Chapter 10
A lsander
He hadn’t known he could be tired like this.
Not the wrung-out exhaustion of a long battle. Not the gray bone-tired of three centuries of curse-bleeding. Something else. Something quiet.
The kind of tired a man earned giving pleasure to a woman.
He lay on his back on the bed of furs with one arm under his own head and the other curled around the woman tucked against his side. Firelight crawled across the high vault of stone above them. His body felt heavier than it had in a hundred years.
It also felt lighter.
Poppy had her cheek on his chest. Her hand traced an old scar across his ribs. Her hair was a silken sprawl across his shoulder. Neither of them had spoken in a long time.
He had thought, when he carried her into this lair, that he would not survive a second hour of having her in it.
He was past the second hour.
He was alive. He was warm. His lair didn’t feel like a tomb.
The skin between his ribs, where the rot had been deepest, no longer ached when he breathed.
He drew a long breath in.
Drew another.
The weight on his chest that he had stopped noticing because he had carried it since before the woman in his arms had been born — that weight was lighter.
"What are you thinking about?" Her voice was soft against his collarbone.
"You."
"Liar."
A small laugh moved through him. It surprised him. He’d never laughed in this room.
"Myself," he amended. "I was thinking about myself. I feel —"
He couldn’t finish.
She lifted her head. Propped her chin on his chest. Looked up at him through the tangle of her hair. The pendant at her throat caught the firelight and held it — a small bright bead of warmth between her collarbones.
"You feel what?"
"Better."
He said it plain. He had no other word.
Her brow tilted, considering. Then she smiled. A small smile, with something tired underneath it that he didn’t look at long enough to read.
"Good," she said. "You should."
She put her cheek back on his chest. Her hand found his and laced their fingers together. He looked at the pale shape of her hand against his and couldn’t remember the last time another living thing had held his hand.
Not since Mairin.
"Tell me about her," Poppy said.
He went still.
"You don't have to." Her thumb stroked his knuckle. "I just — you said her name once. At the shrine. I thought — I dreamed it. I don't know what was real anymore. But you said she was your sister."
She didn’t push. She only waited.
He stared up at the firelit stone.
He thought about how easy it would be to say nothing. To kiss the crown of her head and roll her under him again and let the words die unsaid the way they had died unsaid for three hundred years.
The thought passed.
It passed because he understood, in a way he hadn’t understood an hour ago, that he didn’t want her to stop knowing things about him.
"Mairin," he said.
The name was strange in his mouth. He hadn’t said it aloud in over a century. He had spoken about her, when he had to, but only as his sister, the keeper, the one who fell.
Mairin was a name that belonged to a girl who had braided wildflowers into his long black mane of when he was in dragon-form and laughed when he sneezed them out.
Mairin was a name that belonged to before .
"Mairin," he said again. The second time was easier.
"Tell me," Poppy whispered.
"She was younger than me by sixty years.
A child when I was already a man. A young woman when I was already old.
" He paused. "She was the keeper because the elemental magic chose her at birth.
The forest looks at a Draquonir baby and says yes, that one .
There is nothing the family can do but raise the child for the work the forest has already chosen. "
"Did she mind?"
"She loved it." His mouth tried to smile.
"She loved it the way other women love their husbands.
The forest was hers and she was its, and there was never much space in her for anything else.
She would vanish for weeks. Come back with leaves in her hair and dirt under her nails and her eyes the color of moss.
She would tell me which fox kit had been born under which oak.
She would sleep for three days. Then she would go again. "
Poppy's hand had tightened in his.
"What happened to her?"
"I told you."
"You told me she died. You didn’t tell me how ."
He shut his eyes.
He could speak here. In this. In the warmth of her against his side. He couldn’t have spoken anywhere else.
"She felt the corruption first." His voice had gone flat. "She felt it in the relic before any of the rest of us knew anything was wrong. She came to me one night."
He could see it. Centuries gone and the memory was still fresh.
His sister, sixteen and frightened, wearing a long white shift, her dragon-eyes wide. She’d tried to warn him, but he’d brushed her worry aside.
"She told me she could feel a wound in the wood. Couldn’t find where it was." His voice cracked. "I told her to sleep. I told her she was tired. I told her the forest was old, and old things ached, and there was nothing to find. I sent her back to bed."
