pressure, so I sang the summoning song again, and the song draca joined in harmony. Like parody, as a challenge, I threaded in fragments of Fènnù’s song—a half bar of melody here, a modulation there.
Fènnù roared, not the weapon of her frozen breath, just deafening noise. She crouched, then leaped. With one downsweep of her wings, she passed over our heads, scattering the song draca. I turned to watch her climb and shrink in the distance.
The colonel was moaning, curled on the ground like a child in a nightmare. I was trembling as well… no, I was shaking from cold. There was hoarfrost on my gloves. The ground was slick with steaming ice. A whorl of half-submerged leaves stood up from the surface, trapped in mid-spiral.
I knelt and shook the colonel’s arms, knocking ice off his coat. “We must move out of this cold.”
His moans quieted, and his wide eyes latched onto mine. “How are we alive?”
“Fènnù resumed her search for my sister. She tried to force her whereabouts from me, but I… refused.” It occurred to me that she had no reason to let me live after that. Perhaps the delusions that confused her had saved us in the end.
We slipped and slid off the ice. The road was still empty, but muddy heads were popping up behind distant bushes and rocks.
“We should walk,” I said. “Make haste while the road is open.”
“Haste,” the colonel echoed tonelessly, but he followed as I started south. Motion felt good, restoring sensation to my freezing toes and loosening my myriad stiffening bruises.
The song draca returned, twenty or so, swooping and circling. They looked uncanny, so I pulled the hood of my black cloak forward to hide my face. For once, superstition might be useful. “Perhaps the crowd will make way for a witch.”
Colonel Fremantle’s officer’s bearing returned.
He had campaigned in the Peninsular wars after all, a far bloodier field than this.
He caught up, striding apace with me, and his hands inventoried sword, pistol, powder.
His methodical check reminded me to inspect my reticule.
The syringes with draca essence remained, their brass tubes securely sealed.
It was some time before he spoke. “I thought you had no power.”
“That was nothing. You should see my sister.”
Still, he had a point. I had faced Fènnù again, heard her voice, and for the first time, without a great wyfe beside me. And Georgiana swore I had power.
“I may have some peculiar talent,” I admitted.