Chapter 37 Fire and Song
FIRE AND SONG
MARY
Georgiana was answering the flood of questions. “Mary solved it when she saw the valley walls.”
I pointed down. “The dragon is in the stone below us.”
Every head dropped to examine the dirt. Mr. Darcy shifted the toe of one boot. “How do you know?”
“I never understood how Fènnù could sleep in the Thames without being found. The river has been sounded countless times. But when Yuánchi and Fènnù rose, the earth shook, and then I remembered the Loch bairn journal, ‘her waes eac eorestyrung on lak manegum stowum’—an earthquake at a lake. When draca return to the water, they swim in a fish-like form, but when dragons sleep, they dig into the bottom, into stone itself, then burn it to seal it. The shaking is when they break free.” I pointed to the hillside we had seen.
“The stone here has been melted and cooled.”
“How do we wake a buried dragon?” Mr. Knightley asked.
“Fènnù was raised with her song,” Georgiana said. “We need the third dragon’s song.”
Mr. Darcy shook his head. “Fènnù was raised with her song and with the dagger.”
“We do not have the flute,” I admitted, “but we may have its song. The piece of the flute I held had markings. I think they are musical notation. May I see the amulet?”
Emma lifted it over her head and passed it to me. I rubbed off the dirt, revealing the layered iridescence of Yuánchi’s scale. The jade whorls of the setting were intricate but too uniform to conceal information, so I flipped the amulet over.
The backside had irregular, fine radial grooves. Their lengths and spacing varied. I rotated it, mentally piecing them into a horizontal sequence like a musical score.
“The markings on the flute are like these,” I said with a surge of excitement. “Musical scores have a… feeling. A structure one sees at a glance. This is notation.”
“Can you sing the flute’s song?” Georgiana asked.
I was spinning memorized images of the flute in my head and matching the symbols.
They were the same, but… “I have not heard either song. This is like memorizing an alphabet without hearing the letters.” I passed the amulet back to Emma, thinking.
“We need Fènnù’s song as well. That is the reverse situation: I have sung it, but I have not read the dagger’s markings. ”
Harriet wrapped her arms around herself. “The dagger is dangerous. It summons the black dragon.” I had forgotten she was forced to use it while drugged by the slavers.
“Read the markings,” Mr. Darcy advised, “but do not sing them. Before we call Fènnù, we must raise the dragon of song, and Emma must break Yuánchi’s binding and bind Yuánchi… and Georgiana must bind the dragon of song…” His cheek twitched. It was a daunting list, even if his logic was sound.
Lizzy drew the dagger and shook back the sleeve on her other arm, but I stopped her. “Let me do it. You will make a mess.” She hesitated but passed me the dagger.
I used the point to prick the tip of my left, littlest finger, then pressed the flesh with my thumb until drops welled. I painted that down the flat of the blade, away from the serrations. The notation, presumably, was on the smooth part.
Patches of blood began to hiss and smoke, stinking like burned hair. Symbols emerged, metallic-bright in the carbonized ash. I turned the knife horizontal, realized it was upside down, and reversed it. “It uses the same notation.”
Eyes smarting from the smoke, I picked out the symbols.
More examples helped; rules clicked into place.
The markings were more abstract than a musical staff, which literally conveyed pitch.
This was like a composer’s shorthand for chordal structure.
That was a breakthrough, and the symbols fixed in my memory.
Structure was easier to recall than randomness.
“Can you sing it?” Mr. Darcy asked, his voice tight. “We do not have much longer.”
“Do not rush her,” Georgiana warned.
“I am still working on the notation,” I muttered, rereading the dagger.
Reading was easy now, and this time I imagined Fènnù’s song in my mind while I read.
I knew the song; I had even transcribed it to paper.
“The marks are not a melody. The same symbol can indicate any of several notes. What we humans sing, what we call the song, is one melodic line of many.”
Mr. Darcy checked the sky. “We do not need the theory—”
“Be quiet,” Georgiana said. “It matters.” Mr. Knightley added a cautioning look at Mr. Darcy, who nodded rigidly.
“The notation is like a cantus firmus in counterpoint,” I mused. “It defines what the song permits. It is rules for how to choose the notes, not the notes themselves…”
“You are marvelous at counterpoint,” Georgiana said supportively.
I reread again, hearing Fènnù’s song in my mind and sinking deeper into this alien form, music that was not only unfamiliar but inhuman, the harmonic system of another species. As my eyes skipped from symbol to symbol, a whispered voice echoed the tune…
I yanked my eyes away and frowned at the watching faces. “Do not sing.”