"Oh." Just that. The smallest sound from Poppy.
"Three weeks later she went into the shrine alone to look for the wound. She didn’t come out. I went in after her."
He stopped.
He could see that too, the memory just as horrifyingly fresh.
The inner chamber. The smell of old water. His sister on the floor with her hands at her throat. Her eyes already gone. Vacant.
"There was a shadow on the wall behind her that shouldn’t have been there." His own voice wasn’t his anymore. It was the voice of the man who had walked into that chamber. "There was a voice in the shadow that knew my name. It said —"
He couldn’t speak for a moment.
"It said ‘ Too late, little prince. She let me in’. "
Poppy made a small sound against his chest.
"I went for it with everything I had. The shadow withdrew. Mairin died in my arms an hour later. The forest died with her. I have spent every day?—"
He stopped cold. Every muscle in his body went rigid in warning.
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
The fire in its iron cradle had taken on a strange, unnatural shape.
It had been burning low. He had let it burn low. Now the flames had folded inward. Hunched. The way a small animal hunches when something larger walks past its hole.
The light in the chamber thinned.
He could hear his own breath.
He could hear Poppy's breath.
He couldn’t hear the soft drip of water from the seam at the back of the lair.
The constant drip had been there long before the cave had become his home, and no matter the season, the water had never stopped flowing, providing a steady supply of fresh water for generations. That water was one of the reasons he’d chosen to remain in this cave. For it to have stopped?—
"Alsander." Her voice was very small. "What's —"
"Don't move."
He sat up. Pulled her up with him. Pulled the fur around her shoulders. Put his body between her and the dark at the back of the chamber where the shadows had begun to gather thicker than shadows ought to gather. Where the dark wasn’t behaving like dark.
The lair had been his refuge for three centuries.
Nothing had ever come into it that hadn’t been let in.
Something had been let in.
" Too late, little prince."
The voice was in the chamber. It was also inside his skull.
It was the voice he had heard once before. The voice that had taken his sister.
Alsander was off the bed before the second word.
He moved, naked, across cold stone, teeth bared, the dragon already up under his skin and clawing for the air. He put himself between Poppy and the back of the chamber.
"Get behind me." He didn’t turn his head. "Stay against the wall. Don’t touch the floor with your bare feet."
"What —"
" Do it. "
She did it.
The shadows at the back of the lair began to move.
They poured up out of the seam in the rock where the water no longer dripped. They pooled on the floor. They rose into a column.
The column folded into itself and folded again and a shape emerged. Not a body. Not yet. The suggestion of one. The hint of a tall man-shape. The long line of a shoulder. The shadow of a hand.
Its eyes were the worst.
The eyes hovered in the dark, without a face.
"You look better, dragon."
The voice was a slow thing. It tasted the words.
"I have not seen you look this well in three hundred years. I had begun to think you would simply rot quietly and save me the trouble."
"Laoch." Alsander's voice was flat. "You and your decay are not welcome in this place."
"Am I not." The shadow tilted what might have been a head. "And yet here I am. The wards on this lair were laid by your mother and your mother's mother. They have held against me for ten generations. They should have held against me tonight. Why do you suppose they did not? "
Alsander didn’t answer.
He could feel Poppy at his back. Her pulse was fast, but not panicked. The pendant at her throat warm emitted a small steady fire he could feel even through the air between them.
"No guess?"
Laoch made a sound that might have been a laugh.
"Come now. You have always been the clever one. Use that long old mind of yours and tell me, dragon. What walked into this chamber tonight that has not walked into it before. "
The world tilted.
"No," Alsander said. " No. She is —"
"Ah."
The shadow leaned forward. The eyes moved past Alsander's shoulder. Past the line of his body. They found Poppy where she stood pressed against the cold stone.
"There she is. There she is. Hello, little daughter. I wondered when one of you would come back."
"Don’t look at her."
"Oh, but I know her." Laoch crooned. "I know her bones. I know the shape her grandmother's grandmother's grandmother wore when I came up out of the dark and put my hand through her chest."
The chamber went very still.
" Banríon na Síol , we called it. Queen of Seeds. Such a pretty name for such a small soft creature. I thought I had killed all of them."
The shadow tilted its head.
