by C. E. Murphy
Despite the threat hanging over her head—and there’d been no mistruth in Emyr’s voice, making it credible—Lara laughed into Aerin’s shoulder. She knew almost nothing about the Seelie. Certainly not enough to read meaning into details of well-worn battle gear, but she had, at home, studied psychology. It was difficult not to apply human psychoanalysis to an alien race.
Aerin pulled her helm off, sending threads of white hair around her face as she glowered over her shoulder at Lara. “Something amuses you?”
“Only my own arrogance. Aerin—” Half a dozen topics fought for precedence, and Lara settled on an apologetic, “I’m sorry for hitting you. I completely misunderstood what was happening that day. I thought you’d driven Dafydd into the Unseelie army on purpose. That you were a traitor.” An echo of the horror she’d felt then came back to her, feeding on her new concern for Dafydd. Lara clenched her teeth, fighting it down. She needed to be clearheaded now, not tangled with emotion. Struggling for something nonconfrontational to say, she blurted, “Your nose looks all right.”
Aerin’s mouth thinned. “I gathered that was your assumption, when you ordered me arrested. All Seelie have some talent for healing themselves. I’ve come away from greater injuries unscathed.”
“Recently?”
A spasm crossed Aerin’s face. Rather than answer, she urged their horse forward again, guiding it through the encampment until they reached what was unmistakeably Emyr’s tent. No larger than the others, its fabric walls were sheened blue, as though glacier ice had touched them, and the snapping banner that flew from its peak showed the white citadel in outline. Aerin gave Lara a hand, dropping her from the horse’s back as readily as she’d lifted her earlier, then swung down with a grace so far beyond Lara’s capability she couldn’t even envy it.
“Rub him down, if you will,” the Seelie woman said to a guard who stood at attention. “He’s seen no battle, but he’ll go in again more readily if he feels spoiled.”
“Do horses really look that far into the future?” Lara asked as the guard led the animal away.
“Any beast as wound with magic as our horses certainly can, if they wish.” Aerin flipped the tent flap open, gesturing Lara in. “We keep them happy, so when we ride to battle we know it’s to battle we go. You’ve ridden with us before.”
Lara made a sound of agreement as she stepped into the tent. The Seelie horses did something inexplicable to the distance they traveled, diminishing it, as if each step they took covered six or eight paces. According to Dafydd and Aerin, the horses themselves worked the spell, so it was easy to believe a badly tended animal might decide to go elsewhere rather than take itself into the dangers of battle.
Easy to believe. She pressed the heel of her hand to one eye, partly adjusting to the dimness inside the tent, but more in weary acknowledgment of a phrase she had never used before. Her truthseeking talent had always shown her the world in terms of black and white, of true and false. Nothing was easy or difficult to believe; they simply were. Only in the past few days had she begun to hear and use shades of gray in the form of half-truths or vernacular phrasing.
“Are you well, Truthseeker?”
“Well enough.” Lara dropped her hand, glancing around the tent’s interior as Aerin let the entrance door flap fall back into place. It was markedly cool within, and she wondered if every Seelie tent was affected by the element its owner wielded. Probably not: Emyr’s tent was dominated by a scrying pool and a table of maps, beyond which hung another door flap, pulled open to reveal a sumptuous bed with a deep silver tub at its foot. This was the king’s tent and the king’s tent alone. Lara doubted many others in the army were as singularly well-provided for, and therefore as able to leave an impression of themselves in the air itself. “Where’s Emyr? I thought he wanted to talk to me.”
“His majesty,” Aerin said with the slightest emphasis, “is bound to no one’s whim. Not even a truthseeker’s.”
“I didn’t mean …” Lara sighed and glanced around for a chair, finding none. The tactical meetings she presumed were held in the front part of Emyr’s tent must not last long, then, or his commanders would spend uncomfortable hours standing with increasingly itchy feet. Unless Seelie didn’t suffer from that kind of circulation problem, which seemed probable. Lara thrust her chin out and glanced roof-ward, trying to pull her thoughts into a semblance of reason.
