Chapter 14
T hey read the rest of Saoirse’s journal.
Saoirse wrote of the Draquonir . The keeper-line.
The dragon-kin who had stood beside the Lady at the relic in the wood.
She wrote of the one who had loved the Lady — her brother in scale and bone — who had survived her, and who walked the wood still.
She wrote that he didn’t know what the Lady had done.
That only the girl knew. She was instructed to keep herself, and her line, away from the deepest part of the wood until the children in the village sickened with a fever only the Aos-sí-bloom could cure because the line was what the Lady made it.
The line was what may yet undo what was done.
"Here." Alsander stopped at a line. "Your great-grandmother knew the line was meant to undo it. She didn’t know how."
"What does she say?"
He translated, slowly, line by line:
"The daughter who walks back into the wood shall do the work the Lady could not finish.
Her love shall be the dragon's salvation.
The cost of the work is heavy, and I do not know its full shape.
The telling we received is not complete.
We have lost too much. The full of it is held elsewhere — in the books that are not ours, in the keeping of those who were here before us. "
Poppy went still.
"Those who were here before us."
"Yes."
"Meaning —"
"She means the elves." Alsander's voice was flat. "The Aos Sí . The folk who were in this country before the human village had a name."
"Oh."
"Yes," he continued, more gently. "They exist. They are not gone.
They are elsewhere . They are not easy to find unless you know where to look.
They have not come to me in two hundred years.
But they exist, a chuisle . Your great-grandmother knew the full of your line's story was held in their books, not in hers.
Knowledge of the Secret Kingdoms, knowledge of the elves, is forbidden.
Mairin gave your line magic and a knowledge of our kind that, by our laws, requires death. "
Poppy had to put the book down. Had to put her hand flat on the table to steady herself.
Her head swam with dizziness. She didn’t know if it was the news of the elves, the slow weight of Saoirse's account settling on her, or only the long night she hadn’t yet slept through.
On shaky legs, she pushed her chair back and walked to the hearth to throw another log on the fire because she didn’t know what else to do with her body.
She stood at the hearth with her back to him.
When she felt steadier, she turned around.
Alsander was sitting where she had left him, half-turned in the chair to watch her. His elbow rested on the back of the chair. His head tilted.
The fire in the fireplace had burned low. The flames painted him in the same warm gold she had seen across his lair last night, when he had moved over her, into her, with the long, held attention of a man who had no intention of finishing soon.
Her body remembered.
It came up in her without warning. The bed of furs. The weight of him. The rough, urgent first time before she knew his name. The slow careful inevitability of him in the lair, when she had.
She really was in love with a dragon man, she mused.
She’d started to fall for him that first day.
Completely, irrevocably in love with him.
He was her choice. Not because of the pendant.
Not because she was a descendent of the chosen girl.
She didn’t love him because it was her fate.
She loved him because of who he was, man and dragon.
All the little things. With a small smile, she returned to him and squeezed his hand.
He squeezed back. “Are you well?”
"Keep reading," she urged.
They read the rest of Saoirse's book. The later pages were thinner, less certain — like a woman who had run out of things to write but couldn’t bear to stop writing. She wrote prayers. She wrote the names of her daughters. She wrote a small note, in a smaller hand, that said only:
Forgive me, child. Whichever of you finds this. Forgive me. We did our best with what was given.
Poppy wept a little over that.
Alsander folded the book closed and waited for her tears to dry. He didn’t tell her to stop, didn’t tell her she was being silly. She fell a little harder.
They went through the rest. The letters tied in pink ribbon were her grandmother's correspondence with a sister in Cork — gentle and ordinary and full of nothing at all.
Then she pulled the velvet pouch toward her and tipped the small iron key out into her palm.
The key for the small chest within the chest.
It was warm.
"My grandmother, Caitlín, gave me this on the last evening of her life." Her voice had gone steady. "She said I could use it or do as she had, and pass it down the line, and that I would know which one when the time was right. It was such an odd thing to say. Now I understand."
Alsander didn’t speak. He only watched her.
She set the key in the lock of the inner chest. Turned it. The lock gave.
