by C. E. Murphy
Aerin, softly, said, “No one returns from the Drowned Lands,” but Ioan raised a hand to silence her.
“No one returns without help,” he agreed, “but that doesn’t mean no one returns. There are trials to be faced, but they must be faced even when bringing someone to the healing waters. The petitioner must be found worthy.”
“And if they’re not?” Lara wished she hadn’t asked even as the words slipped out. The pitying expressions around her answered as fully as she might need. “Well, you were trying to save Dafydd’s life and you were found worthy. I’m trying to find the truth of what happened to this world, so hopefully that’ll be enough to see me through. I want you to agree to a cease-fire while I’m gone.”
“What makes you so certain we’ll allow you to go?” This time it was Emyr with the half-made threat.
Lara’s eyebrows rose. “Aside from me intending to bring back your son and heir?”
“And my old enemy,” Emyr pointed out. “Perhaps the loss of one is worth the loss of the other.” Aerin’s face tightened, but she held her tongue as Emyr continued. “You are an outsider, Truthseeker, with an agenda of your own. You returned the staff, a dangerous weapon, to the Barrow-lands, and I have no way of knowing you won’t offer it to my enemy or destroy my lands if you’re allowed to run unchecked.”
The staff was suddenly warm again, eager to fulfill Emyr’s expectations. Lara reached for it, moving slowly because she knew the action could be seen as aggressive, and didn’t speak until she had it in her hands, one end resting against the stoneworked floor. It seemed brighter, as if trying to draw attention to itself, and she wondered what kind of picture she made, bedraggled in mortal wear but holding a weapon of immortal make. She drew herself up, aware she was much shorter than the elfin folk around her, but making the best of her presence.
“I have the staff, Emyr, and I’ll defend myself with it if my own power isn’t enough. But I won’t sit idly by while your two factions work to destroy one another. If rousing Hafgan, awakening Dafydd, and lifting the Drowned Lands is what it takes to end this mess, then that’s what I’ll do.”
They couldn’t stop her: the staff all but hummed in her hands, suggesting ways she could make an escape. The earth below would break with one sharp blow, a tunnel tearing through granite to offer her a pathway out. The cavernous roof could be splintered with no more than a surge of willpower. Lara had no doubt the staff could drag her skyward and send her soaring through the shattered ceiling.
And both would destroy the Unseelie city. She knotted her fingers against the staff’s intricate carvings and tried to exude calm, not encouraging any of the dramatic scenarios the weapon proposed. There was a door out. She would use that, like any normal person. Not that she felt normal. She never had been, not with her odd talent, but for the first time, standing there with the staff, she felt as though she had the potential to be vastly more than she was. That she could, if she wanted to, rule this world, and perhaps her own as well.
“He won’t stop you,” Aerin said unexpectedly. Some of the flare left the staff. Lara breathed more easily and blinked toward Aerin, who continued, “I’ll go with you so the Seelie will not be forgotten, no matter how far you travel.”
“And the Unseelie?” Ioan asked.
“It’s your story she looks to corroborate,” Aerin muttered. “I doubt she’ll forget your kind. But send a representative, if you like. Quests are always best done in threes.”
“A point well made.” Ioan smiled and turned to Lara. “I’ll join you.”
“Abandon your people in the midst of war?” Emyr sounded pleased by the idea.
Ioan widened his eyes in flawless innocence. “The truthseeker has proposed amnesty, Father. Will you not lay down your sword for the little time it takes us to journey to the Drowned Lands and back?”
“Little time? It could be months. Years!”
“Which is negligible to immortals,” Lara said. “Maybe you could stay here to ensure the Seelie court’s good behavior.”
Emyr looked down his nose at her, disdain no less effective for the water still dripping off him. “I am a king, Truthseeker.”
“Which should make you an effective bargaining tool. More effective than your firstborn sons turned out to be. Speaking of which, have you seen Merrick, Ioan?”
Astonishment lengthened Ioan’s jaw. “Merrick is dead.”