Half a dozen tiny globes hung in the tent’s peak, offering the soft silvery light she remembered from the Seelie citadel. She had no idea what powered them. Magic, clearly, but whether it was an individual’s will or if they were somehow manufactured, she couldn’t imagine. Either way, the light they offered was flattering, even to the merely mortal. “I just wondered if I had time to get cleaned up. Not that I have any other clothes with me.”
Aerin, as if given permission, turned a curious eye on Lara’s outfit. Her dress was a classic style, boxy shoulders and a narrow waist above a full skirt, and it fitted perfectly. Or it had, before it had been torn and made filthy by climbing mountains. Lara had a sudden image of herself looking like a battered but beloved old-fashioned doll incongruously clutching the staff as though it were a weapon. She fought the impulse to twist the staff behind her back. It would only draw attention to it, especially since it stood taller than she did.
“Is this what women in your world usually wear?” Aerin asked eventually, and eyed the staff. “And how they …”
“Accessorize,” Lara supplied, but shook her head. “No to both. I dress conservatively, compared to a lot of people, and the staff—”
“Is of Seelie make.” Emyr flung the door flaps back and stalked in, his armor not daring to so much as rattle and spoil the entrance. He was as tall as Lara remembered, though the armor lent breadth to his slender form, and made him that much more alarming. “That weapon has not been seen in our lands in aeons, Truthseeker, and it is, should you wonder, most of the reason you still live.”
Air rushed from Lara’s lungs, leaving stars in her vision. “It is?”
“It tends to favor its wielder,” Emyr said sourly. “Or has, since it passed from immortal hands to mortal. Where did you get it?” He put his helmet aside, and Aerin stepped forward to help him remove his shoulder-pieces and breastplate. Lara’s gaze lingered on the former, searching for a name for them. They had to have one, but her expertise lay in the fine details of sewn garments, not forged. She could see the mastery in even the padded silken shirt he wore beneath the armor, and for an instant regretted that she’d had no hand in its making. Seelie clothing had awakened that faint pang in her from the first moment she’d seen it, and reminded her again that her ambitions had been those of a tailor, not a hero.
Lara brought her attention back to Emyr with a sigh, briefly silenced by the realization she had so much story to tell it was difficult to find a place to begin. She finally said, “I found it in my world,” though she felt like she juggled truth and lies with her answers as she went on. “The Unseelie king had suggested I look for it there. Your majesty, the last I knew, Dafydd had been returned to the Barrow-lands by his brother Ioan. Has Ioan not contacted you?”
Emyr’s face turned white with anger. “Hafgan bid you search out that staff? Dafydd is captured by my traitorous son? What more ill news do you bear, Truthseeker?”
Lara groaned and sat on the floor, needing a seat more than she cared for propriety. The floor was rugs thrown over earth, somehow unmarred by their muddy feet, and she frowned at that a moment as she sorted her thoughts. “Okay. I need you to just listen for a few minutes. I’m a truthseeker, so you know I’m going to tell the truth even if sounds preposterous. Right?”
Both Aerin and Emyr nodded when she glanced up, the latter begrudgingly. Lara nodded in turn, then spread her hands. “When you fostered Ioan, made him hostage to good behavior, whatever it is you want to call it that prompted the exchange of firstborns between you and Hafgan, Ioan embraced his new family, far more than Hafgan’s son Merrick ever did in the Seelie
court. Ioan even changed his physicality through magic, so he’s more broadly built and golden-skinned like the rest of the Unseelie.”
Emyr’s expression darkened further and Lara climbed to her feet again, full of nervous energy now that she was speaking. “It gets more complicated. Ioan has been ruling in Hafgan’s name, literally, for a long time. Centuries, probably. Hafgan retreated ages ago, and Ioan never admitted it to you because he thought you’d see it as weakness and try to destroy the Unseelie court.”
