by C. E. Murphy
Aerin’s shape became the predominant one again, but her skin was reddening like she’d stood in the sun too long. There was hope, Lara thought. The only question was whether the hymnal would burn Aerin away before the deviltry was purged from her body. So easy to think in those terms, though the “devil” was no more than another creature fighting to survive in waters tainted by magic gone wrong. Witchcraft: that was probably how her church would see everything in and about the Barrow-lands. Lara had never thought of witches or their magics as beautiful, though, and even under the strain of Lara’s own power, Aerin was beautiful.
Selfish, shallow, childish thought; it was good to save something beautiful. It was good to save any life; that was the idea she should hold on to. Her voice strengthened again, though the contortions beneath Aerin’s skin, the heat of her body, said there was almost no time left. Dafydd had flinched at the name of the Holy Trinity, and Aerin was being exposed to so much more.
A clawed hand suddenly came up and caught Lara’s throat. Song squeaked into nothing, but for an instant all the black, all the discolored yellow, fled from Aerin’s eyes. She rasped “Keep. Singing!” before collapsing again, and clarity rang in Lara’s mind.
The Seelie woman would rather be immolated by God’s word than live the half-life of black magic. A shaking note of laughter went through Lara’s voice, and between lines she took enough breath to whisper, “Not if I can help it.”
It should have made no sense to Aerin, but gratitude flashed through still-yellow eyes and she nodded once, sharply. Her hair was burning, shriveling from the ends toward her scalp, but the heat within her was purifying her as well. The shifting scales were gone now, only flushed red skin visible where they’d been. Sharp teeth still erupted through her gums, pushing away the old ones and giving her the look of an evolving gargoyle. Lara, aware it wasn’t wise, shoved her fingers into Aerin’s mouth and grabbed her jaw from the inside, using the feel of ivory and flesh to remind herself of what was true and meant to be.
The last words of the third verse broke free, pleading that God hear her call, and vertiginous power roared from Lara, truth as she envisioned it: Aerin whole and uncorrupted again before her. For an astonishing few seconds the black light of the city retreated under a burst of starlight.
Heat exploded from Aerin. She screamed and bucked, scrambling backward to escape Lara’s grip. Her skin blistered and her hair, once hip-length, was now burned so short the upswept tips of her ears were exposed. But her eyes were her own, green with fear and fury and gratitude, and she sat where she was, gasping and fumbling at her own body, making sure it was still hers.
Lara whispered, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, thank you,” smiled weakly, and tipped over sideways, unconscious before she hit the seabed floor.
She woke again because of the pain. Her shoulder sent flashes of white heat through her vision, worse than a migraine. A gurgle caught at the back of her throat, injury too offensive to even give it full voice as a shriek.
Aerin, grimly, said, “Good. Try not to scream, if you can help it. The sound will attract predators. This will hurt.”
Lara wanted to ask It will hurt? Like it doesn’t already?, but Aerin pulled something tight around her shoulder, and Lara’s entire right side cramped and spasmed with agony. Another gagging sound caught in her throat and she clutched sand with her free hand, trying to squeeze the pain away. It in no way helped, but Aerin sat back, glowering with satisfaction. “That should hold until we return to the Barrow-lands. I’m sorry, but I have almost no talent for healing others, and even if I did, working enchantments here …” She shook her head.
Lara blinked, trying to focus. Trying to think, while her shoulder settled into a dull throb. Her doublet was gone, or rather, torn to pieces, with its padding drifting around them on eddies of wind or current. Its fabric had been bound around her shoulder and upper arm, with a bulky lump over the deep cut. Staunching blood, Lara imagined, though browning stains already discolored half her shirt.
“You should have lost more blood,” Aerin said. “As it is, the muscle won’t heal properly without magic. It’s too badly damaged.”
Lara suggested, “Stitches,” light-headedly, and had a vision of stitching up her shoulder herself, a tailor’s needle bright in her fingertips. Anatomy was no doubt more difficult to sew than fabric; it was warm and bled, for one thing, never mind the near impossibility of sewing herself together almost under her own chin.
