Chapter 32 #2
Mary knelt, wincing, beside Mamma. She embraced her and then, with gentle fingers, closed her eyes. “She used to scold me when I hid here, but she remembered. She thought it would be safe…” Her voice strangled.
“It is not your fault,” I said. My voice was perfectly clear, the words disciplined by past selves while they dissected the scene.
A wyvern could not carry a baby; Mamma had done that.
My selfless, scatterbrained, loving mother, who only ever wished to secure her treasured daughters’ futures, had fled all this way while unthinkable ruin and destruction rained around her.
Part of me—witty Elizabeth Bennet, my mother’s daughter—was helpless with loss. The rest, my older selves who had chosen vengeance, arrayed themselves in silent tribute.
Fènnù’s mad whisper slipped into my thoughts. I am waiting for you. You need not suffer. Grief is nothing to me. I savor it. Pass your burden to me, so you may fly.
“My grief is my own,” I whispered. Finally, heartbreak overcame my dispassionate ghosts, and molten tears filled my throat.
Georgiana was stroking Mary’s bent form while wiping her own tears. Then her chin lifted, and she said angrily, “The blight is here, too!” A swath of meadow beyond the stone wall was a soggy charcoal gray.
Mary threw her tangled hair out of the way and shoved to her feet, kicking her skirts free of burned hollyhocks.
“I do not understand why these things keep happening!” She yanked off her bent spectacles.
She looked younger without them, as if we had slipped into some pleasant past, but her face was contorted.
“I would have attacked the perfumer, Lizzy. I wanted to! But all I did was send her here. This is so… unfair!”
My internal dance of minds continued, and an ancient warrior used my lips. “The perfumer reports to this emperor? This… Napoleon?” When Mary looked confused, I snapped, “She spoke with you. Think.”
“Reports?” Mary blinked, her posture crooked as she took her weight off her hurt leg. “I do not know. He gives her orders…” Georgiana slipped an arm around her waist, supporting her.
“She does, then,” I said. “She is his swiftest, most lethal asset. He uses her for his most crucial tasks. She fought you, and won, and learned the flute is destroyed. She came here to kill Jane, and could not find her, but she thinks she fought and killed a great wyfe’s wyvern.
She will report back. He is a general. He has instilled obedience in her. ”
“Elizabeth,” Darcy cautioned. His arm was half extended, just short of where Gramr’s blade wove through the air between us, black serrations shining, my hand twisting it as if it had a mind of its own.
Finally, he stepped lightly around the blade and touched my shoulder.
“Put away the dagger. Grieve your mother.”
“I can find Napoleon,” I told him. “When we flew over London, I saw his forces. It was like a map, a window to his thoughts. A web where every strand reveals the spider. When I find him, I will find the perfumer.”
Darcy shook his head. “He is protected by two countries’ massed armies.
You cannot reach him, and it is wrong to try.
The perfumer has erred. She revealed our enemy’s weakness.
Bonaparte fears that the great wyves will unite.
That is how we win. You must stay with Georgiana so, together, we can find Emma. ”
The conflict between my internal selves spiraled. Grief and fury ground together like millstones, flaking and splitting.
“Win?” Mary spat bitterly. She shrugged off Georgiana and waved her deformed spectacles furiously.
Her eyes were reddened wrecks, her face tear-streaked and bloody.
“I wanted to kill the perfumer. You would have, Lizzy, but I am pathetic. Now the colonel is dead, and Mamma is dead, even the horses are dead…”
Georgiana grabbed Mary’s windmilling arms, holding her until she collapsed into a moaning embrace. Darcy began a speech about revenge and war and old prophecies, I was not even sure for whom.
Give me your grief, the mad voice whispered. I taste it. I will remember it. You will be free.
“My grief is my own!” I shouted it this time, brandishing the dagger, and a memory shifted my grip, pressing the pad of my thumb to the flat of the blade. The polished surface touched my skin—
It was cold, absurdly cold, impossibly cold, a chill that burrowed up the tendons of my hand and rode my veins to my heart. My grief and loss, those barbaric tortures, retreated to a remote place, crystallizing into an abstraction so alien it held only analytic interest.
