by C. E. Murphy
Pain twisted Emyr’s expression, betrayal so clear that it might have been a knife slicing across his face. A second image sprang up in the ice, this one, Lara thought, called from his memory, rather than any new visitor within the scrying spell.
It was a young man—a boy, really—with finer, longer features than Ioan possessed. Even in ice, his hair seemed wheat-pale, not the white or silver sported by Aerin and Emyr, but touched with sunlight. His eyes, like all Seelie’s, were light-colored, but less deep-set in his face than Ioan’s. The boy wore Seelie clothing: winged shoulders and light, fluting fabrics that wove in and out to make snug-fitting patterns against his torso. Despite the differences in coloration, Lara had no doubt this was Ioan as a child; Ioan as his father remembered him.
Ioan turned his attention from Emyr to the sculpture, then twisted away to gesture at the pool behind him. A third image rose from the water, as colorless and as vivid as the ice child Emyr had wrought. First the boy, and then a youth who bore a striking resemblance to Dafydd, though he wore his pale hair long and smooth, rather than the jagged rock-star cut that Dafydd favored. Still, the height of his cheekbones, the expressive mouth, and the slenderness of his frame all called Dafydd to Lara’s mind.
But then he changed, the image evolving more rapidly than Lara thought possible for its living counterpart. Though it was only water, it called darkness the same way Emyr’s ice scryings did, coloring hair to black and skin to a darker shade of pale. The water-Ioan lost height, shaping it to breadth, and his Seelie garb was put away for the heavier stuff worn by the Unseelie. Within moments the transformation was complete, leaving an almost-perfect echo of the Ioan whose image Emyr had called forth.
Almost perfect: the real Ioan wore the ebony circlet, where the younger version did not. The latter turned up his palms as if to say what else did you expect?, then fell away into the pool with a splash. The remaining image sought out Lara’s gaze. Despite the diminutive size demanded by the scrying pool, she found as much presence and command in his simulacrum as she had when she’d met him in person.
“Welcome,” Ioan ap Annwn said with genuine warmth. “Welcome back to Annwn, Lara Jansen.”
Emyr smashed the image to pieces with his fist.
Lara flinched backward with a yelp, and even Aerin’s hand went to her sword, as though the ruined vision might somehow prove a threat. Emyr’s harsh panting filled the tent, then disappeared as he stalked from the scrying pool to shove Aerin aside and catch Lara’s dress.
Or very nearly: his hands came together, grasping. Lara’s heartbeat shot up, fear and anger rising to the fore. She lifted the staff crosswise over her chest, making it a barrier between them. Eagerness thrummed through the ivory, as if Emyr were a recognized opponent. His hands splayed and his lip curled as he stilled his action. “How dare you—”
“How dare you,” Lara said incredulously. Her hands were icy, as though Emyr had caught them in his grip and called his element into play, but they gripped the staff with conviction. She could probably manage a single blow if she needed to: neither Emyr nor Aerin would expect her to respond physically to his advance. “I don’t care if you’re the king of Heaven. You don’t go around manhandling people.” Beyond Emyr, Aerin’s astonishment suggested that, as king, Emyr both could and did behave so aggressively. Offended at the idea, Lara spat air, not quite uncouth enough to draw liquid for the full effect. “You damned well don’t do it to me.”
Tension pulled at Emyr’s upper lip, like he’d smelled something vile and was just polite enough not to speak of it. But he withdrew a step, giving Lara her space and autonomy. She remained where she was, staring at him and glad that her hands still refused to shake. A month earlier she might have screamed if a man had come at her the way Emyr had just done. She might not have, too: society dictated foolish amounts of discretion in response to bad behavior, especially for women. But she could hardly imagine that she would ever have stood her ground, or thought of risking brute force against a larger adversary. The Barrow-lands, Dafydd, and her own burgeoning magic had lent her confidence she knew was growing, but coming up against it directly still surprised her.
