Chapter 32
THE REFUGE
LIZZY
The sheathed dagger weighed on my thigh as we flew to Netherfield, Jane and Charles’s estate and their home with young Jemma.
Yuánchi’s strength flagged and the wind howled as we returned to Hertfordshire, where this all began.
Here, Jane was stung, Lydia corrupted. Here, Jane, Mary and I had pored over the Loch bairn journal, that so-called family history which neatly excised an ancient Bennet betraying the great wyves.
Hundreds of yards below, a passing wheat field caught my eye.
Half the field was the vibrant chartreuse of young grain.
The rest was foul black, like it was smothered in crow feathers.
Then a mile farther, a stand of majestic, old poplars appeared soaked in oily soot.
It looked like the tainted gardens and forest at Pemberley, but Fènnù was behind us, following at the edge of my perception, not in front to spread her blight.
I spotted the town of Meryton. Beyond, a column of dirty smoke hung—but in the direction of Longbourn, not Netherfield. There, I thought, and Yuánchi swerved. The violence stewing in me, the fury that had saturated me when I saw Mary’s bloodied body lying so still, boiled hotter.
Traveling the mile from Meryton to Longbourn took a few tens of seconds at this speed.
Be ready, I thought to Yuánchi, and sun-like heat kindled in his breast. Down.
He folded a wing and plunged sideways. Behind me, Georgiana gave an abbreviated shriek.
This had been an unpleasant introduction to flight.
The cream firedrakes broke left and right, flying opposite directions around Longbourn.
They circled it a hundred yards distant, their remarkable vision flicking through esoteric color schemes as they worked to peer through the smoky haze.
The house was not burning, not seriously, not flames in the interior, but it was charred and damaged, fire licking from a hanging shutter, the front door wide open, a fence fallen in cinders, swathes of ground and garden smoldering.
Everything was deadly still. Fear and fury battled within me. What had happened?
The drakes tuned their vision to see lesser heat.
That bloated the fires to featureless glares, but subtler details emerged.
There were no living persons outside, nor any bodies—a body still shone warm an hour after death.
But this perspective was a window to the past. The ground was painted in thirty-foot-long stripes of latent heat.
Crisped, dead creatures filled them, some kind of crawler with glossy shells that reflected the heat.
There were fires farther away, in a stand of trees and a meadow, all fueling the dingy pall.
We settled in front of the house. My feet hit the earth before Yuánchi had folded his wings. On Longbourn’s front walk, I closed my eyes and reached out with my mind, reached hard, pressing my awareness to Netherfield and beyond, another mile, another five miles…
Nothing. “I cannot find Jane’s wyvern.”
I opened my eyes and saw Darcy running into the house, pistol in hand. Fool. I shouted at Georgiana and Mary, “Stay with Yuánchi,” then summoned the drakes and ran after him.
Darcy had stopped inside the door, silent and listening. Not so foolish after all. I whispered, “I will check the top floor.”
“How?” he whispered back.
Distantly, glass smashed. “One of the drakes,” I said, my vision splitting as I saw through the drake’s eyes. She had simply thrown herself through the window to Jane’s and my old bedroom; glass was no threat to her scales. The floor was sprayed with transparent fragments and shattered frame.
Wordlessly, Darcy headed to the kitchen. I went the other way, checking the parlors and Papa’s old library. I found Darcy again as he emerged from the pantry.
“Nobody,” he said. “The kitchen door is standing open. The servants may have run that way.”
His gaze settled on my hand, where Gramr’s serrated blade gleamed. I did not remember drawing it, but Darcy held a cocked pistol, so he could hardly criticize.
“The house is empty,” I agreed as the drake finished surveying the top floor. She floated down the stairway to us, the outer halves of her wings folded so tight to fit that their tips met under her claws.
Outside, Mary shouted, “Lizzy!” We sprinted out the front door. She pointed down the road where two riders galloped toward us. “I think that is Jane.”
They were coming from town, not from Netherfield, but it was Jane.
I had never seen her gallop a horse, but I recognized her riding form.
Charles was with her, and he held up his arm to wave.
Relief spilled into me, disarming the quivering violence in my muscles and nerves.
Mary sighed softly and slumped, wincing, on Georgiana’s arm.
Darcy seemed the only one driven to action.
He grabbed the well bucket and splashed water over the smoldering shutter.
Charles reached us a few horse lengths before Jane, and he reined his frothing mount to a skidding stop. “You have Jemma?” he shouted to Darcy as he leaped down.
