Page 56 of Dragon Cursed
He translated, slowly, line by line:
"The daughter who walks back into the wood shall do the work the Lady could not finish.Her love shall be the dragon's salvation.The cost of the work is heavy, and I do not know its full shape.The telling we received is not complete.We have lost too much.The full of it is held elsewhere — in the books that are not ours, in the keeping of those who were here before us."
Poppy went still.
"Those who were here before us."
"Yes."
"Meaning —"
"She means the elves."Alsander's voice was flat."TheAos Sí.The folk who were in this country before the human village had a name."
"Oh."
"Yes," he continued, more gently."They exist.They are not gone.They areelsewhere.They are not easy to find unless you know where to look.They have not come to me in two hundred years.But they exist,a chuisle.Your great-grandmother knew the full of your line's story was held in their books, not in hers.Knowledge of the Secret Kingdoms, knowledge of the elves, is forbidden.Mairin gave your line magic and a knowledge of our kind that, by our laws, requires death."
Poppy had to put the book down.Had to put her hand flat on the table to steady herself.
Her head swam with dizziness.She didn’t know if it was the news of the elves, the slow weight of Saoirse's account settling on her, or only the long night she hadn’t yet slept through.On shaky legs, she pushed her chair back and walked to the hearth to throw another log on the fire because she didn’t know what else to do with her body.
She stood at the hearth with her back to him.
When she felt steadier, she turned around.
Alsander was sitting where she had left him, half-turned in the chair to watch her.His elbow rested on the back of the chair.His head tilted.
The fire in the fireplace had burned low.The flames painted him in the same warm gold she had seen across his lair last night, when he had moved over her, into her, with the long, held attention of a man who had no intention of finishing soon.
Her body remembered.
It came up in her without warning.The bed of furs.The weight of him.The rough, urgent first time before she knew his name.The slow careful inevitability of him in the lair, when she had.
She really was in love with a dragon man, she mused.She’d started to fall for him that first day.Completely, irrevocably in love with him.He was her choice.Not because of the pendant.Not because she was a descendent of the chosen girl.She didn’t love him because it was her fate.She loved him because of who he was, man and dragon.All the little things.With a small smile, she returned to him and squeezed his hand.
He squeezed back.“Are you well?”
"Keep reading," she urged.
They read the rest of Saoirse's book.The later pages were thinner, less certain — like a woman who had run out of things to write but couldn’t bear to stop writing.She wrote prayers.She wrote the names of her daughters.She wrote a small note, in a smaller hand, that said only:
Forgive me, child.Whichever of you finds this.Forgive me.We did our best with what was given.
Poppy wept a little over that.
Alsander folded the book closed and waited for her tears to dry.He didn’t tell her to stop, didn’t tell her she was being silly.She fell a little harder.
They went through the rest.The letters tied in pink ribbon were her grandmother's correspondence with a sister in Cork — gentle and ordinary and full of nothing at all.
Then she pulled the velvet pouch toward her and tipped the small iron key out into her palm.
The key for the small chest within the chest.
It was warm.
"My grandmother, Caitlín, gave me this on the last evening of her life."Her voice had gone steady."She said I could use it or do as she had, and pass it down the line, and that I would know which one when the time was right.It was such an odd thing to say.Now I understand."
Alsander didn’t speak.He only watched her.