Not quite as much as it surprised Emyr, perhaps. Lara lowered the staff by degrees, neither Seelie moving until it rested butt-down against the carpets again. “With all due respect, your majesty, Ioan’s probably the only one who has any idea where Dafydd is, or what kind of condition he’s in. Cutting off communications,” in a temper tantrum, she carefully didn’t say aloud, “wasn’t the most tactful thing you could have done.”
“With all due respect,” Emyr echoed flatly. “Truthseeker, I thought you were not given to embellishing your statements. I find that phrase difficult to believe.”
Lara gave him a pointed smile. “I assure you I meant it with every bit of respect appropriate to the moment, your majesty.” There were relatively few colloquial phrases she had been able to use throughout her life. With all due respect was one of them, because it could be invested with precisely as much respect as she felt was due.
Emyr made a sound that indicated he understood all too clearly what she meant. “Spoken in a child’s word,” he quoted, bitterly. “Changes that will break the world. What have you done to my people, Truthseeker?”
Guilt made a tight knot in Lara’s stomach before she banished it with indignation. “As far as I’m concerned it’s been barely a month since I first came here, Emyr. Even if you take the time that’s elapsed, it’s only been a year and a half.” She had, once again, become a time traveler. Skipping months at once, lurching from what had been a simple, linear life into the chaos of other lives moving on without her. At home, that had distressed her badly. Her attachment to the Barrow-lands was far less profound, and as she had left and returned in the midst of battle, worrying about a handful of disarrayed months seemed useless.
Useless except in terms of how Dafydd ap Caerwyn might have fared in those long months. He’d lived out the time she’d missed at home in jail, awaiting trial on charges of her kidnapping and presumed murder. Ioan, she hoped, would have treated his brother more humanely, but she couldn’t be certain of that until she saw him again. She made a fist, the staff’s reassuring carvings marking her palm. “Either way, I couldn’t have possibly affected Ioan’s choices. He decided to become Unseelie long before I came to the Barrow-lands. I may be destined to break your world, but you can’t lay that fracture on my head.” That was all you, she wanted to conclude, but had the wisdom to stop her tongue.
As a child wouldn’t. The prophecy Emyr had quoted sang through her mind in its entirety: Truth will seek the hardest path / measures that must mend the past. / Spoken in a child’s word / changes that will break the world. Finder learns the only way worlds come changed at end of day.
She was the truthseeking child, according to Oisín, the mortal poet who had first spoken the prophecy. A child by Seelie standards, who viewed her twenty-three years as inconsequential. And if she’d had doubts as to whether she might break or mend a world, the staff she now carried had clarified that: even on Earth, where its powers were muted, it had the strength to call up earthquakes and storms. Here, in the land of its making, she had every confidence it could destroy or create as its wielder desired.
God should have that kind of power, not Lara. She dragged in a steadying breath, then met Emyr’s eyes. “Is Ioan right, Emyr? Did you use the staff to drown the Unseelie lands? Is that what started your territory wars?”
“Ask Hafgan, if you would know what happened.” Emyr threw away the words with a sharp gesture and turned his back on her.
Exasperation flooded Lara. “I would, but he’s not here. You must’ve been there when the sea rose. Aerin? Were you?”
The Seelie woman stiffened and cast a discomfited glance at Emyr. “I don’t remember a time when the Hundred were not drowned, Lara. They may not have been, in my childhood, but …” She passed a hand over her eyes and shrugged. “The memories I have weigh in favor of them always being d
rowned. I remember swimming in the high tides with Dafydd and Merrick when I was a girl. I recall Rhia—” She broke off as Emyr hissed, and when she resumed again her voice was softer. “I recall the queen watching over us, and how she loved the waters.”
“Rhiannon.” Lara finished the name Aerin had not, and this time Emyr’s hiss was directed at her. She shook it off, more curious about the Seelie queen than concerned about the king’s anger. “Oisín mentioned her once. Even Dafydd barely remembers her. What … what happened to her?”
