Chapter 11
A lsander
The last light in the pendant fluttered and disappeared.
The light in Poppy's hand did the same.
The drip of water at the back of the chamber resumed. Slow. Steady. As if nothing had happened.
Poppy swayed.
The dragon caught her before she could fall— an ungainly motion that scraped his own scales against the stone — and he set her down against his foreleg. Then he poured himself back into the man-shape because he couldn’t hold her properly otherwise.
When he was Alsander again, he was on his knees on the cold floor of his lair with her in his arms.
She looked up at him with enormous, frightened eyes.
"What did I do?" she whispered. "Alsander. What did I just do?"
"I don’t know." He had no word for what he had just seen. "I don’t know, a chuisle . I don’t know."
He held her until her breathing slowed.
It took longer than he liked. Her hands fisted in the bare skin of his chest. Her face buried in the side of his throat.
He could feel her trembling all the way down to her bare feet.
He held her with one arm and dragged the fur up over her shoulders with the other and stared, over the crown of her head, at the seam in the rock where the shadow had come in.
Centuries of wards.
Wards laid by his mother and her mother. Wards that had held against Laoch every other night of his long, unhappy life.
They hadn’t held tonight.
They would not hold the next time.
The thought arrived cold and complete.
Whatever Poppy was — whatever the line in her blood was — it had drawn Laoch through the wards as surely as a candle drew a moth. Laoch had been waiting for the dragon to die quietly. He had stopped waiting tonight. He would come again. Soon.
The lair was no longer safe.
It was a doorway. Some sort of portal.
Alsander pressed his face into Poppy's hair.
"We cannot stay here another night."
She lifted her head. Her eyes were red. Focused. " We? "
"Yes."
"Oh." Her voice cracked. "Oh, Alsander."
"You thought I was going to send you away alone?"
"I thought —" Her voice broke. "I thought you were going to do the thing brooding immortals do. I thought you were going to tell me to go, that it was for my own good. I thought —"
"Not tonight." His hands tightened on her. "Not ever. But especially not tonight. He came through my wards because of you. He will come through them again. I am not letting you walk out of this forest alone with that thing in it. I am not letting you out of my sight."
She made a weak sound that might have been a laugh but seemed more like a sob. "Good. Because I wasn't going to let go."
He kissed her. Briefly. The kind of kiss a man gives a woman when he doesn’t have time to linger but needs to know she is still there. Still with him all the way.
She kissed him back the same way.
"Then tell me." His voice steadied. "He spoke about your line. Tell me what you know."
"Nothing." Her hands were still in his chest. "I —"
She stopped.
Her brow furrowed.
"I have books, Alsander. I have my mother's books and my grandmother's books.
There is a chest at the foot of my bed I have only opened a few times.
There is a journal. There is more than the journal.
" Her voice steadied. "There is a smaller chest inside the chest. There is a key. I have never used it."
He looked at her.
"You have a chest of your foremothers' writings in your own bedroom. And you have never used the key to the inner chest."
"I wasn’t ready."
"And now?"
"Now," she said shakily, "that thing just told me it has history with my grandmother’s grandmother’s — you get the idea. It has history — dark history — with my ancestral line. I think the time for not being ready is over ."
Alsander’s heart swelled with pride. The strange, fierce pride a man feels when he sees the woman he loves decide to step into the path of the very thing she has been avoiding her whole life.
"Then we go to your cottage," he said.
"Yes."
"We read everything. Every page. Every margin. We start with the smaller chest you haven’t opened. We don’t stop until we know what you are. What was given, every gift, to your line. And how we are meant to use it. "
"Yes."
"And you don’t leave my sight, Poppy. Not in the cottage. Not in the garden. Not in your own bath. He has seen you. He knows your face. I will not have him near you again. Do you understand?"
"Alsander." Her voice was soft. "I wasn’t planning to leave your sight."
He kissed her again. Longer this time. He let himself.
He stood. Pulled her up with him. She swayed once, steadied, and he watched the small white tightness around her mouth that hadn’t been there before the fight.
He forced himself to look at her clinically, the way a healer might assess an injured patient after the worst of the danger had passed.
The strain showed now that the adrenaline had faded.
Color had drained from her face beneath the warm glow of the firelight, and exhaustion weighed visibly at her shoulders.
The burst of magic she had unleashed across his lair had cost her dearly.
He did not yet understand what she had done or what price her body would eventually demand for it, but the aftermath lingered beneath her skin like the fading echo of lightning.
“We walk?” she asked quietly.
“No.”
Her brow furrowed. “No?”
“It is twelve miles to your cottage through forest he knows better than you do.” Alsander crossed the chamber toward the dying fire. “I am not leading you through those woods on foot tonight.”
Realization flickered slowly across her face.
“Then how?—”
He lifted a brow.
Her eyes widened almost instantly.
He caught the beginning of a smile threatening at the corner of his mouth.
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
The soft disbelief in her voice scraped dangerously close to amusement, and after centuries of silence, the sound unsettled him more than it should have.
Alsander lifted a hand.
Magic stirred inside him, answering the summons instantly. Since Poppy had first appeared in the clearing, his strength had been returning more each day. He was, at long last, at full strength. Magic poured into him, through him, his to command.
