Chapter 39
PURSUIT
MARY
With the captives protected, Lizzy and I hurried into the street. I checked both directions, wondering where a dragon would fit. “Which way?”
“Yuánchi will find us,” Lizzy said, but her voice was more detached than confident. Disassociated.
“Let me see you.” I steadied her chin to examine her eyes. We had discarded the riding hoods and pulled on our heavy fishermen’s leathers and caps. Lizzy’s curly dark hair was tucked away except for stray floating locks. The hairs looked black as coal against her drained complexion.
Pallor. Pupils blown to full dilation in daylight. I rested two fingers at her carotid artery. Pulse racing but weak beneath clammy skin. Illness, not fear.
This had worsened far too quickly. “Had you symptoms last night? Sweats?”
“Mary, I know I am worse. Do not bother.” Her face tilted to the sky. “They both come. It is a close race.” She stared upward, entranced by senses I did not share.
“By the river,” I decided and pulled her along.
We cut through a shipping yard, drawing stares for our garb from a set of boys braiding hawsers, then heard their youthful shouts when a dozen small draca scampered behind us.
We scrambled over a collapsing chunk of seawall and onto the stony shore.
Here there was room. A stiff, cold breeze snapped, little impeded by the broken ice.
Even so, I was hot in the heavy leather.
Draca leaped from the seawall and gathered around our feet. “Lizzy, can you stop this… summons?”
“I called too loudly. They know me, now. That is how Fènnù found us. I called too loudly…”
Close to shore, the river was a slurry of hand-sized ice chunks, flotsam, and brackish water.
Unexpectedly, the water glugged and surged, then a translucent, writhing shape, finned and fishlike and at least fifty pounds, drove itself onto the stony shore at Lizzy’s feet.
A shadowy shape squirmed inside. Lizzy had described this, the amphibian or chrysalis-like aquatic form draca took after their bindings broke, the form in which they transformed to their next breed.
A razor claw split the side releasing a greasy torrent of gelatinous liquid, and a good-sized bronze lindworm crawled free, mewling at Lizzy.
“You! Stop!” A trio of men were running toward us on the street, their stride occasionally interrupted to look over the seawall, searching for a path down. They had the cropped hair and wide belts of Blackcoats.
“There,” Lizzy said, pointing high. Scarlet Yuánchi, wings tucked to stoop like a hawk, was diving toward us.
I steadied Lizzy as his wings snapped vast, hiding half the sky.
The blast of wind launched spray and ice, and the draca around us hunkered low, claws clutching the ground.
He hit with an earth-shaking splash, near foot ashore, far foot in the water, the ladder-like steps of the harness facing us.
Lizzy climbed while I stuffed the books from the cellar into the saddlebag, then I followed, strapping my lap belt and tugging hers to be sure she had not forgotten.
I slapped Lizzy’s shoulder and shouted, “Go!” and the wings drove us into the air.
It was as tempestuous as the first launch.
I caught a glimpse of the three men who had chased us pointing pistols, but they were too distant to be a danger.
Then the sky rocked madly, and I held tight.
We settled into a rhythm, climbing fast. Like the first flight, pain built in my ears, then released with a pop.
Pressure, like the effect reported by divers.
A page of Valsalva’s treatise on the Eustachian tube opened in my mind’s eye, the Italian I had comprehended appearing in neat lettering, the parts I had not understood a mushy blur.
Lizzy twisted in her seat and looked left. Above the hills west of London, a black winged form flapped. Even miles distant, Fènnù’s black silhouette was clear.
Yuánchi’s voice filled my mind, a silent yet roaring basso profundo. Hold fast for speed. The force of his message rocked my mind. How did Lizzy manage this every day?
The rhythm of wings sped. The wind of flight, already intense, rose to a gale, then a tempest. Lizzy hunched forward and lay flat. I did the same, spectacles jammed against her leather coat. Still the wind grew, battering my shoulders and arms while an endless, merciless thunderclap howled.
With no warning, our path jagged up and to one side, slamming us into our seats.
A monstrous black shadow flashed past. Twenty seconds later, we jagged again, sudden as a carriage striking a curb.
My head was knocked up enough that my spectacles caught the wind.
The leather cord snapped with an ephemeral tug, and they were gone.
Squinting, face averted from the blast, the horizon softened to a familiar blur, rocked crazily, then leveled.
Fènnù’s black bulk flashed overhead again.
The wind had eased tremendously. We glided in a downward curve toward a hilltop.
Lizzy pushed upright in her seat and shouted back, “We cannot outfly her. I told Yuánchi to land.” Already, his wings were flared and cupping, and we settled in uncanny grace, his sides heaving like a ship-sized bellows.
Lizzy unstrapped her belt and climbed down. I hurried after, stripping off my gloves as my fingers were numb from effort. By the time my feet struck earth, Lizzy had dropped her cap and goggles in the rough grass. She turned to watch Fènnù’s approach. Her expression was manic.
“What are we doing here?” I shouted.
“I have told Yuánchi not to interfere. I must help Fènnù. She is not under the dagger’s influence, so our enemies are unaware. She comes only for me.”
“That is what I am afraid of!”
A new round of gusts battered us. I shielded my eyes from dirt as Fènnù came down crouched, her chest thirty yards distant.
This was my first view of her in daylight.
She was longer in body and neck than Yuánchi, and even more broad-chested and muscled, easily twice his weight.
