Page 94 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
I had heard this song before, sung at the ball in London when Miss Rees read the melody embossed in Gramr’s blade and invoked its power to wake Fènnù. But that had been an ordinary wyfe, ordinary singing. This was ancestral tones rising from the earth. Notes storming from the restless sea. Music shining from the countless dusks and dawns stacked beyond the horizons. The forces that ruled the world of draca, forces rooted in nature, were being folded into melody.
Only one woman had that power. “Stop!” I shrieked. I turned toward Pemberley, hundreds of miles distant. “You cannot have her! She chose me.Iam the wyfe of war!”
Fènnù’s wings spread, and she leaped into the sky. In seconds, she was shrinking into the south.
Like an iron chain stretched beyond its limits, the madness filling me groaned, bent, and shattered. The cold shroud erected to block my link with Yuánchi fell.
Trembling with shock, I fumbled the dagger into the sheath on my thigh. Its touch burned my skin. Ashamed and terrified, I looked up at Darcy.
He cradled my hands in his. “You did it. You commanded her.”
He had not heard the music. “No. Fènnù had taken my mind. I was lost. She was summoned by another…”
His head turned to watch her fading silhouette. “Who could summon Fènnù?”
“The wyfe of song. Georgiana is singing her melody. Calling her.”
He grabbed my arm. Hard. “Why?”
“I do not know, but we must stop her. She has the power to summon Fènnù, but the wyfe of song cannot hold the black dragon. Fènnù will break her, and consume her strength, and pour it into destruction.”
For the first time since I rose from the lake, the fears that had driven me, the fears that had led to indecision and hiding and running, were gone. Now the contest was clear. And even with Fènnù’s influence removed, I remembered my lifetimes of training. Wars were not won by running.
With the cold shroud gone, I reached my thoughts out to Yuánchi.
Your mind is clear, he answered in tremendous relief. I fell into his welcoming senses, sightless but rich with other awareness, the flows of air, the sound of waves cresting hundreds of feet below, the peculiar abstract imagery shared by the two firedrakes.
Fènnù found me, I thought.She hid her approach—hid herself from you and me until she was upon me. She is stronger than ever. Come. We must save the wyfe of song.
Below, stunned people congregated on the frozen shoreline of Helmsdale. Behind us, Mistress MacLeod and her husband, both bloodied, staggered out of the sprayed rubble of the castle. They were supporting Sellar, who was dragging one leg. He saw me and reeled back, wild-eyed and terrified.
I took Darcy’s hand—his left, which made him wince, but I forced that guilt aside. There was no time.
“We must fly,” I said as the scarlet of Yuánchi’s wings became visible, streaking above the gray sea. “Race south as we have never flown before. We must stop Fènnù before she breaks the wyfe of song.”
28
PEMBERLEY, SHROUDED
LIZZY
When I trickedDarcy into fleeing, our flight north had been an exercise in nighttime stealth made clumsy by my lost connection to Yuánchi’s thoughts.
Our return was a brazen, daylit sprint. Yuánchi’s mind and mine were joined again, our path so high above the earth that the air thinned until my heart pounded between straining lungs and the sun glinted from Yuánchi’s scales with unnatural brilliance.
I rode pressed flat to the leather of the saddle, head tipped just enough to peer through my goggles at the horizon. Through my eyes, Yuánchi read the ever-changing wisps and roils of cloud, an atlas of drafts and currents. The cream firedrakes, who usually flew ahead on each side, took turns perching on the saddle below my right knee to rest, hooking their claws to a sturdy iron ring, their neck, body, wings, and tail flattened into a gleaming, drop-like form that effortlessly split the air.
My human body was far inferior. The wind pummeled my shoulders, forearms, and fingers like tireless fists until my grip shook with exhaustion. Pinprick gaps in the seams of my riding coat admitted icy needles of air. But all that was nothing compared to the pain in Yuánchi’s ox-sized breast muscles as he drove his vast wings beyond endurance.
When we donned our riding gear, Darcy had asked one question, “Can webeat Fènnù to Pemberley?” I shook my head and saw the bitter compression of his lips. My scheme had taken us far from home. Now Yuánchi paid the penance for my failure, spending his impossible strength in reckless pursuit.
Forests passed below. The sun shifted. The Highland mountains shrank to hills. We overflew a tremendous bay beside a coal-smoke-wreathed city—Edinburgh. Yuánchi, even blind, steered us with a draca’s awareness of place, senses so inhuman that I understood only his reactions, a wing dipped to correct for a crosswind, a burst of effort to ride a higher, fortuitous breeze.
What would happen when we arrived? Had Georgiana already fallen to Fènnù? I closed my eyes and stretched out my senses. Georgiana’s song filled my bones, its beauty intact, its power uncorrupted. All was not lost. But that did not answer what we would face.
I was so exhausted and awash in inhuman senses that Darcy spotted our destination before me. He tapped my hip, then whacked me when I did not stir. I twisted my head to see him—conversation was impossible—and saw his arm point forward.
An unnatural storm squatted on the horizon, shaped like roiling thunderclouds but as black as tar. I checked the landscape, less familiar from this direction. The ridges matched: the blackness engulfed Pemberley.
