Chapter 36 BreakBind
brEAK OR BIND
EMMA
I knelt in the grass, holding the amulet in one hand and resting my other on Yuánchi’s muzzle.
The scarlet dragon lay still as death, his fire-bright scales mottled even more with midnight darkness.
His sprawled form reminded me of an illustration of a beached whale I was shown as a child.
I had cried when that was explained to me, that magnificent creature powerless and doomed outside of its natural domain.
Now, I felt the same despair. I could sense the broken song eroding whatever lifeblood gave draca their miraculous vitality.
I squeezed the amulet again, closed my eyes, and thought, Heal.
Nothing happened. I may as well have thought, Turn the moon to cheese.
After all this time, even clutching an artifact held by my own ancestor, my gift of healing was merely a window to suffering.
I felt a harsh envy for Lady Anne Darcy, so skilled a healer that she had gifted her ability to me through her long-dead wyvern, even if that benefit had been short-lived.
But if my gift was a cruel window, it was a spectacular one.
Yuánchi’s binding was a scarlet tether surrounded by a huge aura.
It stretched into the distance like a dazzling beam of sunset.
And that was different from before. When I first met the Darcys, I had been unable to touch Lizzy; their binding was too bright.
Now, immersed in that power, I felt wonder.
Wonder, and curiosity. I saw draca bindings as the color of their draca. Yuánchi’s true binding was pure scarlet; what I had seen as black streaks were foreign strands wrapped around it like a choking vine.
But even the scarlet core was… flawed…
Yuánchi’s blind head stirred weakly. The wyfe of war comes. The broken song surrounds her.
“Lizzy is coming,” I called to Mr. Darcy, not sure whether to convey the rest. He nodded and rolled his shoulders like a man preparing for battle. Perhaps the rest was assumed.
Nervous, I stood. I knew Lizzy had heard my message, but she and Fènnù should have arrived long ago, and I worried about the delay.
I ran my fingers over the burrs and dirt on my clothes.
Strange that those imperfections no longer mattered.
They seemed proper, a sign of life, of taking risks and caring.
But in the back of my mind, a new unease lurked.
My obsession with the imagined miasma had been replaced with something real: the spreading blight.
Harriet and Mr. Knightley came to stand with me. The three of us linked arms and watched the sky.
“There have been dreadful moments today,” Harriet said, “but wonderful ones, too. I am thankful we returned. You saved all those girls, and I know every one of them.”
“That would not have happened without you,” I said. “We would not even have the amulet.”
“There,” Harriet said and pointed.
Fènnù had cleared the horizon, distant enough to appear bird-sized if her wings had not swept with such slow, brutal power.
Even that weak illusion faded as she came closer.
Half a mile away, she was simply huge. She turned and began a circle around us—a jerky path with swoops and bucks, her head swinging.
“The steed fights the rider,” Mr. Darcy said. He crossed his arms, his fingernails white where they squeezed his tensed biceps.
“Perhaps that is a good sign,” I said. “Lizzy is seeking control.”
Fènnù ended her circle and turned toward us. Blackness began billowing in her wake, the sign of her deadly breath priming.
“Or not good,” Mr. Knightley said. “Should we run?”
“If you wish,” Mr. Darcy said. “I shall stay.” He had described the devastation they crossed while flying here, an area larger than this entire valley. A few yards hardly mattered, and even less to Mr. Darcy. If his wyfe chose to attack, I doubted he cared to escape.
I touched the amulet.
Yuánchi’s awareness filled me as if I had embraced his body, the wasting poison of the broken song but also his binding to Lizzy, pulling taut and glowing brighter and brighter.
“Lizzy is drawing on her binding,” I said. She was also hastening Yuánchi’s descent into whatever fate awaited a dragon mis-bound, but that die was cast when Yuánchi bound her to end his despair after Lady Anne’s death. Perhaps he had sensed the decay of the song and knew time was running out.
Fènnù reached the edge of the Abbey meadow and reared stallion-like in midair, black poison spilling from her wings and splattering among the trees.
She bellowed; Harriet covered her ears. Then the black dragon smashed down fifty yards from us, each massive claw crushing a wagon load of earth, the crook of a wing pulverizing one of the Abbey’s six-hundred-year-old walls.
Lizzy was on the ground; I did not even see how she managed so fast, only that she had run between us and Fènnù.
She faced the black dragon, her arms raised wide.
Fènnù bellowed an ear-ripping roar, and Lizzy shouted, “No!” The strength of the wyfe of war’s command hit me, magnified by her binding to Yuánchi—strength enough, barely, to turn the black dragon from her prey.
Fènnù hooted a peculiar, piqued snort, then her wings unfolded to span the meadow.
A gale blasted, flinging branches and clods of uprooted grass.
Mr. Knightley pulled Harriet and me to him, sheltering us with his back to the storm until the torrent quieted.
“Good God,” he said when speech was possible again. “We cannot seriously intend to bind that monster.”
Fènnù was airborne and vanishing over the hills. Lizzy stood a few steps from Mr. Darcy, her face pale, the rose-colored mark on her cheek livid. After the unthinkable power she wielded in the world of draca, the woman looked small and vulnerable.
“I am myself again,” she told her husband, “for a while.”
