Chapter 19 #2
His voice was different now. Soft. "Thank you."
She hadn’t, in any of her imagining of this moment, expected gratitude.
"Thank you." Laoch said it again. "Oh, little daughter, thank you . I have been waiting so long. I didn’t think one of you would come."
The dragon snarled.
The dragon's great body shifted, putting itself between Poppy and Laoch. The lights that had been around her head rose and scattered and re-formed in front of her in a thicker, brighter cluster. Laoch raised what would have been his hands and shook what would have been his head.
"No," he said. "No, dragon, no . You do not understand. I have not come to take her. The breaking is happening. The breaking is the breaking. I have come because I have been called. "
Laoch turned.
The whole of him turned, slowly, until he faced the green lights at the center of the chamber.
The green lights had drawn together into a denser cloud that had begun, very slowly, to spin .
Laoch stepped forward. He lifted his arms. The dark of him peeled away from him in long ribbons, and the ribbons rose and joined the spin around the green —
And the chamber filled with the slow grand music of two opposing things finally being allowed to meet.
It was beautiful.
Poppy hadn’t expected that. She had expected horror. The dark and the green didn’t fight. They wove . Lifted and lowered around one another in a slow elegant spiral, and where they touched, they didn’t annihilate — they balanced, they completed.
The green needed the dark to be green.
The dark needed the green to be dark.
They had been waiting three hundred years to do this.
A small laugh came up out of her. She pressed her hand to her mouth.
The cycle wasn’t war between the dark and the green.
The cycle was their dance . Mairin had stopped the dance because she had loved the green too much to let the dark have it.
Laoch had stopped the dance because he had loved the dark too much to let the green hold.
Both had been right about half of it.
Both had been wrong about the other half.
The dance was always the answer.
And then she saw it.
The cluster of green at the heart of the spiral had been bright and thick.
Now it was bright and thin .
The green was holding the shape of the spiral but the shape was wider than the green was full. Where the dark was rich and dense, the green was beginning to look like a thing being asked to stretch farther than it had been built to stretch.
The dance kept turning.
The dance was beautiful.
But she could see — as a person could see a candle running low — that the green didn’t have enough of itself to keep the balance turning.
"Oh." Her voice was small. "Oh, no . You don't have enough."
The green sparks closest to her — the small bright halo that had touched her hair — paused.
They turned in the air.
They came toward her.
Not in a rush. The way an old friend comes.
The way a child reaches for a parent. The way a hand finds a hand in the dark.
They came toward the place behind her sternum where the pull had always lived.
They came toward the line in her blood that had been put there ten generations ago by the woman whose lights they were.
She understood.
She didn’t run. She didn’t scream. She didn’t call out to him. She held very still. She lifted her hand from her side and she opened her palm. She turned her hand to face the green — the way a person turns their hand to receive a gift.
"Come on," she whispered. "Come on then, my dears. Come and finish. "
They came.
It wasn’t painful.
That was the strange thing. She had been afraid it would be painful. She had imagined, in the long sleepless hours of last night, that the giving would be a tearing — that the line in her blood would resist, that her body would fight what was being asked of it.
None of that happened.
The line in her blood had been waiting for this since the day she was born.
The line in her blood recognized the green coming toward it and went, gladly , to meet it.
She felt the warmth of her own self lift and pour out of her open palm in a slow bright stream.
She felt the green at the center of the chamber take that warmth and use it — and the dance brightened, and the spiral steadied, and the balance, the balance she had thought was failing, began to turn full and rich and even.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, yes . Yes, that's it."
She felt herself, distantly, beginning to leave.
She felt it the way one might feel sleep beginning.
The slow soft narrowing of attention to the small specific thing in front of her.
The chamber was very bright. The chamber was very full.
The dance was working. The dance was healing the wound at the heart of the wood — she could feel the wound knitting somewhere out beyond the falls, somewhere out in the green miles of trees that had been bound for three centuries — and the magic in her hand was the price.
The price was being paid.
She held her hand open.
She glanced at the dragon.
The dragon was watching her.
The dragon's great golden eye had moved to her, and the dragon had seen her, and the dragon had seen the green stream pouring out of her open palm, and somewhere inside the great black shape of him she felt Alsander begin, very slowly, to understand .
"It is fine," she said softly. She didn’t know if he could hear her over the dance. She said it anyway. "It is fine, my love. It was always going to be this. It was always going to be this."
The green poured.
Her hand was steady.
She couldn’t feel her fingers anymore.
