Page 24 of The Magic of Pemberley (Fitzwilliam Darcy, Mage #2)

Chapter 24

T he throbbing in his shoulder yanked Darcy out of sleep. He opened his eyes, blinked, and closed them again. This had to be a dream. Why else would there be the tree roots over his head? And surrounding him, too, forming the rounded walls of small chamber. A room filled with child-sized wooden furniture.

He dug his fingernails into his palms, willing the dream to fade. But when he looked again, nothing had changed. A fire burned merrily in an undersized hearth, with a tiny pot over it giving off an appetizing aroma. His stomach rumbled. When had he last eaten warm food?

A squeaky voice said, “Ah. You are awake; good.” The voice came from the middle of this empty underground chamber, where no one stood.

An invisible speaker in a strange burrow where everything was too small for a human. There was only one answer, and it terrified him. “Am I in Faerie?” he choked out.

Faerie had cost him his mother for over a decade. Faerie could steal a dozen years from his life. His baby would be nearly grown by the time he returned. Elizabeth might have remarried, thinking him dead…

A rusty chuckle. “Nay, we are still in your mortal world.”

Relief washed over him. Anything was better than Faerie. He tried to sit up, but a vicious stab of pain in his shoulder made him collapse back down .

“Allow me to help you.” Invisible hands slid behind his back. “Let me do the work.” The hands pressed upwards.

Darcy still grunted with pain, but this time he managed to reach a sitting position. “Who are you?”

“Names can be dangerous. I am a friend of a friend.”

He was not about to trust a fae with vague answers. “Are you a friend of Napoleon?”

A tsking sound. “I care nothing for mortal rulers.” A bowl wafted through the air and was set in front of him.

“A neat evasion, as Napoleon is not a mortal.” Devil take it, would this pain never ease?

“Then no, I am no friend to Napoleon.”

The smell of the food, the aroma of meat and roasted vegetables, almost made him dizzy. “Will this food have any magical effect on me? Or otherwise harm me?” He was so hungry he might eat it anyway.

“How sensibly distrustful you are! It is plain mortal food, without any spells, potions, poisons, or traps. It will not hurt you.”

He could not help himself. He shoveled it into his mouth as quickly as he could with the tiny spoon. It tasted better than anything he had ever eaten. A second bowl appeared, and he demolished that, too.

It almost made him feel like himself again, despite the pain in his shoulder. Still, something nagged at him. “Napoleon’s men are hunting me, and they have a tool that will lead them to me. Even here.”

“Not to you, but to this.” The leather pouch holding his dragon scale suddenly pressed against his chest as if a finger was pushing into it. Then the pressure eased, and the voice became annoyed. “Horrid iron bullet. It stings, even from this distance.” A spitting sound.

“They are tracking what I have in the pouch?” The one thing he could not bear to give up.

“That bit of dragon, yes. They have a dragon lodestone.”

He had never heard of such a thing, but it might explain how Napoleon had found the dragon Nests. “You are certain?”

“I overheard them speaking of it. They are close, even now. ”

Damnation. That would explain why they found him at night. When the scale became active at sunset, it would lead them to him again.

Perhaps he could hide it somewhere. But then the soldiers would find it and take it for themselves. They would do that eventually, no matter how well he hid it.

That scale was his only connection to Elizabeth and to England. She would assume the worst if he suddenly stopped answering. She would worry terribly. But he could not flee from the soldiers again, not with this wound.

Could he steal one last chance to contact her? Elizabeth had begged him to do whatever would keep him safe, even if it meant hiding for months.

She would want him to get rid of the scale that was endangering him. Even if his chest ached at the thought of losing that moment of connection to her, leaving him completely alone among his enemies.

Using his left hand, he slowly lifted the chain over his head and balanced the pouch in his hand. “I must hide this somewhere, then. Or better yet, put it on a diligence that will carry it far away and lead the soldiers to hunt somewhere else.” But if he had this much trouble sitting up, how could he sneak into town, much less disguise himself to get close to the diligence ?

“Clever, for a mortal. If you wish it, it shall be done.”

“By whom?”

“I, or one of my kin,” the fae said obligingly. Too obligingly.

Darcy weighed his words. “I do not understand why you would wish to aid me with no expectation of return.”

A cackle of laughter. “Oh, how it pains me to explain myself to a mortal! The payment has already been made. You placed us under an obligation to you, and by this service, I lessen that debt.”

He struggled to understand. “Because I tried to stop Napoleon?”

The spitting sound again. “Nothing so trifling.”

It had not felt trifling to him.

A softer, gentler voice spoke. “You created an obligation by your kindness to her whom you call your sister. ”

Cold washed over him. How did these French fae know about Georgiana? “She is my sister in every way that matters,” he said stiffly.

“Ah, they said you were proud, and so you are, even with a bullet in your shoulder! We cannot fix that, since it is iron, but a mortal healer will be here soon to remove it.”

His mind seized on the least important part of his words. “Bullets are made of lead, not iron.”

“Not this one.” The kind fae sounded amused. “They use iron bullets when they are hunting fae. Likely they were unsure of your mortality and took no chances.”

It made sense, but… “A human healer will betray me to Napoleon.”

“This one shall not. But first we must take that bit of dragon far from here. The diligence is a good thought, but better to have someone take it even farther and throw into the sea. Then they will believe you gone.”