Lara crushed her eyes shut, trying to remember who she had shared what information with. For a moment she wished she was at home, gossiping with her friend Kelly Richards, if for no other reason than her certainty that Kelly had been told everything. “No, he isn’t. Merrick was the mastermind of his own demise. He framed Dafydd. A power play.” She shrugged, eyes open again, and sympathy splashed through her as she saw Ioan struggle to fit the news against what he thought he’d known. “He controlled the nightwing hydra you fought in my world,” Lara added. “I caught up with him a few hours later, and you’d hit him pretty hard. I thought he might have come looking for payback.”
“That was—” Ioan broke off, held his breath, then, more steadily, began again. “That was months ago. I hadn’t spared a thought for the … hydra … or you, in some time, Lara.”
“It was this morning, in my timeline. So where’s he been all this time? Hiding? Recovering?”
“Dead,” Emyr said, and shrugged arrogantly as she looked at him. “All we have is your word that he lives at all.”
Ioan, to Lara’s gratitude, spluttered, “A truthseeker’s word is incontrovertible! How can you—”
“Even a truthseeker can be misled, especially if young in years and power. More likely by far his resurrection is a conspired tale between the two of you to draw me here so you might execute me.” Badly tuned string instruments sang through Emyr’s theory, proof that even he didn’t believe what he suggested.
Lara gestured toward the pool. “Use it to scry for him. Prove me wrong.”
Pique thinned Emyr’s lips, and Lara fought down a triumphant smile. Ioan, though, took a few quick strides back to the pool’s edge and knelt by it. The unbroken surface shimmered, then deepened, water turning stormy gray. “If I can find him we may have more than one task to complete, Truthseeker. Hafgan and Dafydd’s return, yes, but hunting down our cousin may be more important still.”
Emyr made a sound of angry disbelief. “That spell works in ice alone!”
“What is ice,” Ioan murmured, “but frozen water? The scrying spell has long since been mine to command, Father. You might have considered that, in the years we were apart. We might have been closer, had you ever thought to answer my seekings.” He dismissed the comment with a wave of his fingers, though Emyr went briefly still, staring at the man his son had become. Ioan, as if ignorant of the hard look, brought his full attention back to the pool.
It showed nothing more than relentless gray whirls and white-caps, a chaotic ocean reflected in contained waters. Lara edged forward, trying to find a pattern in the breaking waves. “I thought the scrying spell could find someone anywhere.” Rather like a cell phone, putting people in touch at the farthest points on the globe.
“Almost anywhere. If he’s within Annwn, certainly, but if he’s returned to your world …”
Very much like a cell phone, then, reliant on the coverage available. Lara flashed a smile, somehow reassured that magic and technology had similar limits, though her humor faded as Emyr slid her a triumphant look. “Your protestations of his survival lack teeth, Truthseeker.”
Lara mumbled, “Lara. My name is Lara,” though she doubted Emyr would deign to use it. The title objectified her, and it was always easier to ignore an object than a person. “I’m not going to argue about it, Emyr. Either he’s dead like you’re pretending to believe, or he’s hiding in my world. Either way, he’s a problem we don’t have to deal with right now. Will you call a cease-fire?”
A thrum of determination went through her as she asked. She was almost certain she could enforce a reprieve by using th
e staff, but it was a solution she shied away from. Like escaping the Unseelie city, the first methods that came to mind were violent: splitting the earth between the two armies, for example, so that few, if any, could cross over and make war on the other. They weren’t options she wanted to explore, regardless of the ease with which she suspected they could be done.
Once again, an image of herself as she’d been only a few weeks ago—quiet, shy, always ready to remain in the background—rose up in contrast to what she’d become. The very idea of wielding significant power, secular or magical, to get her point across would have been inconceivable. Now it was a matter for debate, even if she was determined those debates remain internal.
