Page 38 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
More crawlers lofted from the field, passing between us and over our heads. Mr. Gastrell shrieked and flailed his arm, then stomped on the ground. A crawler flew toward me but was intercepted midair by a swerving song draca breathing fire. The crawler fell, a smoking cinder.
The men shouted warnings as a twisting column of crawlers seethed up like an airborne snake. The mass fell on a horse, swarming like hornets. The horse screamed and threw itself to the ground. Men dodged, cursing, as a thousand pounds of desperate animal rolled, saddle and all, then Mr. Berrycloth was back, swinging his bundled coat at the throng.
Amid that, Georgiana was trying to untie her panicked horse—so it could run; it was too maddened to mount. Crawlers streamed between us, and fear for her cut my breast.
That fear brought clarity. “Call draca!” I shouted to her over the deafening buzz.
She turned, her face pale. “I cannot. It is Lizzy who commands…”
I pulled her to me, wrapping our hands together, and sang my summoning song, that excerpt from my first fantasia. The song for that little draca from London.Mydraca.
And through the cries and insectile whir, answers came. Woodwind whistles joined my voice, some as melody, some in harmony. Then Georgiana’s confidentsoprano rose with mine. Our eyes locked over our clenched hands, hers sapphire and bright, and the mesh of our fingers tightened.
The music expanded my senses. I heard the tune of the living hillside around us, the water and sun singing their endless duet, night and day performing their ageless round, and woven through that, the call and answer of hundreds of draca voices. It was profound. Ecstatic. A joining with something vast.
Jewel-bright wings swirled, fifty song draca in that group alone, and blue flame snapped out in a furious storm. A pillar of crawlers rose, wide and ponderous as cold smoke from smoldering leaves. We sang, the world sang with us, and the crawlers were encircled by spiraling song draca. A hundred small flames met, together so hot that my skin flushed as the pristine blue fire turned dirty orange and black with exploding vermin.
The crawlers were all around us, leaping, flying, scurrying, darkening the air. The draca pursued them. Thousands of bird-like forms raced, unfathomably agile. My next snatched breath came tainted with the bitter citrus of crawler venom, and I broke into hacking. Georgiana’s tones held though, and I found the tune again, my eyes smarting.
Slowly, the dark madness subsided. The buzzing faded and stopped, leaving crackles from a hundred small fires. Song draca whirled triumphantly over the field in shifting, fabulous murmurations.
Synchronized by our touched fingers, Georgiana and I ended our song in unison. For a few breaths, we stared at each other. Georgiana’s cheek was soot stained and smeared where she had wiped her watering eyes. Smoke and sparks floated between us. The air had a foul stench.
I remembered the others. “Is anyone stung?” I called.
Mr. Digweed stood with two of the gentlemen, coughing and well back from the smoke. They shook their heads, and one said, “The draca protected us.”
Mr. Berrycloth did not answer. He was kneeling by his fallen horse.
I knelt beside him as the mare wheezed a shuddering breath. Her body and neck teemed with the paired pricks of crawler stings, already bloating.
“Are you stung?” I repeated, soft but insistent.
He shook his head, then said in a cracked voice, “Have you draca essence at Pemberley?” He was petting the suffering creature. Comforting her.
“We do. That would treat one sting, or two. But this… this is too much.”
Mr. Berrycloth choked out a sob and nodded. He fumbled for the pistol and powder hanging from the saddle.
I stilled his fingers and returned them to his horse’s shoulder. “There is no need. She is gone.” Her last sigh had passed. Mr. Berrycloth’s grayed head bent, and he sobbed freely.
I rose to let him grieve. I understood mourning from the hospitals, and a strange woman was no comfort to a weeping man. He might have ridden his horse for twenty years, a deeply personal connection.
That left me facing the other gentlemen. Song draca flitted around and over us, several hundred still. At the peak, it had been far more. Fire flashed as they scoured the infested field and burned the blighted plants. The last beanstalks were collapsing, wilting into a blackish mire.
The bold song draca from London landed on my shoulder. As if that were a signal, others arrived, landing in a loose semicircle around and behind me, filling the bushes and blanketing the ground where they hunted restlessly, prodding any burned or crushed remains of a crawler. It was like I wore a living train of brilliant feathers and jeweled muzzles.
The memory of the song spawned from the hillside hung in my mind, an existence that dwarfed flickering human lives.
Mr. Gastrell was sniffling in blank, rotund shock. Two pudgy fingers picked aimlessly at a silver button.
Mr. Spragg though, the younger man, watched me steadily. I met his scrutiny easily enough. The nerves that jumbled me before had been burned away as thoroughly as the crawlers.
“I do not know what the Britons say,” he said, “but I have heard what they call you in London. Mary Bennet. Great Wyfe.” He folded his arms. “My mother kept the old ways. When I was a child, she visited Pemberley for the Britons’ celebrations. She brought me, too. Dragged me—as a boy, I had no patience for anything but riding and shooting. Then a fever took her in my sixteenth winter, and that door closed.” He unfolded a hand toward the smoking field. “You said we must coordinate our efforts. What do you propose?”
Returned to Pemberley House,I sought solitude in the observatory looking out over spring-green hills.
Inspections were underway at the neighboring estates. One infected field had been found, but there were no reports of mass crawler eruptions. With luck, the broad beans had been the most advanced infestation.
