Page 10 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
A massive metal bell, open at the base and big enough to conceal a man, rose ponderously into view. A wooden boom swung the bell over the barge, and two crewmembers helped a tall man crawl from the bottom while lake water sheeted down. They wrapped a blanket over his sopping black tailcoat and dripping neckcloth. I snorted. That could only be Mr. Darcy. His hat was likely in the lake.
Mr. Rennie was bouncing on his toes with delight. He was exactly the sort that Lizzy adored, a gentleman inventor remaking the world without a thought for the damage to humanity or nature. I imagined her peppering him with questions, and I muttered, “Lizzy would love this.”
“Tell my brother I am returned,” Georgiana announced icily. She was angry—at my words, or at Mr. Darcy. She strode off, her steps scattering pebbles, not toward the coach but along the water. I went after her, puzzling.
A hundred yards from the crowd, we reached Lizzy’s memorial, a life-sized, granite statue. Gentle waves sloshed a few feet shy of the base.
I thought I understood Georgiana’s anger now, but my explanation stumbled. “I meant how Lizzy admires inventions. She loves bolts and hoses…”
Georgiana pointed at the statue, sculpted as if Lizzy were stepping from thelake. “This is what I have seen.Thisis how she returns. What Fitz is doing… it is all wrong.”
I caught her outstretched wrist, and we faced each other, her eyes bright, the lakeshore breeze flattening the brim of her bonnet.
“You haveseenher?” I said. When Georgiana played or sang, her power—occasionally—provided visions. Once, she tried to show me one and failed. Many times, she tried to describe them and frustrated us both.
With Emma, naturally, she had shared one effortlessly.
“I have not seenher, exactly,” Georgiana admitted, “but I have seen her melody return. Mary, you must know what Fitz is doing is wrong. Lizzy was ill, and Yuánchi was terribly wounded. Blinded. Their rest—their sleep together—is a gift, not a vault to be pried open. It must not be interrupted. It is how theyheal.”
Lizzy had been worse than ill. She was in the last throes of meningeal consumption, a ruthless killer. When she and Yuánchi vanished into the lake, she had, at best, a day left. If Lizzy had survived five months since then, it was a miracle—but that was nonsensical. Lizzy was submerged. Five minutes was a miracle.
“You tell me this now?” I heard the burr of accusation in my tone. “You know I am trying to raise her, too.”
“But you have notdoneanything!” Georgiana cried. I dropped her wrist—I recoiled—and she lifted her hands in frustration. “I do not mean it like that! It is just… you will think before you act. Fitz does not.” Her cheeks flushed in the breeze. “Yuánchi will rise as all draca rise, summoned by love and need. Not by ropes and hooks.Hemust choose when they are ready. He will bring her to us.”
She was beautiful in her certainty, and she had gifts I did not comprehend. But she did not understand. “He may sleep a hundred years. A thousand. The last wakings of dragons are lost in myth.”
“Then… then we shall not be here to greet her when she returns.” Georgiana’s voice caught but cleared with a singer’s hard-won control. “I am not despairing. Or saying we cannot help. But this has happened for a purpose.”
My shoulders were shivering. To disagree with Georgiana was to plunge a knife into my own heart. And I believed her. Every word. But knifed or not, my heart could not agree.
“I miss my sister, not her dragon,” I said. “Lizzy has been gone five months. Soon it will be a year, then it will be ten. Her life is in our world, and it is passing her by. I will not let her return abandoned and alone. Yuánchimay rise when he wills, but my sister has a will, too, and it is a will of iron. Whether I need a flute or a song, if I can reach her—if I so much as make her stir in her sleep—shewill choose whether to rise.”
The breeze pressed Georgiana’s clothes to her slender body. For once, she looked unsure. She was so much more poised than me, her gifts so remarkable, I sometimes forgot I was the older of us. She would turn eighteen next month.
She stepped to me and slipped her arm through mine. Deliberately, she turned us to face the memorial.
The base of Lizzy’s monument had always held mementoes and remembrances. Bunches of field flowers. Notes from the household and the Britons in the hills…
Now, it was a shrine. Flowers tumbled in drifts two feet thick. Burned candles rested in wax puddles. Bark chips held offerings: an edge of bread, a sliver of cheese, a spoonful of grain. More unsettling yet were the rusted knives sunk among the blooms. And atop it all, several feet long and woven of sharp holly and hawthorn, a woman’s figure slept, violent with spikes and thorns.
“She may choose to rise,” Georgiana said. “I do not think she should.”
4
PEMBERLEY PROTECTED
MARY
We sentthe coach ahead and walked to Pemberley House, the swish of our skirts and the leg-straining slope welcome after sitting so long. The garden stream, swollen with spring rain, gushed and sprayed beside the road, tumbling down the slope to feed midnight-blue depths.
At one of the garden promontories overlooking the lake, Georgiana stopped and squeezed my fingers. “You know I will do anything to recover Lizzy.”
“I know.” From here, I saw the barge as Georgiana must see it—an angular, technological intrusion. “You were right. Ropes and hooks are foolish.”
She gave me a swift kiss. Then, tired, she continued toward the house. I stayed, submerged in one of Pemberley’s wilder, more formless gardens.
Rowan wreaths, symbols of the druids, hung in the trees. Today was the twenty-ninth of April. Tomorrow, Pemberley’s Britons would celebrate Beltane eve. Druidic beliefs were widespread in these hills, older and stronger than any English or Roman church.