My wyfe of war, Fènnù whispered in ecstasy, and a chorus of past wyves sighed in relief and despair.
In the field, Yuánchi shuddered. His head dragged up, turning blindly toward me, but I felt our binding flare in glorious brilliance. His voice was undiminished, and it thundered in my mind, Elizabeth Darcy Bennet. Come back.
The words barely touched me. An icy clarity sorted my thoughts. A revelation. Even Mary, who could argue for an hour why a mouse should not be punished for gnawing into a flour sack, had seen the truth. Victimhood was unjust. Grief was unfair, weak, and wrong. There was only vengeance.
You are not a victim, Fènnù’s crazed voice said in my skull. You are my wyfe of war.
Yuánchi’s voice roared again, Help her! This time, the others heard. Mary and Darcy winced, stopped their argument, and turned to me.
“Your hand,” Darcy said, his face blanked by shock.
My thumb was cut. I had not felt it; the dagger’s edge was that perfect. Blood wandered over and among my knuckles, insinuating its slippery presence between my palm and Gramr’s leather-wrapped hilt. I held the dagger higher, admiring how the red reflected the light.
“Give me the dagger,” Darcy said, his hand outstretched. I read the tension in the muscles of his palm, the wariness of his stance. He thought he was soliciting a madwoman. Behind him, Mary and Georgiana were wide-eyed.
“I am not mad,” I reassured him. “This war is mad.”
“What do you mean?” Darcy said cautiously, edging closer. Gramr flicked between us. I was adjusting the angle, watching how it made my blood run, though not yet along the blade…
“Mary is right,” I said. “This war is unfair. This pain is unfair. It should end.”
Georgiana lifted an appealing hand. “The war will end when we heal the song.”
“That is mad,” I pointed out. “The flute is lost. The song cannot be healed.” I slashed the blade through the air to point out the infested field.
It was not a threat—the tip passed at least an inch short of Darcy’s cheekbone—but he ducked anyway, which made me smile. “We are too late. The blight spreads.”
“Lizzy, I was not thinking when I spoke,” Mary said. “Give Mr. Darcy the dagger.”
“I cannot,” I told her. “I need it to end the war. We thought we needed three great items, but we were wrong. The dagger is sufficient. We thought we needed three wyves. We do not. I am sufficient.”
“The dagger is affecting you,” Mary said.
“Fooling your mind. Look!” She pointed to Yuánchi, dragging himself to us, his tremendous shoulders shivering, his blind head high as if he could see through the ragged, weeping black scales where his prismatic eyes had been.
“You can do nothing alone. Yuánchi is too spent to fly, let alone battle an army.”
I inverted the dagger. Blood trickled down the glossy blade. As it crossed each hidden symbol, smoke spit and hissed. Curious, I turned the blade horizontal. The symbols formed an uneven pattern—music, in some ancient form.
“That is not what I meant!” Mary cried, her voice speeding to a desperate staccato. She gestured frantically at Darcy. “Do not let her sing. She will summon Fènnù.”
I laughed. Papa had loved my singing—I had a pleasant voice for a country lady—but these symbols were a cipher. She might as well tell me to sing by staring at a box of bolts.
“Shall I end the war?” I asked conversationally.
“Lizzy, this is not the way,” Georgiana began.
Darcy, though, waved to quiet her. “How would you end it?” His eyes were intent. My husband trusted me.
“I have seen a thousand wars,” I said. “Wars launched by idle cruelty. Wars over a misspelled word in a scripture, or skin that is too light or too dark, or food that is unfamiliar. I have seen wars that pander to imperial vanity. Wars that consume generations, fought by fathers and sons, then their sons, and then theirs. But I have also seen wars end.”
Swift as a blade, the smoky daylight dimmed as Fènnù coasted over us, fifty yards high.
