Page 94 of Dragon Cursed
It threaded through every cell of her body.It wove into her bones.Into the marrow.Into the blood.
He didn’t stop.
He couldn’t stop.
He understood, with a flat clear certainty he hadn’t had in three hundred years, that he was going to give hereverything.The way he had tried to give Mairin everything on the floor of this same chamber three hundred years ago.The way he had reached for his sister and failed and stayed and bled into the roots of her wood every season since, because he hadn’t known how to stop reaching.
He was going to give Poppy his fire and his magic and the long centuries of his life.All of it.This would not be a sharing.
He was going to die so she would live.
The dragon roared its agreement.
The dragondemandedit.
And then —
Stop.
The voice wasn’t in the chamber.
The voice wasn’t in his head.
The voice wasinside the fire.
The fire stopped flowing.
Alsander felt it — the way a man feels a hand laid on his arm to halt him, gentle and absolute — and the long bright stream of dragonfire pouring out of his jaws checked, slowed,held, as if a larger hand had cupped itself around the flame and would not let it go further.
Stop, brother.
The voice was Mairin's.
It was Mairin's voice and it wasn’t — it was something older underneath Mairin's voice, something that had been pouring through Mairin's voice for ten thousand years before Mairin was born.Banríon na Síol.The Lady.The green of the world.
The voice was both of them.
The voice was speaking out of the chamber.
Stop, brother.You will not do it again.
Alsander made a great wounded sound that the dragon's throat could only half-shape into language.
She is dying —
She is not dying.We have her.Stop.
I have to —
You did this for me, brother.Three hundred years ago.You poured everything you had onto the floor of this chamber and the dark used what you gave to bind you.You did not save me.You will not save her this way.You will keep her by living, dragon.By living.We will not lose another keeper to your love.
The fire in his throat held.
The dragon — wild, snarling,desperate— couldn’t push past what the voice had done to it.The fire wasn’t his to spend now.The fire belonged to the woman in his arms, and the rest of him belonged tohimself, and the voice would not let him give it.
You did enough,the voice said.Softer now.You have done enough, brother.Three centuries.Every drop of blood you bled into our wood.You have already paid.You will not pay again.
Mairin —
