Page 137 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
Bound lovers, my brave wyves of song. Go forth and make music.
39
THREE CODAS
Lady Catherine de Bourghlay on a quiet Surrey hillside amid birdsong and fresh sun. One side of her gown was dark with blood. A few feet away, a patch of blight slowly spread. By her other side, her bronze wyvern lay curled as if sleeping, her scaled chest rising and falling, the motions strangely slow.
Hesitantly—she had never dared before—Lady Catherine touched her fingers to the wyvern’s shoulder. The scales were perfectly fitted, as smooth as porcelain, and as hard as diamond. Warmer than a person, but no warmer than a cat.
The wyvern’s muscled, battered, mud- and blood-stained form did not respond. She lay as if dead other than those slow, soft breaths.
The carnage of battle covered the slope. This patch of Surrey, on the fringe of the Donwell Abbey grounds, was a very easy distance from Hartfield. For hundreds of years, it had led an uneventful existence. Now, the dead littered the ground. The victims were foul crawlers and the men who wielded them, the Overseers in their dark gray coats.
The slavers’ captive wyves had been spared while their masters died. Drugged and confused, the wyves had wandered away.
One crawler, the length of Lady Catherine’s arm, survived as well. It was exploring the dead a dozen yards away from her. Dissatisfied, it reared the firstthird of its body above the ground, pointed legs weaving, the tongue-like organs between its pincers hunting for scents. It flopped down facing her.
Lady Catherine pried another rock from the ground—a sturdy, apricot-sized rock. She threw it. The rock missed, but the crawler retreated a few feet. Lady Catherine was, however, running out of rocks.
“You don’t have to kill them no more,” a young boy’s voice told her.
Wincing, Lady Catherine twisted her head.
The boy was about ten years old. His bottom lip poked out as he considered the lady’s blood-drenched gown and the charred, bedraggled ostrich feather in her turban.
“What else does one do to a crawler, child?” Lady Catherine demanded.
“You just got to make music. Any music. Watch…” He pursed his lips and whistled the tune of “Frère Jacques.” Lady Catherine scowled at the choice, but perhaps a mother or an aunt had sung it to him to teach him a few words of French.
The crawler was unaffected. It rattled closer. The boy finished his recitation and watched it fearlessly.
A small, iridescent, sapphire bird swooped overhead, splaying its forked, swallow-like tail. It landed neatly a few feet from Lady Catherine and inspected the motionless wyvern with curious, flicking attention. Instead of a beak, it had a muzzle covered with shining, pebble-like scales.
The song draca hopped around to face the nearing crawler, then it sang—not birdsong with its pleasant, short recitations, but music incandescent with emotion, romance, and longing. The crawler reared, its pincers clicking as it listened.
The song finished in transcendent joy. The crawler relaxed to the ground and writhed into a curling mass, twining, shell segments clicking. It looked like a skein of wool winding itself. The two stingers began extruding a cloudy blue silk, and swiftly it wove a cocoon, arching and rolling its body to cover every part until it was wrapped in fleecy blue, a woolly oval the size of a loaf of bread.
“See?” the boy said proudly.
“I do,” Lady Catherine said. “What happens to it now?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know.” Then his mouth formed a guilty O, and he waved both arms high, shouting in his young, piercing voice, “Found her! Over here!” He whispered to Lady Catherine, “I forgot I was supposed to yell. You won’t tell, will you?”
“Certainly not,” she agreed.
Mr. Knightley ran up the hill. “Lady Catherine. We were concerned…” He slowed when he saw the dead and fell silent when he saw her condition.
“There were rather more of those fools than I expected,” Lady Catherine explained. She sounded tired, and her voice shook a little.
Mrs. Knightley arrived after her husband, puffing from running up the slope in her long skirts.
“You are in a state, woman,” Lady Catherine observed disapprovingly.
Mrs. Knightley’s gown was thoroughly ruined, and she was both ungloved and her head uncovered. She seemed unconcerned about her clothes though, and knelt by Lady Catherine, looking with great worry at the blood. Mr. Knightley stood gravely while his wyfe took Lady Catherine’s hand in both of hers.
“I gather you succeeded,” Lady Catherine said. “You and my nephew and… the great wyves.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Knightley said.