Even with her wings still, her weight squeezed the air in my lungs.
Her wake stained the sky to midnight. She settled in the field, not far from Yuánchi, and night settled around her.
Yuánchi turned, hissing, his wings spread, but Fènnù ignored him. She watched me.
“There was no need to sing,” I told Mary, who was floundering in the dark. “The dagger may summon the black dragon, but she seeks for her great wyfe unbidden.”
I vaulted the collapsed stone wall and dashed into the meadow.
Fènnù lowered herself and pressed the elbow of her wing to the earth.
I ran up the leading bone, thick as a tree trunk.
Her scales were rough, distorted by centuries of disease, and the uneven edges bit my boot soles.
At her shoulder, I paused while she stood, colossal muscles sliding over one another, raising me more than twenty feet high.
“Elizabeth.”
I turned. Darcy was behind me—he had chased me up Fènnù’s wing.
“That was quick,” I admitted.
“The dagger has your mind. Fènnù is filling you with anger. Resist her. Come back.”
“My anger is my own.” I could feel Fènnù’s mind, dispassionate and superior, pruning my clumsy human logic. “Mary is angry. You are angry; it is in your eyes. But you are all afraid to act. Your grief and fear paralyze you. I have shed grief. I have shed doubt.”
“At the end, my mother had visions,” he whispered, “but I was too proud to listen. I ascribed them to weakness—to binding sickness, to madness. I see better now. My mother foresaw the blight and the return of the dragons. She knew she could not heal the song, so she chose to pass her strength to the next great wyfe of healing.”
Irritation burrowed through my dispassionate mood. “Are you sure this is the correct speech? It seems to be for Emma.”
“My mother passed a legacy to the next wyfe of healing. She charged me with another: to remember the great wyves and to defend them. To be faithful and bold to their cause. When I found you and loved you, I flattered myself that good fortune had aided my task. You were wise and strong, and I would always protect my wyfe. But here”—his hand chopped down toward Fènnù, under our feet—“you have chosen the wrong path. Fènnù has exploited your grief to take control. But you can resist her. Yuánchi told you that you are the strongest wyfe of war there has been. That is why he bound you. You can withstand Fènnù—”
Yuánchi’s name jolted Fènnù’s thoughts, splitting them into paranoid fragments. A past life replaced mine, the life that led to the breaking of the song. Darcy became a different man, a Roman general and a lover, then he was Imhotep, the Egyptian priest who betrayed me…
In the confusion, a spark lit my mind, Yuánchi pressing through our binding, trying to speak to me. But Darcy was right; I was strong. I stiffened my mind to block him. Sealed him away.
Be still, my Fènnù, I thought. Be calm, my plague, my storm. The wild fears eased and the past life retreated, leaving a trickle of cold sweat on the back of my neck.
“You fear that Fènnù controls me?” I said to Darcy. “She will do whatever I wish.”
I pointed the dagger to the far side of the field, and Fènnù strode that way—one massive step, a second. A little farther, I thought, and she adjusted her stance to where I wanted.
Darcy, stubborn as usual, argued on. “You told me you might control her for a time, but that she will win. That you will lose yourself to her.”
“You are confusing me. Am I strong or am I doomed?” He licked his lips, dismayed—Darcy hated to be caught in an error—so I took pity and reassured him.
“Trust me, love.” I flicked my blood off the dagger and slipped it into the sheath, then showed him my empty hands.
I stepped closer, so close that the heat of his heaving chest warmed mine.
“If you leave,” I promised softly, “I will tell you how wars end.” I adjusted the set of my boots on the ragged scales of Fènnù’s back.
Darcy’s brow was furrowed, his dark eyes confused.
We were close enough to kiss. I smiled willingly and rested my palm low on his chest, a handbreadth above his center of balance, then shoved.
His arms wheeled, a foot skidded, and his stunned face fell out of sight.
I leaned over and watched him land in the soupy pond below.
“Wars end when everyone dies,” I called, but I was not sure he heard.