Chapter 15
P oppy’s garage.
"Is that —" Alsander scowled.
"Yes."
"Is that the car ?"
"It is."
"You intend that we both fit inside that."
"I do."
"Poppy."
"Her name is Margery." She gave the bonnet another fond pat. "She’s a 1978 Mini. She was my grandmother's. She has never failed to start. She has crossed this country twice and she has never once let me down. And you, my love, are about to fold yourself into her like a piece of laundry."
"The car has a name."
"Yes."
"You have given the car a woman's name."
"Yes."
He stood in the pre-dawn at the back of Poppy’s cottage and looked at the small green object she had pulled out of the shed.
He tried to adjust the image he had carried around in his head for more than a hundred years with what he was seeing now.
He remembered, vaguely, of a thing he had read about in a newspaper someone had brought into his forest and left behind.
It was French. The Serpollet. It was steam powered and had a flash boiler mounted on the front.
He hadn’t thought about such human contraptions again.
The lair didn’t require thought about cars and dragons could fly.
The thing rolling out of the shed was nothing like the Serpollet.
It was the metallic green of a poison dart frog, and in his opinion, wasn’t much larger than the amphibian, its body approximately the size of a small wardrobe. A very small wardrobe. For a child.
It had four wheels, like the Serpollet — that part was correct — but the wheels were the size of dinner plates.
Margery. A ridiculous name for a death trap. He frowned. He was expected to fit inside. He didn’t see how, unless Poppy expected him to shrink.
He had commanded armies. He had ruled the sky for almost two thousand years. He had survived three centuries of slow poisoning by a curse meant to kill him a hundred times over. He wasn’t going to be defeated by a machine named Margery .
Poppy patted it on what he understood to be the bonnet with the same proud affection she had patted the rump of his dragon-form last week. “Hop in, dragon man. She won’t bite.”
Alsander only just kept his lip from curling in revulsion. "I still think we should fly." Deep inside, his dragon concurred most vehemently.
Poppy laughed.
He hadn’t, in all his long years, expected to be laughed at by a woman in a dead garden in front of a frog-colored vehicle named Margery. He found, with mild surprise, that he didn’t mind.
It took him three tries to get into the passenger seat.
The first attempt failed miserably. He bent at the waist to enter and his head met the top of the doorframe with the dignity of a man who hadn’t expected to be defeated by an inanimate object made of tin.
He drew back. Considered.
Tried again at a steeper angle.
This solved the head problem and created a knee problem. His knee met the dashboard at a velocity that would have rung a smaller man's bell.
The third attempt involved Poppy crouched beside the open door giving him quiet calm instructions like a woman walking a horse into a too-small stall.
At last he was seated. More or less. Chin tucked toward his sternum. Knees drawn up almost to his chest. Hands resting awkwardly on top of his knees because there was nowhere else for them to go.
Poppy got into the driver's seat with the ease of a woman who had been doing this since she was seventeen.
She got in in roughly half a second.
She turned to him. He stared straight ahead through the windshield. It was approximately six inches from his face.
"You're sulking."
"I am not sulking. I am fitting ."
"You're sulking."
"Children sulk. I am ancient, Poppy. I don’t sulk."
"You are sulking."
She was smiling. The small private smile of a woman watching the very large and very brooding man she loved be folded into her grandmother's tiny green car like a clean shirt into a drawer that was just slightly too small.
He couldn’t, despite himself, find it in him to be angry about it.
He hadn’t been smiled at like that in three centuries.
He could endure the indignity of Margery.
"Seatbelt," she said, her tone full of amusement.
He cocked a brow.
"The strap. Reach up by your shoulder. Pull it across. Click it into the buckle by your hip."
He did. The strap drew tight across his chest. He looked down at it. He understood, at once, the principle. He understood, at once, why the strap existed.
He looked at Poppy with what he hoped was an even expression.
"This does not inspire confidence."
"The seatbelt?"
"The seatbelt and what it implies. Why does the car require that we be strapped in?"