Caution crept into Emyr’s cool gaze as he studied her, and Lara wondered what subtle change had come over her face to prompt discretion in the Seelie king. “Three days,” he finally said. Beyond him, Aerin’s head came up, surprise clear in the action. “Three days from dawn my army will strike again, and strike hard. If they find themselves battling an enemy whose leader has abandoned them, so much the better for us. If you can affect change, Truthseeker, best do so quickly.” Emyr raised a hand and his horse, still soaked from its prance in the pool, came to him. He swung up onto it with consummate grace and rode for the garden entrance, guards scattering to make way.
He stopped at Aerin’s side, looking down at her. “Join them. I will scry you nightly to learn what comes of this adventure. Should you not return, our vengeance will be in your name.”
Aerin paled but nodded, and whispered something in the elfin high tongue, so quiet that even Lara’s gathering talent couldn’t decipher it. Emyr softened briefly and he put a gauntleted hand on Aerin’s hair, then rode past her, his guards falling into place behind him.
Not until the hoofbeats had faded did anyone speak. Ioan said, “Well,” with pleasure, and Lara, at the same moment, asked, “Why did he do that? He can’t want me to succeed.”
“You could not see your own face, Truthseeker,” Aerin replied. “Emyr remembers when your kind were our justice. I think you may have reminded him of that time, and reminded him of powers even he doesn’t want to cross.”
“What? I thought he was the law. I thought there’d never been more than a few truthseekers anyway. What?” Lara bit down on further repetitions, feeling like an actor dropped into a play she didn’t know the lines to.
“It only took a few,” Aerin said. “And Emyr’s word has been law as long as I can remember. But once upon a time—”
“Oh, no. That’s how fairy tales start.” Lara turned back to her horse, burying her face in the solidity of its shoulder. “I don’t like fairy tales.”
“They seem to have a fondness for you,” Ioan murmured. “Aerin is right, Lara. Yours was not an expression to interfere with. Even I would have shied from it, and you and I aren’t at such cross-purposes as you are with my father.”
Lara gave him a sharp look. “Don’t be sure of that. At least he didn’t kidnap me.”
“Can we not let that be bygones?”
“No, we can’t. I’m not doing any of this for you, Ioan. I’m doing it for Dafydd. If I have to uproot your entire world to get him back, I will. That might end up being to your advantage, but this is not about you.” Lara spoke with ferocity, as if doing so could quell the worry that rose in her every time she thought of Dafydd.
“I envy him,” Ioan said after a moment, “to be capable of inspiring such loyalty on so brief an acquaintance. Be that as it may,” he added, “Aerin is right about another thing. Our ancient histories and legends suggest truthseekers were once the law in these lands, and, not even royal blood was above them.”
“What happened?”
Aerin shrugged. “Rhiannon died.”
“She was one person!”
“She was the queen of Annwn.” Ioan’s simple phrase rang deep bells through Lara, making vibrations that bounced against each other and resonated out again. Lara shuddered, overwhelming emotion rising up to sting at her eyes and send cold bumps scattering across her arms. She cleared her throat, then did so again before gathering enough voice to speak.
“Why is that so important? That was the most … true thing … that I’ve heard here. One of the most true things I’ve ever heard. It felt like—” She broke off, lips pressed together as Ioan and Aerin gave her curious looks. “It felt the same way pure faith does in my world. Like you’d just said ‘God is the king of Heaven.’ It’s so true that saying it is almost silly. Like …” She faltered, but the two elfin folk, fair and dark, were both smiling with wry comprehension.
“Rhiannon was our goddess, Lara. Queen of Annwn, heart of the land. Annwn was born of her, and without her cannot help but be a shadow of what it was. Emyr and Hafgan both loved her, it’s said, and she danced between them as her mood took her. They were jealous of each other, and of her mortal lovers, but when she died they were devastated. That story,” Ioan concluded softly, “is so beloved to our peoples that not even time has worn away its telling.”
“But how can you kill God? Or a goddess, how can you—?”
“Your god, I think, doesn’t walk the earth,” Aerin said, as quietly as Ioan had spoken. “Ours was one of us, the first of us, the womb and magic and vision from which we and this land were born. And for all the endless years of our lives, we can die by accident or violence, and so could she. We’re not like you, Lara.”
