Page 64 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
Searing heat lit the garden as draca fire blew a laurel bush into roaringflames. The roseworm? No, she lay where she had been dropped by the crawler. Miss Bates was dodging panicked soldiers to pick her up.
Two other small draca had entered the garden. They were not prestigious breeds, probably ferretworms or broccworms, but they moved with a draca’s predatory exactness.
My spinning head had eased. I knelt by Augusta and wrapped her wrist in my fingers. I could perceive her health—alive but unconscious, more from exhaustion than any new harm—but my thoughts fluttered oddly. Some reservoir within me had been drained by breaking her binding.
Then I recognized the real danger. Her sleeve cuff was undone.
I fumbled to fasten it, but the button had torn off. Broken cotton threads hung in a hideous tangle. I felt in the dirt, finding only pebbles, my panic growing as gleams of miasma bled from the earth.
The heat of draca fire flooded my side amid more yells. A pair of hobnailed boots ran up, nearly stomping on my seeking fingers. I looked up at a furious gray-coated soldier. He shouted, “Go inside!” just as a garden shovel clanged the side of his head. He keeled over, leaving Mr. Knightley, holding the shovel like a club.
“We must run!” he shouted.
“I cannot leave her,” I said, pinching to keep her sleeve closed. “I cannot find her button!”
He cursed and hauled her out of my grasp, the ruined sleeve ripping from my fingers. He slung her over his shoulders like a yoke for hauling buckets, then grabbed my hand and yanked me to my feet.
Miss Bates dashed by, shouting unintelligibly but pointing, the Otways behind her. The miasma spilled in vile pools in their footsteps. Mr. Knightley followed, dragging me and oblivious to the danger. I cried out, pointing to the shimmering puddles, terrified that he would step in one.
We entered the trees, the east path. Shots fired behind us, and a bullet buzzed overhead, snicking off a branch. “Where to?” Mr. Knightley shouted. Someone answered, and he ran, Augusta bouncing on his back. His pace was slow, and I followed him easily enough, trapped between the seeking miasma ahead and the pursuit behind. More bullets whizzed, clipping leaves or hitting trunks with loudwhacks. Mr. Knightley stumbled; this time, I caught his arm. His eyes were grim.
We almost collided with the others, who had stopped cold. Everyone had escaped: the Otways, the Westons, Miss Bates. But the older people were spent—Mr. Weston had sat down in the dirt, his head hanging. Anne was panting while clutching their squalling child.
But two new women were here, elderly widows from the poorer north district of town. I knew them, but I had to look away, their clothes were so disarranged. Everyone’s were. I fixed my eyes on a gnarled root instead and pulled off my remaining, asymmetrical glove, discarding it behind me.
The shouting behind us grew louder, joined by the baying of dogs.
“Do not stop.” Mr. Knightley begged the group, but he was bent almost double under Augusta’s weight, his legs shaking.
Miss Bates’s face was locked in a drugged rictus of a smile. She gasped, “Kent,” as if that was an answer. “The widowed wyves of Kent have come.”
A majestic, gray-haired woman stepped around her. Her clothes were not patched and worn. Greedily, I fixed my eyes on perfect silk seams.
Lady Catherine de Bourgh saw me and offered a regal nod. “Miss Woodhouse. I do not forget a face. I am, however, disappointed in Surrey. It has become far less tolerable.”
Her bronze wyvern trotted up beside her, sparkling in the dappled sunlight. The miasma had caught us now, and it poured down, condensing from every forest leaf, but the drops vanished in the shine around the wyvern. Her prismatic eyes met mine, and through the closing walls of my exhaustion, words chimed:
healer. you must bind for strength
She spread her wings, and with a spray of leaves, launched herself low to the ground. Her powerful, compact wings steered her between tree trunks, deft as a hunting goshawk, and she vanished toward the pursuing shouts.
21
BUN ILIDH
LIZZY
The stars burnedpinpricks through the pre-dawn sky, the bitter air raked my cheeks, and I wondered how much longer I could lie to Darcy.
A thousand feet below, the churning surf glimmered in the faint light, outlining the shape of the coast.
Slow now. I visualized a falling feather to the drakes, and they swayed to and fro, shedding height and speed while Yuánchi cupped his wings to follow. We floated lower. My goggles had fogged from the cold, so I loosened the leather strap and let them dangle from my neck.
“Are we landing?” Darcy called from behind me.
The wind had eased enough for conversation, and my mind had calmed as well. There were no longer a hundred prior lives condemning Darcy’s presence—that was a comfort—but his touch confused me with longing and guilt.
“Soon…” I answered.
