by C. E. Murphy
“All of that was Merrick.” Even the attempt at further explanation defeated her. Lara took Dafydd’s hand instead, trying to impart comfort. He flinched at her touch, then turned a suddenly haggard gaze on her.
“Is my father dead?”
Lara pressed one hand against her eyes, then shook her head. “I don’t know. If I were Merrick, I’d have murdered Emyr in your guise, then built the illusion of Ioan coming for you, and switched from one role to the other when they came together. But I don’t know. The way flame dances, Dafydd … it disguises any hope I might have of seeing through the illusions. If I’d been there, maybe …”
Hafgan waited a heartbeat, then two, before bursting out with, “Merrick? My own son sits on the Seelie throne, behind Ioan’s face?”
“What bitter dregs those must be for Merrick,” Dafydd said with a thin smile. “To plot and plan so long and be left wearing another man’s mask when victory is in his hand. The war is not over, Hafgan. I will not allow Merrick to sit on my father’s throne for long, no matter what the cost to myself or the Barrow-lands.”
“You cannot be such a fool,” Ioan protested. “Emyr is dead, our chances of learning the past’s truth have slipped away, and you would still continue with these endless skirmishes, the eternal war? To what end, Dafydd? To what purpose?”
Dafydd whispered, “I might have let it go, if it were you. Changed or not, beholden to the Unseelie or not, beneath it all you are my brother and Rhiannon’s son. Had you come to the throne of—”
“Of Annwn,” Ioan put in strongly, and Dafydd broke off to stare at him a moment before continuing.
“Had you come to Emyr’s throne I might have found my way past the differences between us. But Merrick has tricked and murdered his way there, and I will not let it stand. He was my brother, closer to me than you ever were, and this betrayal runs too deep. My father is dead.”
“Is he?” Aerin asked the question this time, with more grief than either Dafydd or Ioan had shown. Her green eyes were red-rimmed, a show of emotion that seemed tragically mortal to Lara, and the hope in her face was more desperate yet.
Lara, for the second time, whispered, “I don’t know. It feels like all of Annwn believes it, and I can’t tell if it’s the land or the truth whose music I’m hearing.”
Hafgan sneered. “Perhaps you do not wish to know. A truthseeker is of no use if she refuses to accept her power.”
A sharp laugh broke from Lara’s throat. “It really has been a long time since you’ve dealt with a truthseeker, if you can make yourself believe that. I’ve spent a lifetime wondering why people don’t just accept the truth. I don’t think there’s any comfort in not knowing. But it doesn’t matter how I twist it in my head, ‘Emyr is alive, Emyr is dead,’ neither one sings clear. So neither is true or they both are.” She sharpened her gaze on the Unseelie king. “The sleepers under the sea. Are they alive?”
“Yes.”
Discord crashed through his answer and Lara released another sharp laugh. “But do they live?”
“No.”
The same wrenching music played, and Lara dropped her forehead against the staff, hanging on for a few long seconds. “So they’re dead.”
This time Hafgan gave no answer at all, and when she looked up again, irritated confusion had settled across his face. The others were so silent as to be statues, not even their breath stirring the air as she turned to them. “There’s a chance, then. If I can’t tell, then maybe he’s somewhere between dead and alive. That means there’s a chance he’s alive, maybe in the Drowned Lands, maybe … you said there was a place of remembrance in the citadel, Aerin. Does it share any of the drowned city’s aspects? Could there be a stasis hall beneath it?”
“We never found one, playing as children.” Aerin sounded as if the lack of discovery implied it was impossible one should be there.
“It took me to find the way in the drowned city,” Lara reminded her. Aerin shrugged an eyebrow in cranky assent and tension-ridden amusement sparked in Lara. Whether it was her mortality or her magic, the idea that she could find what Aerin couldn’t visibly annoyed the Seelie warrior, and Lara didn’t quite blame her. She was the outsider, usurping far too many things, but momentum had her in its grasp. Dafydd and then Ioan had asked for her help, setting her on this path, but now she wanted the answers for her own sake. Nothing would stop her, though the thought brought a shiver of alarm.