She didn’t look at her hand. She looked at him .
"I love you." Her voice was a whisper now. "I love you. It's all right. It's all right."
Her knees folded slowly.
She had time to be surprised by it — the way a person is surprised by their own body deciding to lie down. The cold stone wall slid up against her back, then her shoulders, then her cheek. She was on the floor of the shrine somehow.
The green was still pouring.
The green was pouring out of her open palm and into the dance at the heart of the chamber, and the dance was bright and steady and good. She watched it from where she lay on the cold stone.
The carvings on the wall above her were close now. She could see the chisel marks. The figure of the Lady leaned down toward her —
And the figure of the Lady was smiling .
Hello, child , the figure said without saying. Welcome. Well done.
"Oh," Poppy whispered. " Oh. Hello."
And then the dragon wasn’t the dragon anymore.
Alsander came down beside her in the shape of the man — naked, on his knees — and his arms went under her shoulders and under her knees and he lifted her and pulled her up against the bare warm wall of his chest. His face was wet.
He was speaking.
His lips were moving but the words were coming from a great way off, and she thought she should answer him but she couldn’t quite remember what answering was .
She could feel his heartbeat against her ear.
That was the most important thing.
His heartbeat was steady.
His heartbeat was steady because the curse was leaving him — the dance was working, the rot was unwinding — and somewhere out beyond the falls, Mairin was lifting away from a wood she had loved too long, and Laoch was unbinding from a wound he had made, and the cycle was turning again, and her hand had stopped pouring because her hand had given everything in it.
" Poppy. " The word reached her this time. The word reached her clearly. "Poppy. Look at me. Poppy, what have you — "
He stopped.
She watched, from the long quiet distance she was beginning to fall into, his face change.
She watched him fully understand.
She watched the moment the dragon at the back of his mind connected the green leaving her hand to the warmth leaving her body to the slow soft narrowing of the woman in his arms, and she watched him do the math in real time — the math she and Niamh had done last night by the lamp, the math the prophecy had said in plain words —
She watched his face break .
"What have you done?" His voice was a whisper. " What have you done? "
She tried to say I love you .
She tried to tell him she wasn't afraid.
None of the words made it to her mouth. She managed his name.
She managed only his name — very small, the way a child says a name when they are falling asleep — and her hand on his chest had gone still, and the chamber around them was bright with the dance of the green and the dark in slow steady balance, and Niamh's voice came thin and far away from beyond the curtain of the falls, still singing, still singing the old song to the wood.
"Alsander," Poppy whispered.
"What have you done, my love." His voice was breaking. "What have you done."
She closed her eyes against the warm column of his throat. She felt his pulse under her cheek. The dance kept turning.
His arms tightened around her until she couldn’t have escaped them if she had tried.
"Poppy."
"Mm."
"Poppy, no ."
"It's all right —"
" No. No, you do not — Poppy, open your eyes — "
She tried.
She got them open partway. She saw his face. Wet. Wrecked . His green eyes burning the way they had burned in the lair the first night, the way they had burned in his Dublin bedroom, the way they had burned when he had said I will love you past the world ending .
"I love you," she breathed. " Mo chroí. "
It was the first time she had ever said the old word back to him.
It was the last thing she said.
Her head fell against his throat. Her hand on his chest slipped down to her side.
The dance at the center of the chamber turned full and rich and even, the green steady now, the dark steady now, the cycle restored — and at its edge, on the cold stone floor of his sister's shrine, Alsander knelt holding the body of his mate.
He made a sound. It was full of pain.
It tore up out of his chest from the same place the dragon lived.
It wasn’t a roar. It wasn’t a word. It was the sound a creature makes when the thing it has built its whole long life is taken from it , and the dragon and the man made the sound together, and the chamber rang with it, and the dance kept turning because the dance didn’t care, and somewhere beyond the falls Niamh's singing stopped.
He pressed his forehead to Poppy's.
Her skin was already cooling.
" Mo chroí. " His voice was ruined. "*Mo chroí, mo chuisle, mo bheatha — Poppy, no, no, you cannot, you cannot — *"
The dragon inside him was screaming .
Screaming and clawing at the inside of his ribs and demanding to take her back, demanding to give her his fire, demanding to pour every last shred of three centuries of dragon magic into the small still body in his arms. And Alsander — wrecked, broken open, naked on the cold stone of the shrine where his sister had died three hundred years ago — heard the dragon and didn’t fight it.
He drew breath to do the only thing he had left to do.