"In case of accidents."
"What sort of accidents?"
"Collisions."
"With?"
"Other cars, mostly."
"How many?"
"Alsander." Her hand came to rest on his knee.
"We are about to drive two hundred miles to Dublin.
There are going to be a great many other cars.
Most of them will be bigger than this one.
Some of them will be much bigger than this one.
We will share roads with them at speeds I think it would be unkind to tell you about right now. "
"How large can the other cars be."
"Some of them are lorries."
"What is a lorry?"
"They have big engines and pull trailers, containers full of— You know what, my love? Let's find out together."
She turned the key.
Margery coughed once, like an old woman waking, and settled into a small steady purr. Poppy patted the dashboard. The headlights came on.
Alsander gripped the strap across his chest with both hands and didn’t breathe out for the first half-mile.
By the time they reached the motorway he had reluctantly accepted he wasn’t, immediately, going to die.
He was, however, gripping the strap again.
"Poppy."
"Yes."
"What is the speed of this vehicle?"
"Sixty."
"Sixty what ?"
"Kilometers per hour."
"— I see."
"We will be going faster than this in a few minutes."
"I see."
"My love."
"Yes."
"You have flown me on the back of your dragon, soaring above the clouds over the Atlantic."
"Yes."
"Surely a motorway is less alarming than that."
"On the back of a dragon," he said carefully, "no. I am the dragon. I have complete confidence in my skills. I have control. The wind is like an old friend. The risk to your person, in my hands, is zero." He swallowed. "I am not the car."
"You are definitely not the car."
"I mean, I am a passenger in a small tin box being piloted by a person I love at unsafe speeds on a black ribbon of road shared with other tin boxes approximately the size of houses, none of whom know that the woman piloting Margery has become my reason for existence, a person without whom I would become nothing more than an angry, destructive monster.
If they knew the danger they were in, they would be far more careful.
Perhaps even remove their tin cans from the road until we have passed. "
He breathed out, slowly, through his nose.
She glanced at him, her lips obviously pressed together to contain the mirth he saw reflected in her eyes. Her face softened. "Oh, Alsander."
"Don’t be tender with me. I am holding it together."
"You’re not."
"I am."
"You're holding the seatbelt strap so hard your knuckles have gone white. And, uh — "
“What.”
“There’s smoke coming out of your nose. Not a lot. Just —”
"Yes. But we are still in the car instead of flying, as we should be. I have not used my magic to remove us from this deathtrap. I am holding it together."
"Try the dashboard. The dashboard is sturdier."
He moved his right hand from the strap to the dashboard. The dashboard was, indeed, sturdier. He kept his left hand on the strap on principle.
Internally, where Poppy couldn’t hear, he yelled at his dragon. Stop smoking! You’re making us look bad in front of our mate!
Tin can dangerous. Must stay ready. Mate will understand.
No. She is laughing.
The dragon didn’t seem the least concerned, but the smoke stopped.
A lorry passed them on the right.
A lorry the size of a small ship. Painted bright orange. The side covered in writing he could read but didn’t understand — something about logistics. The lorry passed them at a speed that suggested its driver had places to be. The wash of air it threw off rocked Margery on her axles.
Alsander made a sound that wasn’t a word.
"That," Poppy said serenely, "was a lorry."
"I dislike it."
"You'll get used to them."
"I will not."
It was, despite everything, a beautiful drive.
He told himself, for the first fifty kilometers, that he was going to die. He gripped the dashboard. He made small involuntary noises every time a vehicle whizzed by.
But somewhere between the first hour and the second, the sheer accumulation of not-having-died began to wear down his certainty that he was about to. His hands relaxed on the dashboard.
He began, by degrees, to look out the window.
Ireland had changed.
It had changed so much he could barely take it in.
Field after field. Hedge after hedge. The occasional brilliant strip of yellow rapeseed flowering out into the sun.
There were houses where there hadn’t been houses.
