Dandelions Forever

You open your eyes and the ceiling is white.

Your mother is humming. You know it's her before you turn your head. She's in the chair by the bed, one hand on the edge of your mattress, the other holding a cup of something that steams. Morning light fills the room. The sheets smell clean.

You're four.

"There you are," she says. She sets the cup down and pushes hair off your forehead. Her palm is dry and warm. "Breakfast is almost ready. Your father's already downstairs."

You slide off the bed. Your feet hit a rug soft enough to lose your toes in. The hallways stretch longer than you could sprint in a single breath. The staircase bends twice before it reaches the ground floor. Your room alone has more space than...

Than what?

The thought dissolves.

---

Breakfast is loud.

The dining room seats twenty. This morning it holds fourteen. Your father at the head, cutting sausage for your cousin Halid, who is three and refuses to use a knife. Your grandmother at the opposite end, eating poached eggs. Brennan, sixteen, hunches over his plate. The twins aren't here yet.

"Sit," your mother says, steering you into your chair. Toast, eggs, sliced fruit.

The food is warm. There's plenty of it.

There was a time when there wasn't. You think that, and then you don't, because you've lived in this house since you were born. So where did the thought come from?

The kitchen door swings open and a tray of pastries comes through, balanced on five clawed fingers.

Alsian moves with a slight forward lean, his digitigrade legs always a half-step from overcorrecting against his own height. His horns nearly brush the doorframe, a fact he seems to rediscover every time, because he ducks a beat too late and one horn clips the wood with a dull tak.

"Careful," your grandmother says without looking up.

"Yes, my lady."

He sets the tray down. His scales catch the light, pale pink, covering his forearms and the backs of his hands. His fingers are too long, his nails dark and curved and trimmed short enough not to scratch silverware, though they click against the tray.

Halid drops sausage on the floor. Alsian bends to get it and knocks his elbow against the water pitcher. He catches it before it tips, but not before it sloshes onto the tablecloth. He stares at the wet spot. His tail goes rigid.

"Sorry."

Brennan snorts. "Fetch me a clean napkin while you're at it."

Alsian retrieves one from the sideboard, folds it, sets it beside Brennan's plate. His face doesn't change. He moves on to the tea.

"Alsian," your father says, "sit down and eat something."

"I've eaten, sir."

"You say that every morning and every morning I don't believe you."

Something moves at the corners of Alsian's mouth. The muscles strain. The bone structure beneath the scales won't give. "I assure you, sir."

Your father points a fork at the empty chair. "Sit."

Alsian perches on the edge with his knees angled outward and his tail curled around one chair leg. He doesn't take food.

His head makes small movements, tracking. When Halid reaches too far for the jam, Alsian is half out of his seat before Aunt Sera catches the boy's wrist. When your grandmother's teacup touches the saucer empty, he's at the sideboard with the pot before she's set it down.

Then Lisbet stumbles in, hair unbrushed, one shoe untied. Alsian catches the trailing lace under his foot and pitches forward into the hutch.

She laughs. He windmills one arm and grabs the hutch with the other, his tail shooting straight out. She laughs harder and hugs his leg, which comes up to her shoulders.

"Morning, Alsi."

"Good morning, Miss Lisbet. Your shoe."

She drops to tie it. He waits, one hand hovering near her back.

---

After breakfast you wander the gallery, the long hall on the second floor with the paintings.

You walk past them slowly. You can't read the nameplates yet, but you know the faces because Alsian has told you about each one at least twice.

The first. A man in a dark coat against open land. The nameplate says something you'll learn to read as Baron Edric Valdris, First of His Name. In the lower corner, a pinkish shape, scaled, smaller than you'd expect, curled at the baron's feet. Horns, a tail, and eyes that look directly out of the canvas.

"That's me," Alsian says from behind you.

The next painting. Different man, same jaw. Alsian is taller now, upright, at the far edge of the frame. The one after, he's in the background through a doorway. The next, beside the seated lord, one hand on the back of the chair. The next, holding a baby.

*Twelve paintings. Twelve generations. Alsian in every one, unchanged. Same scales. Same watery brown eyes. The people around him age, are replaced by new people who age and are replaced, and Alsian stays where he is. Same coat. Same posture, slightly forward, slightly off-balance.

The last painting. Your father seated. Your mother behind him. You, a baby in her arms, face scrunched, mouth open. Alsian on the right, hands clasped behind his back.

You look from the painting to him. Four hundred years, and the only thing that changed was who he was standing next to.

You reach back without looking. Your hand finds two of his fingers, all that fits in your grip.

His claws curl around your hand.

