Page 65 of Dragon Cursed
The dragon didn’t seem the least concerned, but the smoke stopped.
A lorry passed them on the right.
A lorry the size of a small ship.Painted bright orange.The side covered in writing he could read but didn’t understand — something about logistics.The lorry passed them at a speed that suggested its driver had places to be.The wash of air it threw off rocked Margery on her axles.
Alsander made a sound that wasn’t a word.
"That," Poppy said serenely, "was a lorry."
"I dislike it."
"You'll get used to them."
"I will not."
It was, despite everything, a beautiful drive.
He told himself, for the first fifty kilometers, that he was going to die.He gripped the dashboard.He made small involuntary noises every time a vehicle whizzed by.
But somewhere between the first hour and the second, the sheer accumulation ofnot-having-diedbegan to wear down his certainty that he was about to.His hands relaxed on the dashboard.
He began, by degrees, to look out the window.
Ireland had changed.
It had changed so much he could barely take it in.Field after field.Hedge after hedge.The occasional brilliant strip of yellow rapeseed flowering out into the sun.There were houses where there hadn’t been houses.Towns where there had been hamlets.Vast green signs on tall metal poles announcing the names of places he half-remembered — places that had been a single church and a single inn the last time he had walked past them, places that were now dense with rooflines and streetlights and the larger blunt rectangles of buildings whose function he couldn’t name.
"What," he asked at one point, "is that?The tall thing.With the rotating arms."
"Wind turbine."
"What does it do?"
"Makes electricity.From the wind."
"You are making electricity.From the wind."
"We are."
"For what."
"For everything."
He turned in the seat to look at it as they passed.
"Oh," he said softly.
"What?"
"I didn’t realize much I had missed."
She glanced at him.Her hand left the wheel for a moment to reach across and squeeze his fingers.
Sympathy — she didn’t say it aloud, but he heard it in the squeeze.She put her hand back on the wheel.
"We'll see a lot more," she said gently.
"Yes."