Darcy froze, the bucket dripping in one hand. Charles spun to me, the question hot in his eyes as Jane arrived and dismounted, her face streaked with tears.
“Nobody is here,” I told them both.
“Jemma is!” Jane screamed. “She is here!” I had never seen her like this, storming and desperate.
Everyone spoke at once, but some age-old ghost reached into my thoughts, cleaving my fear and leaving an edged focus.
“Who was with her?” I demanded.
Despite the shouting, Jane heard. Everyone quieted as she said, “Mamma is caring for her. We were in Meryton with Kitty, and we saw flying creatures. They came here…” She shuddered, and Charles wrapped an arm around her.
“Listen to me,” I said. “We will find her. Where is your wyvern?” I did not know the perfumer’s skills, but she might have sensed a wyvern…
Jane pressed her palms on her temples, forcing out words.
“She always stays with Jemma.” Perplexed, she looked around the ravaged garden.
“Sometimes I can feel where she is…” She closed her eyes.
A breath passed. Another. When her eyes opened, her cheeks were drained and white, her eyes hollow. She shook her head.
“A wyvern fought here,” I said. I toed the earth at my feet, torn in three deep slices spread wider than I could stretch my hand.
“Fought what?” Jane asked pathetically.
“An evil woman,” Mary answered. “She wields crawlers like Lizzy commands draca.” Jane noticed Mary then, saw her bruised temple and bloody cut ear, her soiled and torn clothing, her hair in clotted tangles. She fumbled for Charles’s hand.
“This way,” I said. The firedrakes were overhead, and their vision revealed streaks of hot ground away from the house and toward the meadow.
The signs were clear to human eyes as well: smoking earth, claw cuts.
Even a stretch of exposed granite had ripped grooves—that could only be a wyvern.
And everywhere, there were the scuttling stab marks left by crawler legs.
And killed crawlers. A hedge still burned over a half-dozen sizzling, ruptured insectile bodies, thrown there by the blast. The bodies had peculiar, charred stubs on their backs.
I touched one, and Mary said, “Those were wings. They fly.” We hurried faster, following an old stone wall that led past our cherry tree.
Here, an eight-foot section of the wall was blown away, the foundation rocks hissing and shimmering with heat.
A greater enemy had fallen. A corpulent crawler, as grossly heavy as a large pig, lay curled on its side, burned legs scrunched like a dead spider, charred wing stubs on its back, its inch-thick shell torn apart.
A muddy reek rose from its clammy flesh, and the citric tang of crawler venom.
Cautiously, Mary leaned to look. “The internal structure is strange. The body contains vestigial shells, like compartments…”
Amid the char and soot, a leaf on a nearby bush shone in the summer sun. I touched it, and my finger came away coated with clear golden ichor. Draca blood.
“Why is a wyvern fighting on the ground?” Darcy asked.
“Her flame has all been thrown back, toward the house,” I said. “She is defending a retreat. Defending someone on the ground.”
“I know where they went!” Mary cried. She ran ahead, favoring one leg.
I caught up as she entered an old stone-fenced paddock.
It had been a sea of overgrown hollyhocks.
Those were obliterated, the ground coated in charred leaves and smoldering stems. Old stones were cracked from heat or smashed.
Dead crawlers crunched underfoot, hundreds of the foot-long flying ones and another of those thick, heavy ones.
Mary was stock still, her face childish and pathetic with shock.
Mamma was curled against the last patch of intact stone wall, one corner of her skirts blackened, her smoke-stained face staring sightlessly at the sky.
Beside her, Jane’s golden wyvern lay unmoving, one wing broken and shredded, the ebony bones a ruined umbrella, the other wing tucked under her, the gleaming scales on her breast riven by a huge, paired sting.
We gathered, aghast. Some wept.
Jane did not cry. She whispered, “Quiet,” then shouted, “Be quiet!” The grief choked into bewildered silence.
Jane fell on her knees by her dead wyvern, pulling at her tucked wing.
Charles was down an instant later, and they dragged the wing loose.
From that crevice, the last defended point, baby Jemma blinked in the sudden light, her little face dirty and tear streaked, her thumb stuffed in her mouth.
Jane swept her up, curled herself against her fallen wyvern, and comforted Jemma while bawling at the same time. Charles shielded them in his arms, and his and Jane’s heads touched in gratitude and sorrow.