There's something at the back of your skull. A room. Smaller than this hallway. Cold floor. Someone's hand in yours, gripping hard, their fingers thinner than Alsian's, shaking.

You blink. The hallway is warm. Alsian's fingers are steady.

---

You are nineteen when you hear it.

The study door is closed but the latch didn't catch. You stopped on the third step for water and your father's voice carried through the gap. He doesn't raise his voice. You have watched him calm spooked horses with the same even cadence.

He is shouting.

You sit on the step. From behind the door, pieces come through:

"...not a discussion. It's done."

Your mother, lower. Then Aunt Sera: "You don't get to decide this for all of us, Caleen."

Uncle Dorin: "The date was last month. Do you understand what the terms..."

"I understand perfectly."

"Then you know what happens when an obligation isn't..."

"They're my child, Dorin."

Your grandmother. Thin, precise. "Every generation has honored this. Your father honored it. His father honored it."

"And where are they now?" Chair scraping back. "Where is every firstborn who was honored?"

Silence. Your mother is crying, the wet interrupted breathing of someone trying to hold still.

"The old families all had arrangements." Your grandmother, quieter. "This is how the house was built."

"I've read every word of it. And I'm telling you..."

"You'd rather gamble with everyone's..."

"I'm telling you they stay. Whatever comes after, they stay."

A hand closes on your shoulder.

Alsian is crouched two stairs above you. His breathing is shallow. He looks at the study door. Then at you. His mouth opens and closes. The scales along his throat shift.

He guides you up. You go because your legs have gone loose and his hand is steady and it's easier to follow than to stay on that step.

He walks you upstairs. Opens your door. Pulls back the covers and sets you down. His claws catch on the fabric and he untangles them with a tug. He moves toward the door.

He stops. His hand rests on the frame. The muscles in his back press tight against the coat.

"I used to do this for your father. When he was small. He'd hear things through walls and I'd walk him back and tuck the blanket in." His claws tap the doorframe once. "He always grabbed my hand before I could leave. Every time."

His hand slides off the frame. The door clicks shut.

---

The next morning nobody mentions it.

Your father eats with his eyes on his plate. Your mother has applied powder around her eyes. Aunt Sera and Uncle Dorin don't speak to your parents. Brennan, twenty-nine now, keeps glancing at you and looking away.

Your grandmother stirs her tea. Fourteen rotations, counterclockwise, every morning. Today she does it thirty.

Alsian brings the toast. He doesn't clip the doorframe. He sets the tray down without knocking anything. His movements are slower, each one checked before he commits.

Nobody asks him to sit.

---

Your grandmother dies on a Thursday.

She'd been healthy. Seventy-eight, strong heart, clear mind. She walked the grounds every morning and could name every vassal family and grain yield from memory.

A cough on Monday. Wednesday night her breathing has a gap in it, a pause where her body seems to forget what comes next. Thursday morning your father goes to wake her and comes out with a face you've never seen him wear.

Alsian carries the flowers to the grave himself. One of his claws snags a lily stem and tears it. He looks at the torn flower for a long time. He rearranges the others so the gap doesn't show.

That night you find him in the kitchen, washing a plate that's been clean for minutes.

"She used to correct my posture. Every single morning. 'Stand up straight, Alsian, you're not a barn animal.' Forty-three years." He rinses the plate and sets it in the rack and picks up the same plate. "I can't remember if I said good night to her on Sunday. I make rounds every night. But Sunday, I can't find it."

He rinses the plate again. His tail drags on the floor.

---

Uncle Dorin is next.

Three weeks later. Checking the stable roof after a storm. The ladder gives way. The rungs were solid oak, inspected that spring. They just broke.

Aunt Sera stops sleeping. You hear her footsteps passing your door at two, three, four in the morning. Alsian walks the hallways too, following at a distance. Close enough to catch her.

---

Brennan packs a bag on a Sunday and announces he's leaving for the capital.

Alsian is in the front hall when he walks past. He steps aside and his foot catches the umbrella stand. It clatters over. Brennan doesn't look back.

"Master Brennan." Brennan keeps walking. "Master Brennan, please. Your riding gloves."

Alsian stands in the doorway holding the gloves, arm extended toward the stable yard, claws dimpling the leather.

His horse throws him at the property gate. He heals. Tries again on foot. Makes it to the village before the fever starts. They bring him back in a cart. Nine days.

Alsian sits outside Brennan's room for all nine. Brennan never let him in his space, even as a boy. Even now, delirious, he flinches at pink scales. So Alsian sits in the hallway with his back against the wall, his tail flat on the floor. Food appears on trays beside him and goes cold.

