Page 65 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
Yuánchi stretched his wings, trimming the lay of his scales, and we glided soundless as a hunting owl. I closed my eyes and found the vision of one of the drakes. Even moonless, the world came alive with the etched, violet precision of draca eyes under night sky.
A prior wyfe’s memories knew the shape of this shoreline, but those images had faded like childhood memories. I caught glimpses as we followed the breakers,the crashing foam sparkling and glowing in the starlight. A deserted mile flowed beneath Yuánchi’s wings. Was this the wrong place? No, there it was, the glistening cold silver of a river winding into the North Sea.
“The river Ilidh,” I called back to Darcy, the Scots Gaelic name simultaneously familiar and awkward on my tongue.
We circled, and I saw a castle had been raised on the hilltop. It used to be a wooden fort. A castle would mean guards… too late, I bit back the thought, then waited for the rush of Fènnù’s anger that followed any halfway military observation.
Nothing. Was I beyond the black dragon’s reach? That would be why my feelings were no longer dominated by dispassion and violence.
We landed beside the castle on a windswept, elevated point overlooking the juncture of river and sea. The castle was in ruins, unoccupied and abandoned. The timbers supporting the main roof had caved in, and the walls were missing stones.
A blue morning glow fringed the eastern horizon. I undid the lap belt and stood on the saddle, toes perched on the highest lip so my head was above the castle walls, then turned a slow circle, adjusting my balance when Yuánchi rocked to stretch his wings. I finished facing the brightening sea and rested my hand on his neck. The pulse of his great heart, quickened by the long flight, thudded almost as fast as a person’s. At least his neck scales were scarlet and firm, not yet corrupted by the evil spreading from Fènnù through me.
The castle, old though it was, was new to me, as was a stone bridge farther up the river, but the shadowy dips and peaks of the hills were unchanged. This was the hill I remembered from long ago. The great inland strath, a vast grassy valley spreading from the river, was the same as well, although without a single lamp or lit window. That was unexpected. Even long ago, there had been farmers who woke before the dawn.
When we left Pemberley, I had hid Yuánchi’s binding. That was an ancient tactic, one used when fighting other wyves—I had forgotten that detail until now, and the realization spilled an ugly chill into my belly. The trick had lapsed, though. Like compressing a carriage spring in my bare hands, a powerful binding could not be concealed forever.
Carefully, I opened my awareness and sought Fènnù. I stretched, straining at the edges of my perception. Nothing.
Darcy had clambered down the stirrup ladder to the ground. I stepped offthe saddle and dropped beside him. The rocky earth smacked the soles of my boots while my thick wool pelisse billowed.
“Fènnù did not follow us,” I said. With my mind opened, the endless pressure—that dark influence—had lifted. Even speaking felt different. I could bare my thoughts effortlessly instead of checking and rechecking that I was not saying something distressingly violent.
Darcy stamped his feet, rubbing his arms and working stiff fingers. “How are you not frozen solid?” He stilled, a dark shape facing me. “You sound more like yourself.”
The wyfe of war must have no husband.
In defiance of that, I offered my hand. “I am glad you are here.” He took my fingers, his grip strong and trusting. Also cautious, the way one would be with an invalid or a madwoman. That made me smile in the dark.
When I did nothing more, he let go and studied the castle’s ragged stone walls, vague and inky in the pre-dawn, then looked down at the village by the river mouth. “Where are we?”
“The village is Bun Ilidh. That just means the foot of the Ilidh river. The castle is new, so I do not know, but this hill had a name. Helmsdal.”
“Helmsdale Castle,” he mused, modernizing the pronunciation. “It is famous.”
“Famous?” I squinted at it again. It would have been an efficient fortress in its day, but it was not extraordinary. Not in obsessively fortified Scotland. Longbourn House was bigger.
Darcy picked his way across the dim ground and patted a stone block. “This place inspired the last scene ofHamlet. An aunt wanted her son to inherit, so she poisoned the earl and countess, but she was careless and poisoned her son as well. Betrayal and tragedy together, all within these walls.”
The story was a coincidence, but “betrayal and tragedy” prodded my uncomfortable conscience. I took a breath to buttress my deceit.
Darcy looked as inky as the castle. I was suddenly desperate to see him and flicked to a firedrake’s perspective. Darcy’s high cheekbones and expressive brows became clear, but his face was unfathomable in the peculiar colors of draca sight. His posture, though, was achingly familiar. He was studying Yuánchi and distinctly dissatisfied.
“He is hungry,” Darcy reported.
Relying on Darcy for reports about Yuánchi frustrated me. Cautiously, I reached for Yuánchi’s thoughts myself and felt a grating, ill-fitted contact, likeshoving a chisel into a finely crafted lock. But that was better than at Longbourn. There, Yuánchi’s mind, usually inhumanly potent, had crumbled under my touch.
Count your successes. The isolation from Fènnù was helping, and with the war drawing the black dragon south, she was too distant to sense Darcy or Yuánchi. The search for the flute would keep Darcy occupied. The rest of our family should be safe in Longbourn and Pemberley, far from London and the war. I could not save everyone, but it was a start. A token.
A boot knocked a loose stone, and the firedrake’s inhuman vision snapped from Darcy to the darkness of the half-fallen castle. A man’s voice called, “Who’s there?” as a figure stumbled into view, his sleepy hand rubbing tousled hair. In the draca’s sight, the man’s face was painfully lean. He squinted at Darcy’s vague but well-dressed shape, then he lifted a farmer’s scythe like a weapon. “Ye cannae hae the stones!”
“What stones?” Darcy asked.
“The Pictish stones,” the man replied in a wary, but calmer, Scottish brogue. “Thought ye were Sellar. Thefactor.”
Factor was the Scot’s name for a land manager, the sort who organized a grand estate, and the man all but spat it.
“I am not your factor,” Darcy said simply. “I am Mr. Darcy.” There was a pause while the two men watched each other, then Darcy asked me, “Is this the place? Is the flute here?”
