Page 22 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
Although they were all carefully shaven, their hair was raggedly cropped. Their coats were black with wide, hanging leather belts.
Blackcoats. My first reaction was frustration that their evil had reached this far north. Then came alarm.
The men spread out, a few feet between each. Our London protests had taught me about thugs and bullies. Shouting men who bunched together were nuisances. Men who quietly spaced themselves were dangerous.
Lucy and Thomas had never seen a Blackcoat. Their expressions were wary but polite.
“You are not welcome here,” I told the leader. “These lands are patrolled. You would be wise to leave.”
Lucy’s polite smile vanished. Thomas took a half-step in front of her.
“That was rude,” the man said. He waved his clenched fist toward Lizzy’s shrine, and I saw a glimmer of metal—he held a short chunk of thick brass rod. “What’s the statue, then? That you?”
“The statue is no business of yours,” I said. “I am not being rude. I am warning you. Briton tribes control these hills, and they will know your dress.But if you turn around and follow the road out of Pemberley, they will let you pass.”
One could not travel through Derbyshire without hearing the name “Pemberley.” The two men behind exchanged an uneasy glance.
The leader scoffed. “Big names mean big money.” He gave Lucy a false smile. “How about you, sweet thing? Who’s this fancy lady?”
He reached for her with his free hand. Thomas batted down the outstretched fingers, but the man’s other fist was already swinging in a vicious, brass-weighted arc. It struck Thomas’s temple, knocking his head a quarter turn. He fell bonelessly on the rocky shore.
Lucy screamed a piercing, young cry, her hands at her mouth.
I started to go to him, but a pair of arms caught me from behind, wrapping my waist and my chest, yanking me off my feet. The memory of another violent day flashed through my mind’s eye: Lizzy summoning the Longbourn firedrake to save us from a mad dog. I tried to whistle the summoning tones, even though a tiny song draca was no lethal drake, but the grubby hand on my chest shifted to grab my mouth and cheeks, stifling sound. Blocking my nose. Blocking my breath. Panicked, I clawed until I was thrown to the ground. A boot landed between my shoulder blades, driving me prone, my cheek jamming into the pebbles, trapped but finally able to draw a sliver of air.
Lucy had dodged behind the shrine, but the other men chased her and dragged her back crying. They pushed her down beside me.
Thomas lay a few yards away, his face toward me. Pages of medical reference burst into my mind. Pterional fracture. Occipital fracture or rupture. But there was no bleeding from his nose or ear. His chest rose and fell. Concussed, hopefully no worse.
The leader shouted, “You’re a pair of troublemakers. The Code says we don’t got to take that. Fancy girls is good for one thing—”
He recited a man’s usual threats, nothing I had not heard a dozen times at protests, but exposing Lucy to that vileness turned my shock to anger. Then, a fear rose: What if I had a role to play in rescuing Lizzy, but I died here first?
I strained for thin breaths. Lizzy’s statue watched, the powerful sister, impassive in stone. Whistling for birds felt childish, and it was impossible anyway, my lips distorted by rocks. As my head spun with anoxia, I stretched my arm to my sister and dreamed I sang my summoning song, but not alone. An unseen chorus joined me in unfathomably complex harmony.
Reality replaced that fantasy. Behind the statue, a stream of hot smoke streaked upward. Flames began to lick. When Lucy ran behind the shrine, she pushed her candle into that mass. She acted while I did nothing, but now I could help. I forced out a shout, drawing threats but keeping the men’s attention.
The dry leaves caught like paper. Twigs flared and crackled. Lucy’s Green Woman filled with fire, the draca breath thumping into flame as if oil-soaked, the thorns orange-silhouetted knives. The whole pile roared up, and the men howled in alarm. It would be a short-lived bonfire—parts were already caving into ash—but the flames crowned Lizzy’s head and higher, a metaphorical pyre turned literal, staining her granite figure sooty black.
Huge clouds of smoke billowed. We were in the center of Pemberley, in plain view of the distant house, and this was a blazing beacon. Two of the men stomped frantically on the fire’s fringe. The leader shouted ill-thought orders, his bootheel jarring my spine with each utterance.
A wave surged up the stony beach, swishing frigid lake water past my nose. I snorted and coughed. Steam boiled from the base of the fire. The water trickled away like freezing fingers on the front of my dress.
A large splash sounded. The man’s boot lifted. He cursed. My lungs filled properly, and I raised my head.
A gigantic fish, ten feet long, was thrashing itself ashore, its mouth gasping in the air, its body distended and thick as a barrel. The tail flapped madly, flinging the whole length aloft to slap the stones, beaching itself in flailing froth. When two thirds were ashore, it stilled, fins trembling and gills gaping, the flesh scaleless and translucent as a tadpole.
“What the devil,” the leader said. I levered myself up. Lucy stared, her mouth open, interrupted mid-sob.
The fish shuddered. A black spike jabbed out the belly. It ripped toward the head, rasping like tearing cloth and gutting the fish from within. Organs spilled out, and a noxious, briny odor spread, redolent of cloves and heated copper. A bleached white foot appeared, then a woman’s naked figure was expelled in a rush of viscous liquid. The fish collapsed like an emptied chrysalis.
The woman curled fetus-like and coughed a vomitous spray. Her shoulders, paper-white where they were not buried by her mass of soaked, dark hair, convulsed as she bent in two, choking. Finally, she subsided to hoarse gasps. She pushed erect and took a swaying step from the shallows.
I scrambled to my feet. My rational mind shouted it was Lizzy, but my heart did not recognize my sister. The pallor of her skin was not so strange; somenewborns were that pale. But her hair had grown impossibly, a foot longer, or two feet, a wild, drenched cascade that tangled front and back, sticking in dark ringlets that reached her hips. Her body had shed fat like a starved beggar, thinning her breasts, but her limbs were wrapped in feminine muscle, the hard-won strength of a charwoman or washerwoman who hauled and scrubbed fourteen hours a day, or the strength they would have if they dined at the rich table of their lords.
From the slack fingers of her right hand, the black dagger Gramr dangled, dripping, the serrations on its blade gleaming. Before, she had not been able to touch the dagger. It had overwhelmed her with visions and violence.
One of the Blackcoats whispered a prayer. Their leader seemed stupefied. Unsteadily, I walked around him. I intended to embrace my sister, but my nerve failed at the last, undermined by her pose. Lizzy could not have stood casually, naked among strange men.
