Page 86 of Dragon Cursed
She would not waste any of the hours she had left.
She held the man she loved against her chest in a guest bedroom of her aunt's house, and she watched his face by lamplight, and she made herself memorize him — every line of his jaw, the soft fall of his black hair across her collarbone, the slow rise and fall of the powerful chest that had borne her up through so much — for the small handful of hours she had left to remember him in.
She had tasted dragonfire.
She was bound to aDraquonirfor as long as she drew breath.
She had loved him with her whole body and her whole soul, and she had given him every word she could find before she ran out of words.
Tomorrow, she would give him her life.
She closed her eyes against the wet on her cheeks.She kissed his hair where it fell across her throat.She held him.
The lamp burned down and out.
In the dark, she stayed awake.
19
The water of the falls was the same.
That was the first thing she noticed.
Everything else in her life had bent in two weeks.The whole shape of the world had changed.The water still came down in the same slim white braid she had seen the first time.The air still smelled of cold stone.The mist still rose off the black pool.
The place was waiting.
Behind her, on the moss at the edge of the clearing, Niamh was singing.
A small thread of sound the falls almost swallowed.Niamh had begun the moment they stopped the car at the head of the path.She had walked behind them at her own slow pace — stick in one hand, a small bundle of green branches in the other — and when they reached the clearing she had taken up position at the foot of the oldest oak.The song was old.Older than old.Now and then she would stop, pat the bark of the oak with her free hand, and say something soft and conversational.
The oak listened.
Niamh had been clear about her job.
"I am here in case anything goes wrong," she had said on the drive out from Dublin.Stick across her lap.Voice flat."I am here to sanctify the ground.I am here to keep what shouldn’t be in the wood out of the wood.I amnothere to interfere.Whatever happens at the altar happens at the altar.Do you understand me, both of you?"
They both nodded in understanding.
Alsander hadn’t asked why Niamh had insisted on being there.Poppy hadn’t told him.Niamh had caught Poppy's eye in the rearview mirror once at a roundabout outside Athlone, and they hadn’t needed to say anything because they both already knew everything.
Now Poppy stood at the mouth of the path that led behind the falls.
Niamh sang at her back.Alsander stood beside her.The canvas bag was over her shoulder.The pendant lay against her sternum where it had lain for as long as she could remember — warm, always warm now,awarenow — and she put her hand to it through her shirt and held it there.
"Ready?"Alsander said quietly.
"Ready."
"You do not have to lead."
"I do, my love.The book was clear.The bearer carries it in.The bearer places it."
He nodded once.He took her hand.He hadn’t let go of it since they got out of the car.
They walked together along the slick narrow path around the pool.Her hand in his.Her boots quiet on the wet stone.As they passed under the curtain of falling water, the world went quiet — the way it had gone quiet the first time — and the small chamber of the shrine opened in front of her in the green dim light.
It was the same.
