“Airmonger,” Nessa said tenderly before turning to Rae. “Rae, quick, bring that salve, no, that one in the small pot, and that tonic.…” She turned back to Mop and, taking his quiet, still-shadowed hand in hers, raised it to her lips. “We’ll see if a bit more time and medicine brings you all the way back to us, my love.”

As Rae and Nessa bustled about, rubbing pungent balms over his limbs, wrapping cool poultices around his temples, Mop wondered at their busyness. I am here, he thought. All here. I’ve been sleeping. Sleeping and dreaming. Dreaming too long, perhaps—of water and darkness and a white-robed girl who reached for me—but I am here. Why do you rush so?

Everything he had said had made perfect sense to him.

You should not take the sheep too far into the hills, he had warned Rae.

It’s dangerous, he had explained.

Yes, I’m here, my love. I’m awake and here with you, he had soothed.

Rae. My daughter Rae, he had said.

Listening to himself, the words had not sounded quite right, but they were right enough in his head. And his body… there was something not quite right about that as well. Some distance seemed to have filled the spaces where his left arm and hand and leg and foot seemed to be. Some slurriness had come where his lips and tongue should be. Some coldness. Odd. He looked at his daughter, who was holding his hand, the hand that now did not seem a part of him. She was beaming, her teeth a crooked jangle of happiness, but when he looked in her eyes, it seemed a little cloud had settled behind them. He could not remember seeing such sadness in her before. The cloud made her seem suddenly older.

Daughter, he said in his mind, reaching with the hand in which he still felt his own self.

“Mountain-found,” said his mouth.

XXXVII

A LIE, A SEED OF UNCERTAINTY

The no-longer-a-boy-boy-king reclined on his pillows. He thrummed his fingers on his cheek. Though the pillows were soft, though he was clad all in silk, though he had passed the morning watching a singer, an acrobat, a puppeteer, though he had nothing at all to concern himself with beyond what he found amusing or not—and everything, everything, he found not amusing—he still felt something sour inside.

He swallowed. Sour and hot. It was always there, a feeling of curdling. He fiddled at the knots and tassels of his belt, trying to relieve the discomfort.

In the time since he had visited the oracles, the palace walls had again grown loud with their prophecies. No matter how furious his search for the heirs, he heard the oracles’ words in every squeaking stool, in every deferent step, even in the antics of those entertaining him. No one will mourn, tapped the singer’s time-keeping toes; joyless, squeaked the puppet’s unoiled hinges; unloved and abhorred, slapped the acrobat’s cartwheeling hands. Would nothing quiet them?