Chapter 5
Chapter
The first bit of shell broke away, and I saw soft down.
The drop in my heart was sudden and fierce. I’d been a fool letting silly fancies get hold of my head.
This was a bird’s egg, and no more. A large, odd bird. But a bird nonetheless.
I knew baby birds gained strength from their struggle to hatch, so I schooled my thoughts, narrowing them to a sharp and scientific point, and watched the egg as it rocked and warped, with a clinical eye.
There must have been a natural cave here, before Lucy’s working.
A bird must have laid her egg near the fossil.
It was only coincidence. And I soothed my wounded ego by reminding myself that even without a hatched pterodactyl—God, what a foolish thought—I’d still found the only extant pterodactyl fossil in Britain.
I’ve done it, I thought, and the relief that poured over me was like warm water, washing away the fear that had taken root in my chest.
I would sell the pterodactyl skeleton and pay the rent on the house and store. I could buy meat again, and bread that wasn’t so stale I had to soften it with precious magic. Aunt Patricia would have what she needed for Mother’s physiomagician visits. This find would buy me years of stability.
A loopy, giddy grin spread across my face. I settled back to watch the egg, fantasizing about the letter I would write to Buckland, telling him about the pterodactyl skeleton. It couldn’t hurt to remind him how valuable I was.
Maybe—I could dream, couldn’t I?—maybe this would even change his mind about my nomination.
Small claws scraped against the shell’s inside, and soon the shell fell away in larger and larger chunks.
Here was the head, a long orange bill and the crest upon it. And now—now the animal stood upon the mess of its shell, shaking loose the sticky fluid and slime from its winged front legs, and making a dear little infant squawk.
It was not a bird.
It was a pterodactyl.
I did not suffer false modesty. In the course of my career, I had already discovered two—now three!—of the most significant geomagical artifacts known to science.
This creature, though…
This creature was the single most important find in—my God—not just geomagical history, but human history. All of human history.
My thoughts went blank. My heart was a drum. Fingers trembled as I reached out to touch the creature’s translucent wings.
This couldn’t be real. I was imagining things. Maybe there was some noxious gas in the cave, and I was hallucinating.
But no. I touched flesh. The leathery skin was a light reddish brown, the shade of a roe deer’s hide, and its wings were like a bat’s. What I’d thought was down were really soft hairlike filaments, closer to fur than feathers.
The animal gave an aggrieved shriek and snapped, flapping its wings. I pulled back my hand, and then gasped as the creature pressed its delicate head into my fingers, turning this way and that.
It liked to be stroked, I realized. The poor little thing was motherless and new.
“Dear God,” I whispered, my voice trembling. “Am I dreaming? This must be a dream.”
Tentatively, I scratched behind its head, on the neck. It cooed, turning big, yellow eyes to peer at mine.
It was more reptilian than I’d imagined from those German descriptions of the skeletons. These were more like a lizard’s eyes than a chicken’s.
The pterodactyl made sweet, unsettling squawks as I looked it over, marveling at every feature, each line and curve of the skin and flesh and filament. The first shock had receded, and my thoughts started up again, now racing a thousand paths.
What would it eat? Could it fly yet? Would the mother have tended the hatchling, like a bird, or left it to fend for itself like a reptile? How on earth was I supposed to care for it?
I heard a distant call and finally remembered that Lucy was waiting for me, probably terrified I’d been caught in a cave-in.
Of course. Achilles. The relief was immediate.
Just after Lucy had returned to Lyme Regis for good—she was seventeen and newly banished from her father’s house—she’d rescued an injured baby raven, orphaned by a cat.
Lucy hand-reared the chick and trained him like a hawk.
Achilles was half wild now; he nested mostly in the trees outside Lucy’s cottage, but sometimes scratched on the door to be let inside, to sleep on his perch by her fireplace.
Lucy would know exactly what to do.
I didn’t want to keep her waiting any longer, but I needed to get the mother’s skeleton out, too. The cave could collapse or, almost as bad, another fossil hunter might climb in to claim it before I returned.
This was just the kind of situation for which I’d held my magic in reserve.
I clasped the ammonite in my left hand, over my breastbone, and held my right hand above the jumbled pterodactyl fossil in the rock.
I focused on my intentions, the way Father taught me as a girl, when he first helped me string another ammonite to serve as my reliq.
The stone around the mother’s fossil was once mud and sediment, and with my palm pressed to the ground, I willed it to be so again.
Transforming things into other things usually needed a great deal of magic from multiple reliquaries.
But I had only the one. I had to hope this magic was small enough, because I wasn’t transforming, per se.
Just asking it to revert to a prior state.
Soften, I thought. Remember what you were.
I willed it to be water, and soil, thick, and slow-moving. To go back.
I let go of my reliq and pressed both hands to the cave floor now. It was working. Silty water rose around my fingers, and the hardened rock melted, slowly, into mud.
The hatched pterodactyl hissed angrily as cool brown water rose and covered its feet.
The mud squelched and sucked at my hands as I quickly gathered the fossilized bones and slipped them into my satchel.
Just in time, too; my reliq went cold. The magic had run out. I exhaled with relief and said a quick prayer of thanks as the mud hardened back to stone.
I turned my attention to the creature again. I couldn’t put him in the satchel now that it was full of bones, so I tore off a strip of my petticoat. After it nipped a few times at my fingers, I managed to bundle the sticky, wriggling thing into a makeshift sling, which I looped across my chest.
I crawled to the entrance, the pterodactyl squirming unhappily the whole while.
“Hush,” I chided. “I’m trying to help you.”
I poked my head out of the cave mouth. “Lucy!” She immediately resumed cursing the day we met.
“I’m climbing down now,” I called.
The rain had picked up, and I nearly slipped and fell to my death as I attempted to get into position for the climb.
But after a few harrowing minutes, I planted my feet solidly on wet stone.
Lucy was at my side at once, fussing. “You lunkhead, you fool—fine! Yes, I see how it feels now, if that was your point!”
“I wasn’t trying to make a point.” I plucked my top hat from her hands and set it on my head firmly. “Now—”
“And oh! Your cheek is split.” She pulled a bit of shale from the cut, and I hissed.
“Just a scratch.” I wiped away the hot blood on my cheek and tried again to tell her about my discovery.
But Lucy rolled her eyes. “Let me heal it.”
“Oh, no thank you,” I said, trying to dodge. Just because Lucy could do most magic didn’t mean she was good at all of it. And I’d learned from painful experience that she was particularly unskilled at healing.
But she grabbed my face and pressed her fingers against the cut.
I yelped and squirmed as the skin knit closed. The healing was ten times more painful than the scrape itself. But it was done, and the tenderness faded quickly. I touched my smooth cheek, marveling, as always, at the power of her magic. It would have drained my whole reliq to do that.
The pterodactyl made a croaking sound.
“A bird? Why didn’t you say so?” Lucy’s eyes lit, and she reached for my sling. “Is it injured?”
I hesitated. “Not a bird, exactly.” I opened the fabric.
Sensing an opportunity, the baby creature flailed wildly, and I quickly tied it shut.
But Lucy had seen.
“Mary.” Her eyes went wide, lashes fluttering. “What is that?”
“Well. If I am not mistaken—and I don’t think I am—this is a pterodactyl.”