Page 138 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
“I saw…” Lady Catherine’s strong blue eyes turned to the azure sky, awed, and she did not say what she had seen.
Urgently, Knightley asked his wyfe, “How bad is she?”
“My ability to sense that has passed,” Mrs. Knightley answered. As if reminded, she lifted one hand from Lady Catherine’s and, unassumingly but with an irrepressible hint of style, swept her fingers through the encroaching, blighted patch. The oily, sticky blackness shed where she touched, running like rainwater and vanishing into the earth.
Lady Catherine’s gaze had returned to her bronze wyvern. For the first time, her wrinkled eyes admitted concern. “She was brave and loyal,” she said. “More than I deserve. What is wrong with her?”
Mrs. Knightley gave her a comforting smile. “The world has changed. The draca are sleeping to find their place in the new song. Each must choose how they wish to proceed, and to choose their new name as well. She will wake soon.”
Mrs. Knightley then looked more carefully at the sleeping wyvern, and at Lady Catherine. She smiled and whispered in the old lady’s ear, and a sparkling tear of joy ran from Lady Catherine’s eye.
“Where is the nearest doctor?” Mr. Knightley asked his wyfe.
“Whyever do you keep interrupting?” Lady Catherine demanded crossly before Mrs. Knightley could reply. “Are you ill?”
Mr. Knightley, awkwardly, indicated Lady Catherine’s blood-drenched gown.
“Heaven and earth! That is notmyblood.” Lady Catherine frowned, very much offended. “I have twisted my ankle. Be useful and give me a hand up.”
Lord Wellington stoodatop a low rise, surveying the victory that would cement his fame.
For this conflict, with the survival of England at stake, he had relied not on battle-hardened troops but the militia, the least renowned of Britain’s soldiers. The militia trained for a few weeks a year. They were scorned as grubby farmers and posturing gentlemen by the cavalry and infantry who fought England’s wars overseas. But those regular troops were trapped in Spain or shattered by the Confederates’ lethal crawlers, so Lord Wellington had sent stealthy agents behind enemy lines to muster the militia in towns and villages. He committed that ragtag force to a last strike, an unimaginable attack from within the conquered south, a blow intended to penetrate the heart of the enemy by capturing or killing the emperor Napoleon himself.
It would have been a bold plan had it a chance of success. Lord Wellington, a consummate strategist and pragmatist, considered it a fool’s gamble. But it was better to gamble than present the keys of London to the invaders, so Lord Wellington grit his teeth and sent orders to twenty-two near-amateur regiments in occupied territory. Then he dispatched his most trusted aide north to Pemberley to seek a miracle.
The outcome should have been defeat, a brutal and bloody last stand in eternally dull Surrey. Instead, he beheld the career-capping achievement that would ultimately launch him to Prime Minister in a remade Britain.
In most ways, the spent battlefield looked like any other. Confusion, suffering, exhaustion, and celebration. The surrendered French and Confederate soldiers had been herded into demoralized groups. Carts were carrying wounded to surgeons in tents outside the worst of the muck.
The difference from prior battles was the occasional glimpse of women in filthy, tattered skirts, the captives of the slavers.
His expert gaze stopped on three distant, red-coated militia soldiers clustered oddly, their muskets leveled. Lord Wellington mounted his borrowed gelding, rode several hundred yards, and called, “What have you?”
“If you please, m’lord,” one said, and they parted to show a girl dressed in what might charitably be called the worn remnants of a fine white dress. She looked fourteen years old, a child. “She got one of thosemonsters,” the soldier pointed out. He spat nervously and aimed his musket at the huge crawler by her feet. It was a foot thick and as long as the girl was tall, one of the heavy-shelled creatures that had torn through English lines.
When the soldier pointed his musket, the girl took a quick step to stay between the barrel and the creature.
Lord Wellington dismounted. The girl’s eyes were the muddy brown of the battlefield, the whites bloodshot, the pupils massive, but her gaze met his steadily enough, an achievement not every general could manage.
Beyond her, several Confederate soldiers and an Overseer lay dead, limbs swollen and contorted. The Overseer had a bloody twinned sting on his neck and a pistol in his hand.
“Victory belongs to England,” Lord Wellington told the girl. “You are free and safe. Where are you from?”
She had to think a long time before answering, “Brighton.”
A soldier guffawed. “Nobody’sfromBrighton.” He shrank under Lord Wellington’s glance.
“That creature is dangerous,” Lord Wellington said to the girl. “Stand aside so we may dispose of it.”
She shook her head, and her thin hands clenched to fists. The crawler hissed and clacked sword-long pincers.
“I would be dead without it,” she said with a young lady’s diction. “At the end the slavers, they… were shooting the girls.” She swallowed, and her gaze counted the dead men. “I had to do something.”
“The slavers were ungentlemanly criminals and cowards,” Lord Wellington noted. “They deserved a foul end. You did nothing wrong.”
“What of the others, though?” she whispered. “I remember them, too. I know I will remember them all.”
Lord Wellington had spoken with freed wyves. He granted pardon, explaining they had been drugged, tortured, and unaware. But facing this girl, different words emerged.
