Wayfinder

Thirty-one

Are you sure this is going to work? wasn’t a question Lara was given to asking. She had always known whether someone was sure, and both Ioan and Dafydd were certain of their plan.

But surety wasn’t interchangeable with being right, and the problem with plans was she had no way of determining whether they would succeed. She’d laid down law with her voice once or twice, but the wholesale demand that events go her way lay beyond her. Perhaps only because she thought it did, but that was enough: the limitations she argued were her own.

The glamours disguising them were subtle enough to hardly bother even her. Aerin’s burned hair had been darkened to buttery yellow, and her eyes made blue, but her appearance was so altered from extended use of earth magic that little else needed to be done. Dafydd’s golden tones had been bleached, leaving him wraithlike, and he had taken on fuller-featured aspects: a lusher mouth, cheekbones less angled, and the sweep of his hair longer to help change the line of his jaw. Lara had observed once how alarmingly similar the Seelie looked to one another, and now the understated changes in Aerin and Dafydd reminded her of that. They weren’t themselves, but they could have been any of their people: a police witness would be hard-pressed to single them out of a Seelie lineup.

Lara’s glamour was little more than a change in her height, and the shape of her ears had been altered. She was pale enough already, and her features delicate, so stretching what she had over a frame seven inches taller did most of the disguise work by itself. Even with the headache it induced, she wanted to stare at herself in reflective water a long time, struggling to fully see and appreciate what she looked like as a Seelie woman. Alien and beautiful, but all the more extraordinary for knowing a human lay beneath the imagery.

Ioan stalked along behind them, darker of countenance and narrower in his features than normal. Of all of them, he was the only one armed: Lara and the others dragged along in ropes, Seelie prisoners to an Unseelie guard. None of them had needed begriming or theatrics to play the role of downcast prisoners, not after days of forced marching. Ioan had the hardest part, Lara thought: he was meant to be fresh and triumphant at having captured a handful of runaway Seelie.

“Why wouldn’t he just kill us?” Lara had wondered as the plan was laid out.

Aerin and Dafydd had exchanged glances, and once more Aerin answered when Dafydd clearly didn’t want to. “Merrick always resented being an outcast within the Seelie court. Rightfully, and I did less to mitigate that than I might have,” she admitted grudgingly. “But I think while he would have every Seelie in the Barrow-lands put to the sword, he would first want to have them captured and paraded before him.”

“So they could see his ascension,” Lara guessed.

Aerin nodded. “And so he could perhaps give them false hope of survival, and then enjoy their execution all the more. I’m sorry, Dafydd, but Merrick has always been petty.”

“Maybe he’d have risen above that if he’d been better-treated,” Dafydd said without heat. “It no longer matters. What’s important is I suspect Aerin’s right, and that will give us our best way into the citadel. The glamours will be too subtle to draw attention—we use such minor ones all the time, to straighten disheveled hair or smooth wrinkled clothes. It’s not like entirely hiding four people from sight, or changing our looks completely so we all appear Unseelie.”

“There are more Unseelie than Seelie,” Lara said. “Will the citadel be too full for us to get to the remembrance gardens without being noticed? Or would they expect us to go straight to the throne room?”

“Unlike you,” Ioan pointed out, “I can lie, Truthseeker. If necessary I can tell any curious passersby that you three are being taken to the gardens to meet and appreciate the Seelie dead before joining them yourselves.”

A sour twitch crossed Dafydd’s face, though he said nothing. He had been overruled: he’d wanted to go directly for Merrick, only acquiescing to searching for Emyr first when it was pointed out that the reappearance of two apparently dead Seelie royals would do more to dishearten the Unseelie than just he could.

“And if we find out Emyr really is dead,” Lara had said with more bloodthirsty pragmatism than she’d realized she possessed, “then no one, present or future, will blame you for taking action against Merrick. Not once the illusion is exposed.”

Dafydd had looked at her a long time, then nodded, and a few hours later they’d infiltrated the citadel that was his home. It remained unaltered, pearlescent stone bright with light of its own and hallways suddenly giving way to gardens large enough to be called parks. Only its people were different, making splashes of color against the white city walls where the Seelie had nearly blended in. Like the Seelie, they shared a greater homogeneity of features than any ethnic group Lara had ever encountered at home, but the range of hair colors—from coppery red through shades of brown and into shining black—gave them more distinction than the uniformly pale Seelie. Many scowled or sneered as Ioan herded his trio of captives by, but none of them questioned him. Authority, Lara supposed, was authority, regardless of what world it was in. Ioan acted as if he had every right to be there, and no one suggested otherwise.

