Chapter 20
T he silence in the chamber was the most terrifying sound Alsander had ever known.
A profound, absolute silence. A void where the beat of her heart should have been.
He held her — his Poppy, his light, his entire world — cradled in his arms. Her body was limp and cold. Her skin was already taking on the waxy pallor of death. The curse had taken her. It had taken her and left him with nothing but a crushing, soul-destroying emptiness.
A roar tore from his throat.
A sound of such pure, unadulterated agony that the very stone of the chamber shuddered. The water of the falls outside trembled with it. The carvings on the walls trembled with it. He had failed. He had watched her sacrifice herself. He had let her die.
He was alone.
Truly. Finally. Forever alone.
But in the heart of the despair —
A different instinct.
Ancient. Primal. Terrifying .
The dragon.
It had been caged. Suppressed. Held back by the curse and by his own fear of its power. Now it was free. It surged through him in a tidal wave of raw, untamed magic, fueled by a grief so vast it could crack the earth.
She is ours, the dragon roared. We will not let her go. We will not let her go, do you hear me, give her my fire, give her every drop of fire I have ever held, GIVE HER EVERYTHING —
The change wasn’t a choice.
It was a necessity.
It was agony and ecstasy. A violent tearing and remaking of his very being. Bones snapped and reformed. Skin split and hardened into scales. His vision exploded into a world of heat and energy. He was no longer Alsander, the broken man.
He was a dragon.
A creature of fire and storm.
His only purpose was the cold still woman on the stone.
He lowered his massive head. His emerald eyes — blazing now with inner fire — fixed on her pale face. He could feel the last flicker of her life. A tiny guttering spark in vast darkness.
I will not let it go out.
He opened his jaws.
A torrent of dragonfire — not of destruction but of pure, life-giving magic — poured forth.
It wasn’t a burning.
It was a baptism .
The fire — brilliant, shimmering gold — flowed over her, sinking into her skin, into her flesh, into her very bones. A heat that was both scorching and gentle. A pleasure so intense it was almost pain.
He poured.
He poured everything. His own life force. His ancient magic. His very soul. He chased the shadows of death from the small chamber of her chest, breathing life back into her heart, and he felt the moment it caught — the tiny spark in her chest flaring back to life, fed by his fire.
He felt the dark taint of Laoch recoil from the purity of his flame and shatter, dissolving into nothingness. The shrine was cleansed. The curse was broken .
He didn’t stop.
He poured more fire into her. He marked her. Claimed her. Bound her to him on a level that transcended flesh and bone. This was the ancient way. The true mating. She is mine. Forever. There is no breaking it.
The fire-binding from the night before had taken deep.
It took even deeper now.
It threaded through every cell of her body. It wove into her bones. Into the marrow. Into the blood.
He didn’t stop.
He couldn’t stop.
He understood, with a flat clear certainty he hadn’t had in three hundred years, that he was going to give her everything .
The way he had tried to give Mairin everything on the floor of this same chamber three hundred years ago.
The way he had reached for his sister and failed and stayed and bled into the roots of her wood every season since, because he hadn’t known how to stop reaching.
He was going to give Poppy his fire and his magic and the long centuries of his life. All of it. This would not be a sharing.
He was going to die so she would live.
The dragon roared its agreement.
The dragon demanded it.
And then —
Stop.
The voice wasn’t in the chamber.
The voice wasn’t in his head.
The voice was inside the fire .
The fire stopped flowing.
Alsander felt it — the way a man feels a hand laid on his arm to halt him, gentle and absolute — and the long bright stream of dragonfire pouring out of his jaws checked, slowed, held , as if a larger hand had cupped itself around the flame and would not let it go further.
Stop, brother.
The voice was Mairin's.
It was Mairin's voice and it wasn’t — it was something older underneath Mairin's voice, something that had been pouring through Mairin's voice for ten thousand years before Mairin was born. Banríon na Síol. The Lady. The green of the world.
The voice was both of them.
The voice was speaking out of the chamber.
Stop, brother. You will not do it again.
Alsander made a great wounded sound that the dragon's throat could only half-shape into language.
She is dying —
She is not dying. We have her. Stop.
I have to —
You did this for me, brother. Three hundred years ago.
