Page 109 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
Everyone spoke at once, but some age-old ghost reached into my thoughts, cleaving my fear and leaving an edged focus.
“Who was with her?” I demanded.
Despite the shouting, Jane heard. Everyone quieted as she said, “Mamma is caring for her. We were in Meryton with Kitty, and we saw flying creatures. They camehere…” She shuddered, and Charles wrapped an arm around her.
“Listen to me,” I said. “We will find her. Where is your wyvern?” I did not know the perfumer’s skills, but she might have sensed a wyvern…
Jane pressed her palms on her temples, forcing out words. “She always stays with Jemma.” Perplexed, she looked around the ravaged garden. “Sometimes I can feel where she is…” She closed her eyes. A breath passed. Another. When her eyes opened, her cheeks were drained and white, her eyes hollow. She shook her head.
“A wyvern fought here,” I said. I toed the earth at my feet, torn in three deep slices spread wider than I could stretch my hand.
“Foughtwhat?” Jane asked pathetically.
“An evil woman,” Mary answered. “She wields crawlers like Lizzy commands draca.” Jane noticed Mary then, saw her bruised temple and bloody cut ear, her soiled and torn clothing, her hair in clotted tangles. She fumbled for Charles’s hand.
“This way,” I said. The firedrakes were overhead, and their vision revealed streaks of hot ground away from the house and toward the meadow. The signs were clear to human eyes as well: smoking earth, claw cuts. Even a stretch of exposed granite had ripped grooves—that could only be a wyvern. And everywhere, there were the scuttling stab marks left by crawler legs.
And killed crawlers. A hedge still burned over a half-dozen sizzling, ruptured insectile bodies, thrown there by the blast. The bodies had peculiar, charred stubs on their backs. I touched one, and Mary said, “Those were wings. They fly.” We hurried faster, following an old stone wall that led past our cherry tree.
Here, an eight-foot section of the wall was blown away, the foundation rocks hissing and shimmering with heat. A greater enemy had fallen. A corpulent crawler, as grossly heavy as a large pig, lay curled on its side, burned legs scrunched like a dead spider, charred wing stubs on its back, its inch-thick shell torn apart. A muddy reek rose from its clammy flesh, and the citric tang of crawler venom.
Cautiously, Mary leaned to look. “The internal structure is strange. The body contains vestigial shells, like compartments…”
Amid the char and soot, a leaf on a nearby bush shone in the summer sun. I touched it, and my finger came away coated with clear golden ichor. Draca blood.
“Why is a wyvern fighting on the ground?” Darcy asked.
“Her flame has all been thrown back, toward the house,” I said. “She is defending a retreat. Defending someone on the ground.”
“I know where they went!” Mary cried. She ran ahead, favoring one leg.
I caught up as she entered an old stone-fenced paddock. It had been a sea of overgrown hollyhocks. Those were obliterated, the ground coated in charred leaves and smoldering stems. Old stones were cracked from heat or smashed. Dead crawlers crunched underfoot, hundreds of the foot-long flying ones and another of those thick, heavy ones.
Mary was stock still, her face childish and pathetic with shock.
Mamma was curled against the last patch of intact stone wall, one corner of her skirts blackened, her smoke-stained face staring sightlessly at the sky. Beside her, Jane’s golden wyvern lay unmoving, one wing broken and shredded, the ebony bones a ruined umbrella, the other wing tucked under her, the gleaming scales on her breast riven by a huge, paired sting.
We gathered, aghast. Some wept.
Jane did not cry. She whispered, “Quiet,” then shouted, “Be quiet!” The grief choked into bewildered silence. Jane fell on her knees by her dead wyvern, pulling at her tucked wing. Charles was down an instant later, and they dragged the wing loose. From that crevice, the last defended point, baby Jemma blinked in the sudden light, her little face dirty and tear streaked, her thumb stuffed in her mouth.
Jane swept her up, curled herself against her fallen wyvern, and comforted Jemma while bawling at the same time. Charles shielded them in his arms, and his and Jane’s heads touched in gratitude and sorrow.
Mary knelt, wincing, beside Mamma. She embraced her and then, with gentle fingers, closed her eyes. “She used to scold me when I hid here, but she remembered. She thought it would be safe…” Her voice strangled.
“It is not your fault,” I said. My voice was perfectly clear, the words disciplined by past selves while they dissected the scene. A wyvern could not carry a baby; Mamma had done that. My selfless, scatterbrained, loving mother, who only ever wished to secure her treasured daughters’ futures, had fled all this way while unthinkable ruin and destruction rained around her.
Part of me—witty Elizabeth Bennet, my mother’s daughter—was helpless with loss. The rest, my older selves who had chosen vengeance, arrayed themselves in silent tribute.
Fènnù’s mad whisper slipped into my thoughts.I am waiting for you. You need not suffer. Grief is nothing to me. I savor it. Pass your burden to me, so you may fly.
“My grief is my own,” I whispered. Finally, heartbreak overcame my dispassionate ghosts, and molten tears filled my throat.
Georgiana was stroking Mary’s bent form while wiping her own tears. Then her chin lifted, and she said angrily, “The blight is here, too!” A swath of meadow beyond the stone wall was a soggy charcoal gray.
Mary threw her tangled hair out of the way and shoved to her feet, kicking her skirts free of burned hollyhocks. “I do not understand why these thingskeephappening!” She yanked off her bent spectacles. She looked younger without them, as if we had slipped into some pleasant past, but her face was contorted. “I would have attacked the perfumer, Lizzy. I wanted to! But all I did was send herhere. This is so… unfair!”
My internal dance of minds continued, and an ancient warrior used my lips. “The perfumer reports to this emperor? This… Napoleon?” When Mary looked confused, I snapped, “She spoke with you.Think.”
