Page 176 of Mountain of Mirrors and Starlight
“Terrific. Three spears, two halberds, firepower we can’t use inside the castle, one blade fused to my arm, and a rolling pin. Yes, we can definitely take back a kingdom with that.”
“Don’t forget audacity,” Bell intervened. “We’ve plenty of that.”
“We can’t fight with audacity, Bell!”
“Have you tried? Very effective.”
Minerva stared at her wife. “You’re trying to make me laugh. It won’t work.”
Bell shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
Aislinn appreciated the attempt at humour, but as Luna returned to add the rolling pin to their pile of assets, her laugh fell short. Caer was still sitting by the side of the room, his face unusually pale, his eyes dark. He hadn’t looked right since Aeron had used the Mirror.
She sat down beside him, but he jerked away from her. They were outside the walls now. She was not safe from him. She should have been prepared for this, and yet those few days she’d spent tangled up inside his arms had made her forget their reality.
She had not expected it to sting this much. It was not natural to sit so far apart.
A few days. What if that was all they had? No one had come up with any viable plan, yet—
Caer coughed, his breath hard. He groaned, streaking his hands down his face.
Aislinn frowned. “Are you all right?”
“Probably just exhausted from everything that’s happened today, you know?”
He offered her a weak smile, but it looked forced and laboured. Beads of sweat gathered at his pores.
Aislinn raised her hand to his forehead, but he jerked away again. “You can’t—”
She grabbed Luna’s nearby hand and placed it to his head instead. “Does he feel hot to you?”
Luna’s eyes widened. “Caer, you’re burning up.”
“Flora!”
Flora came bumbling over to inspect him, putting her hand to his head, looking at his mouth, taking his pulse. “Could be a mortal case of the sniffles,” she surmised.
“I don’t… get sick…” Caer said, his voice crackling.
“Allmortals get sick.”
“Not me,” he insisted. “My mother said that’s why I was blessed…‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, Caer…’”
Flora patted his arm. “Mortals are liars, boy, and I think you might be delusional. Lie down. Rest. We’re not going anywhere for a bit.”
It was a testament to how wretched he was feeling that Caer did not argue. He slumped against the cold stone floor, moving only once when Luna gave him something to use as a pillow. He didn’t react at all when Aislinn draped a blanket over him.
“Flora,” she said, when she decided he was probably asleep, “dwarves can lie too.”
Flora paused. The rest of the room carried on with their muted conversations, discussing the next best course of action. “Could just be a mortal illness, like I said,” she responded. “The boy’s been through a lot and dragged this way and that, exposed to who knows what. Just let him rest, girl. Ain’t nothing we can do about anything at the moment.”
Itwaslate—verylate.Eventually, Minerva announced the best course of action was for everyone to try and get some sleep. “Everything looks better in the morning,” she said, but her grim expression did not match her optimism.
Aislinn took the first watch. She felt beyond sleep. Caer lay on his side, coughing intermittently, radiating heat. She’d tried to heal him, or at least ease his symptoms, but mortal illness had a habit of clinging to their fragile bodies and was not so easily expunged.
She had not thought of Caer as breakable before—not even during the manticore poisoning. After her initial fear had worn off, she’d been certain he’d recover.
Beau had tried to heal him too, but to no avail. “His heart feels weird,” he’d remarked.
