Chapter 17 #2
"He came up out of the dark and he killed her before she could choose.
And in so doing, he became the thing he had set out to oppose.
He stopped being a corrective and became a curse .
He locked himself into the woods as surely as your sister had locked the forest into life. He has been there ever since."
"Three hundred years." Alsander's voice was a whisper.
"Yes. The forest cannot die because your sister bound it. Your sister cannot leave because her work was unfinished. He cannot withdraw because he is locked into the wound he made. You fight the curse, bleeding into the roots to keep something half-alive that was meant to be wholly something else."
She drew a breath.
"And your sister's spirit, dear — your sister's spirit has been waiting three hundred years to be allowed to leave ."
His hand tightened around Poppy's.
"How is it ended?"
Niamh turned the book so they could both see. There was a drawing on the page she had stopped at — a small careful diagram of the pendant, and above it, a small careful diagram of a stone altar.
The shrine.
The carvings.
The chamber behind the falls.
"You take the pendant to the shrine. You take it to the altar where she fell. You destroy them both at once — the pendant and the relic at the heart of it. The book describes the working. It is not complicated."
She paused.
"The breaking is the breaking. The magic in the pendant unmakes the magic in the relic. The magic in the relic releases your sister. Her release breaks the binding on the wood."
"And the wood."
"The wood does what the wood was always meant to do. Some of it dies. Some of it sleeps. Some of it returns. The cycle resumes. The corrective unbinds and goes back to wherever correctives go. Your sister is free ."
She looked at Alsander.
"You are free. Of all of it."
He didn’t answer at once.
His hand was very tight in Poppy's.
"When?"
"Tomorrow, if you can stand it. The sooner the better. The book is clear — the longer the binding holds, the worse the unmaking when it comes."
"We drive at first light."
"Good."
He was silent a long moment.
Then, very low: "She is going to be free."
"Yes, dear."
"Mairin is going to be free."
"Yes."
Whatever emotions he was processing, he turned away to do it. Poppy let him. Niamh — who had also seen — looked very deliberately down at her book and pretended not to see.
After a long while he straightened his posture. He drew a long breath. "Thank you, Niamh."
"Oh, child. Thank me when it is done."
There had been a moment, somewhere in the reading.
Poppy was almost sure of it.
A pause when her aunt had laid her finger flat on the page and looked up at the wall and not said the thing she had read. Poppy had been watching too closely to miss it.
She didn’t say anything about it now. She was watching her aunt now too.
Niamh closed the book.
"Right. You will both want sleep. There is nothing else to be done tonight. Alsander, dear — the second room at the top of the stairs. The bed is made. The towels are on the chair. There is a very old robe on the back of the door if anything fits you, which I doubt."
She turned.
"Poppy. The small room next to it. Or —"
Her sharp blue eyes came up.
"Wherever you end up. I am eighty-three. I don’t police the hallways at night."
Alsander gave Niamh a small careful bow she would never forget.
He turned for the stairs.
"Poppy, my love." Niamh's voice was soft. "Would you stay a moment? Just to help me with the dishes."
Alsander paused on the bottom step. "I can do dishes."
"Go to bed, dear." Niamh's voice was firmer now. "You will need your strength tomorrow, and I haven’t seen my great-niece in too many years to let her go to bed without a bit of catching up first."
He looked at Poppy.
Poppy nodded.
He hesitated one beat longer — he had heard the same thing she had heard, the something Niamh wasn’t saying with both of them in the room — but he climbed the stairs.
Poppy waited until she heard the door close above.
Then she turned to her aunt.
"Tell me."
Niamh didn’t pretend not to understand.
She opened the book to a page she had passed and not translated. She tapped the script with one bent finger.
"Here. This is the part I didn’t say in front of him."
"Auntie."
"Oh, child."
She closed her eyes for a long beat.
When she opened them, they were wet.
"Sit down."
Poppy sat.
"The pendant," Niamh said quietly, "is Mairin's. Made of her remaining magic. The breaking of it requires a price . The price is the life that has held it."
"Which is —"
"You."
Poppy heard it the way a person hears a thing they had already, somewhere, known.
She didn’t jump.
She didn’t weep.
She was very calm, in fact — more calm than she had felt at any point in the last week. Calm the way a person was calm when an old fear became a present fact.
"Say it plainly," she said.
"The pendant has been carried in our line for many generations. It was given to our ancestor by Mairin's spirit. It was given to be passed down — daughter to daughter — until it found the daughter who would bear it back to the shrine. That daughter is you .”
