Page 56 of Mountain of Mirrors and Starlight
“Ooh, better stop now. She will actually be held to that.”
Caer ignored him, still looking at Aislinn. His gaze kept on her as he bent down to add the logs to the fire. She could not shake it. She did not want to.
Beau took out his notebook and started to sketch. He drew the party huddled around the fire beneath the large, near-full moon. He drew Caer’s figurines and Minerva’s arm. He drew hands on cards and a brown finger of flesh tucked into a finger of metal. He drew Diana and her patches of inky skin, and Luna with her hair like moonshine.
Aislinn had always been jealous of Beau’s ability to do that, to immortalise a moment with the flick of a pencil, the way he could rend memory to paper. Such a skill was beyond her. Although she wouldn’t have traded her talent with weaponry for her talent with a paintbrush, she envied him all the same.
“What are you drawing?” Luna asked, looking up after her character was immobilised for three turns. “Oh! It’s me! I look so pretty.”
“Youarethat pretty, Luna.”
Luna beamed. “You’re so kind to say so.”
“You’re so kind toexist.”
Caer snorted. He’d elected to opt out of the game tonight to service their weapons. He sat beside Aislinn in the glow of the campfire, sharpening Minerva’s axe. Aislinn tried not to focus too hard on how his fingers rested against the blade, or how the veins in his arms flexed as he worked.
“They seem to be getting along,” he told her. “Do you think there’s something going on there?”
“I don’t think so. Whenever Beau fancies someone, he tends to either be over-the-top flirty or painfully awkward. There is no in-between.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“What are you like, when you like someone?”
Oh, you know, I fixate on certain parts of their body and stare at them from a distance, imagining them in a number of compromising positions and calling their mouth ‘sullen’.
“Usually I just go up to them and invite them back to my room. That works rather well at getting my point across.”
“Oh,” said Caer, a little sadly.
“Not always, though.”
“Are you avoiding answering the question?”
“Yes.”
They turned away from each other, smiling.
He must know,she thought,after overhearing me with Beau. He must know I find him attractive. Why doesn’t he ask outright?
Why don’t you?
Because it didn’t matter if she found him attractive. It didn’t matter if he foundherattractive, if every touch risked her life.
He could get control of his powers,whispered another voice.
Before we reach Avalinth?
It doesn’t need to be by then. You have forever.
He doesn’t.
Caer was mortal. Even within Faerie, he’d still age, and inside the walls of the dwarven kingdom, where magic was muted, he might not even have that long.
She shook her head. It was foolish to contemplate such things. She’d been attracted to people before. It would fade.