“You cannot imagine I will allow you to seek out my old enemy if there’s a chance he still lives,” Hafgan said in soft astonishment. “To see Ioan, Seelie by birth but Unseelie by choice, take Emyr’s throne would have been triumph enough. But my son by blood and birth has ascended through wit alone, and you think I will let you go?”
“I was your son.” Each word scraped from Ioan’s throat like a wound, his gaze on Hafgan bleak and betrayed.
“And I loved you. But I love my own flesh more. How could I do less, when he’s devised and won such a game? I will embrace him, so he might cast aside the false face he wears and the Seelie people will know we’re united in ruling them.”
“He said four,” Lara said, quiet and mellow in the face of Hafgan’s delight. He scowled and she turned a palm up, explaining, “He said there were four people between himself and sovereignty in the Barrow-lands. Emyr, Ioan, and Dafydd are three. That leaves you, the last king. Do you really think Merrick has any plans to power-share, Hafgan? You gave him up as a child. Why would he want to give you your due as his father?”
Uncertainty, then anger, flashed in Hafgan’s eyes. “If he’s so callow as that, then he can be replaced. Emyr is dead or lost to the Barrow-lands, and I have his heirs here before me. Like Merrick, there is now only one person standing between myself and kingship over all the land.”
Fire gouted up as he spoke, dancing over rubble-coated surfaces and melting the black opalescent stone that made up the Unseelie citadel’s floor. Metal-laden trees buckled, then disintegrated as flame exploded over them. The surface of Ioan’s pool hissed and bubbled, brought to boiling in an instant as the fire rushed Lara’s group. She clenched her mouth shut, appalled at the air’s searing heat. It would take accelerants to make a fire explode so dangerously in her world, but here it took nothing more than the will of an angry man. She moved backward, heat at her back telling her there was already nowhere to go: the center of the Unseelie palace was entirely alight, raging flame consuming all it touched. There wasn’t even the blessing of billowing smoke to grant them a chance at easy passage. Hafgan’s magic burned clean, so greedy it left nothing at all behind.
A true path might save them, if she could find one that led out of the inferno. The staff might save them, if she was willing to pit one unearthly magic against another. Its enthusiasm for the prospect made her grab it harder, uncertain if her grip was meant to quell or encourage. Truthseeking magic, she reminded herself: that was her strength, and that was their chance. The staff would only wreak more havoc, and the image of Boston’s ruins already left a mark in her mind. She would not release that power within the Barrow-lands, not if she could help it. Even if it meant leaving the lands drowned, if she could find no way to control the staff’s devastating magic, she would not again call on its power. Her own would have to be enough. Resolute, she whispered the phrase that had helped her open a true path the first time: “Follow the yellow brick road.”
The familiar bouncing tune cut across the fire’s roar, helping her to focus, though it did nothing at all to alleviate the air’s scalding heat. She coughed on it, trying to draw her next breath through her nostrils, but their moisture was already gone. She had to do more, had to do better, and had to do it quickly. Another breath or two and her lungs would burn trying to draw air that fire already consumed.
Beneath the flame’s noise, at Lara’s side, Ioan whispered, “Oh no, Father,” and water began to fall from a rocky sky.
She had forgotten. Had forgotten the waterfall and river that fed the cavern, if they were even necessary to
Ioan’s power. Had forgotten Ioan’s element entirely, anathema to Hafgan’s fire. And, truth be told, had hardly realized the sheer potential of released power, when two such elements were flung against one another in battle.
The first drops hissed to steam so quickly they might not have fallen at all, save for Hafgan’s squall of outrage. The deluge came after that, bucketsful of water pouring down. Steam billowed everywhere, as dangerous in its own way as the fire. Lara screamed, cowering from clouds of superheated water as they rolled toward them. There was no true path opening up to save them: terror stymied her magic thoroughly, and if there was a song to be heard, it was that of elemental destruction. It was wilder than the earth songs she’d heard, full of crackling enthusiasm and the clash of water’s rush against fire’s snap.
