Chapter 13 #2
"The journal first." Her voice was steadier than it had been.
"Then the recipe ledger. Then this one — my mother's herbal.
Then the stack of letters. Then this one, here — this is my great-grandmother's.
Saoirse Ní Bhriain. I have never read it.
My grandmother told me to leave it until I was ready, and I have never been ready. "
"You are ready now."
"I suppose I am."
"And this?"
He pointed at the small dark chest at the bottom of the larger one. The one with the iron bands and the lock she hadn’t used. The key for it sat in the small velvet pouch she had taken out of the chest first and laid on the table and not yet opened.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "My grandmother gave me the key on the last evening of her life. She said I would know when the time was right."
"Tonight?"
"I don't know. Let’s start with what I can read. We work our way down. If we get to that and still have nothing, I will open it."
"Fair."
They began.
She gave him the journal first. Watched him take it in his big hands and open it with the careful reverence of a man who had kept and treasured his own. Watched his face as he read her grandmother's handwriting.
He read fast.
Faster than she had expected.
She had thought — she didn’t know what she had thought. She’d seen his books. They were in old languages. Surely her grandmother's casual modern Irish-inflected English would be a chore.
She took the recipe ledger. Read the small marginal notes about which moon to harvest under, which neighbor had which complaint. She had read all of this before. She read it again. Found nothing she hadn’t found before.
After an hour, he set the journal down.
"Nothing?"
"Your grandmother was a good woman," he said. "She loved you very much. She knew enough to know there was a thing she didn’t know. She wrote of waiting for it. She wrote of the prophecy. She didn’t write of him . She didn’t write of the line. She didn’t write of what your blood is."
"She didn’t know."
"She didn’t know," he agreed. "Or she knew and wouldn’t write it."
They moved on.
He took her mother's herbal. She took the bound stack of letters tied with the pink ribbon. They read the letters together. The fire burned. The morning lengthened.
She made more tea.
They ate cookies.
He ate four cookies in a row without seeming to notice and then looked at his own hand in surprise as if he hadn’t known it could still want a thing as simple as a buttery yellow cookie. She didn’t point it out. She didn’t want to make him self-conscious. She wanted him to keep eating cookies.
Around noon, he picked up the small leather book at the bottom of the kitchen stack.
It was the oldest book in her cottage. Perhaps older than her grandmother had said it was. The leather was cracked and dark, the edges of the pages soft and brittle with age. She had always assumed it was a book of prayers. She had never opened it. There had been no reason.
The script on the outside was old Gaelic. The long-tailed letters of a hand that had been dead two hundred years before her grandmother had been born. Poppy couldn’t read it. She only knew three words of old Irish from her grandmother's lullabies and nothing more.
Alsander opened it.
She watched him, a little breathless. Perhaps he would be able to decipher the old script.
He bent over the page. His finger moved along the line of script. His lips moved a little as he read. His face didn’t change.
"You can read that."
"Yes."
He looked up. The corner of his mouth had moved.
" A chuisle . I am ancient. I am a dragon. I read seven languages quite well. I read four others poorly. I have lost two more to time."
"Oh," she whispered.
She had to look down.
She didn’t know why the small ordinary fact of his ability to read her oldest book was, all of a sudden, the thing that almost broke her.
He had spent lifetimes learning languages.
He had a private interior life she hadn’t yet had time to imagine.
He was so much more than the brooding, wounded creature she’d found in the forest.
And he was hers.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and straightened her shoulders. Now was not the time to unpack all her feelings. They had work to do. "What does it say?"
“It is an old book of household charms. Recipes for protective bundles. A way to bless a hearth-stone. A blessing to be said over a bowl of milk left out for the small folk. A song to keep the milk from souring in summer.”
Poppy’s heart squeezed painfully. Alsander had just unlocked a piece of her family history.
None of what he read was what they needed, but it was still important to her.
Her hands shook slightly with emotion. She closed her eyes, listening to the way he read in a low careful voice that turned the old words into a music she hadn’t known her language could make.
