Wayfinder

Sixteen

“That is not possible.” Dafydd lifted a hand even as he spoke, barring any protest of truthfulness Lara might have made. She hadn’t planned to; Dafydd’s confidence in her power was sufficient that she recognized his denial as both necessary and perfunctory. People often disbelieved reality, even when the so-called impossible had taken place before their eyes. To be told the man he’d murdered was alive, without seeing it himself … it took Dafydd less time to recover than Lara thought it might. He gave a minute nod, freeing Lara to speak.

“He was your brother in all ways that mattered. You know what element he commanded?”

“Air.”

“And with the right glamours, air becomes illusion.” Lara counted loud heartbeats, waiting for Dafydd’s second nod. Waiting for him to work through what he’d been told, and waiting for the argument she knew he’d make:

“The compulsion that drove me more than once was no illusion.”

“Dafydd, I can lay compulsions.” Lara made her hands into fists, hating the confession. “It’s what I’m doing when I make people believe me, or when I stop them from acting as they might want to. And I’m only human. A truthseeker, maybe, but still only human. If I can do it, I’d think anyone with enough will and power could do it.”

“Someone of royal blood,” Aerin said. “Someone of Rhiannon’s line.”

Lara, taken aback, blinked at Aerin. “I thought Rhiannon was Emyr’s wife. And I thought you were all of her line. I thought that was the point.”

“We are, but some are closer to her than others. Your faith is full of contradictions itself, Lara,” Dafydd murmured. “Do you believe all mankind to be descended from Adam and Eve? Or from Noah, after the Flood?”

High chimes of discomfort sent cold crawling up Lara’s nape. It was a question she’d struggled with as a child, until religion and science had come to a truce: she had no concept of how long God might think a day was, nor any reason to be utterly convinced that making Man in His image had not taken generations of evolution. There had been Adams, of that she was certain; there had been Eves. Men and women who were the first of their kind whose children, through the ages, bred true. “Point taken. But does that mean Rhiannon was both your mother and grandmother?”

Dismay twisted the words, and the staff, quiet for so long, gave a sentiment very like chuckling. Lara resisted elbowing it as if it were an annoying person only because its location across her back made the action impossible. She twitched toward it, though, and her shoulder shrieked an objection, providing another reason not to react to the object’s teasing.

Aerin said, “Yes,” without seeming unduly disturbed by it. “Emyr and Hafgan are the oldest of Rhiannon’s blood. Their sons are her children and grandchildren both, while we others are farther removed, and less exalted.”

Contradictory truth ran through it, jarring Lara’s skull bones. She put a palm forward, stopping Aerin. “All right. Okay. Faith is simple. That’s what’s complicated about it. And truthseekers probably shouldn’t try dissecting it. What’s relevant is that the magic is there, Dafydd. Compulsions can be laid against your will. Everyone saw you draw and fire on Merrick, and saw him die, but none of it was real.” The language, she thought grumpily, wasn’t well suited to determine between things that had happened under coercion and things that were voluntary. “He was trying to sow the seeds of civil war,” she finished. “And he’s succeeded. If he can get the rest of the royals to kill one another …”

Dafydd hadn’t moved from in front of the tomb he’d stopped at, though he finally looked back toward Aerin and Lara. “Here lies Hafgan, king of the Unseelie court. Now we are four, we royals, and Merrick only one. The warmongering will end, and Merrick pay the price. This I swear.”

Resolution rolled through his words, deep and comforting. Aerin, though, snorted with humor. “A worthy oath, my prince, but there is one flaw. We have no one to waken Hafgan with love’s kiss, and without him your truthseeker’s quest will fail.”

“Love’s kiss.” Dafydd turned a slow smile on Lara. “Is that what wakened me?”

A blush began below Lara’s collarbones and rushed upward, so her shoulder ached anew and her face blazed with heat. Dafydd’s smile grew larger still, wicked delight dancing in his eyes. “I was right. There are things I would like to say to you, Lara Jansen.” Say, and, from his bright, lascivious examination, do. Lara blushed harder, blood stinging her cheeks to painful prickles and making her shoulder throb so hard she whimpered and put a hand over it. Outside pressure made the pain flee inward, twisting her stomach, but at least it was different.

Dafydd’s smile fell away, concern replacing it as he truly saw her for the first time. His gaze lingered on her shirt’s bloody stains before coming up to meet hers. “You’re hurt.”

“I’ll live.” Lara tested the phrase for veracity, then shrugged her shoulders. Close enough for government work, Kelly would say.

