Page 49 of Mountain of Mirrors and Starlight
I can’t.“Right,” she said quickly, and shook her head. Waves of chestnut red cascaded over her shoulder. “Bed. Sleep. A good idea.”
She seized her shirt from the mossy ground and plunged it over her head, as if the extra clothing would cover up her thoughts. She marched to her bedroll without looking back, aware that Caerwyn was still standing there beneath the moonlight, that he only moved once she was settled under her blanket.
They should say goodnight. They should saysomething.
But goodnight was too small and fleeting and everything else monumental or ridiculous. So Aislinn stayed silent.
And so did he.
Caerwynwasraisedtobe king. From his earliest moments, the words were whispered over his cradle. He could never remember a time when he didn’t know his future. His fate.
“Eat your food, Your Highness. A king must grow big and strong.”
“Concentrate on your lessons, Prince Caerwyn. A king must have an education.”
“Ignore those other children, Your Highness. A king must know his place, and the place of others.”
All his life, Caerwyn did exactly as he was told. He listened and learned and ignored the others his own age, even when all he wanted to do was run across the courtyard with them and dive into the piles of hay. Each season would bring a new kind of torment. In spring, he’d watch them skip round maypoles, make daisy chains in the grass, slip outside the castle walls and run off to the fields and forests, free and unrestrained. In summer they’d splash in fountains and streams, lie in the shade, laugh in the sun and whisper long in the evenings. When autumn came, they’d race around to beat back the cold and build enormous piles of leaves to jump in. Even winter never seemed to dampen their spirits, and Caerwyn would watch enviously from the castle as they drew pictures in the frost and made men of snow when the cold weather swept through the land. He felt he’d give up everything for a chance to join them.
But he was not allowed to complain. Loneliness was the price of the greatness he was told would be his one day.
And yet sometimes, during his lessons, his gaze would fall outside the walls of the castle, to the mountains in the distance, and his heart beat so madly in his chest it felt like a sickness. He’d dream of running away to them. On his rare excursions out of the town, on hacks and hunts, he’d ignore his game and skirt to the edge of the wilderness, wondering what it would be like to live a life out there. It felt more natural, that way of life. Each time he journeyed back, the shadows of the castle walls closed in on him like the lid of a casket. It was harder to breathe there.Everythingwas harder there, and no matter what anyone told him, Caerwyn couldn’t help but feel like this life was not meant for him at all.
Meanwhile, the mountains sang, beckoning him with a call like the siren-music of old.
But he never let himself do more than dream. He was a prince, after all. He had expectations, rules, responsibilities. He ate well and lived in luxury and paid for that with freedom.
He knew it was more than a fair exchange, but he also didn’t know hunger, and sometimes,sometimeshe thought he might have preferred it.
He never told anyone. How could he? He didn’t have true friends, noble children few and far between and rarely in his life long enough to form attachments, and he was discouraged from dallying with the common folk. He could not tell the servants, knowing how insulting his dreams might be, and his mother…
His mother. He could tell anything to her, but not that. Not his wish to run away from it all. Not when that would mean leavingher.
In his twentieth year, when she fell ill, the servants and ladies twittered and whispered that she’d always been of weak and frail disposition, an assertion that made no sense to Caerwyn. His mother had held a kingdom after the death of her husband, had maintained peace without having to marry him off as a boy, had stayed beside him whenever he was sick as a child, never leaving him for a moment, had her own brushes with illness, sure, but had attended every royal event, every joust and festival, every dance even when she never left her throne. The few times she was bed bound, she always rose again.
Until, one day, she didn’t.
To begin with, he thought nothing of the servants’ remarks. His mother wasn’t frail. His mother was stronger than anyone. She would overcome this. She would.
Only she didn’t. She grew weaker and paler, as still and scrawny as a scarecrow. He’d look at her emaciated body and want to stuff life back into her. Only he couldn’t. He didn’t have that power.
Others did.
When Owen suggested sending for a faerie healer, none of his council backed him. Magic was unnatural, death was not. The Queen was only a woman. They already had an heir. If Owen was lonely after her death, she could easily be replaced. Maybe the next one would give him children of his own.
“I already have a child of my own!” Owen spat, and then, with a darkness Caerwyn had never seen before, barked at everyone to leave. “Not you, Caer,” he said, as everyone else slunk away. “For it is your opinion alone that I care for.”
Caerwyn stayed, pinned to the spot. Before Owen married his mother, he’d been Lord Cadwaladr, his mother’s most trusted advisor. He’d watched over him since he was a boy, picking him up when he fell, instructing him to listen to his mother… and quietly loving her from afar. He told him stories about his father and the man he was and the person he would have wanted Caerwyn to be. Some stories didn’t help. Most did.
“What say you, Caer?” Owen asked, staring out at the mountains that now, more than ever, Caerwyn wanted to run away to. Anything to avoid witnessing what was about to happen next. “No one else seems to be with me. Should I call on a faerie? I’ve heard of one not far away.”
“What will they ask for?”
Owen shrugged his shoulders. “Does it matter?”
And Caerwyn found himself in perfect agreement. It did not matter what the faerie wanted. He felt like he would pay any price.
The faerie was summoned. He was a slender, sharp-faced, pointy-eared creature with hair like sunlight sheathed in mist. He looked exactly like Caer had imagined a faerie looking, and he moved like he was made of water, his voice river-soft.
