Chapter 13
P oppy
She hadn’t thought having him in her home would feel like this.
The first time didn’t count. They’d been too busy fucking like wild animals to do anything as domesticated as look around or sit in her living room and talk.
In fact, he’d broken her window with the initial force of his arrival.
He had pinned her against the stone of the wall outside.
He hadn’t been welcomed in. He’d been an intruder and a furious creature and a thing she should have feared.
This was different.
The next time, she had thought, when she pictured him here at all —and she had— that bringing him into her cottage would be strange.
He would be strange in it. He was positively ancient, after all.
He wouldn’t know what to do with a kettle — not when he could simply use his magic to heat the water.
Every time. Perfectly. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he looked at her grandmother's cracked teacup or worn out ironing board like they were relics from another world and curled his lip. But he didn’t.
He stepped through her door and her cottage fit him .
He had to duck a little under the lintel.
She had expected that. He straightened on the inside, and her kitchen seemed suddenly smaller — the stove a doll's stove, the table a child's table, the rocking chair by the hearth a piece of furniture meant for a smaller people.
He looked around with the slow attention of a man who had never been inside a human home; he looked with almost rapt attention, as if memorizing every fascinating detail.
His gaze caught on the jar of honey. On the bunch of dried sage hanging from the rafter beam. On the cracked teacup on the drainboard.
"Mortals live here. You live here," he said.
"I do."
"I didn’t —" he stopped — "I did not understand. Until now.”
"It is small."
"It is a home ."
She looked at him in her kitchen in the gray morning light, and her chest hurt for a reason she couldn’t at first identify.
Then she did.
He’d never had a home. Not in the way a home was a kitchen with a kettle and a jar of honey and a cracked cup that had belonged to a grandmother.
"Sit," she said. Her voice came out thicker than she meant. "Sit, Alsander. Let me put the kettle on."
He sat at her kitchen table on the chair her grandfather had built before Poppy was born, and he laid his hands flat on the worn wood, and he watched her move around the kitchen as if he were memorizing every step she took.
She lit the stove. Filled the kettle from the pump.
Pulled down two mugs from the shelf — the cracked teacup for herself, the larger plain mug for him because his hands were too big for the cup and she didn’t yet trust him with it.
Measured leaves into the pot. The small ordinary motions of her own kitchen steadied her in a way nothing else could have.
She set the mug in front of him. He wrapped his hands around it.
"Milk?" she asked. "Honey?"
"Honey."
"You remember honey."
"I remember honey." His mouth tried to smile. "I wasn’t always a man in a stone room, a chuisle .”
In the space it took to blink, Alsander’s demeanor changed. He was on full alert. “Poppy, two mortals, a human woman and a small child, are approaching.”
She froze with the honey jar in her hand.
He was already rising.
His shoulders had gone tight. The brooding watchfulness that had stood at her back through the forest had snapped back into him in the space of half a breath. His eyes had narrowed to the focused, hard green of a creature deciding whether the thing on the path was a threat.
She cocked her head. Listened as the gate creaked.
Her ear had been tuned to that gate her whole life. Two pairs of footsteps on the path — one heavy, one light — and the small bright voice of a child saying something she couldn’t catch through the door.
"It's Briíd," she whispered. "From the village. With her son. He was sick. I gave him a tincture three days ago. They must be coming to thank me."
"She cannot see me."
"I know."
"I cannot be seen inside this cottage if a stranger is at your door, Poppy. I don’t know what you would tell her. I don’t want you to have to tell her anything."
"I know."
He looked around her kitchen for half a second. Set the mug down. Moved — and even now, three hundred years after the last battle his body remembered, he moved like a warrior, a soldier — for the back of the cottage. The small door behind the curtain that led out to the garden.
He paused at the curtain.
"I will be in the trees. I will see her. I will see you . If anything feels wrong — anything —put your hand to the pendant. Do you hear me? You put your hand to the pendant."
"Yes."
"Swear it."
"I swear."
He pushed the curtain aside. He was gone before the second knock landed.
Poppy set the honey jar down. Crossed her kitchen on legs that had remembered, finally, that they were tired.
Before she reached the door, her beautiful dragon-riding apparel disappeared, and in its place were a clean pair of jeans and a fresh sweater.
