Page 50 of Mountain of Mirrors and Starlight
“You may call me Rowan,” he instructed.
He made no promises of a miracle cure, only that he would try his best to save the Queen. Human diseases, he said, were frequently untouchable by faerie magic, but there were things he could try—potions and wards to fight whatever ailed her. Mercifully, he did not ask for more than gold and jewels—things that were easy to part with.
“Did you expect blood-letting?” he asked when Caerwyn frowned. “The still-beating hearts of seven virgins? A lifetime of tears?”
Caerwyn gritted his teeth. “Something like that.”
“Those things have their value, as does everything,” Rowan replied. “But in the land of men, gold has value, and I will have it.”
Rowan told them nothing of where he came from, no tales of Faerie save the ones they already knew. He was a silent presence in the main hall, but sometimes Caer heard him singing—singing to his mother in that slippery, melodic voice.
He eased her pains. Her skin regained its lustre. Her hair even started to thicken again. There were days—whole, wonderful, beautiful days—when she was well enough to sit outside with the sun on her face, and Caerwyn thought she might be getting better.
And then there were days when she couldn’t move, when she couldn’t speak for groaning, when none of the faerie’s magic would touch her.
“There must be something you can do—” Owen begged him.
“I may have a back-up plan,” Rowan whispered in the corner of the room. “Something we can do if worse comes to worst.”
Caerwyn didn’t hear his reply. He was too busy holding his mother’s hand. It felt like a handful of twigs inside his.
He barely slept. He barely ate. Each time he nodded off, he woke up with a hard jolt, wondering if she was still there, if today was the day his mother died, the hour.
In his worst moments, he almost wanted her to go. At least then, she wouldn’t be in pain. At least then, he wouldn’t have to wait and watch with her, halfway to Hell.
But he feared the world without her in it more.
When he was alone, he begged her not to go. Begged her to stay with him. Told her he wasn’t ready.
When he had company, he realised how selfish that was.
Little by little, something ate away at him, too, as surely as the festering disease taking her.
It didn’t matter if he wasn’t ready, if she was.
“It’s all right, Mama,” he said to her one morning, as the weak sun rolled on another pain-filled day. “I’ll be all right, if you need to go. I’ll be as strong as you were when you lost Father.”
His mother turned to him, half a smile in her ghostly cheeks, and uttered the first word she’d managed in days.
“Stronger,” she said hoarsely.
But she didn’t go. She continued in her silent agony, too weak to cry out, to move. She shrivelled away to nothing, clinging barely to life, sustained by the faerie’s magic and Owen’s refusal to let her go.
If the illness didn’t kill her, Caerwyn was sure it would kill him. He could not stand to watch this much longer. What was even the point? She was a skeleton stitched together by pain.
“Do you not think…” he started carefully one evening, not meeting Owen’s eyes, “that she’s suffered enough?”
Owen dug his fingers into the arms of his chair. “She will endure,” he said. “She has to. Just a little longer. Rowan says he has a plan, has people out looking for something that could help us—”
Could.No absolutes, no certainties. Caerwyn wanted to believe there was hope, but hope now felt like a thing that happened to other people. He couldn’t remember the shape of it.
But he could remember his mother’s. Her small, fragile shape, and pain the only certainty of her existence.
“Owen,” Caerwyn begged, voice grating, “please. This isn’t right.”
“You want her to die, boy? Is that what you want?”
“No,” Caerwyn said, his voice trembling. He felt like a boy again, the world a dark, scary thing, and he an ant beneath the boot of a giant. “I just don’t want her to suffer. I don’t want to watch—”
