Page 82 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
And when I recovered the flute—persuaded the staff to loan it to me, or claimed it in the name of the King, or stole it—how would I return?
“What if I need your aid when we reach London?” I asked. “Lord Wellington sent you to us.”
“To be frank, that would put me in a difficult position. Lord Wellington did not instruct me to aid your… quest. I have been left to guess at his intent. My duty is simple. Return to him.”
The song draca chittered, the points of his claws digging into my shoulder. I replaced my spectacles and blinked bleary eyes. “Do you see something new? Something dangerous?”
The colonel’s head pivoted, then he pointed. “To the west. Is that one of those flying creatures?”
Miles distant, a dark shape climbed on powerful strokes of colossal wings. Recognition wiped the cobwebs from my brain. “That is the black dragon, Fènnù.”
“The demon of the Thames,” Colonel Fremantle whispered. “Saints preserve us.” When I did not answer, he looked more alarmed. “I hopethatis not our ride!”
“Nobody rides Fènnù.” She was miles distant, but I felt her gaze focus on me, then her awareness pressed my mind. The song draca on my shoulder flew away with an alarmed screech. “She must have sensed I was near. She will come. Stay close to me.” I called to our driver, “Come here, quickly.”
The crowd had seen her, and the Londoners who lived through Fènnù’s attacks cried out. People ran, northward on the road or scrambling over the fences into mud and rough brush.
Fènnù was closing at a phenomenal pace, sweeping through a curve that intersected the packed road two miles south of us. Where her shadow touched, the crowd seethed in panic. She swept lower, following the road, her wings driving for speed, low enough that dust rose behind her, then lower yet so the wind of her passage knocked people off their feet like wheat in a storm. A windyhowl became audible, the deepest pedal pipes of a celestial organ played in discordant madness.
Behind us, the horse team whinnied and fought their traces. The driver turned to go to them, but I grabbed his wrist. “She seeks me because she wants my sister. You are safest here.”
Incredibly, the road in front of us had emptied other than dropped bags and packs. Fènnù’s dark shape grew. Already her wingspan filled my eyes, eclipsing the sky, surely atop us although the shadow of her wings was a quarter mile distant. But no black cloud billowed behind her, that omen of her destructive breath. Her approach was intimidation. She would turn aside.
A hundred yards away, her scaled feet untucked, and her hooked rear claws, the longest, caught the earth like a pair of razor-sharp plows. Dirt and rock exploded in her wake, a barking cacophony that shook the ground. The colonel shouted something inaudible and fell. The horses screamed. I had one heartbeat to thinkI was wrong; we are deadand then her feet flashed past, bracketing us with the roar of twin landslides. I threw myself down, shielding my head as gravel and rocks stung and dust coated my throat with grit. There was a meaty thump and a smash of wood and glass, then a hurricane blast as her wings carried her up. Each gust slid me across the torn dirt.
Coughing and spitting grime, I struggled to my feet. Colonel Fremantle and the driver were shrugging off inches of debris. Two massive furrows had been ripped down the road, strewing rocks, soil, and boulders…
The horses were unrecognizable gore splattered among the wrecked flinders of our coach. The iron scent of blood joined the dirt in my nostrils, and unpleasant scenes filled my mind’s eye: a mid-thigh amputation I had observed with clenched teeth; the violent death of Joane Rees.
My rational mind was reeling. Despite her devastation of London, I had invented a delusion that Fènnù, named a deity of death in the broken records of ruined civilizations, was somehow… fond of me? Tame? Harmless unless commanded by the dagger?
The driver was gibbering, pointing at four thousand pounds of gutted horse and the remnants of the carriage. Then he broke and fled, tripping and stumbling to the north.
Across the fields, Fènnù’s wings angled as she turned to return.
I screamed—at the air, at her—“Why kill horses?” Our transport was destroyed, my supplies gone, but the horses seemed… arbitrary. Spiteful. “Why?” I shrieked.
“Run!” the colonel cried. He was pulling me, his arm linked through mine as if we were on promenade.
“I will not.” My error, my blithe trust and naiveté, had turned to anger. I scrambled to a less ruined patch of road. The colonel followed, tugging with aimless resistance.
Fènnù hung in the air, black and growing.
My lips were too crusted with dust to whistle, so I sang the summoning song. The song draca returned to my shoulder, settling his feathers as if nothing were wrong, then another winged in from the field beyond, and then another. Those others did not land but circled in the air around and above us. More joined them.
Fènnù’s awareness caught my mind again, cajoling me with whispers of vengeance and death. I sang an answer, fitting makeshift words to my little tune, “I am no wyfe of war. You do not tempt me.”
Her wings flared, darkening half the sky. Leaves stormed, turned white with frost, and my skirts twanged and shivered like sails in a tempest. She settled fifty yards away. The furor stilled. Her scaly head descended, and her faceted eyes reflected red hues from the sky. Black bile dripped from sores on her jaw. The reek of her corruption, acidic and biting, burned my eyes, and I recognized volatile scents shared with crawler venom.
Dozens of song draca circled the colonel and me, a flowing shield high and low, too many to have been in the local fields—they must have followed from Pemberley. Fènnù’s head twisted, tracking their motion, then the turbid swirl of her gaze fixed on mine. Maddened visions entered my brain: Lizzy floating in the depths like drowned Ophelia, then Lizzy’s face with brown skin decorated with Egyptian kohl, then Lizzy nude and writhing in passion.
Words came, stuttered and uneven:Where is my wyfe of war?
“Gone,” I cried. “Escaped.”
A vise crushed my mind.Yield! Where is my queen?
I could not force words through that pressure, so I sang the summoning song again, and the song draca joined in harmony. Like parody, as a challenge, I threaded in fragments of Fènnù’s song—a half bar of melody here, a modulation there.
