Chapter 19
T he water of the falls was the same.
That was the first thing she noticed.
Everything else in her life had bent in two weeks. The whole shape of the world had changed. The water still came down in the same slim white braid she had seen the first time. The air still smelled of cold stone. The mist still rose off the black pool.
The place was waiting.
Behind her, on the moss at the edge of the clearing, Niamh was singing.
A small thread of sound the falls almost swallowed.
Niamh had begun the moment they stopped the car at the head of the path.
She had walked behind them at her own slow pace — stick in one hand, a small bundle of green branches in the other — and when they reached the clearing she had taken up position at the foot of the oldest oak.
The song was old. Older than old. Now and then she would stop, pat the bark of the oak with her free hand, and say something soft and conversational.
The oak listened.
Niamh had been clear about her job.
"I am here in case anything goes wrong," she had said on the drive out from Dublin.
Stick across her lap. Voice flat. "I am here to sanctify the ground. I am here to keep what shouldn’t be in the wood out of the wood.
I am not here to interfere. Whatever happens at the altar happens at the altar. Do you understand me, both of you?"
They both nodded in understanding.
Alsander hadn’t asked why Niamh had insisted on being there. Poppy hadn’t told him. Niamh had caught Poppy's eye in the rearview mirror once at a roundabout outside Athlone, and they hadn’t needed to say anything because they both already knew everything.
Now Poppy stood at the mouth of the path that led behind the falls.
Niamh sang at her back. Alsander stood beside her. The canvas bag was over her shoulder. The pendant lay against her sternum where it had lain for as long as she could remember — warm, always warm now, aware now — and she put her hand to it through her shirt and held it there.
"Ready?" Alsander said quietly.
"Ready."
"You do not have to lead."
"I do, my love. The book was clear. The bearer carries it in. The bearer places it."
He nodded once. He took her hand. He hadn’t let go of it since they got out of the car.
They walked together along the slick narrow path around the pool.
Her hand in his. Her boots quiet on the wet stone.
As they passed under the curtain of falling water, the world went quiet — the way it had gone quiet the first time — and the small chamber of the shrine opened in front of her in the green dim light.
It was the same.
It was the same and it was different .
The carvings on the walls were the carvings she remembered — the woman, the forest, the wound at the heart of the world — but they were not asleep this time.
They were aware .
The figure of the Lady on the largest wall seemed to lean forward in the curving lines the carver had used to suggest her. The defaced figures — the man and the dragon Alsander had taken a chisel to in his grief — were still gone. The empty space where they had been hummed .
"Oh," Poppy said softly. The same soft sound. "Hello again."
Alsander's hand tightened on hers.
She walked to the altar.
It was a low slab of dark stone in the middle of the chamber. Worn smooth by centuries of hands. A shallow oval depression carved into its center the size of a fist.
The depression had been waiting.
She understood, the moment she saw it, that the depression had been carved exactly for the shape of the thing she carried at her throat.
That her foremother's foremother had walked this same path with the same warm stone in her palm and had placed it in this same hollow.
That the line of women between Caoimhe and Poppy had each in their turn dreamed of doing it and had each in their turn never been the daughter who was meant to do it.
Now Poppy was here.
Now the daughter the line had been making had walked into the chamber with the pendant in her hand.
She stopped at the altar.
She let go of Alsander's hand.
She lifted the chain over her head.
The pendant hung at the end of its chain — small and warm and golden in the green dim light.
Her grandmother had given it to her on her thirteenth birthday with a kiss on the forehead and a quiet Wear it always, my child.
Wear it always. Poppy had worn it. Through girlhood and through grief and through every lonely year.
She had thought it was only her own warmth she felt reflected back.
She had been wrong about that her whole life.
She laid the pendant in the hollow of the altar.
It fit.
The way a hand fits a glove. The way a key fits a lock. The way a small lost thing fits the hollow that has been waiting for it for ten generations. The chain pooled around it. The stone seemed to settle.
She felt — in the place behind her sternum where the pull had lived — a small soft answering settle.