“That’s not a god,” Lara protested. “That’s—I mean, my God doesn’t walk the earth, no, or not mostly, but He’s eternal, and humans are mortal. You keep reminding me of that.” She sent a sour look after Emyr, though he was long gone.
“Mortal flesh,” Ioan said, “but immortal souls. You go on forever, in a way we do not.”
Hushed truth ran through his words, more like water over stone than the symphonic song Lara was accustomed to. She finally said, “That’s awful,” feeling it entirely inadequate, but Ioan laughed.
“Perhaps, but then, we would consider your brief span of physical years in exchange for an eternity of disembodiment terrible, too. We follow different paths, Truthseeker, and different fates await us.”
“But not for the next few days,” Aerin concluded pragmatically. “Until we return from the Drowned Lands, our fates are most certainly bound together, and most particularly bound to …” She trailed off, frowning at Ioan.
“We were children together,” he said after a moment. “For a little while, anyway. It may as well be Ioan, especially as I think the royal title would sit poorly on your tongue.”
“Hafgan is king of the Unseelie,” Aerin said, though without conviction.
“Which is why I took his name when he went to the Drowned Lands. The continuity was more important to my people than my name was to me.”
“The continuity was more important to my king,” Aerin corrected. “Had he known of Hafgan’s abdication—”
Ioan’s eyebrows rose fractionally, a hint of humor coming into his response. “He would have invaded. Hence its importance to my people.”
Aerin thinned her mouth, clearly exasperated at the shaving of details, but she let it go to continue what she’d been saying. “We will be greatly in your power, which I acknowledge so that you’re aware I understand our debt and danger. Do not abuse it, teyrnfradwr.”
The word echoed in Lara’s mind, rendering meaning though she was certain she hadn’t genuinely understood it. Traitor, or something close, full of bitter connotations. Ioan pursed his lips and glanced away, then met Aerin’s gaze without guilt. “I mean you no harm, nor will any come to you through any inaction of my own. I believe all of Annwn needs Lara’s help, Aerin. This is not done for myself alone, or even for the Unseelie people at the expense of the Seelie. It would be counter to my own purposes to lead you into harm’s way.”
Lara exhaled. “What’s the problem, Aerin? He’s telling the truth, but even if he wasn’t, I’ve seen you fight. I’m the weak link here, not Ioan.”
“You don’t understand.�
�� Aerin turned a look of condescending pity on Lara. “The Drowned Lands hunger for Seelie lives. Without Ioan’s presence, we will most certainly die.”
But I’m human! The childish protest, made in half-offended innocence, still made Lara wince the next morning. Aerin had been scathing, and even Ioan was apologetic, making it clear that only Unseelie could pass safely into the Drowned Lands, so long as they had the strength to succeed in the trials.
They rode out together at what Ioan claimed was dawn, though there was no way for Lara to tell within the enormous Unseelie cavern. Someone had worked all night to take in a cream-colored tunic and rich, dark-red doublet so they would fit her small frame. She suspected the leggings she wore had recently belonged to a half-grown teen, as their hem had only been brought up an inch or two. There was padding in the seat and thighs, just enough to make riding slightly more comfortable, and Lara suspected her gratitude, already significant, would know no bounds before the journey was over.
She was escorted by the two elfin warriors—escorted, because she was the most likely to fall off her horse. Ioan and Aerin rode close to either side of her, even though Aerin had once again worked the magic that kept Lara stuck in the saddle. Less stuck than before, though, Aerin had said: Lara would never learn to ride properly if she trusted magic over her own talent and instinct.
Lara muttered “What instinct?” again now. They had been riding for a long time, but with only magic-born globes like those from the Seelie citadel for light, she had little idea of how long. Long enough to make her thighs and back ache, but at her skill level, that had only taken a few minutes. Her discomfort was worsened by the supply packs strapped across the horse’s haunches. Intellect told her they were far enough back not to disturb her ride, but she kept edging forward in the saddle, trying to give them more room.