She would have to thank Alsander for remembering that small detail later.
Sighing, Poppy opened the door.
Briíd O'Malley stood on her doorstep with a covered basket on her arm and little Finn beside her — his hand fisted in his mother's skirt, his cheeks pink and round and entirely free of the fever that had dimmed them.
He grinned up at Poppy.
He grinned the way only a child grins when they have decided you are theirs .
"Miss Poppy!"
"Oh." Her voice cracked. "Oh, Finn."
She crouched down. She had to. The boy let go of his mother's skirt and threw his small warm body against her, and she caught him. He smelled of soap and sunshine, and his eyes shone with the kind of innocence and joy only a child who knows he is safe and loved can have.
Poppy pressed her face into the top of his head and shut her eyes.
"He wanted to come," Briíd said softly. "He wanted to thank you himself. I told him your medicine fixed him and he insisted, Poppy. He has talked of nothing else since yesterday morning."
"Finn." She said it into his hair. "Oh, Finn, look at you."
"We made you cookies," Finn announced into her shoulder. "With butter. The yellow ones. I helped."
"You helped."
"I stirred. I stirred so hard ."
A sound that was almost a laugh moved through her. She let him go. Straightened.
Briíd was looking at her.
Poppy watched the woman's face change — the way faces always changed when people looked at her closely. The polite distance went out of it. The small wary respect the village kept for her went out of it.
What replaced them was concern.
"Poppy."
"It's nothing."
"You're white as a sheet. Are you eating?"
"I'm fine."
Briíd reached out — slowly, the way a person reaches for a bird that might startle — and laid the back of her hand against Poppy's forehead.
Her fingers were warm.
They were too warm.
Poppy understood, with a small sick lurch, that her own skin was cold .
"You're not fine."
"It's a chill. I caught it walking yesterday. I'll boil up some willow bark and be right by tomorrow."
The lie came out of her so easily.
She had never lied easily in her life. She had never had cause to. The smoothness of it surprised her almost more than the lie itself.
Behind Briíd, in the dark line of the wood at the edge of her dead garden, she couldn’t see him. He had wanted not to be seen. But she could feel him. He was watching her lie to a woman she had known her whole life.
She didn’t look toward the trees.
She kept her eyes on Briíd's kind, worried face.
Briíd looked at her a long moment. Whatever the woman saw, she didn’t push. She set the basket down on the table beside the door and gave Poppy's shoulder a squeeze.
"You send word if you need anything. Anything at all. We owe you. The whole village owes you. You can't carry every load in this place by yourself."
"Thank you," Poppy whispered.
Finn pressed something small and warm into her hand on his way past. She looked down. A smooth black pebble — the kind a child finds and decides is precious. He looked up at her with enormous serious eyes.
"It's for you. It's a good one."
"It's the best one." She smiled.
She watched them go down the path. Briíd held Finn's hand. Finn looked back twice. The second time he waved. Poppy waved back.
She stood at her door until the gate closed behind them. Then she shut the door. Slid the latch. Pressed her forehead against the wood for the space of three slow breaths. She was tired. So very tired.
She turned around.
Alsander was already in the kitchen.
She didn’t know how he had gotten back inside without her hearing him. She would never know. He was simply there , where he had been, his hand wrapped around the warm mug as if nothing had interrupted them.
His face was the face of a man who had been watching the woman he loved through her own kitchen window for the last three minutes.
"You lied to her," he said quietly.
"I know."
"You are not —" he frowned — "you are not a person who lies easily, Poppy."
"I wasn’t, no." She walked past him to the basket Briíd had left on the table. Lifted the cloth. The cookies were yellow with butter. The smell of them — ordinary and warm and good — made her eyes sting. "I seem to be one now. I don’t know what to make of that."
He didn’t answer. She had lied to protect him. When he answered, his voice was very gentle. "Come and sit down, a chuisle . Come and have a cookie. We have books to read."
They cleared the kitchen table.
She dragged the heavy chest from the foot of her bed into the middle of the kitchen floor and knelt in front of it and opened the lock with hands that shook only a little.
He watched her open it. He didn’t offer to help.
He understood, without needing to be told, that this was hers to open and his to be present for.