The two dragons’ necks wove, testing wary perspectives like a pair of belligerent barn cats. But not violent. Not yet.
Lizzy took an uncertain step forward, then another.
I said, “What are you doing?”
“She is mine. I am hers.”
I caught Lizzy’s wrist. She turned to me, her eyes wide as if amazed I were present, her pupils empty pools.
“You already have a dragon,” I said. Her answer was a glassy stare and an impatient tug. Yuánchi towered above us, so I shouted up, “Stop her!”
She is a great wyfe. The will of a great wyfe has power.
“She would never choose this if her mind were clear!” There was no reply, so I took Lizzy’s shoulders in my hands. “Lizzy. You are ill. It is time”—my throat balked at the gentle phrase I used at the clinic but had spoken only to strangers—“It is time to be with your family. It is time to go home.”
“She calls me,” she whispered. “I am not strong enough to deny her.” She did not fight my grip, but her head craned, staring at the black dragon.
Fènnù’s neck descended until her scintillating eyes were level with ours.
The underside of her jaw brushed the grass; her head was as tall as me.
This close, my blurred vision was clear.
The black scales on her skin did not mesh with the smoothness of other draca; they were disfigured or diseased.
Rough sores fringed her lower jaw. Farther away and slightly blurred, the sores continued along the leading edge of her shoulders.
They dripped blackish ichor onto the grass, issuing an astringent and biting scent as the grass wilted.
Oily, pitch-dark vapors rose, coiling like ink in water rather than gas.
A hot snort, cloyingly humid, blew around us. Lizzy moaned like a sleeper trapped in a nightmare.
I let her go and stepped between the dragon and her.
Fènnù’s nostrils and the sharp ridge atop her snout aligned at my breastbone.
The faceted eyes fixed on mine. The tip of her snout drew closer.
A yard. A foot. The rumbling rush of a breath flattened my leather jerkin, then the inhalation lifted it.
“You cannot take her,” I said to those inhuman eyes. “She is unwell. If you desire her—if you care for her—find the sense to understand me.”
The jaws cracked six inches, enough for the gleam of obsidian-black teeth and a rush of bitter air that sank in a chilled, veiling mist, but the gesture seemed puzzled, not a threat. What use had this creature for threats? No force could oppose her.
As another breath began, I laid the flat of my bare palm against her nose. It fit easily between her nostrils; I could have placed both hands side-by-side. The heat under my skin was fevered. The scales were sharp as roughly stacked blades.
I pressed hard, like I would prod a reluctant cow.
There was no give, not the suppleness of mammalian skin, not yielding muscle, certainly not retreat.
An animalistic fear unnerved the muscles in my arm.
This was an adamantine colossus, as old and massive as the pyramids, a creature whispered of in myths of fallen cities.
Her eyes flickered, turbid with spectral hints, each a roiling jewel. But changing. Brightening with beautiful gossamer hints of gold.
“You are aware,” I whispered. “The injured mind thirsts even more to comprehend. My sister has seen your past. She told me you rise in vengeance against wrongs. Remember what you were. It is the corrupt and powerful who covet and steal. If you overcome her—if you overwhelm her—you pollute yourself. The memories you treasure would diminish to ignes fatui. All you value would become mockery.”
So abruptly that I staggered, the muzzle withdrew a yard, then farther. There was a gargantuan wheeling of gleaming black and the metallic grind of rubbing scales, then a blasting wash of fetid, acrid odor, and she was gone.
My outstretched arm hung, shaking. My ankles and feet were freezing. I clenched my fingers, feeling as if my heart had stopped and restarted, then turned.
Lizzy stood, eyes closed and face uplifted, her attention distant—her pose when sharing a draca’s vision. Yuánchi’s vision. His head was a few yards above hers, his gaze on me.
Yuánchi’s thought came. The will of a great wyfe has power.
Lizzy whispered, “You are shining, Mary.”
“What?” I said. How like my sister that sounded.
“It was you at the ball. The fourth great wyfe. But your aura is different. It stretches like a rainbow to the north. Toward Pemberley.”
Fragments of facts fluttered past my mind’s eye, like when weeks of research first hint at connected meaning.
“Lizzy,” I said, “at the performance tonight. At the musical event for the royal court. I had planned... I hoped to show you a truth about me.”
Her eyelids opened, and she smiled through pale lips. “Show me then. Nothing will keep me from your performance. I have another day, at least.” She picked up her leather cap with its funny, round goggles and began hauling herself up the harness ladder.
A tiny movement caught my eye. A few feet from my frosted boot, the thick hilltop grass had eroded where the black ichor dripped.
A small, segmented worm emerged from the ebon-stained, freshly barren earth.
It was the length of my little finger, with dozens of pairs of legs, and pincer stings at the rear.
A foul crawler: mundane, small, and deadly.
That tiny sting would kill me as surely as the titan I had touched.
All the strangeness affecting our family began when Jane rode to Netherfield to visit our handsome new neighbor, Mr. Bingley, and was stung by a foul crawler. Like the crawlers that answered to Lydia when she drank their venom.
Again, fragmented facts teased my mind. A flickering page from our family journal. The history of the Bennets reached far back. Even the name of our family estate, Longbourn, was a corruption of old lore: loch bairn, Child of the Lake.
But no image assembled in my mind’s eye. Like the composition of a painting, an image requires clarity of comprehension. Pieces of the puzzle fit, but I did not comprehend the whole.