When he was finished, she asked him to go back and read the blessings again.
They moved on.
Saoirse's book was older than the household charms but younger than the leather one. The hand was strong and tight, the script a kind Poppy could read with effort and Alsander could read with ease. They opened it together, side by side at the kitchen table, his shoulder against hers.
"Oh," he said, very softly, after the first page.
"What?"
"Your great-grandmother was angry ."
"At who?"
"At the silence. At the line. At the women before her who would not write things down. Listen." He turned the book toward her. " My grandmother told me nothing. My mother told me half a thing. My daughter shall not know the half I knew. I shall write it. I shall write it down. "
"Oh, Saoirse," Poppy whispered.
They read together. Alsander kept his finger on the line so she could follow.
He translated where the spelling defeated her.
Saoirse's account of the line was patchy — she had been writing what she had been told , and what she had been told was already partial after ten generations of oral telling.
But she had pieces. She had names. She had the bones of it.
She had written of the Lady, whom Saoirse called Bantiarna . The Lady was the green of the world. The Lady was the keeper of a wound at the heart of the wood, and the Lady fell.
And as she fell —
She chose.
She chose a daughter of the human village.
Eighteen years old. The eldest of seven.
A girl named Caoimhe who had nursed the Lady through her dying without ever knowing what she was nursing.
The Lady poured what she could into the girl, and the girl carried it, and the girl bore daughters, and the daughters bore daughters —
And we are here.
Alsander's hand had gone tight on the page. "Mairin chose."
"Yes."
"She gave her pendant to a girl."
"Yes."
"She gave the last of her magic to a human girl I didn’t know existed. And the girl carried it. And she had daughters. And they had daughters." A pause. "And one of them is you ."
"Yes," Poppy whispered.
He let out a breath that had been held a long time. His hand stroked over his jaw. He sat that way for a long moment, his shoulder pressed against hers.
She watched as centuries of grief rearranged themselves in his chest.
When he lowered his hand, he looked tired, but content. Like a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
"She knew." His voice was soft. "She knew when she did it. She didn’t have time to tell me — but she knew. Mairin knew what was coming for her and she chose you, chose your line, a chuisle . She gifted your line with her magic because she couldn’t save me herself."
"We don't know that."
"I know it."
"Alsander —"
"Read the rest."
She turned the page.
Saoirse's hand. The same strong, angry script.
The Lady chose the girl because she had seen, in her dying, that the dragon would need her.
That the dragon would not be able to bear the weight alone.
That the rot at the heart of the wood would eat the dragon as it had eaten her, and the line of her own divinity would die with him, unless she gave a piece of herself into a vessel that could carry it forward and bring it back to him in time.
The kitchen went very quiet.
The girl was the vessel. Her daughter was the vessel.
My grandmother was the vessel. My mother was the vessel.
I am the vessel. My daughter shall be the vessel.
And one of us, one of these daughters of Caoimhe, shall be the one the Lady saw.
The one who shall walk into the wood and find him.
The one whose touch shall undo what was done and break the curse.
Poppy read it all once. Again. She set her hand on the page where her great-grandmother had written let it be me, let it be over , and she felt, with a quiet, absolute certainty she had never felt about anything in her life, it was her.
She was the one. She was going to figure out how to break the curse.
How to save the dragon and the forest. "Alsander. "
"Yes."
"You’re the dragon."
He turned his head against her shoulder. He didn’t lift it. "I know, a chuisle ."
"I am the last of the line that carries Mairin’s magic."
"I know."
The fire in the hearth cracked.
Outside, the dawn had given way to a clean morning. Somewhere far off, a gull cried over the harbor. In the small dark chest at the bottom of the larger chest, the one with the iron bands and the lock she hadn’t used, something began very faintly to hum .
Poppy lifted her head.
"Alsander."
"I hear it."
He had already heard it. His eyes had gone to the chest.
"I think," she said, very softly, "I am ready now."