Page 133 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
Yuánchi’s huge body convulsed, his mass landing hard enough to vibrate my shoes. Lizzy gave an abbreviated, pained cry. The tension wound tighter, as if the world around us was being wrung, a hawser stretched by an elysian windlass…
“What is important about the joint?” Georgiana gasped raggedly. I blinked, forcing my attention away from the world of draca, away from the black storm in the south, and the trail of memory snapped to the instant I sought, the curator’s description of how the flute was assembled.
I quoted him aloud: “?‘A mouthpiece and body joined by an annulet.’?”
Georgiana’s supportive smile finally failed. “What?”
“An annulet is a circle,” I explained. “It would be the diameter of the flute.” I let go of her hand and held my thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Thatis a simple object. That is a shape one could carve from a dragon’s claw. It would survive a funeral pyre. It would never melt, not even in a smith’s forge, not even submerged in molten metal.” I was certain now. “The third wyfe in the visiondidhave the flute.”
“We saw her,” Georgiana protested. “She had nothing.”
I had memorized that scene, three ancient wyves in foreign clothes amidstrange plants. Unsure what mattered, I had committed every scrap to memory: shoes, hair bindings, hands…
“She wore a black ring on her thumb,” I said. “The color of dragon claw.”
The incredible tension in the world of draca skidded then caught, tore then steadied, screeched to an unimaginable peak, and then something beautiful ripped asunder. Lizzy screamed the raw cry of a woman in agony—a mother losing a child, or a mother birthing one. The world froze as scarlet brilliance saturated my brain. That faded, leaving me reeling.
Georgiana fell against me, dazed. Lizzy’s screams softened into wailing loss, muffled as she thrashed in her husband’s embrace.
Emma dangled lifelessly in Mr. Knightley’s arms. He eased her to the ground, called her name, and shook her. Desperately, he shouted, “Mary!”
I helped Georgiana to kneel, then staggered to them and half-fell by Emma’s side, the aftershock of Lizzy’s broken binding muddling my balance.
Mr. Knightley chafed Emma’s whitened face. He put his ear to her lips, then shook her harder. “She is not breathing!”
Training from the clinic returned, in its own way as automatic as memorized music. I pushed him aside. “Let me see.” I felt her wrist for a pulse, then the carotid artery… nothing. Her heart had stopped. But it had been only a few seconds… I moved the amulet out of the way, held my fist two measured handbreadths above her, and thumped the precordial region of her chest. I pressed my ear down and heard the frantic pound of a racing heart.
“That worked,” I marveled. “I must tell Dr. Davenport. I only saw him try it once, and it did not.”
Mr. Knightley, wisely, was ignoring me and comforting Emma while she gasped for air. I tried to order my scrambled brain. What were we supposed to be doing?
“Bind Yuánchi,” I told them.
I could hear Lizzy moaning; I remembered the flute and ran to her. Her flailing had stopped. She hung exhausted in Mr. Darcy’s arms, her cheeks wet.
Be literal. Be accurate. I dragged my gaze from her pain and spoke to Mr. Darcy. “When you married, Lizzy gave you Papa’s wedding ring. I need it.”
He raised his head; he was weeping for his wyfe. He stared at me in astonishment. Georgiana staggered to us then and grabbed my shoulder for balance. “Fitz! Give it to her.”
Uncomprehending but obedient, he pulled Papa’s golden ring off his finger and passed it to me. It felt unexceptional, a man’s ring, but it was aBennet heirloom—our only real heirloom other than the journal. It had passed through generations, a posy ring inscribed on the inside with verse, but the verse was a family joke because it was worn to illegibility and forgotten.
I held the ring at an angle, peering at the markings inside. The soft gold was worn and scratched, but that was not why it was unintelligible. The symbols were not letters. They never had been. They rose and fell in patterns, musical notation blurred by a layer of gold.
“The Bennets had the flute all along,” I said. A thousand years ago, our Scottish ancestor, the son of a great wyfe, had claimed the annulet from the ashes of his shamed mother’s pyre. Then he carried it and his Bennet name south to found the Loch bairn estate and start anew.
The dagger still hung from my reticule loop. I pulled it out and slipped the point through the ring, then stabbed it into the ground, staking the ring in place. I summoned the little song draca—it was easy now, I did not even think of music, just thought of him—and he fluttered to the ground at my feet.
I tapped the ring, spinning it around the dagger. His little head pivoted, curious, and I imagined fire.
Not much bigger than a sparrow, he blew a hissing, transparent blue flame from his muzzle, narrow as a pencil but hotter than a bellows-driven forge. The grass and earth around the ring flashed into spitting fire. I blew and waved away the smoke.
Resting in a tiny splash of molten gold, a black circle gleamed.
The blade of the dragon-tooth dagger shimmered with heat, but the hilt was cool. I flipped the ring onto fresh grass, then stomped on it, driving it into the moist spring earth. Steam puffed under my shoe, warming the sole.
I fell on my knees. Georgiana did the same across from me.
The ring was embedded in steaming soil, a shining, perfect black circle unmarred other than a few wayward specs of gold.
