“What do you mean, Papa?” Mary asked.
Mr. Bennet ignored her.
“Now, seeing as you’re back in my hands for the next hour, I’d say it’s time for something your training has, so far, entirely overlooked. Something I feel I owe you all, given the sacrifices I’ve asked you to make.”
He paused until Jane finally asked the inevitable question.
“Which is what, Father?”
Mr. Bennet smiled. “Fun. There is, you will observe, a stag striking a most majestic pose upon that hilltop.”
The girls followed his gaze to the east, and saw, not a quarter mile away, the great, antlered buck their father spoke of.
“Kiss it.”
“Kiss it?” Mary said.
“Yes. Catch it and kiss it.”
Lydia grimaced. “On the lips?”
Mr. Bennet shrugged. “Or the nose or the cheek or whatever else you might prefer.”
“You expect us,” Jane said slowly, “to catch a deer and hold it long enough to kiss it?”
“Oh, goodness me, no!” Mr. Bennet chuckled. “Not all of you. But your training has, I suspect, brought you further, faster than you think, and one of you might manage it—and whichever of you it is will get the rest of the hour off to do whatever she pleases.”
Jane was already halfway to the stag before anyone else was even running.
Elizabeth took off after the deer with no hope of actually catching it. The big buck quickly saw the girls coming, wheeled about, and bolted. How were such as they to catch one of the fleetest creatures in the forest?
Yet the distance between her and the hill disappeared with surprising speed, and even when she charged up the bluff and into the trees, she found herself hardly slowed at all. The deer kept to no path, of course, simply crashing through the bramble, and Elizabeth was soon doing the same—bursting through bushes, hurdling over streams and rocks, dodging tree trunks that flew past her in a smear of brown.
All those dand-baithaks, all those laps, all those hours meditating and sparring and wielding the weight of swords and axes and heavy wooden staffs—it was working!
All around, Elizabeth could hear her sisters laughing as they, too, discovered what they could now do. And she joined in.
The stag began to zigzag, cutting left, then right as the girls closed in. Though Elizabeth was now closer to him than ever, he grew harder to see: The chase had led them into the darkest, thickest of thickets. Soon, all she had to guide her was the sound of the buck’s flight up ahead, but then even that began to fade. Elizabeth pushed herself harder, trying to squeeze out even more speed, and when she came to a tangle of thick vines, she sought to vault herself over it with one of the Master’s moves, the Leaping Leopard, instead of sparing the extra second to go around. She sprung up high enough to catch sight of the deer again, ghostly white shapes—her sisters in their sparring gowns—converging on it from all sides.
Then her left foot caught on a vine, and she spun end over end to the earth.
She landed on her left knee, rolled, landed on her back, rolled, and kept landing and rolling and landing and rolling until she finally came to a stop against the broad base of an old oak tree. She lay there for a moment, panting, and allowed herself a small indulgence she would not have otherwise engaged in even if only Jane had been there to hear it.
“Damn.”
When she finally dared sit up and catalogue her wounds, she found, to her infinite relief, no twigs sticking from her side, no shattered femurs jutting from her thighs, no digits missing, no long strips of skin flapping loose and bloody. She could even stand up and limp around. So it only felt like she’d crushed every bone and organ in her body.
She’d raced into the forest faster than a fleeing stag. Now she began hobbling out again with all the speed of a three-legged tortoise.
Her sisters were nowhere in sight, and Elizabeth could only assume they were far off now, smothering the buck with kisses. Yet after she’d taken but a few steps back toward Longbourn, she noticed something moving off to her left—a dark shape blotting out rays of dappled sun. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one who’d fallen behind.
She turned and started toward the shifting shadows. They were being cast by movement in a small glade, she saw as she drew closer. And there were two shapes.
It was Kitty and Lydia, surely, the two of them taking advantage of their father’s indulgence to pause and pick wildflowers—or gossip about her and Master Hawksworth.
But hadn’t she seen them heading the other way, mere strides behind the stag?
The thought came to her too late. The “Lydia?” was already halfway off her lips as she stepped into the dell.
Two dreadfuls looked her way.
They were on the other side of the clearing, turned toward each other, as though they’d been chatting away like two friendly neighbors. One must have been weeks if not months dead, for its clothes and flesh had rotted clear through in spots, and what remained was tattered and gray. Not much was left of its face—just clumps stuck to skull, some still heavy with thick, black hair. It had sported a beard, back when it wasn’t an “it.”
The other unmentionable was male, as well, yet it was far, far fresher. Though its skin was tinted green, it had yet to rot enough to begin falling off, and the clothes were dirty and frayed but hardly worm eaten. The mouth was set in a large O, the eyebrows arched high on its forehead. Whatever had killed it seemed to have been a considerable surprise.
Elizabeth knew the feeling. She started to let another “Damn” slip, but caught it just in time. It seemed unwise to have a curse on her lips with Judgment so close at hand.
The more decayed of the dreadfuls gurgled a sound at her, part growl, part groan, then began staggering toward her with startling speed.
Fast as the zombie was, and bruised and battered as Elizabeth was, she might have outrun it had she tried. Yet something—shock, training, or mere foolishness, she had no time to decide which—kept her from turning away.
She reached down, unsheathed the ankle dagger she’d worn to the dojo that morning, and assumed the Natural Stance. When the unmentionable was twenty feet off, she let the blade fly, and—to Elizabeth’s relieved surprise—it buried itself between the creature’s red, rheumy eyes.
She quickly decided on her next step: retrieve the dagger from the dead dreadful’s head so she could turn on the other zombie and throw it again. Unfortunately, there was a snag to her plan.
The dreadful didn’t die. It just kept coming toward her, arms out, mouth open wide, dagger handle jutting from its face.
Elizabeth didn’t even get through her mantra once—“Smooth stone beneath still AHHH!”—and the unmentionable was on her, grabbing for her shoulders and snapping at her neck. She hopped back and, for the second time that morning, set a foot streaking into someone’s nether regions.
Or some thing’s nether regions, this time. Which made all the difference.
The unmentionable’s unmentionables might have just been squashed flat, but the creature showed no sign of noticing. Instead, it merely took hold of the foot that had been planted in its mushy-rotten groin, pulled it up toward its mouth, and leaned in for a bite. Elizabeth toppled backward to the ground, unable to do anything but watch in horror as her toes approached the dreadful’s gaping maw.
Just before the zombie could launch into its first chomp, there was a loud pop, and a spray of black pulp shot from the side of the creature’s head. As slowly as a felled tree, the unmentionable tilted, teetered, and then toppled forward onto Elizabeth.
By the time she managed to struggle out from under it, she found the other zombie crouching down beside her . . . with a smoking flintlock in its hand.