On the seventh day you sit across from him.

"He used to pull my tail. When he was three. He'd sneak up and grab it with both hands and pull and then run." His claws scrape the floorboard, leaving faint white lines. "I pretended it hurt. It didn't. But he laughed harder when I yelped, so I yelped." He blinks. His lids stay closed a full second. "He stopped when he was six. I remember the exact day. He walked right past me and didn't reach for it and I..." His throat clicks. "I missed it."

On the ninth day Brennan dies. Alsian stays in the hallway another hour. Then his knees pop loud enough to echo and he walks to the kitchen to prepare the body.

---

The twins go within a week of each other.

Oren first. An infection from a kitchen knife. The cut turns red, then dark, the redness spreading up his arm. He dies on a Wednesday. Lisbet finds him.

Lisbet goes to the mage in the eastern township. He tells her something old is attached to the family line, something he can't pry loose. She pays his price.

She falls asleep Tuesday night and doesn't wake up.

Alsian washes her hair. You stand in the doorway. He doesn't tell you to leave.

His hands tremble. He pulls the brush through in long strokes, and between strokes he pauses with it suspended in the air, eyes unfocused, mouth open. Then he blinks and continues.

"Morning, Alsi," he says under his breath. A higher register than his own, lighter, with a lilt on the second syllable. He brushes her hair and mouths her greeting to himself and doesn't look at you.

He tears two flowers at this funeral. He places them on the grave as they are.

---

Halid catches what your grandmother caught. He is twenty. The physician doesn't come.

On Halid's last night, Alsian holds his hand. Halid's grip tightens and loosens in cycles. Alsian adjusts each time, folding his claws away from Halid's skin.

"Am I hurting you?" His voice cracks on the second word.

Halid shakes his head.

"Good." He swallows. "You had this way of eating toast. You'd pull the center out first and leave the crusts in a ring on the plate. Your mother would tell you to eat them and you'd look at her and then look at me and I'd eat them when she wasn't watching." His grip adjusts as Halid's fingers loosen. "Every morning, Halid."

Halid's breathing stops at four-twelve a.m. Alsian's hand remains closed around his. His chest moves with controlled, deliberate breaths, each one visibly initiated.

---

Aunt Sera walks into the lake on a clear afternoon.

The groundskeeper sees her go in. When he reaches the water she's under. Her face when they pull her out is smooth, relaxed.

Alsian carries her up from the bank. Water runs down his scales. He kneels and presses two fingers to her neck. Keeps them there long after it's obvious. His eyes closed, his lips moving without sound.

He withdraws his fingers and pushes himself upright. "I'll prepare the arrangements." His left eyelid twitches three times. He walks toward the house and clips his shoulder on the garden gate he's passed through ten thousand times.

He stops eating after this. Your mother puts plates outside his quarters, the small room off the kitchen. A shelf of mended books and a coat hook holding seven identical coats in various states of wear. The plates come back untouched. Smaller portions. Then bread. Then water.

He drinks the water.

You find him sitting on his cot, which is too short for him, holding an old coat from the hook. The fabric is worn soft, the collar frayed. He has it pressed against his chest, claws sunk in.

"The first Baron Valdris gave me this coat. He measured me himself. He said my arms were too long for any standard pattern and he'd have to adjust the..." His voice gives out. "He sat at that desk upstairs and redrew the pattern four times because the shoulders didn't..."

He stops. His chest moves with those manual breaths.

"I've been wearing this cut for four hundred years. Same collar. Same buttons. And I still catch my horn on doorframes and knock over pitchers and I can't..." His claws puncture the fabric. "Four hundred years and I can't keep anyone..."

He closes his mouth. Folds the coat, smoothing the puncture marks with his fingertips. Hangs it back on the hook. Walks past you into the kitchen to wash dishes that are already clean.

---

Your mother gets sick in autumn.

She hides it. You notice because her hands, when she passes the salt, are cold in a way that doesn't come from the room.

She lasts two months. Still arranging flowers. Still in the garden when the sun is out, eyes closed, face tilted up.

One morning you find Alsian in the kitchen holding a teacup. The tea is cold. A hairline crack runs down one side and brown liquid seeps through onto his fingers. He's staring at the wall.

You take the cup. His fingers don't let go. You peel them open one at a time. When it comes free, his hands stay curled around nothing.

He reaches past you for a new cup and begins making tea.

"She takes it with honey. Half a spoon. She told me once her mother made it the same way." He stirs. The spoon clinks in a stuttering rhythm. "I remember everything anyone in this family has ever told me about how they take their tea. Brennan switched from milk to black when he was fourteen. The twins liked four sugars. I always put in three and neither of them noticed." The spoon stops, dripping. "What good is remembering all of it?"

