Page 50 of Dragon Cursed
His gaze caught on the jar of honey.On the bunch of dried sage hanging from the rafter beam.On the cracked teacup on the drainboard.
"Mortals live here.You live here," he said.
"I do."
"I didn’t —" he stopped — "I did not understand.Until now.”
"It is small."
"It is ahome."
She looked at him in her kitchen in the gray morning light, and her chest hurt for a reason she couldn’t at first identify.
Then she did.
He’d never had a home.Not in the way a home was a kitchen with a kettle and a jar of honey and a cracked cup that had belonged to a grandmother.
"Sit," she said.Her voice came out thicker than she meant."Sit, Alsander.Let me put the kettle on."
He sat at her kitchen table on the chair her grandfather had built before Poppy was born, and he laid his hands flat on the worn wood, and he watched her move around the kitchen as if he were memorizing every step she took.
She lit the stove.Filled the kettle from the pump.Pulled down two mugs from the shelf — the cracked teacup for herself, the larger plain mug for him because his hands were too big for the cup and she didn’t yet trust him with it.Measured leaves into the pot.The small ordinary motions of her own kitchen steadied her in a way nothing else could have.
She set the mug in front of him.He wrapped his hands around it.
"Milk?"she asked."Honey?"
"Honey."
"You remember honey."
"I remember honey."His mouth tried to smile."I wasn’t always a man in a stone room,a chuisle.”
In the space it took to blink, Alsander’s demeanor changed.He was on full alert.“Poppy, two mortals, a human woman and a small child, are approaching.”
She froze with the honey jar in her hand.
He was already rising.
His shoulders had gone tight.The brooding watchfulness that had stood at her back through the forest had snapped back into him in the space of half a breath.His eyes had narrowed to the focused, hard green of a creature deciding whether the thing on the path was a threat.
She cocked her head.Listened as the gate creaked.
Her ear had been tuned to that gate her whole life.Two pairs of footsteps on the path — one heavy, one light — and the small bright voice of a child saying something she couldn’t catch through the door.
"It's Briíd," she whispered."From the village.With her son.He was sick.I gave him a tincture three days ago.They must be coming to thank me."
"She cannot see me."
"I know."
"I cannot be seen inside this cottage if a stranger is at your door, Poppy.I don’t know what you would tell her.I don’t want you to have to tell her anything."
"I know."
He looked around her kitchen for half a second.Set the mug down.Moved — and even now, three hundred years after the last battle his body remembered, he moved like awarrior, a soldier— for the back of the cottage.The small door behind the curtain that led out to the garden.
He paused at the curtain.