You poured everything you had onto the floor of this chamber and the dark used what you gave to bind you.
You did not save me. You will not save her this way.
You will keep her by living, dragon. By living.
We will not lose another keeper to your love.
The fire in his throat held.
The dragon — wild, snarling, desperate — couldn’t push past what the voice had done to it. The fire wasn’t his to spend now. The fire belonged to the woman in his arms, and the rest of him belonged to himself , and the voice would not let him give it.
You did enough, the voice said. Softer now. You have done enough, brother. Three centuries. Every drop of blood you bled into our wood. You have already paid. You will not pay again.
Mairin —
Brother.
Mairin, I am sorry —
I know. I forgive you. I forgave you long before you knew you needed it. Stop.
The dragon shuddered.
The dragon held the fire.
And Mairin — what was left of her, the small bright last piece of his sister that had been pouring back through the air of the shrine since the breaking — moved.
It moved through him. Past him. Into Poppy.
He felt it pass.
The bright last fragment of his sister flowed past his throat where the fire had stopped, slipped into the column of light he had been pouring into Poppy's body, and went deeper .
It went past where his fire had reached.
It went into the place behind Poppy's sternum where the pendant had lived.
It went into the line in her blood that had been built to hold this exact gift.
It settled.
A second fire took root inside the first.
A green fire. Quiet. Alive. Nothing like the gold of his dragon-fire and everything like the green of the lights that had risen out of the broken pendant. The line in Poppy's blood — which had been waiting ten generations — opened to it. Drank it down. Made room.
The magic Mairin had spent on Caoimhe was coming home.
The pendant was gone but the magic wasn’t.
The magic now lived in Poppy .
And then —
Alsander felt it.
The dragon felt it.
The sense that lived in the deep place under his ribs, the sense that knew his mate by scent , knew her bond , knew the exact specific frequency of the heart he had been pouring his fire into for the last long minute — that sense suddenly registered something it hadn’t registered before.
A second heartbeat.
Small.
Steady.
New.
It was inside her. It was inside Poppy's body, just under the place his fire had pooled, and it had been there the whole time. It had been there since the night in the moss two weeks ago when he hadn’t stopped to think.
It had been there in the lair. On the back of his dragon-form in the Atlantic dawn.
In the brass bed in Dublin where he had bound her in fire and the binding had taken deeper than it should have because there had been two of them to bind.
Two of them.
His mate and —
Oh.
Oh, no. Oh, gods.
The dragon made a sound that wasn’t a sound. Not a roar this time. Something smaller. Something that lived underneath the roar — wonder , raw and shaking, the wonder of a creature who hadn’t had anything to be tender with in three hundred years and had just been handed the impossibility of two .
He didn’t have time to feel it properly.
He set it aside. He set it aside the way a soldier sets aside a wound he will treat after the battle, because the battle wasn’t over yet and Poppy wasn’t yet back , and the dragon turned its great head and poured the last of the fire it was permitted to pour into the two heartbeats that lived in his mate's body.
He bound them both.
He bound them as one and he bound them as two because this wasn’t sacrifice — this was gift , given by a creature with three centuries of fire to spare and finally, at last, somewhere worth spending it.
The chamber went still.
The fire in his throat banked.
The green light at the center of the chamber — the dance of green and dark, balanced now and turning easily — softened to a low warm glow.
Mairin's voice, going as she went:
Be good to them, brother. Both of them. Live a long human life with your dragon's heart. We will see you on the other side, all of us. We will be waiting.
Mairin —
Goodbye, Alsander. Be happy. Live.
The voice went.
The last piece of his sister lifted away from the chamber it had been bound to for three centuries, and the chamber filled briefly with the scent of wildflowers — the kind she had braided into his dragon-form's mane when she was a girl — and then the smell was gone, and the green of the dance was gone, and the dark of Laoch was gone, and the chamber was only stone and water and Poppy.
Alsander shifted back.
The change was just as violent. Just as desperate. He was human again, naked and kneeling on the stone floor, gasping for air.
And she was alive.
Her chest was rising and falling. Steady. Slow. The pallor was gone from her skin. Her hand on his chest was warm again — warm , the way she had always been warm against him — and her eyelashes were fluttering against her cheek the way they fluttered when she was about to wake.
Her eyes opened.
They were changed.