“These are healing chambers—”

“And if we’d come in the right way I might be willing to ask for help.” Lara shook her head carefully, trying not to jolt the renewed discomfort in her shoulder. “But we came in through the back door, magically speaking, and I’m afraid calling any more power than we absolutely need to will have consequences.”

“I’ve missed rather a lot, haven’t I,” Dafydd said after a few heartbeats of silence. “I’ll want to hear it all.”

“Let’s wake Hafgan up and get out of here first. I want to get away from the Drowned Lands before Emyr contacts Aerin.”

“I’m sorry, Truthseeker.” Aerin sounded as though she spoke from a great distance. Lara turned on a heel, dread sickening her belly. Aerin stood rimed with ice, more invasive than the cold that had gripped them on entering the chamber. This seeped out from her, freezing the air into thin crackling lines, a reminder that only Llyr’s power allowed them to breathe.

Emyr. His icy scrying spell was meant for a recipient who was surrounded by air, not water. Here, in the heart of the Drowned Lands, the magic was bound to go wrong, freezing what it touched. Hoarfrost crackled and fell, new stuff forming as Aerin turned her head to glance at Lara and Dafydd. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I fear it’s already too late.”

Lara jolted forward a step, stopped by Dafydd’s hand on her elbow as he murmured, “This isn’t right. Scrying shouldn’t ice the air.”

“It’s not air,” Lara hissed, but bit back the rest, still uncertain of how the pressing sea might respond if she voiced truth aloud. “If it keeps up it’ll freeze us all, Dafydd.”

“No. Only me. I can do that, I think.” Shards of ice buckled and folded in as Aerin spoke, digging against her armor. Frost patterns appeared where they touched, cold spreading inhumanly fast. Her sword’s hilt went dull with layered cold, icicles forming on her gloves when she reached for the weapon. “The magic is not right,” she agreed hoarsely. “It grips me, struggles to hold me. It is not the window it’s meant to be.”

Lara, shrill, cried, “Then why doesn’t he stop?” and Aerin gave her a hard smile.

“Because he must press on until he’s certain I’m dead. He’ll have no excuse to invade otherwise.”

“He’d kill you for the chance to invade?” Lara whispered, suddenly numb. She had simply not considered the possibility, but Aerin showed no surprise as she looked to Dafydd.

“Pass me quickly, Dafydd. Go now.”

Dafydd gave one grim nod and caught Lara’s right arm. Pain staggered her, a guttural cry tormenting the air, and he released her again. Lara dropped to her knees, catching herself with her left hand, but jarring her body hard enough to shoot sickness through her. Her elbow collapsed, bones and muscles useless as water, and she put her forehead against the floor, unable to move further.

“I thought you said you were all right!”

“I said I’d live.” The tiniest whisper of humor went through the correction, though it did nothing to push back waves of pain. Concentrating on a different worry helped: “Dafydd, what’s Aerin’s element? How can she stop the ice?”

“Stone.” Worry flattened his voice. “Stone endures. Cold can be drawn into its center.”

Lara lifted her head the few inches she could manage, face tight with horror. “Stone cracks, Dafydd.”

“Hence the necessity for your escape to come sooner rather than later.” Aerin managed a degree of amusement, though the edges of her voice broke apart. The air around her was thick with slush now, swirling against her in grasping patterns. Ice built up around her feet, working to encase her shins, but even as she worked to draw it in, it pooled out, encroaching on the chamber floor. Every breath Lara drew was colder, a welcome relief in subduing her throbbing shoulder, but increasingly dangerous in terms of their survival. “You saved my life, Truthseeker. Let me save yours.”

“I didn’t save it so you could kill yourself an hour later!” Lara made it back to her knees, though she cradled her right arm. Letting it dangle hurt too much. She’d thought when she faced the nightwings that she was becoming a warrior, but a warrior would have to face pain better than she could.

“I told you.” Aerin smiled again, ice cracking around her mouth. “The Drowned Lands are deadly to the Seelie. I think it was never my fate to leave them.”

“Enough.” Warmth rushed the chamber. More than warmth: genuine heat swept from behind Lara toward the entrance. It splashed against Aerin in a visible wave, steam hissing and the sharp scent of warmed metal billowing off her. Ice turned to drizzles, and in seconds she stood in a pool of water. Violent pops echoed around the room, like glaciers calving, and Aerin shuddered from the bone outward. Her armor shattered, blackened fragments falling to the stone floor in a rain of metallic music. She stood among them, not daring to move for long moments before she, like Dafydd and Lara, looked at their savior.