Aerin’s gasp was audible over Emyr’s lower growl, but Lara rushed on, as she stood and paced the width of the tent as she spoke. “Ioan believes that the Barrow-lands were once called Annwn, and were … I’m not sure. Ruled jointly, maybe, by the Seelie and Unseelie, until the Seelie called the sea to drown the Unseelie coastal lands, making them exiles in their own country. That the war between you stems back that far, so far that it’s legend even to those who lived then.” Lara could barely conceive of a lifetime so extended that lives became history and history legend, though she recognized that her own childhood memories were scattered and hardly complete. Lives lived over millennia instead of decades would almost necessarily fade into obscurity, but events of the magnitude Ioan had spoken of seemed like they should stand out in anyone’s mind.
“He thinks this staff was the weapon that broke the world, back then. He thought it was sent to my world so it couldn’t be used again. I found it there, waiting for me.”
“Waiting!” Emyr burst out. “For you?”
“For a truthseeker,” Lara said, unexpectedly steady in the face of his anger. “For someone who could see through the spell laid on it and perhaps command its power. Probably any truthseeker would do, but there aren’t that many of us.” Dafydd had searched her world for a hundred years, trying to find someone with her talent, and having found her, had ended up nearly dead and now disappeared for it. Lara’s heart clenched, hurting her chest, and it took a few seconds before she could speak again.
“The point is, none of what Ioan said rang false to me, Emy—your majesty. It didn’t exactly sound true, either, but I’ve never dealt with history turned legend before. And he was right about the staff being in my world.” She frowned at the Seelie king, whose narrow face was drawn with anger. “Which means I’ve got a lot more to try to settle here than just the question of who murdered Merrick ap Annwn.”
A laugh of frustration burbled up and she cast her gaze skyward again, as if the baubles lighting the tent might lend her strength. “Except he isn’t dead. He framed Dafydd in hopes of starting a war between your court and the Unseelie court, so he could be the last man—elf—standing, and take the spoils. So Dafydd brought me here in the first place because of fraud. Because of a lie.”
There was so much more to say, but Lara fell silent as shock created lines in Emyr’s face. Age didn’t mark the Seelie in the same way it did humans, but watching Emyr’s pale skin turn to ash and the scouring of lines around his mouth told her how Seelie might look if they did age: still beautiful, but also terrible. Vampiric, as though whatever vitality they’d had had long since drained away, and left only a walking shell. Lara felt momentarily sorry for the Seelie king, though his arrogance didn’t, as a rule, invite compassion.
“Merrick is a master of air,” she said wearily. “Of illusion, shaped from air. I’m sure Dafydd did draw and nock the arrow as everyone saw, but the Merrick he shot and killed was nothing more than a phantom. A ghost of himself. I’ve stood face-to-face with Merrick, your majesty. I promise you he’s alive.”
Color flooded back into Emyr’s face, the heat of rage warming his features in a way Lara had never seen before. He snapped around to his scrying basin, simply a pool on a tall slender pedestal, and ice crackled from his fingertips as he seized the basin’s edge. Lara said, “Wait,” and Aerin directed a warning sound at her as Emyr shot a glower her way. But he released the stoneworked pool’s edge, evidently understanding he would have a great deal to look for once he began. Better to search it all out at once, than have her interrupt him time and again.
“Merrick called a nightwing attack into my world,” Lara said. “I closed the breach between the Barrow-lands and Earth to stop them. It worked, but it also closed off Dafydd’s source of strength. I had to find the staff, so he would have something of the Barrow-lands to draw on to help him stay alive.”
Old anger turned Emyr’s expression bleak. “That staff abhors the touch of Seelie hands. It should have destroyed him, and your world with him.”
Lara stuttered, then lurched on with her story: “It tried. It threw down an earthquake in a part of my world that doesn’t normally get them. It didn’t seem to affect Dafydd adversely. I thought he might be getting better, but nightwings infested a human man and came after us. Dafydd fought them and almost died for it. I used the staff to reopen the break between the worlds, and Ioan came for Dafydd. To bring him back to the Barrow-lands, where he might have a chance to heal.”