She drew a breath.
"When the pendant is destroyed, the life that has held it is the seal. The blood of the bearer breaks the blood-bond Mairin made when she gave herself to Caoimhe. It frees Mairin. It frees her brother dragon. It frees the wood."
"And the bearer."
"Dies."
"Dies, child. Yes."
Poppy nodded, very slowly.
"Okay."
"Poppy."
"I said okay, Auntie."
" Child. " Niamh's hand had come out across the desk. "You don’t have to. We can — there must be —"
"Is there another way?"
Niamh shut her eyes.
"Tell me, Auntie. Is there another way that the book describes?"
"No."
"Is there another way that has been described in any of your reading?"
"No."
"Then I will do it."
"Child —"
"Auntie. Listen. "
Poppy reached across the desk and took her aunt's thin warm hand.
She didn’t let herself think — not yet, not while she still had to be steady — about the things she was choosing to give up.
The cottage in spring. The lavender she hadn’t had time to replant.
The years she would never have with Alsander on the other side of this.
The mornings she had imagined, almost without meaning to, ever since the first night in the moss — Alsander beside her in her own kitchen, his shoulders too big for the chair, his hands too big for her grandmother's cracked teacup.
A child, perhaps. Some day. A small dark-haired baby on her hip with green eyes and a stubborn jaw, and Alsander's face when he held it for the first time, and the long quiet years of a life she hadn’t, until this moment, fully let herself want.
She had been keeping the wanting small.
She had been keeping the wanting small because she had known, in the deep place inside herself, that wanting too much was how this line had broken itself the first time.
Now she let herself want. Just for one breath. Just so she would know what she was paying.
Then she put it away.
She put her hand on Niamh's hand on the desk, and she breathed out slowly, and she went on.
"He has been alone three hundred years. His sister has been trapped three hundred years. The forest has been bound three hundred years. Three hundred years of ache because Mairin loved too much. We are the line that was made to undo it. We’ve all paid a price, Auntie.
Every single one of us, from Caoimhe down to us.
I am the final daughter the line was made for. "
Her voice was very steady.
"I can release Mairin and that thing living in the forest. I can save Alsander. I can right the wrong. I would rather die tomorrow doing the thing I was made to do than live to be your age never having tried."
"Poppy —"
"I am not afraid of this, Auntie." Her voice cracked, just for one word, and then steadied. "I love him. I love him in a way I didn’t know was possible to love. Whatever I am giving up — I would have given it up for him a hundred times by now, and I have only known him a week ."
"A week."
"Tomorrow is a week, Auntie. A week. I would do it again."
Niamh's eyes were full.
She didn’t let the tears fall. She squeezed Poppy's hand.
"You will not tell Alsander?"
"No. He would try to stop me. He would die in my place, given the chance, and the prophecy is clear that the bearer must do the breaking herself. He would only break, watching, and the work would not finish. He cannot know."
"Agreed."
"You will —" Poppy's voice gave way. She tried again. "After. You will look after him. If anything is left of him after. He will need —"
"He will need a great deal." Niamh's voice was firm. "I will be there. I will be there at first light."
"Auntie —"
"Did you think I was going to let you go alone? As you said, we have all made paid a price. This is my fight, too, child. We are all part of this."
"Oh, Auntie. "
"Hush, child."
She squeezed Poppy's hand once more.
"I have been waiting for this my whole life. I would never miss it."
Poppy climbed the stairs slowly. She paused on the landing, one hand against the wall, and breathed through the thing in her chest that wanted to be a sob. She didn’t let it become one — because crying through the door was a thing he would hear, and a thing she couldn’t explain.
She straightened.
She put her hand on the doorknob of the second room at the top of the stairs.
She opened the door.
He was already there. A shadow in the corner that resolved into the solid, powerful form of the man who owned her soul. He didn’t speak.
He just held out a hand.
"Come here."
The door clicked shut behind her.
The sound was unnaturally loud in the hushed silence of her aunt's house.
Poppy went to Alsander as if she were tethered.
As if every atom in her body was drawn to his gravitational pull.
As if she had been waiting her whole life to walk across this small Dublin bedroom and put her hands on the chest of the man who had owned her soul since the moment she had seen him naked and furious in a forest clearing a week ago.
A week.
It had been a week .
Tomorrow would be the eighth day. Tomorrow she would die for him.
Tonight was hers.