A second man had risen from the biers, Emyr’s twin in everything but coloring. His sharp features were the same, dark gold skin lying so taut over bone that Lara was reminded, uncharitably, of face-lifts gone wrong. But there was more expression in this man’s face than surgery would allow. His thin lips curled with contempt, nostrils flaring as if the air he breathed wasn’t quite good enough for him. His gaze flickered across all three of them, distaste finally settling in fine lines around his eyes and mouth as he reached up to tie long straight dark hair back in a knot. “Emyr’s whelp, a mortal trinket, and a tainted warrior. What have I bothered to save, and at what cost? You.” He snapped at Dafydd, then pointed at the floor in front of him, commanding Dafydd forward. “Tell me what has come to pass.”

Dafydd, to Lara’s private horror, looked at her. Hafgan—because she had no doubt that of the dozen sleepers in the chamber, the arrogant Unseelie who had awakened was indeed their king—made his expression long with incredulity. Obviously he’d concluded Dafydd was the only one capable of relating a tale, or possibly was the only one worthy of a king’s attention.

Lara had never been especially contrary, but Hafgan’s readiness to dismiss her awakened enough affronted amusement to drown her burst of horror. She put her left hand in Dafydd’s and let him help her to her feet, not caring that it took several seconds to steady herself from her shoulder’s pounding. “I’m the reason you’re awake, not Dafydd.”

She might have said a hamster or a goldfish had roused him, from the Unseelie king’s disbelieving sneer. “Emyr and no other is responsible. There are no healers here, and passion is the only other tool that can waken a sleeper. Where is he?”

Lara looked over her shoulder at Aerin, who hadn’t yet moved from the circle of fragmented metal. She shook her head at Lara’s querying eyebrow, and Lara turned back to Hafgan. “Probably preparing to destroy your hidden city.”

Hafgan took such a quick step forward Lara didn’t realize he was within striking range until Dafydd inserted himself between them. “Hear her out, majesty. She is a truthseeker.”

And mortal, Lara wanted to add, and easily annoyed by elfin highhandedness. She’d worked at a bespoke tailoring shop in Boston, where suits were made without patterns, custom-fit to those men and women who could afford them. Many of them had been as autocratic as the elfin kings were, but none of them irritated her so much. Maybe it was the power she wielded in the Barrow-lands; maybe, despite its unfamiliarity, she felt it garnered her some respect.

Mostly, though, at home, she was paid to deal politely with the powerful and pompous. She was in the Barrow-lands as a favor to Dafydd, and had vastly less reason to ignore bad manners. They’d wanted her help, not the other way around. “That was Emyr’s scrying spell you just melted. He was trying to talk to Aerin to make sure we were all still alive, but it went wrong. We all owe you our thanks for stopping it.”

“Mine especially,” Aerin muttered. Lara swallowed laughter, unreasonably pleased that Aerin was as ungracious as she.

Hafgan looked between them and at Dafydd before settling on Lara again. She had the impression he’d chosen his battle by saying, “I have never heard of a scrying spell ‘going wrong.’ ”

“Have you ever tried working one underwater?” Lara winced at even asking, but there was no corresponding flex in the air, no loosening of the spell that let them breathe and speak.

Hafgan glowered at her. “I have never worked one at all, not such as Emyr does. It is not in my element.”

“Then trust me: it went wrong. The Drowned Lands corrupt magic, maybe even incoming magic.” Lara liked that idea more than the thought that Emyr might sacrifice Aerin to his war, but there was equal truth in both possibilities. “And—”

And the staff she carried was probably making it worse. Lara caught those words behind her teeth, looking for something else to say instead. “And that’s why I’m here. Ioan, your successor, asked me to find out the truth of Annwn’s past. Emyr’s memory is unreliable, even when he tries to remember. I need both of you to reconstruct the histories.”

“Why?”

“Because if Ioan’s right, if the Seelie did choose to drown these lands, then your people have been treated appallingly, and I want to try to set it right.”

“And if we brought it on ourselves, arbiter? What then? Will you leave us in our drowned home without another care?” Hafgan focused beyond her. On Aerin, Lara thought for an instant, but he said, “Will you use that staff to finish what was begun, if it is all our own fault?”

“The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. No. Trying to fix what’s wrong isn’t contingent on one side being evil and the other being heroes. The Barrow-lands are dying, and maybe I can help. That’s enough by itself.”

“Then what does the history matter?”

Lara quirked an eyebrow. “I just want to know the truth.”

Hafgan gave Dafydd a sour look. “There, whelp. There’s the reason we killed them all.”