Chapter 8 A Scarlet Calm #2
Ribbed bronze wings that spanned six feet whooshed low over our heads. The taloned feet barely cleared Mr. Darcy’s hat. We all ducked, rather too late.
“A drake,” Lizzy said, turning to watch. The firedrake veered upward, soaring toward the river.
The bronze glow of his binding filled me, but with it, suffering. Pain. “His bound wyfe is hurt!”
The bronze glow pointed toward the river.
I followed it and spotted her at the end of a short dock, a simple walkway of floated planks extending a dozen feet into the river.
She stood hunched in a dirty blanket, an invisible sliver of London’s poor.
Her eyes were sunken, her hair filthy, her skin pallid.
The urge to help—and the race to preempt the miasma—filled me. I ran toward her. She saw me and thrust out her hand, clutching something small. “Stay away!” She had a lady’s diction, but her voice was excruciatingly hoarse.
I stopped at the riverbank. Mr. Knightley pounded to a halt beside me, then Lizzy and Mr. Darcy on my other side.
The woman pointed her clenched hand at Lizzy, waving her fist like she held a weapon. She backed from the planks onto the frozen river. “He ordered me to kill you. But I could not. Now he will punish me.” The blanket fell from her shoulders, leaving only a thin chemise streaked with dirt.
A pendant hung from her neck, incongruously bright with gold and emeralds.
Mr. Knightley uttered a soft oath when her blanket fell. He shucked his coat onto his arm and held out his hand. “Come back. The ice is not safe.”
A crowd was gathering, and there were concerned gasps and ribald jokes. A rude man shouted, “Get that Negro away!”
“Let me help,” I said and stepped past Mr. Knightley onto the ice. The patch under my feet sank slightly with a woodish creak that made me hold still.
The woman backed farther. She was ten yards from shore. Dangerously deep if the ice broke. Shouted warnings joined the catcalls from the crowd.
“I am the lightest,” Lizzy said and stepped off the dock.
Like her touch was a stone thrown into a pond, a ripple rushed outward from her foot. Instead of diminishing, it strengthened as it crossed the river, making the ice look fluid but trailing ominous crackles and hisses.
The river groaned, a grumble I felt through my shoes. The crowd gasped and fell deathly quiet, anticipating disaster.
The wisps of fog hugging the ice sank and turned to silver hoarfrost on the glassy surface, the filigrees and feathers lengthening before our eyes.
There was another creaking groan, but not in fracture.
The ice was thickening. I felt it rise and harden beneath me.
The dark glass turned opaque, then whitish-blue.
Ridges pushed up, inches thick with strange, cold steam that trickled down their raised edges.
Amazed cries rose from the crowd, but frightened shouts also.
Lizzy’s pose softened, then she sank to her knees. Mr. Darcy rushed to her and helped her to the dock where she sat weakly. She shook her head. “I am fine! Go help her.”
In her ruined voice, the woman cried, “You are what they said! The Darcy witch!” Her tone was triumphant—joyous—but the crowd echoed “witch” with fear.
The woman turned and began a broken run across the river. The back of her chemise was ripped, exposing skin crisscrossed with ugly red lines. Mr. Knightley bellowed a furious, wordless sound—a shouted gasp—and I saw the red lines were crusted, ragged cuts.
The terrible wounds wrenched my mind.
Miasma erupted, flooding from the moored skiffs until it poured over the gunwales in a deluge of colorless sickness. Lizzy, groggy on the boards, spoke to her kneeling husband, but her words were a wracking cough. Her shoulders hunched and her back distorted, matching the woman’s injuries.
My vision darkened. I was fainting, like at the salon. But this time, the scarlet strength was close. I dragged at my left glove, yanking until the long sleeve fell away.
Mr. Darcy was kneeling by his wyfe. My bare hand landed on his collar, and scarlet threw the miasma back like a hissing animal.
His head turned, astonished, as I pushed my bare fingers against the skin of his throat.
Scarlet flooded me, unfettered by cloth.
The miasma flickered, became ephemeral, and vanished.
The woman’s pain crystalized in my awareness, every horror revealed. Her back had been torn and re-torn, her throat crushed. Her mind was a wreck of terror and despair. But she could be saved.
“Let me help you,” I called. I began walking across the thickened ice toward her. My hand floated free of Mr. Darcy, leaving me brimming with strength.
The woman turned to me, wide-eyed, backing away. “The pain is gone.” She croaked a laugh. “You are too late. He has crept inside!” She thumped her skull with her fist. “I must drive him out.” Her hand tipped to her lips, then she flung a small object that skittered past my feet. A vial.
I sensed a darkness spread in her body, an evil.
“Emma!” Lizzy shouted. “Get away! She is corrupted. Addicted! She will kill you!”
The woman stretched her arms in the cold air, reaching for an unseen lover. “I free myself!”
Command hammered my consciousness, the same sensation I had felt at the salon before the draca fought for Lizzy.
With a wailing cry, the bronze firedrake swept past me, wingtips skimming the ice. His flaming blue breath roared out and enveloped the woman. Glowing, sky-like radiance wreathed her, then it blossomed ugly orange. The clean blue became a searing inferno.
Her pain swept through the bronze of her binding to envelop me in a fiery ocean, but the scarlet calm swathed us both in a blanket.
It was the thought of pain, not pain itself.
It sputtered, faded, vanished. Her form darkened to a flaming charcoal statue kneeling in a steaming pool of melted ice.
The pendant was a splash of molten gold down the chest.
The drake soared upward with an endless mourning shriek. He rose high, high, then his wings furled, and he fell. Like a stone. Like a lance. He slammed into the ice beside the woman’s body, the elegant lines of his head and sinuous neck crushing like eggshell.
The melting ice cracked. Slow as an overloaded boat, a six-foot chunk tipped. The smoldering shape of the woman fell through with a sizzle and gout of steam. The drake’s body, limp and gleaming, slipped after her and vanished into the dark water.