Mr. Darcy had crouched facing the gale rather than turning away.
He was flecked with stems and leaves, his chin grazed by some flying rock.
His back was still streaked with drying mud from being pushed off the back of a dragon.
Silently, he rose and offered his hand. Lizzy took it and leaned into his chest.
An itch of wrongness, a tug like the old miasma, dragged my vision to the trees sprayed by Fènnù’s poison. The black was consuming the bright spring foliage.
Lizzy broke away and ran to where we stood with Yuánchi, pulling her husband with her. She threw her arms around the dragon, her forehead pressed to his cheek. “I can barely sense his mind. This is killing him.”
“The broken song is within him,” I said. “I see it, like I see the blight spreading in the hills, but I can do nothing to stop it.”
She pressed tears from her eyes. “His binding is all that saved me. Fènnù would have taken my mind otherwise.”
Mary and Georgiana were rushing across the meadow. They arrived panting, and Mary gasped, “I feared Fènnù was attacking.”
“Almost,” Lizzy said wearily. “I flew her over the battlefields. England is mustering more troops.”
I gathered Mr. Knightley’s hand for a hopeful squeeze. “Will we win?”
Lizzy shook her head. “Not against Overseers and their crawlers. They are too lethal. And Napoleon only needs to hold us off. He never planned to conquer England. His goal is more brutal: use Fènnù and the blight to destroy us so he can rule Europe unopposed.” She bent to stroke Yuánchi.
“That is also his weakness, the reason he is here. He must ensure the great wyves do not heal the song.”
“Then the song can be healed,” Mr. Darcy said. “There is hope.”
“The emperor thinks so. And he thinks the key is in Surrey.” Lizzy peered at me. “You found the amulet!”
“I do not know what it achieves without the flute,” I said, “but it is potent. It showed me the vision again, the three wyves trying to heal the song. To succeed, we need to bind Fènnù.”
Lizzy drew back. “Bind her?”
There was a babble of discussion, but I was watching Lizzy stroke Yuánchi. Her touch made their binding blaze…
“Give me your hand,” I said to her, holding out mine.
She hesitated—I had shied away from touch in the past—but she took it, and their binding flared into exacting detail, a living thing with shifting layers of thread-like filaments. It reached from Yuánchi to Lizzy and then, in a softer, weaker form, touched her husband.
Where it met Lizzy, there was… not a gap exactly, but blemishes. A thread here that would be better there, another that was loose, two that were tangled…
“You are not matched,” I said. “Not perfectly. Yuánchi chose to bind you, but a wyfe of war is not his intended partner.”
“I know,” she said.
“That left flaws.” Now that I had seen them, I could not look away. My chuckle hurt; I had practiced so hard to overcome this. “Imperfections I obsess upon.” A reckless idea built. “My affinity is manipulating bindings. What if I can break your binding?”
Her eyebrows climbed. “What?”
“Bindings cannot be broken,” Mr. Darcy said. “They are until death.”
“I broke one,” I said. “Not a draca binding, but something like it. I broke the binding between one of those large crawlers and a captive wyfe.”
“Those are drug-fueled perversions,” he said, “not true bindings.”
Mary spoke up. “Draca and crawlers are related, perhaps even the same species.” Mr. Darcy scoffed, and Mary bristled. “I performed an experiment—”
“Mary, please wait a minute,” Lizzy said. She watched her husband. “Your mother was a wyfe of healing. You told me she released her wyvern.”
“Released,” Mr. Darcy agreed. “She did not break a binding.”
“What is the difference?” Lizzy stood. “This could save Yuánchi, and the wyves could bind correctly. Emma with him, then…” She left the rest unsaid, but her finger rubbed the blemish on her cheek from Fènnù’s breath.
“I dislike it,” Mr. Darcy said.
“I dislike it,” Mr. Knightley agreed. “Emma, I was there when you broke the binding. Your mind was gravely affected. I had to carry Augusta. And that was only a crawler. This is a dragon.”
“I have the amulet now,” I pointed out.
“It is still dangerous,” he insisted.
“May I speak yet?” Mary asked.
“In a moment,” Lizzy said. “Let me ask Yuánchi.” Her eyes became distant, then she swallowed. “I can barely feel his mind… Yes. Do it. Yuánchi is failing.”
“Just like that?” Mr. Darcy exclaimed. “Without… debate?”
Firmly, Mary said, “That is what I usually say, so it is my turn. First, the debate is short. I saw the great song, or whatever glimpse of it a human mind can perceive. The song is complex and perfect, and it is built on three foundations—the three dragons’ songs.
It will be impossible to heal the great song if they are mis-bound.
” Mr. Darcy opened his mouth, and Mary said, “Second, Georgiana and I located the third dragon. So, this is not insanity. We can try to bind the dragons.”
There was an explosion of questions.
Lizzy ignored them and asked me, “How do we break Yuánchi’s binding?”
“Give me your hands.” I reached out to her and Mr. Darcy.
“Not yet,” Mr. Darcy said to his wyfe. “I agree we should break the binding. But if you are not bound to Fènnù, and she returns, you will be defenseless. We must get everything ready first.”
“What else?” Lizzy asked.
I answered. “We must raise the dragon of song.”