Aerin frowned, uncomprehending, and the idea that the elfin peoples never needed stitches or surgery the way mortals did fluttered through Lara’s mind. “Nothing. Thank you for tying me up.” She winced, knowing she’d phrased that badly but unable to gather drifting thoughts enough to change it. She’d never been badly hurt before, or lost more than a knife cut’s worth of blood. Aside from the thudding ache that came with each heartbeat, it made her feel uncomfortably detached, as if nothing was of particular importance.
Humor twitched Aerin’s mouth before turning grim again. “You’re welcome. And my thanks to you as well. I would have been lost, worse than dead, had you not done what you did. Binding your shoulder was the least I could do in recompense, especially when the fault of the damage was mine.”
Lara leaned forward until her forehead almost touched Aerin’s, as if proximity would help her communicate. “The doors were a test. A trial. It’s an old riddle in my world. One brother always tells the truth. One brother always lies. If you had waited …!” Scolding delivered, she sat back again, then turned her head carefully to study the blue-lit walls of the drowned city.
They had changed, though she couldn’t place how; her thoughts weren’t yet clear enough. They were taller, perhaps, more like the rooms within the towers: less damage had come to them, though they were by no means whole. Still, the lichen that grew over them looked healthier, taking some of the black-light glow and turning it to growing green. That was probably more how Llyr had intended she see the city. Maybe his spell had grown in strength while she was unconscious. “Llyr said we’ll find Dafydd and Hafgan in the memorial gardens. I just don’t know how we’re going to get there without being eaten.”
Aerin’s face tensed and gentled all at once. “We are already there, Truthseeker. I carried you while you … slept.” She spread a hand in half-defensive response to Lara’s goggle-eyed stare. “The shifting magic lingered in me, perhaps. I saw innumerable monsters, but they chose not to come near me. Perhaps they recognized that I had been one of them.” The tension slipped through her eyes again. “Or perhaps it was the taint of your world’s god that kept them away. Either way, we were allowed to move unscathed, and I thought these gardens might be welcoming. The Caerwyn citadel has a similar place, and it is often comforting.”
“Lucky choice. It could have been haunted, too.” Lara bit her tongue, ashamed at belittling Aerin’s decision. “Sorry.”
Aerin shrugged one shoulder. “It might have been, but then, so is the rest of this city. I searched the grounds, Truthseeker. I saw nowhere for a bier.”
“Did you look underground?” The question came unbidden and Lara bit her tongue a second time, this time in surprise. Aerin looked askance at her, and Lara got cautiously to her feet. The change in elevation made her head swim again, and renewed blood flow hammered pulses of dizzying agony through her shoulder. She took a few deep breaths, trying to steady herself, then focused on speaking. “You came up at me from under the street. There must be some kind of underground structure in the city. We bury our dead. You must, too, right? Why else would they be the Barrow-lands?”
“Because it was the hills of the dead that most often lent us access to your world, and so to come from yours to ours was to enter the Barrow-lands.”
“Oh.”
Aerin laughed, bright and unexpected as she, too, climbed to her feet. “But we do bury our dead. Forgive me, Truthseeker. I suppose I shouldn’t tease you.”
Lara wrinkled her nose and smiled. “It’s all right. Most people can’t.
It’s hard to tell the absolute truth and still be teasing.”
“Perhaps some of your magic lingers in me still.” Aerin brushed fingertips over her short, burnt hair and flicked an eyebrow upward. “Perhaps it always will.”
“I hope not. I don’t think that would be good for you.” Lara edged in a circle, studying the garden walls around her. She could imagine them as such, now: where lichen and coral grew, ivy and moss might have, in years long past. Stone archways, still picked out in now-softened black light, glimmered here and there beneath the coral, but they led to paths and other gardens, not into the ground. Aerin had seen nothing like that, exploring the space. “On Earth we had kings who hid the entrances to their tombs to keep graverobbers from disturbing them. Do you do that?”
Disgust struck deep lines around Aerin’s mouth. “Graverobbers? Who would do such a thing?”
Lara laughed. It jarred her shoulder and sent another wave of dizzy pain over her, but it helped somehow, too. “The poor. The greedy. The ambitious. Ceremonial entrances, then? Do you do something like that?”
