Page 90 of Dragon Cursed
Both had been right about half of it.
Both had been wrong about the other half.
The dance was always the answer.
And then she saw it.
The cluster of green at the heart of the spiral had been bright and thick.
Now it was bright andthin.
The green was holding the shape of the spiral but the shape was wider than the green was full.Where the dark was rich and dense, the green was beginning to look like a thing being asked to stretch farther than it had been built to stretch.
The dance kept turning.
The dance was beautiful.
But she could see — as a person could see a candle running low — that the green didn’t have enough of itself to keep the balance turning.
"Oh."Her voice was small."Oh,no.You don't have enough."
The green sparks closest to her — the small bright halo that had touched her hair — paused.
They turned in the air.
They came toward her.
Not in a rush.The way an old friend comes.The way a child reaches for a parent.The way a hand finds a hand in the dark.They came toward the place behind her sternum where the pull had always lived.They came toward the line in her blood that had been put there ten generations ago by the woman whose lights they were.
She understood.
She didn’t run.She didn’t scream.She didn’t call out to him.She held very still.She lifted her hand from her side and she opened her palm.She turned her hand to face the green — the way a person turns their hand to receive a gift.
"Come on," she whispered."Come on then, my dears.Come and finish."
They came.
It wasn’t painful.
That was the strange thing.She had been afraid it would be painful.She had imagined, in the long sleepless hours of last night, that the giving would be atearing— that the line in her blood would resist, that her body would fight what was being asked of it.
None of that happened.
The line in her blood had been waiting for this since the day she was born.The line in her blood recognized the green coming toward it and went,gladly, to meet it.She felt the warmth of her own self lift and pour out of her open palm in a slow bright stream.She felt the green at the center of the chamber take that warmth and use it — and the dance brightened, and the spiral steadied, and the balance, the balance she had thought was failing, began to turn full and rich and even.
"Oh," she said."Oh,yes.Yes, that's it."
She felt herself, distantly, beginning to leave.
She felt it the way one might feel sleep beginning.The slow soft narrowing of attention to the small specific thing in front of her.The chamber was very bright.The chamber was very full.The dance was working.The dance was healing the wound at the heart of the wood — she could feel the wound knitting somewhere out beyond the falls, somewhere out in the green miles of trees that had been bound for three centuries — and the magic in her hand was the price.
The price was being paid.
She held her hand open.
She glanced at the dragon.
The dragon was watching her.
