Page 148 of Mountain of Mirrors and Starlight
Dillon shook his head. “No. No, she didn’t, but… I know it. I’veheardit.”
“How is that possible?”
“I… I saw her…”
Dillon rubbed his temples, as if trying to squeeze out a thought. His body began to shake. He pitched forward in the water. Beau sprang from his spot, hauling him upright, where his body thrashed and foamed in the water, eyes white and rolling.
It’s happening,Caer thought, fears fracturing,we’re finally losing him.
Dillon floated in a dark, warm place. It was like he was lying at the bottom of the lake in summer, watching the light drift in dabbled shafts from above. He had done this before, long ago, with someone by his side. He couldn’t remember her name. It didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered anymore. Pain wasn’t even a word. All he knew was that he was safe, and he wasn’t alone. Even his own name didn’t seem to matter, but something still stirred inside him when he heard the court bard sing of ‘Dillon the brave, loyal and true’. He watched a girl with tawny hair lay flowers on a statue of a person he thought he knew. Her hand was tight in the arm of an older man, whose features matched the one made of stone.
“I miss him,” said the girl. “Is that rude of me to say when he was your—”
Son,Dillon realised.He was your son. I was your—
No, he was not anything now. He was everything and nothing.
“No, lass,” said the man, his mouth fixed in a worn smile, “I’m glad you miss him, too.”
Years passed in the blink of an eye, decades eclipsing into seconds. He saw a hundred moments in the palace, a hundred balls and revels and dances, a thousand patrols. He saw tournaments and tears and laughter.
So much laughter.
The tawny-haired girl had two children with a dark-haired prince, two happy babies that ran about the castle, shrieking and laughing and beating each other with wooden swords from the minute they could hold them. He—they—rocked their cradles when they slept, made them hammocks from their limbs, shielded them during games of hide-and-seek.
When their hands reached out to touch them, they could feel again. The touches of the prince and princess were sunshine and rainstorms.
We are yours, and you are ours. We are one.
Names were spoken in the castle, but they need not matter to the consciousness that Dillon had become. People were more colours and shapes and feelings—not words. Words didn’t matter.
They watched the children grow, watched their triumphs and failures, watched them fight and laugh and make up and do it all over again. They wiped tears from their cheeks, blanketed them from grief.
Ours, ours, ours to protect.
Dillon had seen it all. Every moment in Beau and Aislinn’s life. He had been there.
In the walls, in the earth—he had been there.
In thevines.
Dillon spluttered up in the water. Aislinn was there, holding his head. Beau’s hands hovered over him. Luna’s too, warming his chest. She was the closest thing he came to feeling anything.
“Steady there,” said Beau, breathing a sigh of relief as Dillon righted himself. “We thought we might have lost you for a moment.”
“I was there.”
“Come again?”
“In the castle. I was there in the castle, watching you grow up.”
Aislinn and Beau blinked at him. So did everyone else.
“I know it sounds impossible, but I was there. I remember the songs that Aoife would sing to you, the colour of your childhood blankets, how you named your first swordBlackbriar,that you had a stuffed horse called Mr—”
“All right, that’s enough!” said Aislinn, stepping away.