Earth song erupted around them, mother-of-pearl flooring shattering upward as the granite beneath rose in a shield that steam couldn’t penetrate. Lara shrieked again, too-hot air still ripping at her lungs, and Aerin, red-faced with heat and concentration, gave her a withering look as more rock shot up, protecting them from the worst of the colliding elemental excesses.
Ioan barked a rough sound of approval and new water formed on the inside curve of their protective wall, dripping down on them to mitigate the heat. Within seconds they were safe—comparatively safe—in a pocket of cooler air. Lara whimpered and smoothed her hand over the condensing water, then rubbed it over her face, more grateful for its presence than she could vocalize. She wanted to lick the wall just to replace a little of the water she’d lost, but urgency pressed at her: Ioan and Hafgan’s battle was only in its infancy, and the city could still trap them. The respite had to be enough. She bent her attention a second time to building a true path, and instead was swept away by the raging song of combat.
Hafgan stood encircled by flame, power and heat blazing off him. Nothing Lara could think of stood against water, not in the long term. Even fire so hot it boiled the bottom of the ocean ultimately conceded its battle, stone cooling and rising under water’s implacable pressure. But that was at home, where magic didn’t hold sway. In the Barrow-lands, it was possible a king’s will and power might defeat even the most relentless element that Lara’s world knew.
Even as she thought it, the strength in Ioan’s calling changed. Its music softened, drawing back, and the heat beneath Aerin’s stone shield intensified again. Dafydd let go a curse, fingers curled uselessly: he might survive throwing lightning into the raging fight between fire and water, but Lara would be electrocuted, and even Aerin, literally grounded, was unlikely to live through the attempt. The fight was Ioan’s alone.
Ioan’s draw of power faded, sending a spasm of despair through Lara. A true path still refused to respond, and with Ioan’s magic faltering they had no more than minutes, perhaps seconds, to live.
Falsehood sang through the thought, and Lara, abruptly, thought of tsunamis.
An instant later a wall of water crashed into the city’s heart.
Fire guttered inside a breath, drowned by the mass of water rolling over it. Shocked relief ricocheted through Lara as the tidal wave rolled harmlessly around them, guided in its entirety by Ioan’s will. Hafgan’s howl crashed through the water. There was no sense, though, of his life being quenched, only the inferno that had eaten at the garden. Within seconds, even that was struggling to rebirth itself, though the stunning amount of water pouring through the city gave fire little purchase. But it only needed a little, when powered by magic instead of conventional fuels.
Lara drew in a breath of wonderfully cool air and knotted her hands around the worldbreaking staff. “Your power, bent to my will,” she whispered to it. “I can open the path out of here, and you can make it solid so we can run on it, or we can burn and drown at the bottom of this cavern. Those are the choices. Take your pick.”
Anticipation stretched from the staff, its semi-sentience searching for the flaws in Lara’s offer. There were none: she’d spoken with a truthseeker’s conviction, certain that they—and the staff; most importantly, in its view, the staff—would lie cracked and lost beneath the boiling inferno if it didn’t choose to bend to her will. It pushed at her resolve, which, a little to her own surprise, held firm: she would rather die there than release the staff’s power into the world un-mentored.
Pure petty resentment flared from the staff, but it acquiesced, and the silly, catchy song sprang into Lara’s mind again: Follow the yellow brick road!
White light, not yellow brick, exploded over the city, pathways parting water as they plunged low, and making brilliant streaks as they shot across the granite sky. Even guided by her desire, the staff had a mind of its own, but it wasn’t reaching for destruction. After an eternity of seconds, one of the pathways crashed into being around them, turning the gloom inside of Aerin’s stone shell to a spotlight-brilliant glare.
All four of them grabbed each other’s arms and scrambled up the escape route they were offered, leaving the conflicted city behind.
Only the fear of falling back into the city took Lara to the path’s end. It angled too steeply upward, and at any other time the incline would have defeated her. Her legs alternated between stabbing pain and rubberiness as they reached the far side of the chasm that protected the Unseelie city, where she and the others simply dropped to the ground, gasping sickly for air. A new sense of determination rolled from the staff and Lara let go a frustrated yell, casting it away so it couldn’t take advantage of her weakness. Contact with the land wasn’t enough: it needed a cognizant wielder in order to parlay its power, and she was determined not to become that conduit when physically and mentally exhausted.
