Page 53 of Dragon Cursed
"And this?"
He pointed at the small dark chest at the bottom of the larger one.The one with the iron bands and the lock she hadn’t used.The key for it sat in the small velvet pouch she had taken out of the chest first and laid on the table and not yet opened.
"I don't know," she said honestly."My grandmother gave me the key on the last evening of her life.She said I wouldknowwhen the time was right."
"Tonight?"
"I don't know.Let’s start with what I can read.We work our way down.If we get to that and still have nothing, I will open it."
"Fair."
They began.
She gave him the journal first.Watched him take it in his big hands and open it with the careful reverence of a man who had kept and treasured his own.Watched his face as he read her grandmother's handwriting.
He read fast.
Faster than she had expected.
She had thought — she didn’t know what she had thought.She’d seen his books.They were in old languages.Surely her grandmother's casual modern Irish-inflected English would be a chore.
She took the recipe ledger.Read the small marginal notes about which moon to harvest under, which neighbor had which complaint.She had read all of this before.She read it again.Found nothing she hadn’t found before.
After an hour, he set the journal down.
"Nothing?"
"Your grandmother was a good woman," he said."She loved you very much.She knew enough to know there was a thing she didn’t know.She wrote of waiting for it.She wrote of the prophecy.She didn’t write ofhim.She didn’t write of the line.She didn’t write of what your blood is."
"She didn’t know."
"She didn’t know," he agreed."Or she knew and wouldn’t write it."
They moved on.
He took her mother's herbal.She took the bound stack of letters tied with the pink ribbon.They read the letters together.The fire burned.The morning lengthened.
She made more tea.
They ate cookies.
He ate four cookies in a row without seeming to notice and then looked at his own hand in surprise as if he hadn’t known it could still want a thing as simple as a buttery yellow cookie.She didn’t point it out.She didn’t want to make him self-conscious.She wanted him to keep eating cookies.
Around noon, he picked up the small leather book at the bottom of the kitchen stack.
It was the oldest book in her cottage.Perhaps older than her grandmother had said it was.The leather was cracked and dark, the edges of the pages soft and brittle with age.She had always assumed it was a book of prayers.She had never opened it.There had been no reason.
The script on the outside was old Gaelic.The long-tailed letters of a hand that had been dead two hundred years before her grandmother had been born.Poppy couldn’t read it.She only knew three words of old Irish from her grandmother's lullabies and nothing more.
Alsander opened it.
She watched him, a little breathless.Perhaps he would be able to decipher the old script.
He bent over the page.His finger moved along the line of script.His lips moved a little as he read.His face didn’t change.
"You can read that."
"Yes."