His hand closed over the pouch. It had saved his life on the smugglers’ boat. He had hoped it would help him find a sailor willing to take him back across the Channel. And it tied him to Elizabeth.

Now it was a target on his back.

He still hesitated. Elizabeth would be frantic. “Would it be possible for you to get a message to my sister, telling her that I gave this up? And perhaps even about the dragon lodestone?” Georgiana would know to tell Elizabeth.

A deep sigh. “I suppose so.”

Slowly he opened his fingers and held it out. “Take it.”

The slight weight lifted from his palm. Now he was completely on his own.

The healer proved to be a lady perhaps a few years younger than Darcy. She arrived the following day, just as his invisibility from the dragon Artifact was wearing off, and just in time. His shoulder might be no worse, but he could not say the same thing for his mind. According to the kind fae, Elizabeth had in fact not been by his bedside throughout the night. Nor had Star, the faithful spaniel whom he had been given as a pup when he was six. Since the fae did not lie, he had to believe her. Then again, he was talking to an invisible fae, which was at least as unlikely as Elizabeth mysteriously appearing and disappearing here when she was far away in England.

He would ask her when she came back, if she did. Or perhaps Star would know.

The woman kneeled beside him. “What is the matter?” she asked, her French accented with some other harsher sounding tongue. Flemish, perhaps, or German? Elizabeth’s French always sounded accented to him, too, although in a different manner.

Her dark hair, pulled back in an intricate style which suggested a degree of wealth, or at least the services of a lady’s maid, reminded him of Elizabeth, too, though this woman’s curls were… His mind failed him in finding the words.

“I need you to pay attention,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”

“They shot me.” He pointed to his shoulder, but he was forgetting something important. Oh, yes. “Are you going to sell me to the emperor?” Not that it really mattered. His chances of getting home now were almost nonexistent.

“No, of course not,” she said. “This may hurt.” She peeled away the blood-soaked linen over his torn flesh and bent forward to examine it, probing it gently with her finger. “The wound is clean, with no bleeding. The surgeon always says it is better to leave a bullet in place if it is not causing bleeding, since cutting it out can do more damage.”

Whatever would heal fastest. Had he said that, or only thought it?

“It must come out,” said the creaky voice, the kind one. “The iron is poisoning him. He has only a trace of fae blood, but enough that it is destroying his mind.”

“He will need a surgeon, then. I can deal with minor wounds, but cutting out a bullet? I do not even know where to begin. ”

“You must do your best, Infant,” said the voice sympathetically. “He has a price on his head, so getting a surgeon would mean a death sentence, and we cannot come near that iron. He will die if the bullet remains and die if we get a surgeon.”

She drew in a sharp breath. “Then I suppose I will do my best. If you wish me to try, that is.”

He had nothing to lose. And perhaps Elizabeth and Star would come back to talk to him again. “I would be in your debt.”

She glanced towards the corner where the voice had come from. “This would be easier for me if he were asleep,” she said in a subdued voice. “Otherwise someone will have to hold him down.”

“I will make him sleep, Infant,” the voice said.

Unseen fingers brushed over his forehead, and darkness fell.

His shoulder burned when he awoke. Pain shot down his arm, which was bound tightly in a sling. The woman had been right, that removing the bullet had made his injury worse. Now he would be more helpless than before.

The woman’s hand was pressing on a bandage over the wound. “How does it feel?”

“It hurts. But I can think clearly again.” And that was an enormous blessing

“Do not try to move that arm. Give it time to recover. There will be more bleeding, I suspect. I did my best, though I made it up as I went along.”

“I thank you for your efforts, Madame.…”

“Mme. Hartung,” she said.

“Thank you, Mme. Hartung.” His lips were too cracked to smile. “I could hardly call you ‘infant.’”

She laughed. “The fae at home named me that when I was barely walking. They saw no reason to change it when I grew up. ”

So she was allied with the fae. “What happens to me now?” he asked in a low voice. Somehow it was easier to ask another human, one he could see. “Will they allow me to stay here while I recover?”

“They will, because of their debt to you, but the soldiers know you were nearby. We will need to find a way to take you farther away, where they will not be hunting for you.”

Suspicion pricked at him. “Why would you help me? If I am caught, it could go very badly for you.”

She looked down at her left hand, where a gold ring circled her finger. “My husband was forced to serve in Napoleon’s army for years. When he was ordered to fire upon our own people in Prussia, he fled rather than murder our countrymen. But when he sought help from them, they turned him in rather than risk angering Napoleon, even though my husband was the kaiser’s own cousin.” Her voice shook. “I help you because no one helped my husband.”

He hardly knew what to say. “You do me great honor. I had not expected to find an opponent of Napoleon among the French.”

“There are many who wish he would give up his dreams of conquest, but I am Prussian, not French. My husband and I were sent here as hostages. I am no servant of the emperor of France.”

“I am sorry for your situation,” he said awkwardly. Even if it was fortunate for him.

“Do you have a wife waiting for you at home?”

Despite the burning pain and the hopelessness of his situation, the corners of his lips turned up at the thought of Elizabeth. He touched the pocket that held the silk handkerchief, as if it were a talisman. “I do. She is expecting our first child.”

The woman nodded. “Somehow we will find a way to get you back to her.”