Chapter 17
P oppy
Niamh had laid the table for three.
Of course she had.
Of course she had known they were coming, even though Poppy hadn’t telephoned, hadn’t written — had only put the Elvish book in a canvas bag and folded a huge man into a Mini and driven two hundred miles on no notice at all.
The kitchen smelled of beef and red wine and rosemary.
A lamp was lit in the corner of the dining room.
Three places were set with the good plates — the ones with the small blue flowers around the rims, the ones Poppy had eaten Sunday roasts off of as a child whenever her mother had brought her to Dublin.
"You cooked."
"I cooked yesterday," Niamh said, ladling the stew. "The woman in my dream was very specific about setting three places. I assumed it would be you and a friend from your village. I am pleasantly surprised by the handsome alternative."
Alsander — who had been in the process of sitting down with the careful angularity of a man unsure whether the chair could take him — paused.
Niamh winked at him over the soup ladle.
They ate.
Niamh poured wine. Poppy watched her dragon — her ancient, lair-dwelling, brooding, deface-the-shrine-with-his-own-grief dragon — be charmed against his will by a woman in a soft gray cardigan who would not stop teasing him about his uniform.
"Tell me, dear, do you have a route? Do you deliver parcels as well as letters? I have a niece in Galway I have been meaning to send a fruitcake to."
"My route is somewhat irregular." His voice had the dry humor of a man who had decided to play along. "I only have two stops. The cap is mostly ornamental."
"I imagine one of those stops is Poppy's cottage?"
"Of course."
“And the other? Is it that little ogre who lives just across the way?”
“No, ma’am. It’s the old vampire up in the castle. He’s very cranky.”
“That’s what happens when you get to be my age, dear. Best not to keep him waiting.”
Alsander cracked first.
He smiled. He tried to hide it behind his wine glass.
Poppy saw it anyway.
She hadn’t seen him smile like that. She’d seen the careful, guarded almost-smiles he had given her in the lair, and the quiet, pleased smile he wore when she said something that amused him. This was something larger.
This was an easy, slightly mortified smile of a man being teased by an aunt and discovering, against every expectation, that he liked it.
Niamh told a story about Poppy's grandmother as a girl.
She told a story about a goat that had got into a wedding.
She refilled the wine without asking. Alsander laughed once — properly, a low real laugh that surprised him into a coughing fit — and Poppy, under the table, reached for his knee and felt him under her palm and thought:
Oh. I didn’t know you could be like this. Oh, you had forgotten too.
By the end of the meal, he was relaxed in his chair.
He had taken off the cap. The high-vis jacket was draped over the back of the chair behind him. He was in his shirtsleeves now, sleeves rolled, and he looked human in a way she hadn’t seen him look since she had met him.
Niamh watched him from across the table over the rim of her glass. Her sharp blue eyes had gone soft.
Poppy understood what she was watching.
Her aunt was watching the long awaited Draquonir come, slowly, back to himself in a Dublin dining room. She was watching it with the attention of a woman who had read about his kind for sixty years and hadn’t quite believed she would ever sit across a table from one.
"Right." Niamh set down her glass. "To work. You brought something with you, correct?"
Poppy nodded.
Her aunt led them down the hall to her study.
The room was small and cluttered with books. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves that had given up imposing any system on themselves a long time ago. A worn green leather chair by the window. A desk with a green-shaded lamp.
The lamp was already on.
A stack of three reference books was laid out on the desk, marked with slips of paper — as if Niamh had spent her afternoon preparing for an interview that hadn’t yet been requested.
"A book you need me to translate, yes?" She held out her hand.
Poppy took the Elvish book from the canvas bag and laid it in her great-aunt's palm. Niamh's hands shook a little.
Niamh's hands hadn’t, until that moment, shaken at all.
"Oh, child." Her voice was soft. "I’ve never seen this one before."
“It was behind a loose brick in the hearth.”
“Yes, child. My mother gave us each a letter before she passed, as her mother did for her. I read your grandmother’s letter, just as she read mine. I’m glad the wait is finally over.”
She gingerly took the book to the desk. Sat in the chair beside it. Turned on the second lamp on the wall — the brighter one — and pulled a magnifying glass from a drawer. Put on a pair of reading glasses that had been folded into the neck of her cardigan.