Heads swiveled. Georgiana said, “Nobody sang.”
The whispered voice crooned on in my mind, an inhuman rendition filled with fury.
“Fènnù heard,” I realized. “She heard my thoughts.” I bunched a handful of my skirt and pulled the blade through, stripping whatever power it drew from the blood of a wyfe.
The cloth fell in two, sliced by the passing edge, and the blade emerged pristine, the obsidian finish reflecting the sky, but the whisper continued.
I slipped the blade through the leather loop for my reticule and let go, spreading my arms wide so my hands were far from it.
“I still hear her,” I said.
“Is she coming?” Mr. Darcy asked.
Lizzy turned to the south. A breath later, Emma and Georgiana turned the same way. Through the music, I heard triumph and pursuit…
“Yes,” Lizzy said.
“Blast,” Mr. Darcy said.
“What do we do?” Emma asked.
“Raise the third dragon,” Georgiana said. “Mary, we need the song of the flute.”
“I have not even started that!” I closed my eyes to shutter distractions and summoned the symbols etched on the flute’s joint.
Now that I understood them, they were upside down.
Drat. Twice in a row. I flipped it, which was harder than reversing the dagger in my hand.
I had to read the symbols right-to-left, turning each one mentally and reassembling them…
The notation on the flute emerged from the charred wood then finished cleanly. “I memorized the end of the song. The beginning was burned away.”
“Sing the end,” Mr. Darcy said. I had never heard his voice so tense.
“I cannot! Each note depends on what came before. They must be derived in order, start to finish. The notation tells how to choose what follows each note.”
“Music does not work like that,” Mr. Darcy exclaimed.
I opened my eyes to explain that, yes, music works exactly like that.
Mr. Darcy was not even watching me; his face was raised to the southern sky. The horizon had been swallowed by a rising wall of black, an inverted thunderstorm boiling up from the earth.
Georgiana took my hands. “Ignore him. I understand. Could we guess the beginning?”
I started a mental list. “Hundreds of beginnings would match… no, hundreds of thousands.”
“Some variations will sound better,” Mr. Knightley said. “Counterpoint can sound pleasant or terrible. Or it may not matter. Try any melody that fits the notation.”
“I do not have the opening notation! It was lost when the flute burned…”
Except… the French did not think that. They had lore we did not, stolen history of draca and of the Bennet family, and all along, they had insisted that a Bennet had the flute. Even today, after I had handed the perfumer the burned remains, she accused me of having it. She had grabbed my hands.
Lizzy was pacing. “I no longer sense Yuánchi’s mind at all. Emma, it is time. Break my binding.”
Mr. Darcy tore himself away from the nearing storm. “Fènnù is coming. You will be defenseless.”
“That was always the plan. It is just happening sooner than we thought.”
Emma gathered Lizzy’s and Mr. Darcy’s hands, then bowed her head, eyes closed. Mr. Knightley took firm hold of her arm.
“Prepare yourself,” he said to Lizzy. “This will be unpleasant.”
Georgiana’s touch, feather-light, guided my attention back to her. She smiled. “What else can we try?”
I attempted to focus on the flute’s music, but my memory refused. It had fixed on a different, irresistible path. Scenes clicked backward through time. A puzzle was solving, but a different puzzle than I had thought…
An image: the museum door labeled 1750–1766. Then the interior of that crowded storeroom: the curator placing the burned flute in my hand. That was not the key, but it was a clue, one of the discrepancies tugging my attention.
“The notation on the flute was marked on the joint,” I said. “That is an odd place to mark something. Assembling the flute would wear away the symbols.”
Georgiana’s supportive smile did not waver, but her “Good point” sounded forced.
My trail of memories was obliterated by a tremendous power in the draca world, a tension like a celestial bowstring being drawn. Emma’s body hunched. In my mind’s eye, the amulet blazed up like a sun.
Yuánchi’s huge body convulsed, his mass landing hard enough to vibrate my shoes. Lizzy gave an abbreviated, pained cry. The tension wound tighter, as if the world around us was being wrung, a hawser stretched by an elysian windlass…
“What is important about the joint?” Georgiana gasped raggedly. I blinked, forcing my attention away from the world of draca, away from the black storm in the south, and the trail of memory snapped to the instant I sought, the curator’s description of how the flute was assembled.
I quoted him aloud: “ ‘A mouthpiece and body joined by an annulet.’ ”
Georgiana’s supportive smile finally failed. “What?”