Warm gold light unfurled through the chamber in slow ribbons, curling gently around Poppy.
She went perfectly still as the magic swept over her, moving carefully, carrying away the grime, sweat, blood, and smoke of the last brutal days.
Tangled hair loosened and softened beneath the glow.
All traces of the morning’s activities were replaced by the fresh scent of sun-warmed skin that was uniquely hers, crushed herbs, wild rain and woodland moss — exactly as she’d smelled the first time he saw her.
It was a combination forever imprinted on his memory.
The fur draped around her shoulders shimmered.
Heavy wool layered itself beneath it, piece by piece, forming close-fitted trousers lined with soft fleece and a thick tunic belted at the waist in dark leather.
A second layer wrapped over it — deep charcoal trimmed with silver stitching that caught the firelight like frost. Fur-lined boots climbed to her knees, lacing themselves securely along her calves before settling comfortably against her skin.
A new cloak trimmed in silver flames settled across her shoulders, held clasped at her throat with a large, sparkling emerald.
Thick gloves appeared last, tucked into the pockets.
Clothing built for cloudy skies and brutal wind.
For flying.
The same magic then rolled over Alsander moments later, replacing black trousers with dark leathers reinforced at the shoulders and forearms, fitted for shifting and flight alike.
A heavy cloak settled across his back before dissolving again almost immediately, discarded by instinct before he even consciously rejected it.
Poppy stared openly now, fingertips brushing the embossed sleeve at her wrist.
“I feel like a princess mixed with Harry Potter . Or maybe Peter Pan . Do I get a broomstick, or will you be sprinkling me with fairy dust?” she mused, only half joking.
“I don’t know of this Harry Potter or Peter Pan . I have summoned the attire of a dragon’s mate, suitable for riding atop my dragon. If it is not to your liking, tell me what you don’t like, and I will do my best to fix it.”
“No.” She grinned. “I love it. Truly. It’s silly, but I forgot you could do that. Make your own clothes, I mean. What else can you do?”
“I can do many things.” The words emerged rougher than intended and loaded with inuendo.
Her gaze roamed over him, traveled over every inch, her eyes heating as she took in his appearance. By the time she reached his eyes, her own had grown sultry with desire. “I believe it.”
Gods help him, with the look she was giving him, he wanted to strip her bare — peel back the layers himself — then dissolve the clothes he’d just wrapped himself in, and forget the rest of the world existed for the next hundred years.
“We leave as soon as you can ride,” he said quietly instead.
She nodded and pulled on the gloves while he watched from across the chamber, memorizing every small movement without meaning to.
The way loose strands of hair slipped across her cheek.
The way she pressed her lips together while flexing her fingers inside unfamiliar leather.
The lingering exhaustion shadowing her eyes despite the fresh clothes and warmth wrapped around her body.
His cavern had held nothing but silence for hundreds of long, lonely years.
Now her presence clung to every shadow and flame-lit stone.
And somewhere deep beneath his ribs, his dragon watched her with possessive, dangerous attention, as though already mourning the moment she would be gone.
Without thought, Alsander closed the distance. He needed to touch her. Assure himself she was still there. Still safe. His knuckles brushed the small bright stone she wore.
The pendant was warm.
The pendant was always warm now.
"Come."
He took her hand and led her up the long stone passage and out of the lair into the green dim of the dawn wood. A waterfall thundered to one side. The trees rose around them in a ragged crown. The sky between the leaves was the color of old pearl.
There was a small clearing beside the falls where the trees didn’t grow. He led her to its center.
"Stand here. Don’t move. I am about to be much larger than you."
"I have noticed."
His mouth tried to smile. He didn’t let it.
"When I am the dragon, I will lower myself to the ground.
You will walk to my left shoulder. There is a place where the spine ridges meet the wing-root.
You will sit there. My magic will hold you.
You will not need to grip. You will not be cold.
You will not fall. Do you understand? I will not let you fall. "
"I understand.” Her voice was very small.
He stepped back from her. Didn’t let himself look at her face. If he looked one more time he was going to walk back across the clearing, gather her up, and carry her bodily to her cottage on his own two human feet — and that was twelve miles he couldn’t afford.
He turned and walked to the far edge of the clearing.
He had spent the last hour with the dragon pressed against the inside of his skin — snarling, fighting Laoch through him, fighting the want of him through him — and now he gave the dragon what it wanted.
The dragon came up out of him in a single smooth uncoiling that didn’t hurt the way the others had hurt.
He spread his wings to their full reach and lowered his great black head and looked across the clearing at the small bright woman in the dark cloak.
She wasn’t afraid.
He folded down to the moss.
She walked to his left shoulder. She had to climb a little — he tilted his wing-root to meet her — and her boots found the place where the great ridge of his spine softened into the pliant tissue at the wing's base. She settled there.
Her hands came up uncertainly, looking for something to hold.
He gathered the dragon's magic around her — a slow warm tether he hadn’t used since he had carried Mairin home from a frozen river when she was small — and wrapped it over Poppy’s shoulders.
Around her waist. Across the tops of her thighs.
He felt her startle when it took hold. Felt her test it.
Lean her weight against it. Find that it held.
"Oh." Even with the dragon's ears, he heard her excitement. "Oh, Alsander, oh ."
He launched.