She opened the book and read in silence for a long time.
Alsander took a position behind her left shoulder.
Standing. His arms folded. His face unreadable.
Poppy stood at her aunt's right shoulder.
Niamh's lips moved, sometimes, around the shape of words neither of them could hear.
Once she muttered something under her breath in what Poppy thought might be old Irish but might have been older than that.
Twice she paused, lifted her head, and looked at the wall as if checking a memory.
Once she made a small soft ah — as if a thing had clicked into place.
After perhaps twenty minutes she sat back.
She took off her glasses. Rubbed the bridge of her nose.
"Right. Okay. Let me tell you what this is."
She turned to face Alsander.
"The pendant," she began, "is the gift of Mairin's spirit. The book says so plainly. When Mairin fell — after she gave the last of her magic to Caoimhe — a fragment of her spirit remained, as well. A phantom. A ghost. Not the whole of her. But enough to be aware. Enough to grieve. Enough to act. "
Alsander didn’t speak.
"That fragment entered the dragon pendant along with her magic. The pendant was her last gift. A key ."
"A key to what?" His voice was very careful.
"To breaking the curse. To the undoing of what she had done."
Alsander's arms unfolded.
"What she had done."
Niamh didn’t look away from him.
"This is going to be hard for you to hear, dear."
"Say it."
"Your sister loved that forest more than was healthy."
His hands went to the back of her chair. He gripped the wood. "I am aware of this. Go on."
"Forests die." Niamh's voice was gentle but her eyes hadn’t lost their sharpness.
"Groves age out. The natural order is one of cycles.
All trees, all forests stands for its time.
Then it is fire, or it is rot, or it is reseeded by something new.
The magic of the place sleeps and rises in something else. That is how it is meant to go."
"My sister was the keeper . She was meant to —"
"She was meant to ease the transitions. She wasn’t meant to prevent them."
"That is not —"
"The forest she loved was an old one." Niamh's finger had landed on the page.
"It was approaching its time. She used the relic to hold it long past its time.
She used the relic to keep the old magic in place when the old magic was meant to be returning to the earth. She thought she was protecting it."
"She was."
"She was refusing to let it go ."
"No."
"Alsander."
" No. "
His knuckles had gone white on the chair. Poppy could see the tendons standing out in his hands.
"My sister loved that forest. She loved it before she loved anything else. She would not have —"
"That is exactly what the book says she did, dear. Because she loved it that much."
"It is wrong."
"It is not wrong." Niamh's voice had gone quiet.
Almost kind. "Alsander. I have not lied to you yet. I am not going to start now. The book is unambiguous. The relic wasn’t meant to be used the way she used it.
The relic was meant to ease transitions, not prevent them.
When she used it to hold , the relic curdled. The magic in it turned."
She paused.
"And the thing that came up out of the dark to confront her —"
"Don’t say his name in this house."
"I wasn’t going to. He has many names. The book uses one I will not say either."
She closed the book under her hand.
"He is the corrective. He is the cycle's defender. When something refuses to die that should die, he is what comes for it. He is not, in his nature, evil. He believed your sister was the corruption."
She paused again.
"The book agrees with him."
Alsander made a strangled sound.
It was a small, awful sound — the sound a man makes when someone touches something broken in his chest and presses on it.
"My sister wasn’t the corruption," he said. “There is no way she was evil. She was good. She had nothing but love in her heart.”
"I didn’t say she was evil, dear. I said she loved too much. The two are not the same."
"Alsander." Poppy reached for his hand.
He let her take it. He didn’t look at her.
He stood very still.
Poppy could see, in the angle of his shoulders, the precise effort it was costing him not to leave the room. He stayed. He stayed because he was a man who had decided three hundred years ago that he would fully understand the thing that had killed his sister no matter what it cost him to learn it.
Tonight it was costing him this.
"Go on." Alsander said, his jaw clenched. “Finish it.”
"He killed her," Niamh said simply. "Which was an act of murder, regardless of his reason. The cycle does not require the keeper to die. The keeper is meant to release the relic and let the forest take its natural course. He didn’t give her the chance."
"He didn’t give her the chance ," Alsander repeated. His voice had gone strange.