Ch.2 Dinner, Before the Dark - The Dragon's Wind: Prophecies in the Storm
CHAPTER TWO
Dinner, Before the Dark
Anya had dinner on the table and Lily already eating, the school play script folded open beside her plate with the aggressive casualness of someone who very much wanted to be asked about it.
"You're here," Lily said, without looking up. She was twelve, and had recently mastered withholding enthusiasm as a form of currency.
"I'm here." He washed his hands and sat in his usual chair — the one with the slightly uneven leg he'd been meaning to fix for three years. The kitchen smelled like the lamb stew Anya made when she was worried about him. She believed in feeding things.
"Tell me about the play."
Lily looked up. "You actually want to know?"
"I have forty seconds before I fall face-first into that bowl."
She laughed — a short, involuntary sound she tried to convert into something more dignified — and launched into it. The school was staging an adaptation of a traditional Bulgarian folk cycle. Lily had been cast as the voice of the storm. Not a character exactly. A presence that moved through the scenes, speaking the transitions.
"The storm," Elian said.
"It's a good part. I don't have to memorize as much."
"It's a wonderful part," Anya said from the counter, in the tone that meant she'd already had this argument once today.
"Why the storm?" Elian asked.
Lily shrugged. "Ms. Petrov said I had the right kind of voice. She also said storms in Bulgarian folklore aren't bad things necessarily. Like they have intentions. They're not just weather."
Elian looked at his bowl. "Ms. Petrov is correct."
"So you DO know something about this."
"A little."
He ate, and Anya sat across from him, and for twenty minutes they talked about the play and about Lily's friend Mara, who always had catastrophically bad ideas, and the ancient bicycle in the hallway that Anya was going to ride to school once the weather improved — a claim she'd been making since March. There was a whole argument in there about the bike's tires, and Lily's dramatic opinion on the subject, and whether a bicycle pump counted as a household item or a Anya-specific item that Elian was not responsible for misplacing.
It was ordinary. That was what he would remember later — the complete ordinariness of it. The lamp that threw everything slightly yellow. Lily turning her script pages with flour-dusted fingers because she'd helped with dough that afternoon. He didn't try to hold onto it or name it. He just ate.
He helped with the dishes. Lily went upstairs. Anya poured them each a glass of wine and they stood at the kitchen window looking out at a sky that was clear and gave nothing away.
"How bad?" she asked.
"I think it will make landfall in four to five days. Category four equivalent, possibly five." He let that settle. "The infrastructure on the northern coast isn't built for anything close to that. I've recommended evacuation staging. There'll be resistance — it's expensive and the official models aren't there yet — but I think we need to move early."
Anya was quiet, looking at the cloudless sky. "And you? How are you?"
"Tired."
"That's not what I mean."
He looked at her sideways. She had the slight tilt of her head that meant she was waiting for the real answer.
"Something about this storm is strange," he said. "It doesn't behave the way it should. And I keep having this —" He pressed his hand flat to his sternum. "This sensation. Like a pressure under the ribs. Like the air in the room changed weight."
"Like anxiety."
"Different. More like..." He searched for the word. "Recognition."
She looked at him for a moment, then reached over and covered his hand with hers, the one on his chest, and held it there briefly.
"Come to bed at a reasonable hour," she said. "That's my only request."
"I will."
He didn't. By ten-thirty he was back at the kitchen table, the wine glass pushed aside, watching Adriatica tighten on the latest satellite pass. The pressure in his chest had not faded with dinner or with the warmth of the evening. It was still there — a low pull, quiet and persistent.
Through the ceiling, he could hear Lily still reciting her lines. The voice of the storm. He couldn't make out the words, but he could hear the rhythm — old and rolling.
He stayed at the table until midnight. When he finally came to bed, Anya had left her lamp burning low, the way she did when she wanted him to know she'd waited up.
He lay in the dark and listened to her breathe and felt the thing in his chest, steady and faint. Like a second heartbeat that wasn't quite his own. He turned over. He stared at the ceiling for a while. Eventually he slept.
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