"And here you are, child, in the lair of the last dragon sworn to its protection. Wearing her stone at your throat as if you have any idea what it does. As if you have any idea what yo u are."
"Alsander." Poppy's voice was paper-thin. "What is he —"
"Don't listen to him."
"I knew your line when it was still divine, little daughter. I knew your foremother when she was the green of the world."
The shadow paused.
Savored.
"The dragon's sister loved her."
Alsander stopped breathing.
"Did he tell you that? Did he tell you that Mairin poured her last breath into a human girl because she couldn’t bear for the magic to die with her?"
A single beat of silence rang out in the cavern more profoundly than any horn could have.
"No? Did he tell you that you are walking around with a piece of her in your blood?"
Alsander's breath stopped, the weight of Laoch’s words like a thousand dragons landing on his chest.
He hadn’t known.
Hadn’t known what Mairin had done in her last hour. What she had spent the last of her magic on. And the monster that killed her was telling him in his own lair while his mate stood barefoot at his back.
Rage took Alsander.
Pure. Simple. Clean.
" Get. Out. "
"Oh, dragon. I will. In my time."
The shadow lifted what might have been a hand.
"I came only to see her. And to take what is mine. Come here, little daughter. Come to me. Your blood is owed. It has been owed for ten generations. Come and pay it."
Poppy didn’t move.
Alsander shifted.
There was no time aesthetics. He let the dragon up out of him in a single brutal sundering.
The chamber was suddenly too small for what he was.
His wings struck the high stone. His tail swept a shelf of his own books to the floor.
He didn’t care. He did not care. He opened his great black throat and gave Laoch every bit of fire he had ever held back.
The fire went clean through the shadow.
It didn’t consume the creature hiding in its depths.
The half-formed figure came apart and reformed two feet farther from Poppy, hissing, and the eyes in it were furious now, no longer playful.
Alsander took the half-second of distance and put himself bodily between them. His vast scaled bulk filled the chamber. His head lowered. His teeth bared. The air in the lair was hot and bright with his fire.
It wasn’t enough.
He knew it wasn’t enough.
Laoch was reforming. Laoch was always reforming. Alsander had thrown everything he had at this thing, and it had only retreated.
He knew back then it hadn’t died.
He didn’t know if it could die.
Behind him, Poppy made a sound. A small, startled sound — as if she had walked into something invisible in the dark.
The dragon turned its great head.
She was on her feet against the stone wall.
Her eyes were wide.
The fur slid off her shoulders.
Her hand had risen, trembling, to the pendant at her throat — throwing a clean white light across the firelit chamber. It didn’t behave like firelight. Didn’t flicker.
Poppy was looking down at her hand, shock written clearly across her face.
Laoch saw the light, too, and hissed .
"No." The shadow recoiled. Smaller. Sharper. The voice was no longer slow and amused. It was a wire pulled tight. " No, no, no, what are you, what are you doing — "
Poppy lifted her hand.
Not toward Laoch. Toward Alsander. As if she meant to put her hand on his scaled flank to steady herself —
Her palm opened.
The same clean white light that lived in the pendant rolled down her arm, out across her open hand, and into the air between her and the shadow at the back of the chamber.
The light moved like water, rolling across the floor of his lair in slow, undulating waves. Where it touched the shadow, the shadow thinned. Where it touched the stone, the stone was cleaned of the dark that had begun to sink into it.
Laoch screamed; a small, high pitched sound. Almost human.
It was the sound of a thing in pain.
"Oh," Poppy said. Soft. Wondering. The same soft sound she made for everything. " Oh. "
And the dragon, who had been about to give a second blast of fire, held it back —
Because the dragon understood, before Alsander did, that whatever was happening was hers .
Laoch withdrew.
It wasn’t defeated. The dragon knew it wasn’t. The shadow drew in on itself and went liquid and poured back into the seam in the rock, hissing all the way.
The last part of Laoch to leave the chamber were his eyes.
The eyes remained fixed on Poppy, full of hatred and retribution.
"I will be back for you, little daughter." The voice was very soft now. Almost gentle. "You cannot stay near him. You do not yet know what you are doing to him.” Laoch laughed weakly. You do not yet know the full truth of what you really are — "
And then the shadow was gone.