Chapter 35: 35 - What’s Under
Adrien lowered himself into the chair and went at it without any warm-up.
"Do you know what’s inside me?"
Vael’s eyebrows went up, and he looked briefly like a man who had prepared a much longer speech and had to throw it away.
"I do. I helped your father put it there."
"You what?"
"Your father and I were close. He helped me when I needed it and I helped him when he needed it, and this was one more of those." Vael pulled out the chair opposite and dropped into it. "Although I’ll be honest with you. Neither of us really thought it would work."
Adrien turned that over and got nowhere pleasant with it.
"Take your shirt off, would you? I’d like to see it properly."
Adrien did, because he wanted answers a good deal more than he wanted his dignity, and the old elf looked like a man who had some. Vael came round the desk and studied the scar without touching it, and Adrien watched the man’s face change halfway through.
"You’ve met a dragon."
"Yes."
"You have a dragon’s mark on you." Vael straightened up. "That isn’t good."
"That’s funny, because the one who put it there told me it stops anything else from noticing what I’m carrying."
"Now that you say it, that’s exactly what it’s doing." Vael frowned at the scar again. "I didn’t feel a thing on you until you walked through that door. Which is impressive, and it means whoever did it wasn’t angry about what we did to you, or you’d already be dead." He looked up. "Can you give me a name?"
"Tess. Tessaly, if we’re being formal."
Vael’s whole posture changed for about a second.
"Tessaly."
"You know her?"
"I haven’t heard that name in a long time." He came back to the chair and sat down heavily. "You’ll be fine for now. You were extremely lucky it was her and not somebody else. Almost anyone else in that family would have killed you for what you’re carrying and considered it a courtesy."
Adrien pulled his shirt back on.
"I’ve got a lot of questions."
"I’d be worried if you didn’t."
"How does a human end up with a dragon’s heart in his chest? And whose was it?" Adrien watched him carefully. "Tess wouldn’t tell me that part."
Vael was quiet for a moment.
"That’s going to be easier to show you than explain. Follow me."
He went over to the desk, reached under the far edge of it and pressed something, and a section of the floor near the wall came away and folded down into a stairwell that had absolutely no business being in a house at the top of a tree.
Vael started down it and glanced back over his shoulder.
"Are you coming, or are you going to stand there?"
They went down for a long time. Adrien lost count of the turns after the first hundred steps, and the air changed twice on the way, and at some point he understood that they were no longer inside the tree at all. They were under it. Under the roots, under the roads, under the whole of Elyndor and everybody walking around in it.
The stairwell opened out, and Absolute Mana Sense hit him before his eyes had adjusted, and what it gave back was the same shape he had felt from Tess, older and colder and going nowhere.
There was a dragon down there. It filled the chamber from one wall to the other, dead and preserved and enormous, with its head resting on the stone and its wings folded down along its sides. Nothing about it had rotted. It looked like something asleep that had been asleep a long time.
Adrien stopped walking without having decided to.
"That one," Vael said. "That’s whose heart you have."
Adrien did not say anything at all.
"He was a good friend of mine, and your father knew him too. The three of us had a great many years between us." Vael walked over and put a hand flat against the dark hide the way a man pats a horse. "He was running out of time. And there you were, and he decided the thing should go to you rather than into the ground with the rest of him. So your father and I tried it."
"And it worked."
"Evidently."
Adrien looked up at the head resting on the floor.
"What did he die of?"
Vael’s hand stopped moving on the hide.
"That is a long story and this is a cold room."
’And that’s a no.’
"Can I ask you something else?" Vael turned round. "What physique did you wake? A human one, or one of theirs?"
"Dragonic Physique."
Vael let out a breath and gave the corpse two small taps with the flat of his hand.
"He was right, then." There was something almost fond in it. "He told us it might happen. Neither of us believed him, and I don’t think anybody in the world has done this before." He looked back at Adrien. "I was going to try something like the mark that girl put on you, before you tell me anything else. It seems I won’t have to, and hers is stronger than mine would have been in any case."
Adrien stood there and let all of it arrive.
’So it wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t an experiment on a sick baby, and it wasn’t something done to me. It was given.’
’That’s better than what I’d been assuming for two weeks. It’s also the smallest of the questions I came here with.’
"Do you know why my father died?"
Vael did not hesitate over that one, which somehow made it worse.
"I have no idea, boy. He didn’t tell anybody anything."
"Nothing at all?"
"He told me to stay out of it, and he told me why, and the why was you and your mother and your sister. That was the whole of it." Vael’s mouth went flat. "I asked him four times. And every time he gave me the same answer, and the fourth time he stopped answering the door."
"Was it this?" Adrien tapped his own chest. "Did somebody find out what he’d done? Is that why he was killed?"
The old elf looked at him for a long moment.
"You’ll have to ask someone else about that."
"So you don’t know."
"I’m saying I don’t know. And I’m saying I’ve spent the last month and a half wondering the exact same thing." Vael turned toward the stairs. "Come on. We should head back up. My granddaughter will be wondering where we’ve gone."
’And there it is.’
Adrien followed him out of the dark and worked at it the whole way.
’He answered the questions about the heart straight away. No hedging, no half-truths. He even brought me down here to prove it. So that’s not what he’s hiding.’
’The dead dragon, he wouldn’t touch. My father, he couldn’t answer. Those aren’t the same kind of refusal.’
’One of them he doesn’t want to tell me. The other he genuinely doesn’t know, and it’s eating at him.’
’I’ve no idea which is which yet.’
Vael stopped four steps from the top and spoke without turning around.
"One more thing. About the mark on your chest."
"Go on."
"She did you an enormous favour. I won’t deny that." Vael put his hand on the door. "But don’t mistake that for a reason to trust her. She isn’t human, Adrien. Whatever she looked like when you met her, remember that. Dragons rarely do things for the reasons you’d expect."
He pushed the panel open before Adrien could answer. The floor folded itself back into place behind them, leaving nothing in the study to suggest anything had ever been underneath it.
Amelia was standing in the middle of the room with a tray in her hands and a look on her face.
"Where did you two go?"
"Talking," Vael said.
"You’ve been gone for twenty minutes."
"Then you’ve had twenty peaceful minutes without me. You’re welcome." He took a cup from the tray as though that settled everything. "Where’s the other one?"
Amelia stared at him.
"There is no other one, Grandfather. You asked me to bring Adrien a drink."
Vael looked down at the cup already in his hand.
"Hm."
Amelia’s eyes moved to Adrien.
"Where were you?"
Adrien had watched the old man do it once and saw no reason to invent anything better.
"Talking," he said.
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