"Oh no, I knew. We start to get bits and pieces of our memories when we're quite young. Confusing at first, but eventually it adds up to a complete picture. By the time David and I met, I knew what I was, and I knew that my full memories would come in when I was an adult. I just didn't yet realize what that meant for me. For us."
"And what does it mean?"
"That I would stop being that human-like person I used to be, and become a dragon, ancient and serene, one with the earth—"
"Bullshit," Tess said simply.
Verd raised his head, blinking. Water dripped off his long black hair. "Excuse me?"
"If you're ancient and serene and all of that, why in the hell are you running a hot springs resort, rather than going off and meditating in a volcano all day, or whatever you people do?"
"It's entertaining," he shot back. "I enjoy watching humans. They're interesting. I didn't say I was completely detached from the world, simply that I no longer feel—"
"Bullshit."
A hint of a growl rumbled in his throat. "Stop saying that."
"Stop saying things you know are lies. Or didn't you know that nymphs can recognize when people lie to us?"
He stared at her. "That one's not in the myths."
"It's not precisely something that fits our image, don't you think?"
"That must've been interesting for David, being married to a woman he can't lie to."
She raised an eyebrow. "That'd only be a problem if he went around habitually lying to people. Which he doesn't. David is one of the most honest people I've ever met, and I grew up around people who are incapable of lying—or, at least, incapable of hiding it if we do."
"Yes," Verd murmured, sinking back into the water. "He always was ... sincere."
"He's a good person."
Silence, except for the lapping of water on the sand.
"David said you met when he fought a basilisk on your ancestral mountain." Verd's voice lifted at the end, turning the statement into a question. It felt like an olive branch, a cautious attempt at truce.
Tess slipped off her shoes, tucked her socks into them, and tossed them one at a time onto the rocks along the pool's edge. The water was much too hot to dip her feet, but she disliked wearing shoes when she could go barefoot, letting the rocks whisper to her as they liked to do. She tucked her feet under her on the rock, sitting tailor-style.
"Yes, as you might guess from knowing David, it was all very heroic and dragonslayer-y. There was a basilisk dwelling on our mountain, poisoning our soil and water, making the dryads' trees ill. We had tried to deal with it ourselves, but it defeated all our efforts. The dryads were beginning to die, and the rest of us were talking about moving elsewhere. So they sent me to talk to the Hunters, since I was the youngest of our clan and the best at dealing with humans. I like to travel, and I had even attended university classes among the humans for a while. Unlike dryads, oreiads are not bound to our mountain. All rocks everywhere remember that they are part of the same whole."
She glanced at Verd. He seemed to be listening, though his eyes were closed again, his long black hair drifting in the water. There was a light fur of dark hair on his chest; her fingers twitched with an irrational urge to reach out and touch it.
"So I went to talk to a dragonslayer. I don't know what I expected, but it definitely wasn't David. He was so young and friendly and curious—about me, about our world. He asked me a lot of questions about the nymphs of the mountain, not in a rude way, but just because he had never met our kind before and he wanted to know more about us, the dryads and nereids and oreiads of the Greek backcountry."
"You didn't mean to fall in love with him," Verd said, his eyes still closed.
"No," she said softly. "No, I did not. He's easy to love. We fought the basilisk together and ... I don't know what to say. He'd never been entirely comfortable with the Hunters as an organization, and it made sense for us to pool our knowledge and resources and contacts, and go on our own to help people the Hunters couldn't or wouldn't. Besides, I wanted to finish my geology degree."
Verd cracked an eye open. "You have a degree?"
"I have a PhD, thank you. I know things about rocks that humans don't, but they have knowledge I don't, about the atomic structure of rocks and the geological history of the world. And David paints—you knew that, didn't you?"
"He was interested in it, when I knew him."
"He's really very good. So we traveled, David for painting, me for rocks, and both of us in search of anyone who needed our help. Until something got him in Arizona."
"He said he didn't know what it was."
Tess shook her head, her lips pressed together in a line. "Neither did I," she said tightly. "I should have. I should have been able to do something. I'm the one who—who knows these things. But it poisoned him, and I ..."