Towns where there had been hamlets. Vast green signs on tall metal poles announcing the names of places he half-remembered — places that had been a single church and a single inn the last time he had walked past them, places that were now dense with rooflines and streetlights and the larger blunt rectangles of buildings whose function he couldn’t name.
"What," he asked at one point, "is that? The tall thing. With the rotating arms."
"Wind turbine."
"What does it do?"
"Makes electricity. From the wind."
"You are making electricity. From the wind."
"We are."
"For what."
"For everything."
He turned in the seat to look at it as they passed.
"Oh," he said softly.
"What?"
"I didn’t realize much I had missed."
She glanced at him. Her hand left the wheel for a moment to reach across and squeeze his fingers.
Sympathy — she didn’t say it aloud, but he heard it in the squeeze. She put her hand back on the wheel.
"We'll see a lot more," she said gently.
"Yes."
"It's a lot."
"It is a lot."
The road thickened as they approached the city.
More cars. More lorries. More signs. The signs began to refer to a place called the M50 and a place called the city centre and a place called the Port Tunnel.
Alsander, who had once known the road into Dublin as the Slighe Mór and had walked it in 1683, sat very still in his seat and tried to take it all in at once.
Then there were the buildings.
They were tall. Not tall the way a cathedral was tall — not the kind of tall a man pointed his head up at to see the bell. They were rectangular. They were made of glass .
He could see Margery reflected in the side of one as Poppy slowed for traffic. Margery and the two small figures inside her.
"What is that one?"
"An office building."
"A place to conduct business, yes, I know of such places. What sort of business do they conduct?"
"I don't know. Probably insurance. Or technology. Or banks. But I think they're mostly insurance or technology. High tech stuff."
"I know what technology is. What is high tech stuff?"
"I —" Poppy laughed. "Like this old car, only better. There are radios. Television. Satellites. Wireless phones. Video streaming. Computer chips.”
He listened, his face carefully kept blank. It was as if Poppy spoke a different language altogether. One he hadn’t learned yet. “I enjoy the theatre. Does that still exist ? "
"Yes. I saw A Midsummer Night's Dream last year."
“So many changes, yet theatre has endured,” he mused. “S hakespeare has endured. I saw that production while visiting London in 1602.”
Poppy’s eyes widened like giant saucers. “Oh. That’s—that’s a long time ago. I would love to hear about it sometime.”
The corner of his mouth curved up. “It seems we both have a great many things to share.”
He looked at the building made of glass.
He looked away.
He looked back.
There were buses.
There had been omnibuses in his time, drawn by horses, which he understood. These were not those. These were vast yellow rectangles on wheels, taller than the houses they passed, and they were full of humans. Humans, and if he was not mistaken, one shifter. A wolf.
The mortals were looking at small bright objects in their hands and not at the city, and he wondered if the city had become the kind of place that people no longer looked at because there was too much of it to look at.
The wolf had one of the objects, as well, but as Alsander passed by, he looked up and scanned the area.
Their eyes connected. The wolf nodded in recognition as Poppy’s car passed by.
Alsander nodded, then returned to his task.
He needed to absorb and process information as quickly as possible.
There were smaller, two-wheeled vehicles weaving between the cars at speeds that set his teeth on edge.
The urge to turn one to ash when it cut in front of their car, forcing Poppy to slam on a pedal to slow the car with a rapidity that nearly put his face in the dashboard, was difficult to suppress.
The expletives he let out would have made a hardened criminal blush. Poppy just laughed.
There were people on the pavements in clothes he couldn’t place. A woman in a red coat. A man in a soft black sweater and the kind of close trousers he hadn’t seen since he had hidden in the wood. A girl, perhaps seventeen, with hair the color of a peach and a small gold ring through one nostril.
"We're close," Poppy said. "Ten minutes."
"You are nervous to see your kin?”
“A wee bit, yes. You're doing very well, by the way."
"I am not."
"You are."
"I am about to be very, very glad to have my feet on solid ground."
" Mmm. About that." Poppy's voice had gone careful. "We are going to need to talk about your clothes."