Page 45 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
His wings unfolded fifty feet to each side, stretching high while his body crouched, muscles the size of oxen bunching in his haunches. The two firedrakes shot past arrow-swift, one on each side, then we leaped into the sky. The wings drove down. Elizabeth leaned with a rider’s anticipation, and I followed her motion. The world tilted, treetops flashing beneath a stroking wingtip, then leveled.
We climbed toward the forest. The world flattened to a painter’s landscape. Wind sang in my ears and forced my eyes to slits. Elizabeth’s rigid tension vanished. One of her hands rested lightly on a knob of Yuánchi’s neck before her, the other atop my forearm around her waist.
“This is beautiful,” I cried. She did not answer; I was not sure she heard over the wind. But we were flying north, the wrong direction, so I shouted, “Are we going to Longbourn?”
She must have heard that, but she did not answer. Her small frame was warm against mine, as familiar as my own body, and I felt her tension return. Was she afraid to go home?
Yuánchi’s wings stopped their massive strokes. We glided for a minute, then he tilted in a wide turn, his inner wing dipping. Elizabeth leaned, studying the ground, and I followed her gaze.
The forest below was hazed with blue smoke. Two full acres had been burned to glassy, bare rock. Patches still glowed sullen red, and a metallic scorch filled my nostrils. The surrounding woods were gone; there were a hundred yards of cinders before tree trunks resumed, blown down like twigs, the smaller branches and leaves missing.
In that ash and devastation, a strip of lemon yellow fluttered from a broken branch, a charred fragment of canvas from the Blackcoats’ tents.
Elizabeth finished her inspection. She shouted, “We will go to Longbourn.”
Yuánchi’s wings snapped us through a cruel curve, wind tearing and hissing. Weight crushed me into my seat until the southern sky swung into view.
Miles away, a huge black form flapped from a rocky hilltop and followed us—Fènnù pursuing her wyfe of war.
16
LONGBOURN
DARCY
We descended,and the wind sharpened. Countryside sped by unfathomably fast a hundred yards below. Ahead, Yuánchi’s shadow raced along a winding country road, his wings eclipsing entire swaths of trees. Houses became more frequent—we dropped lower yet, perhaps seventy yards up—then a picturesque town appeared, a handful of streets filled with rising faces and pointing arms.
“Meryton,” Elizabeth shouted, twisting her head so I could hear, the town out of sight before the word was done.
We cleared a copse of tall ash trees. The twin cream-colored firedrakes tucked their wings and dove like stooping hawks, and we followed in a dizzying descent that made my stomach flip. The ground roared up—my body braced for collision—then Yuánchi reared like a stallion, his wings scooping and pounding the air, the force pinning us to his inclined back until we settled. The sudden quiet was profound, like a hurricane had been snuffed out, then the sounds of nature—birdsong, breeze—returned.
Longbourn House, a well-made country home of two stories and fourteen rooms, was beside us. One firedrake alighted on a chimney. The other found the iron perch on the old draca house, a waist-high stone kennel twenty steps or so from the main house.
Elizabeth watched the house, her shoulders taut as a bowstring. “This is dangerous.”
I looked around the slightly overgrown garden, snug windows, and quiet countryside. “Why?”
“I am dangerous.”
Rules be damned. I leaned closer, my lips brushing her hair. “I will stay with you.” She nodded, a single jerk. There was not even a sardonic glance.
Yuánchi shifted to lie flat, wings folding, his chest and lower neck coming flush to the ground. We were still higher than a horse, six or seven feet from the ground, but Elizabeth stood and jumped. I followed, my bootheels cutting divots in the turf. I smoothed my coattails, and my fingers caught threads torn loose by Yuánchi’s scales. If we kept riding this way, our clothes would fall to shreds.
Instead of following the path to the door, Elizabeth took stiff, swift steps to the draca house. While the cream firedrake watched from the perch, she touched the slate roof tiles. “It began here with Longbourn’s drake. I saw through his eyes, and he feared me. Feared that the wyfe of war would enslave him.”
The Longbourn front door flung wide and Mrs. Bennet, her hair threaded with strands of gray, ran out crying, “My dear Lizzy!”
“Mamma,” Elizabeth said, sounding very much an over-absent daughter.
Mrs. Bennet swept her into a huge hug overflowing with frills from a floppy housecoat and a highly decorated at-home cap. That stilled into an intense motherly clasp and hushed sobs. At last, she stepped back, wiped her eyes, and caught Elizabeth’s cheeks in her hands. She tilted her head one way and the other. “Look at you. Oh, what a state! We shall fix that up in a moment.”
Mrs. Bennet saw me waiting a few steps behind. I bowed, “Madam,” then I was hauled into an equally huge but substantially less expected embrace of my own.
“You wonderful man,” she cried into my soiled neckcloth. “Mary wrote to say you found her. And to think that people used to call you disagreeable!”
I knew quite well who had called me that, but I smiled above her filly cap. “Mary deserves the credit for her return, not I.”
She stepped back and plucked at my wrinkled sleeve. “And you as well! Whatever are young people doing these days? It comes of riding dragons, I suppose. We should make you both presentable, but you are such a tall thing.At least it is a laundry day. Come on. Come on!” She headed toward the house, beckoning.