She became aware, slowly, that there were others around them. The city, quiet as it had been, had not been abandoned: dozens of Unseelie lay scattered around them, men and women who had taken the paths that appeared through the dying city and who had run to safety along a road of magic. Like her little group, they were too sickened by the escape to react for a long while, but an explosion within the city jolted everyone out of their collapse to stare slack-jawed as the granite shell began to fall.
Voices slowly lifted in bewilderment, fear, and growing despair as flame engulfed their home. Their gratitude for surviving was so far beyond them that it was as yet unimaginable. It would come in time, along with guilt if anyone had been left behind, and with anger for what had been visited upon them. Lara, numb beyond comprehension, spared a prayer of thanks that they had survived, but like them, she had nothing in her but blank shock at what was unfolding.
Dafydd, dully, said, “Worldbreaker,” to Lara. The word held no accusation; it was just an exhausted and apt descriptor.
Aerin, beneath that, said, “Lara’s home, now Ioan’s. All that is left, Dafydd, is our own. ‘Worlds come changed at end of day.’ What will you leave us with, Truthseeker?”
“I don’t know.” Lara stared bleakly at the fire. She had in her life never visited destruction on anything more than a pillow, and now she had overseen the ruin of two cities in barely as many hours.
No wonder Hafgan had hunted down and eradicated the truthseekers.
“The city’s fall was my decision, not your failure. I could have drowned him, and chose not to. The survivors will know who destroyed their home. Perhaps it’s a way to mend the schism between Seelie and Unseelie. Especially, perhaps, if Emyr is indeed dead, and the crowns must fall to a different generation.” Ioan put a hand on Lara’s shoulder, then let it fall, as if afraid physical contact would make the uncertainty in his voice easier for her to read.
“What about Hafgan? Is he dead?” Looking at the blaze, it seemed impossible the Unseelie king could live, but Ioan shook his head.
“He’ll be in a fit of ecstasy, bathed in his element that way. It will fade, and he’ll come to the Seelie citadel in search of either Merrick’s capitulation or his own retaliation, but we have a little time. Time enough, perhaps, to learn if Emyr of the Seelie lives.”
“Time enough to depose a preten
der and make a united stand against the Unseelie,” Dafydd growled.
Lara put her hand on his thigh, the gesture weary. “Don’t. Don’t you start hating the Unseelie as a whole, Dafydd. You defended Merrick when the rest of your people dismissed him because of his heritage. Don’t follow them down that path. I couldn’t bear it.”
“I defended an unworthy man.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean the rest of them deserve to be painted with that brush.” Lara’s shoulders dropped, weariness rolling over her again as she thought of how much Kelly would like hearing her use the vernacular phrase.
Dafydd crouched to put his arms around her shoulders and pull her close, murmuring a promise into her hair. “You’re right. I shouldn’t. I’m just tired of this game, Lara. I’ve never particularly liked politics, and now it seems they’re costing me the lives and love of people around me.”
“At least you were born to it. A month ago I was just a tailor.”
“Tailors,” Dafydd said solemnly, “are meant for great things. Someday I’ll have to tell you all the fairy tales that say so.”
Lara groaned, glad for a jolt of humor even as she said, sincerely, “Don’t. If I’d known that I might never have become a tailor.” The blatant untruth made her laugh, and she rocked in Dafydd’s arms, face buried against his chest. He smelled of fire and water, though none of them were as wet as she thought they should be after the deluge. Ioan’s doing, probably; there was no reason for anyone to stand around dripping when a master of the element was on hand. She finally exhaled heavily and sat back, though remaining coiled in Dafydd’s arms for hours was by far the most pleasant prospect she could think of. “Okay. Whether we’re finding Emyr or deposing Merrick, that means we have to get to the Seelie citadel. We don’t have any horses. How far is it to walk?”