Page 129 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
Fènnù had cleared the horizon, distant enough to appear bird-sized if her wings had not swept with such slow, brutal power. Even that weak illusion faded as she came closer. Half a mile away, she was simply huge. She turned and began a circle around us—a jerky path with swoops and bucks, her head swinging.
“The steed fights the rider,” Mr. Darcy said. He crossed his arms, his fingernails white where they squeezed his tensed biceps.
“Perhaps that is a good sign,” I said. “Lizzy is seeking control.”
Fènnù ended her circle and turned toward us. Blackness began billowing in her wake, the sign of her deadly breath priming.
“Or not good,” Mr. Knightley said. “Should we run?”
“If you wish,” Mr. Darcy said. “I shall stay.” He had described the devastation they crossed while flying here, an area larger than this entire valley. A fewyards hardly mattered, and even less to Mr. Darcy. If his wyfe chose to attack, I doubted he cared to escape.
I touched the amulet.
Yuánchi’s awareness filled me as if I had embraced his body, the wasting poison of the broken song but also his binding to Lizzy, pulling taut and glowing brighter and brighter.
“Lizzy is drawing on her binding,” I said. She was also hastening Yuánchi’s descent into whatever fate awaited a dragon mis-bound, but that die was cast when Yuánchi bound her to end his despair after Lady Anne’s death. Perhaps he had sensed the decay of the song and knew time was running out.
Fènnù reached the edge of the Abbey meadow and reared stallion-like in midair, black poison spilling from her wings and splattering among the trees. She bellowed; Harriet covered her ears. Then the black dragon smashed down fifty yards from us, each massive claw crushing a wagon load of earth, the crook of a wing pulverizing one of the Abbey’s six-hundred-year-old walls.
Lizzy was on the ground; I did not even see how she managed so fast, only that she had run between us and Fènnù. She faced the black dragon, her arms raised wide. Fènnù bellowed an ear-ripping roar, and Lizzy shouted, “No!” The strength of the wyfe of war’s command hit me, magnified by her binding to Yuánchi—strength enough, barely, to turn the black dragon from her prey. Fènnù hooted a peculiar, piqued snort, then her wings unfolded to span the meadow. A gale blasted, flinging branches and clods of uprooted grass. Mr. Knightley pulled Harriet and me to him, sheltering us with his back to the storm until the torrent quieted.
“Good God,” he said when speech was possible again. “We cannot seriously intend to bind that monster.”
Fènnù was airborne and vanishing over the hills. Lizzy stood a few steps from Mr. Darcy, her face pale, the rose-colored mark on her cheek livid. After the unthinkable power she wielded in the world of draca, the woman looked small and vulnerable.
“I am myself again,” she told her husband, “for a while.”
Mr. Darcy had crouched facing the gale rather than turning away. He was flecked with stems and leaves, his chin grazed by some flying rock. His back was still streaked with drying mud from being pushed off the back of a dragon. Silently, he rose and offered his hand. Lizzy took it and leaned into his chest.
An itch of wrongness, a tug like the old miasma, dragged my vision to thetrees sprayed by Fènnù’s poison. The black was consuming the bright spring foliage.
Lizzy broke away and ran to where we stood with Yuánchi, pulling her husband with her. She threw her arms around the dragon, her forehead pressed to his cheek. “I can barely sense his mind. This is killing him.”
“The broken song is within him,” I said. “I see it, like I see the blight spreading in the hills, but I can do nothing to stop it.”
She pressed tears from her eyes. “His binding is all that saved me. Fènnù would have taken my mind otherwise.”
Mary and Georgiana were rushing across the meadow. They arrived panting, and Mary gasped, “I feared Fènnù was attacking.”
“Almost,” Lizzy said wearily. “I flew her over the battlefields. England is mustering more troops.”
I gathered Mr. Knightley’s hand for a hopeful squeeze. “Will we win?”
Lizzy shook her head. “Not against Overseers and their crawlers. They are too lethal. And Napoleon only needs to hold us off. He never planned to conquer England. His goal is more brutal: use Fènnù and the blight to destroy us so he can rule Europe unopposed.” She bent to stroke Yuánchi. “That is also his weakness, the reason he is here. He must ensure the great wyves do not heal the song.”
“Then the songcanbe healed,” Mr. Darcy said. “There is hope.”
“The emperor thinks so. And he thinks the key is in Surrey.” Lizzy peered at me. “You found the amulet!”
“I do not know what it achieves without the flute,” I said, “but it is potent. It showed me the vision again, the three wyves trying to heal the song. To succeed, we need to bind Fènnù.”
Lizzy drew back. “Bindher?”
There was a babble of discussion, but I was watching Lizzy stroke Yuánchi. Her touch made their binding blaze…
“Give me your hand,” I said to her, holding out mine.
She hesitated—I had shied away from touch in the past—but she took it, and their binding flared into exacting detail, a living thing with shifting layers of thread-like filaments. It reached from Yuánchi to Lizzy and then, in a softer, weaker form, touched her husband.
