Page 152 of Mountain of Mirrors and Starlight
“Feel anything?” she asked.
“Yes,” Dillon said. “Not much, but it’s strange for me to feel anything, so…” He turned back to the others, gaze settling on Caer. “Want to try bringing something else back to life?”
“Rarely,” Caer admitted, swinging from his saddle, “but I’ll give it a try.”
He walked over towards them and placed his fingers against the calcified bark, brow furrowed. The veins on his arms strained. Aislinn gripped his shoulder, her other hand still against the bark, Dillon’s too. Something throbbed beneath her palm, hard and rumbling.
The bark crumbled, flaking away from the rock. Bright green sparked beneath it, vines curling outwards, racing over Aislinn’s body like an over-excited puppy.
“Well, hello!” she said, gently batting them away. “Nice to see you too!”
The vines trembled towards Beau, too, and Dillon, and—inexplicably—Caer, in the same way they clambered over Aislinn.
Aislinn had asked her mother once, when they’d started talking to her, if it had only happened when she’d ascended to the throne or if it had occurred before then, when she’d married Hawthorn.
“They knew I was their future queen that day,” she’d admitted. “But they’d been trying to talk to me a long time before then, I just didn’t know how to listen.”
Aislinn wondered what the vines knew about Caer.
“Touching as this is,” Minerva remarked, leaning towards them on the back of her wargi, “does this little exercise serve a purpose?”
“Possibly,” said Aislinn.
A vine snaked around her head.
We’re searching for something,she said, pushing her thoughts outwards, casting an image of a mirror.
Several of the vines recoiled.
Please,she continued.It’s important.
The vines coiled instead around Caer, as if understanding that he was the thing she was trying to protect, and trying to judge whether or not he was worthy. Caer’s eyes flickered, and he stared at her as if searching for instruction.
“It’s all right,” Aislinn assured him. “They won’t hurt you.”
The vines twirled all round him, around every strong limb, his broad back, his excellent face, before scurrying away, flicking towards Aislinn, as if approving of her choice.
“Will you help us?”
The vines moved, bursting out of the recess and racing along the floor. Everyone not on a wargi leapt into their saddles, charging after them as they hurtled through stone.
Deep, deep, deeper into the dark they went, over rivers and through caverns that could have swallowed Acanthia whole. The dark thickened. Beau summoned lights and whispered spells. Onwards and onwards, deeper and darker…
Until the vines slowed, creeping under a wall of cracked rock.
Bell went to inspect it first. It was round, brown rock, covered in a thin sheen of moss.
“Can we blast through it?” Diana asked.
Magna was already fiddling with her explosives, her eyes sparkling gleefully.
“Bell?” Minerva prompted. “Can we blast through it?”
“I could try—” Beau said, moving forward.
The rock shifted. Bell bounced back.
“Did Beau—” squeaked someone.
