Page 135 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
As I solved the notation in my mind, I saw that Yuánchi’s song did not stand alone. The three songs were linked: a single composition. One great song. I blinked and concentrated harder; that meant all three were necessary to choose the right notes. Mentally, I stacked the notation from the flute, dagger, and amulet, reading them in parallel like a conductor’s score.
The song woke the world of draca. Power swirled and grew. Then Yuánchi’s scarlet-and-black wings rustled. He dragged them from their crooked rumple and folded them smoothly. His oak-tree legs twitched like a dog dreaming, and a healing warmth seemed to shine from him, a summer sun emerging from cloud.
But the complexity of the song was wild now, and the rules for progressing were unwieldy. It was harder to find a note that satisfied the tripled notation. Despite the freezing air, sweat beaded my forehead. I sang a wrong note and skidded to the correct one. The close call tensed my throat, bad vocal technique which thinned my voice. Georgiana watched me, her tone flawless but her eyes worried.
The song jammed in my mind. I stopped, silenced, unable to find the nextnote. Georgiana stopped at the same instant. Mr. Knightley and Emma fell silent.
“It is too complicated,” I gasped through trembling lips.
“Not complicated,” Georgiana said. Her lips moved silently as she remembered what we had sung. “Blighted…”
My mental notation was stuck at the moment we failed. I searched the harmonies, the form of this music, but there wasnonote that satisfied the rules. I backed up a bar, thinking I had picked the wrong path and steered us to a dead end… No. The constraints were so exact, the form so precise, there was only one path, one inevitable result that traced all the way back to how we began.
Latent power still swirled around us, and Yuánchi snorted. Shivering, he yawned cavernously, displaying gleaming black teeth and a viciously scaled tongue. Emma gave a joyful cry and pressed herself against him.
Yuánchi’s waking mind spoke, blurry like a person fresh from sleep.Emma Knightley Woodhouse, wyfe of healing, I choose—
“No!” I screamed. “Do not bind.” I yanked Emma away from him. “The songs are connected—togetherthey are the great song. If you bind, Yuánchi’s song will be locked in place, and then we cannot change the rest.”
Fènnù, inscrutable and looming, had watched our performance. Now, she stirred. Her head tilted. Her jeweled eyes fixed on me, and her icy intelligence pressed suspiciously into my thoughts.
Lizzy was a dozen yards from me, facing Fènnù with Mr. Darcy at her side. “Mary, what are you doing?” she hissed. “She will not wait…”
“This is why the great wyves failed before! Yuánchi was bound before they began, bound with his old song. That doomed them. It was impossible to alter the great song—impossible to heal Fènnù’s song.”
Fènnù’s muzzle approached and sank until her prismatic eyes were level with mine. Her jaw grazed the ground, and the meadow grass, already freezing, shattered to black dust in her shadow. Her breathing changed to a whirring, endless inhalation, the continuous through-breath unique to flying draca, and black exhalation spewed from the ridges along her back.
Her insane croon filled my mind.My queen is dead. My song is her vengeance. It is unalterable. It is the last. There is nothing to heal. You meddle, wyfe of song.
Lizzy dashed between me and the black dragon. “My sister is not harming you.” Fènnù’s attention centered on Lizzy, and the black exhalation stopped. Then Lizzyshuddered, and I felt a tremendous pressure, a claiming and a grinding conflict… the black dragon had chosen to bind, but Lizzy was resisting.
Lizzy gasped over her shoulder, “Do something!”
“What?” I asked her.
It was Georgiana who answered. “Heal Fènnù’s song.”
Incredulous, I turned to her. “Did you nothear? Fènnù’s song is poisoned, but we cannot alter it without breaking the others. The great song itself ispoisoned.”
“I heard,” Georgiana said simply. “We need a new great song. So write it.”
I laughed in raucous disbelief. “The song is beyond human comprehension. It is so complex—”
“Not beyond yours. Youseein musical form. You understand it in ways I do not.” She took my hand. “Why do you think two wyves of song, melody and form, were born together? You were needed. You are destined for this.”
The meadow darkened. Soft clacks and buzzes rose like night creatures awakening. A swarm of flying crawlers erupted from one of the wild fruit trees, spreading and settling in a dozen others. Through the grass and gorse, unpleasant dark shapes scuttled. On a hillside, a stream of blight spread like a dark river.
By our feet, one of the blackened patches of moss split. Crawlers stretched sluggishly in the cold, flexing poisonous stingers then skittering in different directions.
“Mary,” she whispered, “justsing.”
I sang the first phrase that came to mind, the summoning song I used with the little song draca. It was an excerpt from the first fantasia I wrote, a simple piece but one that touched my deepest feelings. It was the first of my music that Georgiana had played.
It was a foolish choice. I should have picked the intellectual rigor of a Bach fugue, or the stupendous breadth of a Beethoven symphony. Those were nearer to the towering complexity of the music of draca.
But Georgiana sang with me, as sure as if our minds were one, and the little song draca flew to me, singing in his clear, bell-like tones. The song changed and grew. My simple fantasia was not lost; it had been a composition of longing, my imagining of a better world, and that remained like the charcoal sketch underlying an oil painting. But Georgiana’s voice soared atop the musical foundation I created, an improvisatory descant of pure joy, and her song erased that old pain.
Mr. Knightley joined in his powerful tenor—he was nearly as gifted a singer as a violinist. He drew Emma to his side, singing to her, and Emma beckoned Harriet as well. Together, the three of them led one melodic line of the immense construction rising in my mind’s eye. Theirs was a melody of care and healing, the scarlet dragon’s new song as the lead.
