Page 52 of Mountain of Mirrors and Starlight
He didn’t know their intentions. All he knew was that he wanted themgone.
And suddenly, their voices vanished, replaced by awful, gurgling sounds. Their hold slackened, their jaws falling from their faces like snake’s.
The ladies started screaming again.
Caerwyn regained just enough of himself to seize a fallen sword, and cut them through too. Their heads rolled against his mother’s.
He stared at their vacant, empty eyes for a minute that held the weight of a century, the screams of the ladies-in-waiting ringing in his ears like distant bells.
And then he started to run.
He would never remember how he got out of the castle, how he secured a horse, how he managed to navigate towards the mountain or whether some angel guided his path or some demon ensured his torment continued. The forests called to him, but no longer with the song of freedom.
The next truly conscious thought he had was falling from his horse, and waking in a cottage filled with dwarves, screaming for a mother who would never, ever answer him back.
A mother he’d killed.
Caerwynbolteduprightinthe forest, half screaming, barely breathing.
“Caer!” someone hissed. “Caer, it’s all right, it was a dream.”
Aislinn.
Only she was wrong. It wasn’t a dream, but a memory. Sweat rushed from his skin at the starkness of it.
Aislinn hovered nearby, as if unsure where to put herself. Her hands glossed over him. “Are you—”
“I killed my mother.”
Aislinn did not still, barely even paused. “I know.”
Caer froze, looking up at her. Had one of the dwarves told her? He’d babbled out the whole story, the night he’d come to them, but they’d seemed to understand this wasn’t something he wanted to share—
“The others didn’t tell me,” Aislinn went on, reading his hesitation. “I just took an educated guess. Your powers… the way you fled the castle… the timing…”
“I didn’t… I didn’t mean to.”
“I know that, too.”
The softness and surety of her words didn’t reach him, only his desperate need to explain.
“She was just in such pain, and I wanted it to be over, and, and something happened, and then itwasover, and it wasn’t, because she didn’t stay dead, she came back, and the guards tried to stop me and I—”
“Ssh, ssh,” Aislinn said, inching closer. “It’s over now.”
She couldn’t say ‘it’s all right.’ She couldn’t pat his hand like Minerva had when he’d told the others and tell him it was fine. Because it wasn’t. Her tongue knew the shape of a lie.
“Caer?”
He couldn’t look her in the eye. He couldn’t look at her and he couldn’t hold her and he wanted to. He wanted to so badly. But the thought of her skin turning grey, her eyes white, the thought of twisting her—
She dropped his blanket over his shoulders and hugged his back. “This is all right, isn’t it?” she whispered. “It has to be skin-on-skin?”
He swallowed, desperately hoping that assumption was correct. He’d never hurt anything he wasn’t directly touching, and although he’d reanimated the already-dead without contact, he’d never killed anything without physical contact. This was safe. It had to be. If it wasn’t, if he couldn’t latch onto anything, he thought he might slip away entirely.
“Yes,” he said, voice hushed, “this is all right.”
“Follow my breathing,” Aislinn instructed. “If you can. Breathe with me.”