“She died,” Aerin said when it became obvious Emyr would not speak. “Saving Merrick, in truth. He swam out too far. The queen went into the water before anyone realized something was wrong. Merrick returned, but our lady …”
Lara put her fingers over her mouth, comprehension lurching through her. Ioan, so far as she could tell, had been embraced by the Unseelie king Hafgan, while Emyr had never warmed to his own adopted child Merrick. Now she understood why, and for the first time felt real sympathy for the Seelie monarch. It wouldn’t be easy for even a charitable man to forgive a child for costing a wife’s life, and nothing about Emyr had ever suggested he was of a lenient mind.
“Put her on a horse.” Emyr’s harsh voice cut across any thought of condolences Lara might have offered. “Put her on a horse, Aerin, and stick her there. We ride for my traitorous son’s head.”
Stick her there was a literal explanation of the magic used to keep Lara on her horse. She wasn’t uncoordinated, but her exposure to horses was limited. Rather than permit her to slow the Seelie riders down, she had twice now been be-spelled so that she simply couldn’t fall off her horse. She could climb down, slowly and carefully, but that wasn’t something she wanted to try at full gallop, in spite of her reservations about their task. And it would have been far worse to be left behind. At Emyr’s side she had a chance to mitigate his decisions, though the odds of the Seelie king listening to her were slim.
They rode now at the head of a host, Aerin and a dozen other guards behind them. Lara’s place just to Emyr’s left wasn’t a position of honor so much as a location from which she could be easily watched. Guards rode behind them to ensure she wouldn’t peel off and ride breakneck across the countryside alone.
Not that she would: the only two places in the Barrow-lands she knew at all were the Seelie citadel and the Unseelie palace. The one was hardly a refuge when Emyr was infuriated with her, and the other would be her destination regardless. It was the only chance she had at learning Dafydd’s fate. Whatever Emyr’s intentions, Lara’s own were to find the amber-eyed Seelie prince. The hope of seeing him again—of seeing him healthy and fit—urged her forward even if nothing else did.
Forest surged by, the horses crossing unnatural lengths with each step as they left Emyr’s war far behind. In very little time, even the forest was gone and the land sloped up toward rough mountains. In the distance a sheer rock face rose as though it had been thrust out of the earth so recently that erosion hadn’t yet thought to touch it. From what she’d learned of Barrow-lands history, it seemed possible that it had in fact erupted in living memory.
The thought was a true one, filled with deep bassoon notes, as if the sound of tearing stone had been transmuted into music. That would have been enough, but the staff, which lay strapped across her back now, sang an answer as much as her truthseeking sense did. If one part of the Barrow-lands had drowned, another area had risen. The bleak gray wall ahead of them was part and parcel of that, and the staff exuded smugness over the fact. Lara bent her head over the horse’s mane, discomfort crawling along her spine. Ioan hadn’t intimated that the staff had personality, but she had no other word for the barrage of feelings.
The thought twinged discordance and she amended it. She had another word: sentience. But that was too alien to be fully considered. Oisín, who had carried it for years, might be able to explain the weapon’s evident character, but the poet wasn’t among the riders approaching the Unseelie court.
Emyr’s curse barked across her thoughts, and her horse obeyed the command that the other riders gave their animals: it slowed, prancing to the edge of a plummeting canyon. The soaring escarpment lay on the canyon’s far side, emphasizing again the impression that granite had simply been torn asunder, a ravine ripped open so the rock face could be permitted to shoot skyward. On the far wall a narrow, plunging ledge jutted down sheer rock face, its foot lost in darkness. Sparks of pain flew through Lara’s skull as she stared at it.
“The crevasse looks as though it narrows to the right,” Aerin called. “Perhaps there’s a crossing point. Shall I ride to see?”
Below Emyr’s grudging agreement, Lara asked, “Haven’t you ever been to the Unseelie palace?” Her vision pounded, bolts of searing light breaking through the image of what she saw and what she knew was there. She had always had a susceptibility to migraines, but only in the past few weeks had their auras been triggered by deceiving magic.
Emyr growled. “What reason would I have to visit my enemy’s stronghold?”
“To see your son?” Lara suggested, and only too late wished the words away. Emyr’s lip curled, but she raised a hand, barely aware she was silencing a king. “The forest path to the Seelie citadel is glamoured. It can’t be seen until you’re on it, so the horses have to know the way.”
