She stopped. The two of them looked at each other. At last Tess said, "Does this mean you've decided to help?"
"I don't know if I can," Verd said.
"But you'll try." It was a statement, not a question.
Verd didn't answer; instead he walked to the door, forcing her to step out of the way or be shoved aside, and closed it behind him as he left.
"Did he upset you?" Tess asked anxiously.
"No. He was okay." David touched the back of his hand, still feeling Verd's fingers stroking his skin.
"You know, I asked one of the restaurant staff what it was like working for him," Tess said, setting the tray on the bedside table. "She said he's actually a really good boss, very fair about giving them time off and keeping their work hours reasonable. He's just a little weird. Doesn't talk much, doesn't smile ever, has strict rules about what parts of the resort the employees and patrons are allowed in, that kind of thing."
"He wasn't always like that." David sagged into the pillows, his brief surge of energy draining away. "Well, I guess he was always a little like that. Distant and serious. Kind of a nerd, honestly. But he did smile, Tess. He used to laugh a lot ..."
His voice trailed away. Tess sat beside him on the bed and took his hand. She mistook his silence for weariness and pain, he thought—and some of it was, but not all of the pain was physical. It hurt, thinking about the person Verd used to be. Thinking about how that person was gone forever.
Except he wasn't, was he? Verd seemed to think so. Verd had insisted so, when they'd parted all those years ago. The ancestral memories that he'd received when he became an adult would change him forever, he'd said. And certainly, they'd seemed to.
But David wasn't the same person he'd been fifteen years ago, either.
"We weren't doing anything except talking," David felt compelled to say. His skin still seemed to tingle where Verd had touched him, as if to give the guilty lie to his words.
"I'm not jealous." Tess took his hand and put it against her chest, where he could cup the familiar curve of her breast through the oversized men's shirt she was wearing. "My people don't feel that way, in general. I've told you, I don't mind if you have other lovers."
"I never wanted others besides you," he murmured, stroking her breast and running a thumb across the firm nub of the nipple stiffening in her practical cotton bra.
"Except for one."
Oreiads could detect falsehood. It was one of the things he appreciated about his marriage; in a very real sense, she kept him honest. He couldn't lie to her, which made it harder to tell lies to himself.
Except for one.
Tess left David asleep in the room—he was too tired for sex, too tired for anything except a few spoonfuls of soup before he drifted off again. She didn't like leaving him alone, but she wanted to find Verdegris.
She hadn't come all this way to let the dragon go off and sulk while her husband sank ever closer to death.
No one in the main lodge seemed to know where he'd gone. The front desk attendant told her the pools were still open and offered her a complimentary swimsuit and towel. Tess shook her head and went out on the back path that led to the pools and hiking trails. If he wasn't at the lodge, Verd must be out here somewhere.
It was after midnight, but still eerily bright, the sunlit night of the far northern summer. The sun had finally dipped below the mountains, but there was no darkness; the sky was pale blue, almost white, flecked with clouds that were tinted sunset colors along the northern horizon. She had no trouble picking her way along the path to the pools.
The pools might stay open all night, but there was no one out here now except for a young couple who passed her on the path, wet and giggling in their bathing suits with towels thrown carelessly around their shoulders. It would have been a perfect time for a midnight swim, but Tess had no interest in swimming. It was Verd she needed to find. David's remaining lifespan could be measured in days; what did Verd think he was doing, wasting time while David fought for his life?
She knew that David still loved Verd. He'd talked about his old boyfriend often enough that she had no doubt of that, even though she wasn't sure if David himself knew it. But so far Verd wasn't doing much to convince her that he was worth the feelings David clearly still had for him.
She didn't know what she could do if she found him. If he had no love or compassion in his heart, what words could possibly reach him? But there had to be a way. She hadn't come all this way for nothing.
On the upper paths, she circled the rock pools, checking each one. Night seemed a likely time for Verd to bask in the hot water, when the tourists had cleared out. Dragons liked to be hot. They enjoyed geothermally active areas, and some of them even lived in volcanoes.
But there was no sign of him. The pools were empty, glistening beneath the bright midnight sky. Tess looked up at the mountainside rising above the lodge, where the path around the rock-pool amphitheater split into a maze of hiking trails that vanished among the spruces and willows. Somewhere else, she might be able to get the rocks to talk to her and tell her where Verd had gone. But not here. The rocks were his. The entire place was his.
The sound of rushing water intensified as she reached the far end of the rock pools. She had wondered where the water went, and now she saw: there had once been a ravine here, but an ancient rockslide had blocked it, and now the water rushed into the rock itself, vanishing in a froth of steam into tunnels it had carved through the slide.
On the far side of the rockslide, the landscape was wilder and more chaotic. She glimpsed twists and turns of the outflow creek as it wound its way down the mountain, carving a deeper and deeper channel, to meet some far-off river and eventually make its way to the sea.
It made her uncomfortable. She had never felt much of an affinity for water. Water and fire and air were all such changeable things. Only the rock underfoot could be relied on, steady and stable.
... except it wasn't, of course. The ancient landslide that had penned up the creek and formed the pools was evidence of that. Rocks changed just as much as any river, but on a longer time scale. Mountains wore down to hills, deposited themselves as gravel and made new rocks, while new mountains rose in place of the old ones, born of the furnace inside the earth.