She stepped back to where Alsander stood at the threshold of the chamber. She turned to him and put both her hands flat on his bare chest and looked up into his face for what might be the last time.
"Do it," she said.
"Poppy."
"Do it now, my love. Before we lose our nerve."
"You are crying."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I am happy." She kissed him. Quick. Certain. Full. "I am content. Do it. "
He looked at her one beat longer. Searched her face. Didn’t, quite, find what he was looking for. She had buried it too deep. Niamh's singing came thin and small from beyond the falls. He didn’t have time to dig deeper.
He kissed her forehead and stepped back.
He stripped his shirt over his head and dropped it on the stone.
She moved to the wall. Pressed her back to the cold stone where the carvings were. She stayed there because the book had said the bearer must witness — and she was going to witness .
Alsander walked to the center of the chamber. He turned. He gave her one long last look she knew she would carry with her wherever she went next.
He let the dragon up out of him.
It was the cleanest shift she had ever seen him do.
The dragon rose up out of Alsander in a single smooth uncoiling and the chamber was suddenly full of him — his great black bulk filling the space, his head lowered, his wings half-spread and brushing the carved walls. He turned his great slitted golden eye on her once.
She lifted her chin to him.
" Do it, " she mouthed.
He turned to the altar.
He raised his right foreclaw.
It was the size of her ribcage. The black scales caught the dim green light and threw it back in flat hard glints.
He paused for one half-breath — the dragon's long head bent toward the pendant in its hollow — and she understood that the pause was him saying goodbye to his sister.
To the small last piece of Mairin that lived in the stone.
To the magic she had spent herself to make.
His claw came down.
It wasn’t loud.
The book had been right. The breaking was the breaking. There was no thunder. There was a single hard precise impact — the dragon's claw against the altar — and the altar cracked through its center with a sound like a held breath finally let go.
The pendant in the hollow shattered.
The chain went to dust.
The stone of the altar broke into three large pieces and a great deal of finer rubble, and where the dragon's claw had struck the stone, the stone was no longer stone.
It was sand.
It was the gray dust of something that had decided to stop being itself.
And then the chamber filled with light.
It came out of where the pendant had been.
Green. The green of every spring she had ever lived through. Of moss and leaf and new-cut grass and the deep dim green of the wood at noon in summer. It rose up out of the dust of the altar in a slow blooming sphere — and then it wasn’t a sphere at all.
It was sparks.
A thousand small bright points of green light hung in the air of the chamber as if gravity had forgotten they existed.
They moved. They drifted. They coalesced and re-scattered.
They made shapes that were almost shapes and were not.
The air smelled suddenly of green growing things and damp earth and something Poppy had never smelled before — something she understood, immediately and without any frame of reference at all, was her foremother.
Mairin.
The Lady.
The green of the world, present in this chamber for the first time in three hundred years.
Poppy made a small sound.
The dragon drew back. He was watching the lights. His wings had folded against his sides and his great head was still and his eyes had gone wide and almost soft, and Poppy understood that he was seeing his sister for the first time in three hundred years.
"Oh," she whispered. "Oh, Mairin. Hello."
The lights drifted toward her.
Not all of them. Some. A small bright cluster moved across the chamber in the slow purposeful way of something deciding , and they came to rest in a small bright halo around her head, and she felt them touch her hair.
They were warm.
They were gentle .
Her foremother — who had been waiting three hundred years to leave — was saying hello before she went.
"Thank you," Poppy whispered. She didn’t know what she was thanking the lights for. For everything. "Thank you. Go gently. "
And then the cold came.
The drip of water from the seam in the stone didn’t stop this time. There was no warning.
The cold simply came up out of the broken altar like steam off a pond at first light. The green sparks bent away from it. The chamber filled with a second light that wasn’t light at all but its absence —
And suddenly Laoch stood at the back of the chamber where the seam had been.
Not a shadow this time. Not a half-formed thing. He was as much himself as he could be — a tall dark figure in the shape of a man, eyes that were not eyes — and he looked first at the broken altar and then at the dragon and then at the green sparks and at last at Poppy.
His not-face seemed almost relieved .