Page 125 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
Her tone perplexed me. Georgiana had a temper when provoked, but she was never petulant.
I tried filling the silence. “Perhaps you need to do something to sense the dragon. When Lizzy needed to bind Yuánchi, she projected her mind to where he slept.” Every face turned to me. I squinted through my crooked glasses and realized they were surprised. “Did none of you ask how she bound him? I was very curious. She told Yuánchi she would share her life with him. Share her experiences.”
Georgiana was very still and watching me. I tried to unravel her expression. Uncertain? Frightened? But frightened of what? She was fearless with draca. I could understand her being frightened of Fènnù, but this was a dragon of song…
“I do not ‘project my mind,’?” she said at last.
“No,” I agreed. “You sing.”
She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. The others might have thought that was resignation or disapproval, but I had seen her shoulders relax to her singer’s posture.
Her lips parted, and she began a song rooted in old pentatonic forms but filled with modern, restless accidentals. This was her music, the music of the wyfe of song, music that reached and called…
Power unfolded around her. I had expected it, but the intensity staggered me. The hours of the day, the seasons of the year bent in time. The valley became an amphitheater. And her call grew stronger, shivering the very fabric of the draca realm, crying for an answer…
Her last note faded. Nothing happened. There was no response.
Georgiana’s eyes were fixed on mine. She licked her lips, and I thought she would speak, but she did not.
The loyal song draca flew up with a showy flick of his wings and settled on my shoulder.
“Could the little one be the third dragon?” Mr. Knightley suggested hopefully.
“No.” Emma and Georgiana answered together, and Georgiana smiled at that. But when she continued, her tone was edged. “If a dragon slumbers here, it is beyond my reach.”
Another song draca swooped up, then a third. The new arrivals settled side-by-side on a ruined wall.
“You can wake it,” Mr. Darcy said abruptly. “You must. You are a great wyfe.”
“Fitz, Icannot.”
This time, I had concentrated on her voice, not her features, and I sensed an omission, something unsaid. Disturbed, I flipped my mind’s eye backward, as if a pictorial history might somehow help. Unexpectedly, it did. “The song draca may not be dragons, but the perfumer thought they were important. She called themles presages. Harbingers.”
Georgiana seized on that. “They could lead us to the dragon.”
“No,” Mr. Darcy pronounced. “We stay here. We stay together. Elizabeth may arrive at any moment.”
“Fitz…” she said desperately.
“Do you not understand?” he burst out. “Elizabeth is astride the black dragon. If she is not mad already, it is a question of when. We must make every preparation to reclaim her. To… to overcome her, if necessary. You musttry—”
I could not bear hearing them fight. “Shedidtry!Her power filled these hills. Can you not trust your sister?”
He slammed around to face me, flushed, his brow furrowed. Mr. Darcy was not often interrupted.
Georgiana stepped beside me. “Mary and I will follow the song draca. We will stay close. I will know if Fènnù approaches, and we will return.” Her brother scowled, but whatever had unnerved Georgiana, it was not his anger. She stared back, equally intense and unmovable.
Finally, he conceded. His eyes drifted to the sky, and he said almost apologetically, “Go.”
Without a word, Georgiana set out, choosing a thin rabbit trail toward the meadow’s edge. I hurried behind her, the tall grass swishing my skirts. The song draca fluttered randomly around us, perching on ancient bricks, on bushes, on tree limbs. If they were guides, they were poor ones, and Georgiana ignored them. After fifty yards, she turned into the shade of a handful of birches and stopped, her back to me.
I had given up on guessing her thoughts. “What is wrong?”
She swept her hands outward, pushing away speech.
We had crossed a tiny wooden bridge before the birches, three aging boards over a stone-lined ditch. The ground was marshy with rushes and tufted, purple-topped moor grass. Feeling pathetically useless, I studied the trickling water. “These drainage works are everywhere, and very old. The stone is eroded. What if there was a lake in this valley, and they drained it to build the Abbey?”
“Then the dragon of song would be sitting in the meadow,” Georgiana said tightly.
