Page 31 of Mountain of Mirrors and Starlight
Exhausted, and more than a little frustrated, he stopped to rest beside a stream. His spells often kept guiding him back to this spot, if they guided him anywhere at all, but he couldn’t find anything. Nothing but a rather impressive bloodstain, which his senses told him was animal rather than human. There was a slight tinge of magic to it, but nothing to cause any alarm. Maybe Aislinn had dispatched a creature here for her dinner. Or maybe it was something mildly unseelie. It wasn’t unheard of to find a stray one living in the mountains, the offspring of some ancient coupling.
He sang a song to dispel his mood—something cheery. An old ballad of Alia’s, the court bard.
“The merfolk dance in the Summer seas,
In Spring fae fly in the sweetest breeze,
In Autumn they sing and rustle their leaves,
And in Winter snow brings a king to his knees—”
Beau stopped. Something was moving in his peripheral vision. He turned. For a second—a split second—he saw the flash of a tanned face surrounded by black hair, but a second later it seemed to have merged back behind the waterfall.
Beau shook his head, inclining his head towards Hecate, still staring at the wall of water. “Did you just see that, or am I officially losing it?”
Hecate meowed.
He turned to face her. “You’re a lot of help.”
“Beau!”
Beau wheeled back. Standing on a narrow ledge on the other side of the river, next to the curtain of water, was Aislinn.
“Ais?”
Her face broke into a grin. She jumped into the river, Beau already scrambling towards her, not caring that his boots were filling with water.
Aislinn, Aislinn!
She was here. She was all right.
They embraced in the river, water sloshing about their ankles, hands tight in each other’s clothes, holding each other for as long as it took to assure themselves the other was real.
It was a long time until they parted.
Beau punched Aislinn on the shoulder.
“Hey!” she said. “What was that for?”
“For worrying me!”
“That’s fair, I suppose.” She winced, but her hand went to her middle, not her newly punched shoulder.
“You’re injured?”
“I got gored by an undead stag. That’s why I couldn’t—” Her face scrunched up. “Running was a bad idea.”
Beau steered her back to the bank and helped her onto the ledge. The face from earlier—now attached to a rather attractive body—hovered nearby.
Beau’s hands went to Aislinn’s abdomen, pulling up her loose shirt and going to the bandages swathed around her middle. Aislinn handed him her knife.
He half-snorted. Typical of Aislinn, keeping a knife about her person even when she was injured and presumably safely concealed somewhere.
He sliced open her wrappings, swiftly and carefully as he could, revealing ragged, marred skin beneath. “Holy vines, Ais—”
“I told you, I got—”
“Gored by an undead stag, yes. Where did that come from, by the way?”