Reluctant, still visibly horrified, Aerin nodded. “But there are none here, Truthseeker. I would have seen them.”
Conviction sang in her voice, but Lara shook her head. “Not if time had changed them enough, and not if it was hidden. I understand you don’t hide entrances as a matter of course, but if you were building more than a tomb, you might. If you were making a sanctuary to preserve the living, or to heal the dying, especially somewhere already poisoned by trouble, wouldn’t you want to keep it secret?”
A thread of certainty wove into the words, delicate as Lara could make it. Llyr hadn’t lied when he said she would find Dafydd and Hafgan in the gardens, nor had Aerin lied in saying she could find no biers. Something lay between the two truths, subtle and cautious. There was a path to be followed, one only Lara’s power could bring to light, but like all magic in the Drowned Lands, it took a careful approach. Lara’s eyes drifted shut, single notes touching against her skin like fireflies. They became tiny spots of light in her inner vision, slowly dancing together to shape a path.
Hushed awe came into Aerin’s voice: “Truthseeker …?”
“Follow me.” Lara put her hand out for Aerin’s blindly, trusting the Seelie woman to take it. “I can see a pathway.”
“So can I!”
Lara’s eyes popped open. The tremulous filament of light remained visible, darting forward and coming close again, reluctant to stray too far from its maker. Astonished, she whispered, “I thought it was in my head. I didn’t know other people could see it.” It would have been vastly easier in the Catskill mountains, she thought sourly, if she’d realized Kelly might be able to see the light-built pathway that had led them to Merrick ap Annwn. But then, Annwn, drowned or not, was friendlier to magic than her world. The light and song that showed her a true path might well be invisible on Earth. “Can you hear it?”
Aerin shook her head and disappointment flashed through Lara before she remembered Kelly’s dismay at her brief exposure to the world as Lara heard it. For Kelly, truth’s song had been a terrible thing, tearing away at boundaries and driving her into herself. Aerin might well fare no better, especially so soon after Lara had ripped into her with music and faith from another world. “It doesn’t matter. Come on, let’s—” She broke off in a gasp, one or two quick steps more than enough to send her injured shoulder into spasms again.
“Perhaps at a moderate pace,” Aerin suggested straight-faced, and fell into step with Lara’s hobble.
The firefly thread sparked forward and back, dashing down side paths and around clumps of sandy earth. Where it alighted, the city’s dark glow faded, though it returned as soon as the path-seeking brightness fled. Lara, following slowly indeed, watched with bemusement. Every true path she’d opened before had been a blazed trail, leading without correction to her goal. “I guess I hadn’t looked for anything hidden before.”
Aerin picked up on her meaning with a casual gesture around the drowned gardens. “Nor in a place so laden with its own corrupt magic. A seeking spell that works for its answer is safer than one that demands it, here. I’ve felt the power you can command firsthand now, Truthseeker. I think your little questing light is wiser by far.” She hesitated, then admitted, “And I fear for my own existence, should you need to call on greater magics than these a second time.”
“It would defeat the point of having saved you.” The firepoint light ahead of them darted between twists of coral and disappeared. Lara stopped with a wobble, staring at the darkness their guide had been swallowed by. “Something has to be there. Come on. Let there be light.”
Coral shivered and melted, not into the fine dust Lara imagined it would naturally degrade to, but into nothingness. Llyr had disappeared the same way, becoming part of the water—or air—surrounding them. Lara shook herself, hissing as the motion sent fresh pain through her shoulder. “I’m not good at being hurt.”
“But you’re very good at finding hidden things.” Aerin’s voice was low with respect again. She stepped forward, brushing her fingers over the door revealed by the dissolving coral.
Unlike everything else in the drowned city, the door looked fresh and new, its carvings still sharp-edged and the glass set within it brilliant with color. Even the city’s black light couldn’t tarnish the image of a kind-faced man set against a bed of greenery and knotwork. “Llyr’s brother,” Aerin whispered. “Kerne, god of renewal. He gave seasons to the land, so Rhiannon’s children could watch in wonder as their world changed around them. It was from her uncle that Rhiannon learned the gift of healing that every Seelie carries in their blood. This will be the place, Truthseeker. If there is any hope for Dafydd, this is where he will lie.”