Inside was a single envelope.
She recognized her grandmother's hand on the front. Poppy .
She lifted the envelope out with hands that had begun to shake. The paper was soft with age. She slid her finger under the wax seal and broke it.
The letter was short.
My darling girl. If you are reading this, perhaps the day has come. Perhaps you are the one the Lady foresaw. If so, then you have found the dragon. You have come back to this chest with him beside you, or alone, and you have used the key.
I can’t write about the things I don’t know. I can’t give you names I have never been told. I am the daughter of a daughter of a daughter, and we have all done our best with our piece.
But I can give you this much:
The third brick up from the floor on the left side of the hearth, where the bricks meet the hearthstone, is loose.
I didn’t put it there. My grandmother showed it to me as her grandmother showed it to her.
We have never opened what is behind it. We were not the ones the brick was meant for.
We held it. We kept the chimney clean. We waited.
If you have found the dragon, then what is behind that brick is for you, my Poppy. Whatever it is, it has waited a long time. Be brave with it.
I love you. Whatever you are doing now, I love you. Tell the dragon I said be good to my Poppy.
— Caitlín
Poppy couldn’t speak.
She handed the letter to Alsander. He read it. His jaw tightened.
" Be good to you, " he said softly. "Your grandmother left me a message."
"Yes."
"She knew."
"She knew enough." Poppy's throat was tight.
"I will be good to her."
The words weren’t for Poppy. They were for Caitlín. He said it to the empty kitchen, to a woman five years dead, to a grandmother who had loved Poppy enough to leave a message for the dragon she would not live to meet. "I swear it on my blood. I will be good to her."
The hearth made a small sound.
It wasn’t a crack of wood. It wasn’t a settle of coals.
It was a low, steady hum .
Poppy looked at Alsander.
Alsander looked at the hearth.
She rose and crossed the kitchen on legs that were unsteady. She knelt at the hearth. She put her hand on the third brick up from the floor on the left side, where the bricks met the hearthstone — and she felt, almost at once, that the brick was loose.
Not loose the way a bad bit of mortar was loose.
Loose the way a thing was loose because it was meant to be lifted.
Her fingers found the seam.
She pulled.
The brick came out clean.
Behind it was hollow. The interior was lined with a piece of waxed cloth she could just see in the firelight.
And within that, rested something wrapped in oiled leather darker than the leather of any book in the chest.
She lifted it out.
It was small. Smaller than her grandmother's journal. The outer wrapping was nearly black with age but still supple, as if the oil had been refreshed by hands she would never know. She carefully, reverently unfolded the leather.
Resting inside was the book itself.
The cover was made of the finest wood, thinly bound, carved all over with patterns she couldn’t name — spirals and knots and the suggestion of leaves. At the center, raised in low relief and inlaid with something that caught the firelight like a held breath —
A replica of her pendant.
Her own pendant. Exactly. The shape of the stone. The setting. Carved into the cover of a book that had been hidden in her chimney since before her grandmother was born.
"Oh," she whispered.
"Oh," Alsander said behind her. He had risen. He was at her shoulder.
She opened it.
The script inside was nothing she had ever seen. Not English. Not Irish, old or otherwise. The letters didn’t march along the line — they flowed , curving and interlacing. A script that looked more like a song written down than like writing.
The shapes of the letters were beautiful.
Somehow Poppy knew they were not for human eyes.
She turned the page. Another drawing of her pendant. Full size. Detailed. The stone in its setting, the silver pattern, the chain. Beneath the drawing, lines of the flowing script she couldn’t read.
She turned another. More script. Then a small drawing of a tree — but the tree wasn’t quite a tree. The branches forked into the shapes of animals. The roots forked into the shapes of letters. The whole thing was the same flowing script blooming out of itself.
She turned another.
She looked up at Alsander.
"Can you read this?"
He was looking at the page. His face had gone very still.
"No."
"But you know what it is."
"Yes."
"What is it, Alsander?"
" Elvish. It is written in the tongue of the fae . The Aos Sí of the island."
She stared at him.
"You said they left —"
"I know what I said."
His finger had risen. Almost touching the script. Not quite.