Page 119 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
I blinked in the pressing wind, and it was like a storybook spell fell from my eyes. I was straddling Fènnù’s neck, wider even than Yuánchi’s, the jet-black scales uneven and wickedly dangerous with no saddle.
I had pushed Darcy away.
Strike. Unleash your vengeance. End them…Fènnù’s thoughts skidded through mine, trailing ecstasy and fury. Her grip tightened around my mind like a noose. Pain stabbed my temples.
“I am not a queen,” I said to the sky, squinting. “I am Elizabeth Darcy.”
We banked over south London, Fènnù’s body heeling hard. Thespeed pressed me into the hollow of her neck, defying the recklessly tilted horizon. I could see straight down over her shoulder.
The troops, English and French, were conspicuous from the air. The brilliant modern dyes of their uniforms made even a handful of men catch the eye. The Confederate colors were subtler, but my other senses picked them out—each group had an enslaved wyfe simmering with the tainted, oily strength of crawler venom.
As the landscape revolved, the battle assembled in my mind, an overlay on the city and countryside like a cartographer’s tracing page. The smoke from musket fire and cannons marked conflict, tight and dense in active fighting, diffuse from past skirmishes. That revealed motion: here a front advanced, there one retreated.
From that and a thousand past battles, the strategy emerged, a window into the mind of the great French commander. The spider who spun the web in which we danced.
With comprehension came surprise: The assault on London was tactical. Already, those troops withdrew. The bulk of the French army, many thousands, was securing a different objective…
“South and east,” I whispered. Fènnù heard my thought, and we turned that way, her great wings sweeping with tireless efficiency.
The regimented city roofs thinned to scattered villages and farmland, but the French troop deployments strengthened, a massing so extreme it weakened other critical flanks. What objective could be so crucial? We were overflying a rural part of England, no ports, no military significance, just… Surrey.
That name tugged memories from before I went into the lake. Surrey was home to Emma, the great wyfe who should have bound Yuánchi. Conflicted feelings pricked; I liked her, I had sympathized with a lady thrust into this morass, but possessiveness and jealousy made me reach out through the brilliant thread of my binding.
Yuánchi, I called.
Fènnù bellowed in protest, her chest heaving. Her will, irresistible as iron, clamped my mind, hiding the spark of my binding.
Strike!Fènnù screamed in my mind.
Grief drowned me, my own stolen pain multiplied a hundredfold and then slammed back—Mamma lying in ash, her eyes staring sightlessly, Mary bloody and still, both victims of the French, of their perfumer. I screamed into the rushing wind. Fènnù’s breath primed. Freezing blackness streamed from thetrailing bones of her wings, from the ridges along her back, and we hurled down on a column of marching soldiers—
Awareness returned in a confused half-state,as if drowsing and dreaming, but raw physical discomfort broke the trance. Rough scales chafed my thighs. Melting ice clung to my soaked dress. I shuddered convulsively, my hair rattling in the wind, every lock a melting icicle.
Hold close, Fènnù crooned. Warm yourself.
Automatically, I embraced Fènnù’s neck, heedless of crooked scales cutting my skin, reveling in her violent, over-heated pulse.
We were circling. The earth below had been farms, the modest holdings that worked the acreage between the villages dotting London’s perimeter. And there had been troops… Now it was a seething, blackened waste, submerged in an inky flood broken by severed tree trunks and a few buildings blasted to icy shells.
“What happened?” I asked, stupidly.
My wyfe of war,Fènnù sang.My queen judges. She avenges.
Fènnù’s stolen image of Mamma’s death hung in my mind, and the loss burned. That was why I had mounted the black dragon—to find her murderer. But the thought of vengeance raised vomit in my throat and blurred my eyes with tears. My ears rattled with hazy echoes of thunder and screaming men.
“I am not your wyfe of war,” I whispered.
You are mine, and I am yours. Until you die, you shall have only me, and forever I shall cherish you.
Her skittering, crazed emotions caught mine and twisted, but the iron clamp had eased, and once again I saw my hidden thread, my binding to Yuánchi. This time, I did not speak—did not try to reach out to him. I cradled our connection in my private thoughts, I hid it, a north star in a storm, a lifeline to sanity.
Fènnù was surveying the land below with inhuman efficiency, the instincts of a supreme avian predator coupled with the military insight of a hundred wyves of war.
There, she concluded, telescopic gaze finding a small encampment a few miles beyond the frozen destruction. French troops ringed it, but at a distance. It required no massed guard because it had no exposed flanks, no weakness bywhich an army could approach. It was the center, the command. The nearby armies were all French—no Overseers with their corrupted wyves—but I sensed one wyfe, stronger, seething with foul power like I had not tasted since I confronted my mad sister Lydia a lifetime ago.
Fènnù coasted down, air shuddering under her cupped wings as she slowed our descent. And while her attention was fixed below, I saw farther south something unexpected…
Fènnù reared, colossal wings sweeping, and we settled to the earth. After the ceaseless rush of flight, the scattered shouts and cries around us seemed soft.