He carries it upstairs. Small drops mark his path on the hardwood.

She dies in the night, your father beside her. You know because of the sound he makes at four in the morning, a single low noise that comes through the floorboards.

---

Your father stops speaking.

He sits in the study. Same desk, same chair, maintained across centuries. He looks at the wall. He eats if food is placed in front of him.

One evening Alsian sets a plate on the desk.

"Sir. You need to eat."

Your father stares at the wall.

"Please." Cracked. "Sir, please." His tail wraps around his own ankle. "Your father, the baron, used to skip meals when he was buried in work and I would bring him bread and he would say, 'Alsian, if I wanted a nursemaid I'd have hired one,' and twenty minutes later it would be gone." His claws press into the wood. "Please eat. I have never asked any of you for anything in four hundred years and I am asking you this."

Three bites. Fork down. Alsian takes the plate without a word.

Three weeks later. Heart failure. Alsian folds the certificate and places it in the desk drawer beside the others. Eleven documents in a row. His fingers adjust each one, making the edges flush.

It rains at the funeral. Alsian stands at the grave without a coat. Water runs down his scales and drips from his horns. He places flowers on the casket. His hands shake enough that he can barely release the stems, but he manages, one finger at a time. None tear.

He stands there after everyone leaves. Water pools around his feet. His shoulders are sharp through his wet shirt, thinner than a year ago.

When he turns toward the house, he hits his horn on the chapel doorframe. He doesn't duck. Walks into it, staggers sideways, keeps walking. A piece of the frame splinters into the mud behind him.

---

Twenty chairs. One plate.

Alsian sets it in front of you. His coat is buttoned wrong, the third button in the fourth hole, pulling the line off-center. Four hundred years, every painting, the coat always correct. He doesn't know.

He pours your tea. The pot rattles against the cup. A splash lands on the tablecloth. He stares at the wet spot.

His hand goes to the sideboard for a cloth. He holds it over the stain. His arm trembles and his breathing clicks and he stands there with the cloth suspended.

You reach over and press the cloth to the stain yourself.

He watches. Takes the cloth back. Folds it. Returns it. Hands clasped. His left lower lid twitching.

He goes to the gallery. Stands in front of the first painting. He stays there for the rest of the day. His claws extend and retract, the dry rasp carrying down the empty hallway.

---

You wake in the dark.

Scaled arms around you, trembling. Your face pressed against a chest that rises and falls unevenly, each exhale vibrating through your ribs.

"You're going to be alright."

Alsian's voice. His jaw resting on top of your head. "You're going to be alright." Same cadence each time. His arms tighten. One claw hooked into the back of your shirt.

Your bedroom. Curtains drawn. The only light comes from the floor. Lines, hundreds of them, carved into the hardwood in concentric rings radiating from where Alsian sits cross-legged with you in his lap. They glow dull amber, each pulse traveling from the outermost ring inward, converging beneath him, fading.

The symbols between the lines are angular, dense, scratched into the wood with something sharp. Claw marks. Some smaller than your thumbnail. Others spanning a full board. Wall to wall, the entire floor is covered.

The furniture is shoved to the edges. Your bed against the far wall, legs having scraped gouges through the carvings. The nightstand overturned.

You try to move. Your body responds slowly. Your throat is dry. Your joints ache deep and settled. Your shirt is soaked with sweat, cold against your skin everywhere his arms aren't covering it.

You were sick. The cough came three days ago. The same cough. You recognized the sound because you'd heard it in your grandmother's chest and in Halid's. You remember Alsian's face when you coughed the first time, every part of him stopping at once before he moved to make tea with honey.

You remember the second day. The fever. Alsian changing your sheets, his hands shaking so badly the fabric wouldn't unfold, his claws shredding the fitted edge. Him sitting beside you with a damp cloth, pressing it to your forehead, pulling it away, pressing it again.

You remember the sound of him talking. Low and continuous, filling the room. You faded in and out of it.

You don't remember the third day.

You don't remember him carrying you off the bed. You don't remember the hours it took to carve every symbol into the hardwood with his bare claws while you burned in the center of the room.

His nails are worn to the quick. The scales around them scraped away, the exposed skin inflamed. Several cracked. One on his left hand missing, the nail bed open and crusted. He carved the entire floor with his hands.

"You're going to be alright. I've got you. You're going to be alright."

You shift in his grip and his arms lock. His breathing spikes, clicking hard in his throat. His tail curls around both of you, the tip pressing flat against your hip.