Page 82 of Mountain of Mirrors and Starlight
He looked oddly familiar…
“Peace!” he said, his voice rough and hoarse but unmistakably human. “I mean you no harm!”
Caer gasped. “You… you can talk.”
The soldier nodded, as if this was obvious. Aislinn realised that beneath the blood and dirt, he was wearing a white-and-gold uniform that marked him as a knight of Acanthia, although the design wasn’t a recent one. Her father liked to change them every decade or so.
She lowered her sword. “You tried to talk to me earlier. During the fight.”
“I thought you were someone else. A friend of mine, but I see now that I was incorrect.”
“Who?”
“Juliana,” he said. “You look like her. Juliana Ardencourt.”
Aislinn froze. Juliana hadn’t gone byArdencourtin fifty years. “Who are you?”
“Dillon,” he said. “My name is Dillon Woodfern.”
“I’mdead,aren’tI?”Dillon continued, when he was met with nothing but silence. “I look dead. I look quite dead, actually, but feel very alive. How did that happen?”
Aislinn pointed numbly towards Caer, still lying on the floor, wide-eyed. “He can bring back the dead,” she explained.
“Not… not likethat,though,” Caer mumbled.
“Like what?” asked Dillon.
“Um… sentient. You should be so, so…”
“Oh,” said Dillon, like he was brought back from the dead every other day, “well, here I am!”
Hecate, who had been sitting beside the fire all this time, slunk forward and started to wind around Dillon’s legs. The wargis, meanwhile, had decided this person was no threat, and promptly settled back down again.
“I’m sorry,” Aislinn said, gathering her thoughts, “You’re Dillon Woodfern?SerDillon Woodfern?”
Dillon blinked. “I was never a knight—”
“You got it, um, well… posthumously.”
“Right,” he said. “Because I died.”
“Yes.”
“How… how long ago—”
“Fifty years,” Aislinn responded, thinking of the statue in the gardens and the dates printed below. Her mother stopped every time she passed it. Aislinn had made him flower crowns as a child and climbed into his broad arms to place it on his head. She’d thought the statue itself was Dillon until she was old enough to understand.
It was only stone, a monument to the icy, unmarked grave the real Dillon lay in, somewhere in the depths of Winter.
Until Caer had pulled him out again.
“Fifty years,” Dillon breathed. “My father then, I take it—”
“Grandpa Woodfern? He’s still around. Retired five years ago but keeps his cottage on the grounds. He’s old, mind, really old, but, you know, alive.”
“You call him Grandpa?”
“Well, we don’t have any grandfathers and he doesn’t have any grandchildren so we asked him one day if we could call him grandpa when we were little and it just… stuck.”