Aerin, however, actually led the little band of outlaws, guiding them through the citadel through the quietest corridors. She finally veered under an ivy-coated archway and into sunlight. Sunlight, not the opalescent light of the citadel’s floating orbs. Lara squinted up through tall winding trees to see the garden was open to the sky. Shining towers made a sculpted framework above the garden, and light glittered down as if poured like water, soft and soothing. Lara exhaled so deeply her shoulders rolled inward. It took all her concentration to not simply fold up and rest on the mossy garden floor.

Of the others, Aerin had no compunctions against doing exactly that. She caught herself on a bench that looked grown, not carved, for all that parts of it appeared to be marble. There were others like it scattered along green pathways and under the twisting trees, some few of them backing up against latticework fences riddled with ivy. Water burbled over a short wall, though once it must have been as tall as the stonework surrounding it: its edges were worn down and smoothed by centuries, perhaps aeons, of water drifting over it. The little waterfall’s music was soothing, as was the breeze that drifted through the gardens, carrying a sweet scent too subtle to be cloying. The entire space had the aura of holy ground, unspoiled by divisiveness or conflict.

Dafydd crouched by Aerin, brushing a thumb over her temple as she coiled on the bench. “Rest awhile,” he whispered. “You’ve done more than your part. The gardens will revitalize you.”

“Wake me when you leave. I would see this through.”

Dafydd nodded, but Aerin came awake enough to give him a sharp look, and Lara a sharper one. Bemused, Lara promised, “We will,” and only then did Aerin settle again, trusting the truthseeker’s word. She was asleep within a breath or two, and even in that little time looked healthier, as though the garden had revitalized her already.

“It would have been better to refuse her,” Dafydd said quietly as he came back to Lara and Ioan. “She’s exhausted and probably needs the rest more than we need her blade. Metaphorically,” he added, glancing at his own weaponless hands.

“Probably, but she’d never forgive you.”

Dafydd quirked a smile. “I seem to recall someone saying forever is a very long time, to immortals.”

“And it appears we can hold a grudge that long,” Ioan said drily. “Truthseeker, can you find a way?”

Lara nodded, glad she hadn’t sat for fear she would never have gotten back up. Even so, her eyes fluttered shut in the garden’s quiet. The music in her mind was soft, unhurried, as if the garden itself affected it, and Lara shook off its effects with an effort. “Do Seelie ever just give up on living and come here to fade away?”

A startled silence met her and she blinked her eyes open again to find Dafydd examining her with consternation. “Occasionally. How did you know?”

“It’s just that peaceful here. A little like a hospice, as much as holy ground. It seems like the kind of place people might come to die.” Unexpected truth sang through the last words, finally wakening her thoroughly. “Where would they go?” she asked, but not of the men.

Of the music, which flared in trumpets, then lay down a path through the garden, zipping forward. Suddenly reinvigorated, she ran after it, chasing it through doorways and down paths that extended through a far greater area than she’d imagined possible. Ioan and Dafydd came after her, catching up as her bright truthseeking path plunged into the earth and Lara stopped, frowning at it.

“No one said we’d need a shovel. The remembrance gardens in the Drowned Lands had a door, not a …”

“Barrow,” Dafydd said softly.

Lara covered her mouth with one hand, cool shock splashing over her. It stood to reason, and yet she hadn’t expected it. “Is digging the only way into a barrow?”

“There are often cairns atop them, which might be moved to reveal a door, but here …” Ioan trailed off, shaking his head, and Lara turned in a full circle, examining the garden segment for anything that might be a door.

“Truth will find the hardest path. Well, going through the dirt is hardest, all right. I should have been looking for … the key?” Warbling music played, the concept neither wrong nor right. Lara kept it in mind, sour notes dancing as she studied the garden a second time. “There must be something.”

“Must there be?” Dafydd sounded interested and amused. “Why?”

“Because I have a hard time imagining any Seelie digging up six feet of dirt to get into a stasis chamber, and if you were hiding people there, you wouldn’t want to call in servants to do the job. Secrets only stay secret if you keep them.”

An amused voice said, “A truth very few people ever fully appreciate,” as an old man tottered into the garden, a wry smile on his aged features.

“Oisín!” Lara ran to hug him, unsurprised that he caught her confidently for all that his eyes were filmed over, signal to the world that he couldn’t see. She had never made friends quickly or easily, but the ancient poet had found a place in her heart the first and only time they’d met. “You’re still here!”

