She turned her head left and right, examining him. Then she reached down and nudged him with her beak. It wasn’t the most sensitive of tools, designed for ripping and tearing: her tongue◦– what was she supposed to do, tell how he was by licking him? She could smell nothing off him but stale sweat and fear, and he looked… dead.
She changed back. Where had the dress gone? Where did it reappear from? No matter, for she now had hands to wrestle it back under control as the storm crackled its last above her.
‘Dalip? Dalip?’
The tower was properly alight now, burning brightly enough to cast shadows. She felt anxious, but she could only deal with one thing at a time.
She pressed her hand against his cheek. He felt cool, but not cold; that wasn’t a definitive sign of either life or death. She knew there was such a thing as a pulse, but not how to confidently feel for it. His heart was in his chest: she gathered her hair to one side and awkwardly knelt down next to him, pressing her ear to him.
It took her a moment◦– longer than that, because she held her breath until she struggled to contain it. There was the faint, rhythmic, welcome thud of valves opening and closing. All well and good, but she couldn’t carry him to shelter, out of the wind and the noise.
‘Dalip, you fucking idiot. Wake up.’
She’d seen how it was done on the telly. Her first slap was pathetic, weak and tentative. Her second was barely better, but she didn’t want to be out there all night, so she gave enough to make her palm sting.
His eyes opened, and he caught her wrist before she could backhand him too.
‘You hit me.’
‘You pulled me backwards off a fucking mountain.’
He blinked. ‘Did it work?’
‘How the fuck should I know? If I go back up there to check, I’m going to get fried by the storm too, right?’
Dalip screwed his face up. ‘Everything hurts.’
‘The tower’s on fire. I don’t know what that means.’
‘The geomancer?’
‘I don’t know! This isn’t exactly flying weather, is it?’
He reached up and hooked her neck. He did two things, at the same time: pull her down, and twist his body on top of her.
Claws raked the stones beside them, raising a shower of flinty sparks. Then they were gone, away and into the night.
‘Bell disagrees,’ he said, searching the sky for her.
Mary threw him off, and he was too weak to stop her.
‘It was always going to come to this, wasn’t it?’ A flash of movement on the cliff face caught her attention. A long neck, a long tail, broad leathery wings against the rock, then out again into clear air. ‘Fuck. She’s coming back.’
‘What, precisely, do you want me to do about that?’ He raised himself to a half-crouch, but seemed to lack the strength to go any further.
‘Run?’
‘Where? How?’
She couldn’t spot Bell any more. Dalip was right: he couldn’t do anything, but she could. She coiled her legs under her and leapt. With a strong sweep of her wings, she was aloft in amongst the turbulence. Her sight, pin-sharp, spotted her quarry immediately. Out over the castle and heading straight for her.
She flapped hard, building momentum. Someone was playing chicken with an East End girl, and she was determined not to flinch. They closed on each other, and at the last moment, she drew in her wings and turned her whole body. For the brief second of contact, they slashed at each other, and then they were apart, the distance between them widening.
Mary turned the right way up and banked hard, wheeling around the blazing tower and heading back towards the lake.
Here came Bell again, dead ahead, jaws wide, feet raised to strike. And again, Mary flipped over and tried to close her claws on something substantial. Missed. Gone.
They could do this all night until one of them made a mistake, this passing joust. Most likely, because she was less familiar with her skin, it would be Mary who would fall. So she had to change the game. What could she do better than a dragon?
Rather than fly at her◦– she could see Bell lining up her next pass◦– she started to climb. The dragon tried to match her, but flew harmlessly underneath.
Mary dipped a wing and gave chase.
The shallow dive she put herself in took her to within touching distance of Bell’s scaly back. Bell’s serpentine head twisted around and a slight adjustment left Mary with nothing beneath her but the speeding ground. She pulled up, turned in a tight circle and set off after her again.
Now this, this was what she was good at, the dive and strike. She was faster and more manoeuvrable, and the dragon’s drum-taut wings, already ragged and lacy at the edges from the previous battle they’d had, were particularly vulnerable. As long as she could stay away from those teeth and keep the fight in the air, she might even win.
She flapped hard, drawing up behind. Bell put some effort into jinking left and right, and Mary overshot. She angled her wings and rose almost effortlessly up again. The dragon stayed closer to the ground than her. Perhaps she was afraid of the lightning. With good reason, too, but the storm seemed to have blown itself out against the twin mountains and was grumbling away over the plains behind. Having claimed one victim, perhaps it was sated. Mary risked a little more, and a little more than that.
Bell looped the tower and started back towards the lake, earnestly pushing air with great beats of her wings. Mary angled her flight and began her descent.
Dalip, doggedly crawling back towards the castle, was directly in the dragon’s path.
Mary folded her wings and dove down.
There was a moment when she thought she’d be too late, that the dragon would get Dalip because he had nowhere to hide. That moment passed because her approach was both furious and unnoticed. She dipped down with her claws even as Bell did with hers, but it was the bird’s talons that struck first, tightening around the bat-like forelimb, puncturing the leathery membrane and dragging the great beast off-course.
She let go and skimmed the lake to kill her speed. Behind her, the dragon pinwheeled into the ground, bouncing once, twice, and skipping into the water like a spinning stone. The ruined wings spread out over the surface, the sinuous body thrashed, and then it began to sink.
Mary was flying directly at the cliff. She had no room to bank left or right: instead, she flew up, almost to the top, before flipping over and circling back around. Dalip was still struggling over the loose rocks towards the collapsed gatehouse, but he stopped for a moment as she flew overhead and raised his hand to her.
She turned at the tower, taking a good long look at it. The upper floor was burning◦– all the wood was alight, with fire jetting out of not just the windows, but gaps in the roof where supporting beams had collapsed underneath. The balcony was simply a forest of flame, and nothing in the room beyond was going to survive. Whether Mama, Elena and Luiza had escaped was something to find out soon, but it was going to have to wait for just a moment longer.
Mary flew back down to the lake, settling her huge clawed feet into the damp grit at its edge. She waited, and was rewarded by the crown of blonde hair surfacing just beyond the shallows. Bell coughed and choked, her tattered dress rising up around her like a pale moon. Mary changed too, confident that, if it was needed, she could call on the rocks around her to defend her.
‘I knew I hadn’t killed you.’
Bell slowly waded towards the shore. Her left arm hung uselessly by her side, a kink in her forearm the reason why.