Page 30 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
“You encountered thisbefore?”
“Twice. They are not dangerous.”
“Not dangerous!” Venom was trickling from the crushed crawler. The acrid, sour scent stung my eyes.
“A little dangerous,” she admitted. “That is why I do not bring the draca. They cannot fight inthis.” Her hand wafted the venom scented air. She pointed her dagger at my riding boot. The heavy leather toe was pinched and cut. “You see why I want boots.”
“This is madness. You must come home.”
She considered me. She was not even breathing hard. “No. I was called for revenge, and it is not done. What will you say next?”
“Then I will go with you.” The only other choice.
She laughed. “You are no use to me.”
I raised the sword and stepped toward her. She fingered Gramr’s hilt, eyes narrow. I took another step, then lunged, driving the point a few inches beside her calf.
It was a good hit, exactly between the crawler’s pincers and straight into the maw. The blade sank in a foot and a half, spitting half the length of the body. The stingers, which had curled for a last, wounded strike, rattled and fell limp.
I kicked the repulsive thing off the sword, then wiped the blade with my handkerchief and discarded the fouled cloth.
“At least the point is sharp,” I said. “Still no use?”
This time, she did not laugh. I could see her turning it over in her head. That lasted too long, a puzzle more subtle than the benefit and cost of another blade and another mouth.
Every mannerism was wrenchingly familiar. Seeing her was joy and loss together. She was Elizabeth. She was not. She was.
“You are tolerable,” she said at last.
11
TWO SKETCHES
MARY
With no wordfrom Mr. Darcy, I had spent the days worrying about Lizzy’s state of mind, then reveling in Lizzy’s miraculous cure, then worrying all over again in a useless cycle. Irritated, this morning I set a goal: solve the puzzle of the third great item, the flute sought byla Demoiselle des Parfums.
The choice was no whim. Since meeting the perfumer, a lost memory had tickled the periphery of my mind like a crooked page in a pristine stack. A page I had been unable to grasp.
Georgiana’s table in the Pemberley library was, as usual, buried under a mess of musical scores. A half-dozen French and German books perched on the clutter, serving as paperweights while being read. The French books were risqué romantic novels with innocent titles. The German books were philosophy by Hegel and literary reviews by Caroline Schelling.
Mr. Darcy had a library table as well. His held an ebony writing tray with ink, a blotter, and pens—goose quills for correspondence and crow for fine work. A small stack of ivory notepaper sat on an expanse of ready, bare oak.
Despite the mess, I chose Georgiana’s table and sorted inward from the corner, piling manuscripts by musical era until there was enough space to lay the Loch bairn journal open to the page that mentioned the relics:
For the Great Song, I knowe the three relicks, edged, chayned, and hollow. The Queene holds the edged and chayned, but not the thryd, the hollow relick of Musike bathed in tears of betrayal.
The journal’s pages had yielded no further clues. The passage before described the weather, the passage after a clutch of duck eggs. But this room was suffused with volumes and knowledge. It might uncover whatever lost memory involved the flute.
I relaxed and began from the words in the journal:edged, chained, and hollow.
The dagger was edged. The amulet, chained. The item for the wyfe of song would be hollow and, according to the Frenchwoman, it was a flute. But “flute” was a broad label. It included everything from panpipes to piccolos. Still, it would be an old-fashioned instrument, a tube with fingering holes, nothing like a modern flute.
And it would be formed from dragon claw, harder than steel, incredibly difficult to shape or drill. So, it was likely a small, simple flute…
I let my mind wander, my gaze drifting over the shelves of books. Useless memories fluttered, some from Longbourn, some from Pemberley: a treatise on reed flutes, a chart of recorder fingerings, a page of Virgil’sEclogaewheretibia—flute—was repeated over and over.
I let my mind spin from there… flute… music… dance.Pah. That was the wrong direction.