A flush of excitement pushed Lara through the door. It had only been days since she’d seen Dafydd, but they had been exhaustive days. Whatever lay ahead, it would be easier with him at her side.
If he had survived the Drowned Lands. Nervousness squelched her excitement, and as if in response, the firefly light and its accompanying single-note song abandoned her. For a moment she was blind, but phosphorescent light rose, replacing not only her candle spark but the black glow of the city. Aerin breathed a sound of astonishment, surprising Lara into soft laughter.
“I thought the lights in the citadel could be phosphorous. But they’re just magic?” Just, she teased herself, when a month ago she hadn’t believed in magic at all. But her world had grown beyond that, and now like so much else she encountered, the gifts of magic were as easy to accept as the air she breathed.
Given their sea-floor location, she pulled a face at herself and the very air around them as Aerin touched the green-glowing walls. “The light is a small magic from Rhiannon’s mother.”
“Caillech,” Lara remembered, garnering a startled look from the Seelie woman with her. “Llyr told me. I don’t understand your pantheon very well. Mine’s—” She broke off, thinking of angels and archangels, demons and devils, saints and even the most famous sinners, and cleared her throat. “Not simpler. Different,” she decided. “Mine’s different.”
“The old gods existed in the sea and the sky and the wind, immortal and untouchable as the sun.” Aerin dropped her fingers from the wall and tested the sloping floor in front of them, then began picking her way down as she spoke. “When Llyr and Caillech came together to make Rhiannon, daughter of the sky and sea, she could live in neither and so made the land her own. All her family gave gifts so she might make a people of her own body and not be alone. We came from her, and in giving us life she lost a spark of her eternal being, so that, like us, she could die. How are your gods different?”
“I only have one.” The steps were long and shallow, taking a stride and a half to cover two. Missteps made Lara’s shoulder ache, and she slowed, creeping down them as she struggled to find the vital differences between her faith and Aerin’s. Finally she shook her head, smiling crookedly at her half-shadowed feet. “Maybe they’r
e not so different after all, except in number. My God made the sun and the earth and the sea, too, and made Man in His own image.”
“Not so different,” Aerin agreed softly. “Halt, Truthseeker. Something comes this way.”
A wind blew over them as she spoke, air so cold it turned to crystals on Lara’s skin. Fog came with the cold, and brought with it a world of images. A world opened up in front of her, lush and green, a forgotten paradise in which slender long-limbed elfin youths ran and laughed as they played. Dafydd was among them, bright with life in a way she’d never seen him before. Vitality poured from him as though he had to run it off or risk being burned away. His golden hair was wild, the warm tones of his skin drinking down sunlight as he played in it. That was anathema to how Lara had seen the Seelie: they were a moonlight people, pale and delicate, uncomfortable in the light. Their Unseelie counterparts, driven beneath the earth or not, had the richer colors of people meant for the sun. The idea came to her once again that they were two halves of a whole, but it faded as the images in front of her unfolded further.
A girl as beautiful—more beautiful—than Dafydd struck out after him. Her hair bounced in a white braid falling past her hips, mark enough to say it was Aerin. She and Dafydd raced through thigh-high grass, laughter shouted with the exuberance of youth. Aerin was the taller and the faster: Lara saw the inevitable long before Dafydd gave in to it, and counted down the seconds until the young Seelie woman tackled Dafydd into the earth.
The rest, Lara would have preferred not to watch, though every time she looked away their entwined bodies came to focus in front of her again. Sunset came and they walked naked back through the meadows, fairy-tale creatures brought to life.
Years shifted, not through any obvious change of season but by a tightening of the cold fog binding Lara. Aerin and Dafydd, overlooked by a broad-shouldered, black-haired youth, bent their heads over a game very like chess. The third youth—Merrick ap Annwn—reached between them with an impatient gesture, finishing the game with two or three quick moves. Aerin’s features darkened, but Dafydd, tolerant, reached up to grab his adopted brother and hauled him into an affectionate wrestling match. Lara saw what she believed Aerin did: how hard Merrick tried to defeat his slightly taller brother, and his bitterness when Dafydd, victorious, went away with Aerin on his arm.