“I’m too old and fragile to run, even from a war that comes within the citadel walls. The lands have watched over me,” he said genially.

Lara released him and stepped back, smiling. “Emyr said the Barrow-lands liked you.”

“Only he sounded it a curse when he said it,” Oisín guessed. “My long years here have never enamored him of me.”

“Unlikely,” Dafydd murmured, “when my mother was so fond of you. I’m glad to see you’re well, Oisín. Do you remember my brother Ioan?”

“Better than he remembers me, I dare say.” Oisín turned an unerring blind gaze on Ioan. “Changed in body but not in heart, I think. Welcome home, Ioan ap Caerwyn.”

“Ap Annwn,” Ioan murmured. “My dreams are for this land as a whole, not the white citadel alone.”

“As you will.” Oisín looked back at Lara, putting a hand out for her to take. “And you have grown greatly in power since we first spoke. Have you met another prophet?”

Lara breathed a laugh. “A human one. It started out the same way, ‘truth will seek the hardest path, measures that must mend the past,’ but then she said ‘breaker who restores the land, keeps the world gates well in hand.’ I don’t know what it means. I don’t like prophecies, Oisín.”

“Nor fairy tales,” he agreed, and Lara ducked her head to mutter the already-familiar refrain: “And yet here I am, in one.” More clearly, she said, “This was always going to happen, wasn’t it? You sent Dafydd to Earth looking for a truthseeker who would break the world. If he found me, or any truthseeker, I was always going to be a catalyst for change here. Oisín, my power is strengthening, but I just don’t know if it’s going to mature fast enough for me to do what’s necessary.”

Oisín, serenely confident, said, “It will. Begin by locating the key for the door, Wayfinder. I’m far too old to be digging in the dirt, and these two, as you surmised, are far too elfin.”

Vague insult crossed Dafydd’s face, though not Ioan’s. Lara laughed as she closed her eyes again, this time trusting her power over the garden’s lullaby. “Truthseeker, wayfinder, worldbreaker. I don’t think I like titles very much either, but since I don’t even know if we can get in there without the right key, I think this is the only way. Maybe it just takes a little more delicacy than laying down a true path.”

A memory of the lights she’d followed in the Drowned Lands came back to her, fireflies rather than beacons. They were more inquisitive than the truthseeking paths, which bolted hither and yon with great integrity but no subtlety. In some cases that was perfect, but in the green-growing gardens, more gentle means seem called for. Dozens of tiny bells rang with delighted tones as firefly lights scattered behind her eyelids, flitting from one spot to another around the gardens.

More than once, urgency came into their chimes, then faded, as if they found things of interest but not exactly what they sought. The garden seemed littered with those things, and Lara’s heart hopped with interest, wondering what treasures might lie forgotten in a place so old as this one. If all went well, she would have time to discover them later.

And if all didn’t, the Barrow-lands themselves might be lost to eternity. Lara shivered at the thought and her seeking magic redoubled its efforts, sparks of light clearly agitated at the idea of such loss. Reflecting Lara’s own emotions, she realized, which could become dangerous if not controlled. Bad enough a truthseeker could make a thing true by commanding it, but if her magic rolled over into making things true because she felt them, she could wreak havoc without ever meaning to.

The staff, largely quiet over the past few days, thumped with appreciation for the idea. Lara bared her teeth and it went silent again as glints of truthseeking magic discovered and hovered over Aerin a little while, considering her as the answer to their search. Ultimately they slipped away again, but with more purpose, as if something about the sleeping woman triggered recognition. Within a few more minutes, the dancing lights swarmed into another segment of the garden, and music fell into place in Lara’s mind, creating a symphony.

The remembrance garden was laid out in a mirror-image to itself, with the entrance at the center. Lara saw it from above, as if the sparks of her magic flew upward to show it to her. She stood with Dafydd and the others inside the whorl of one elegant pattern, and across the garden, in its opposite place, stood a small stone cairn, no more than a dozen rocks piled neatly atop one another. Lara squeaked, “Ioan!” and thrust a finger after her magic, sending him into a run led by firefly lights. Lara spun to watch the grass where her truthseeking path had ended, but even expecting it, she let go a yelp of surprise when, after a few minutes, it crumbled to reveal an earthen pathway.

Propelled by her own yell, she leapt down the path, leaving impressions in dirt as she ran into a chamber darker, earthier, and emptier than the sanctuary within the Drowned Lands.

Emptier, but not empty.

Hafgan stood over Emyr, an uplifted blade in his hand.