“What of it?”
Lara caught her horse’s reins up. It whickered in surprise, as she’d done nothing to suggest guiding it before, but it went willingly enough when she turned it away from the precipice and rode back through the gathered guards.
“Clear a path.” She would never have imagined herself giving calm commands, nor for a dozen riders to make way as if she had every right to give orders. Only Emyr hesitated, and then, irritated, he, too, pulled back from the cliff’s edge.
It was easier to see from a distance. The air didn’t twist as badly. Lara’s headache faded, allowing her to look through the disguise that had been laid upon the entrance to Unseelie territory.
The rift in the earth was unquestionably still there. But across from them was not flat rock face, but rather a black maw gouged into the cliff. She had ridden it before: she knew, despite what her eyes wanted to see, that the cavern hid a tongue of stone broad and solid enough for a horse to leap to, and that the plummeting pathway visible along the flat wall in truth led straight down into the canyon’s depths. It was a far more difficult illusion than the one laid to hide the Seelie citadel. That one had merely surprised her, while this wrenched at her vision and had nearly cost her the contents of her stomach when she’d first ridden it. Even now, knowing its truth, it was nearly impossible to see through, though the longer she frowned at it, the clearer it became.
Its trick was in flattening the real landscape, so that the eye saw a nearly endless edifice rising behind an equally lengthy ravine. In fact, the stone rising up before them was cut into a nearly perfect squared corner, with great lengths of granite running at close to ninety degrees. One shot off to Lara’s right, where Aerin rode to explore the slight narrowing of the crevasse. The other was almost straight ahead. It was down that angle that the pathway ran, still plunging as deep into the chasm as it did in the illusion. Lara blinked once and the entire glamour smoothed back into a single plane, still fighting the truth she believed in. Dafydd’s glamour hadn’t been so persistent. Once she’d seen through it to recognize his elfin features, it hadn’t worked on her again. Whomever had cast the spell into these great stone walls had poured tremendous magic into the job. Lara wondered suddenly if the maker had survived his efforts.
And now, very likely against wit and wisdom, she was going to lead the single man whom they had probably most wanted to keep out of the hidden city into it. Lara patted her horse’s shoulder and tried not to feel foolish at murmuring “Trust me” to the beast.
It snorted agreeably, and in the instant she drove her heels into its flanks, Lara wondered if it was trust, or if the magic-riddled horses could see through the glamour. It hardly
mattered: it sprang forward in a run and leapt fearlessly into the chasm. Lara’s stomach dropped and she had an instant to be grateful for the spell that kept her stuck to the saddle.
A heartbeat later they landed in a clatter of hooves against the broad cave tongue, glamour giving up and no longer trying to fool Lara’s eye. The horse pitched down the incline leading to the Unseelie city. Behind her, Lara heard Emyr’s shout of astonishment and preparations for his host to follow. Only a few seconds passed before the first of his guards hurtled across the void and gave chase.
Gave chase, as though there might be hope of escape. At best Lara’s precipitous arrival would offer the Unseelie a momentary warning before Emyr burst in on them. Not that there would be many people left in the city, not if things were as they’d been the first time she had visited. It had seemed then that everyone able-bodied was already at war, and after months of battles, she didn’t imagine that would have changed.
Still, Ioan was there, or Emyr’s scrying spell would have called up a location other than the palace garden. He could be warned, and perhaps could tell her of Dafydd’s fate before Emyr arrived. That knowledge might be enough to stop the Seelie king.
Sour notes lingered with the thought, suggesting it would take more than just news of his younger son to placate Emyr. A struggle between gratitude at her power’s continuing development, and resentment that she could no longer abide in false hope for even a moment, rose up. Someday she might be able to turn her truthseeking sense off, a thought worth pursuing.
The plunging path before her ended, her horse’s hooves slipping against stone as they reached flat ground. The roadway took a sharp curve into a carved gateway in the rock wall’s face. The horse gathered itself again and they burst through the unguarded passage into a cavern so vast it defied the eye. Even on a second viewing, Lara found it all but incomprehensible.