Anger rose up, burning through worry to create heat in Lara’s chest. She had come across worlds to offer help, and had found an unexpected passion in exchange. Now that love was threatened, and she had already laid down a promise, a truthseeker’s oath, on what would come to pass if that happened. Lara lifted her chin, meeting Emyr’s eyes with a forthright glare. “I told Ioan if anything happened to Dafydd, his life was forfeit. So, your majesty, I really think we should go talk to your older son.”
Three
“You must be mad.” Aerin spoke so pleasantly it took Lara a few seconds to hear the content of her speech, though it set dissonant bells ringing in her mind. “If Ioan ap Caerwyn holds Dafydd hostage, he would have long since sued for peace, or threatened his life to gain his ends.”
“Not if he sees destroying your people as the only way to save his own.” Lara spoke crisply, still hot with anger. Her magic wouldn’t allow her the comfort of an uncertainty: Dafydd will be all right only set more atonal notes chiming through her head. She wanted action, if only to burn off some of her fear.
Emyr, though, growled, “We are his people,” and turned again to his scrying pool. This time cold steamed from his hands before he even touched it, and his grip turned the water within to crackling ice. Lara sidled toward him, hairs lifting on her arms as his chill permeated the tent. He snapped, “Stand aside, Truthseeker. Your presence causes difficulties enough.”
It had in the Seelie citadel, but there had been another mortal there: Oisín, poet and prophet, whose magics were of a different kind from Lara’s own. Together they had disrupted Seelie magic without meaning to, a truth that itched at the back of Lara’s skull. Her world weakened the elfin people, and her magic, in conjunction with another mortal’s, disrupted Seelie power even in the Barrow-lands. Humans were bad for the Seelie, though what little folklore she knew suggested mortals were also tantalizing, even irresistible, to the fairy peoples.
Emyr would not, she imagined, appreciate being likened to a youth with a taste for bad girls. Lara hid a grin in her shoulder and stayed where she was, hoping her amusement wouldn’t bleed over and affect the king’s spell. Aerin took up a post half a step in front of Lara, further preventing her from moving forward, though she could still see the pool’s surface.
She had once triggered the scrying magic herself, a talent none of the Seelie had imagined might lie within her truthseeking skills. Then, images had awakened in the depths of the ice, carrying sound and color and life. Now Emyr’s power lifted ice upward, making frost-rimed sculptures across the pool’s surface. An interior garden, built wholly of metal and stone rose up. The ice wicked away color, but Lara could see it in her mind’s eye: marbled tree trunks with golden leaves, the vines entwining them made of emerald. They grew and sprawled around a pool, a few of the vines clambering over stone benches, though those details faded away as Emyr focused on the pebbled pathway leading into the garden. “I would speak with the Unseelie king.”
It took a long time, Lara thought. A long time for a ma
n to step into shadows which, by rights, ice should be unable to show so darkly. He was a broad-shouldered form, nothing more; the hair he wore long masked any hope of seeing his features while he stood in shadow. “Emyr.” A note of curious mirth colored the other king’s deep voice. “Have you called to parley?”
“I have called to look on the face of the Unseelie king. When did you last step out of shadow when we spoke?”
“When did you last give me cause to? My people are relegated to shadows; why should I not contain myself within them when we speak? Is it not appropriate?” The Unseelie king’s sarcasm was unexpectedly wonderful to hear, its delivery so deliberate that even Lara, who had never been especially comfortable with irony, could enjoy the game he played with words. “You, lord of the shining citadel, stand in the glaring light, while I, master of the dark palace, remain hidden in gloom. Surely you cannot object to such figurative, if theatrical, stances.”
“I would see your face.” The words came out as clipped breaths of frosty air, individualized by Emyr’s precision.
Silence met his outburst, and then a dramatic sigh. “I gather, then, that the Truthseeker has returned. After so long, I wasn’t sure she would.”
He came out of the shadows as he spoke, changing the ice sculpture’s focus from the trees to himself. Even without color, he was very much as Lara remembered him: broader than Emyr or Dafydd, partly due to the cut of his clothes, but mostly thanks to a wider, slightly shorter frame. An ebony circlet set with rubies kept long black hair from his face. He was unquestionably more classically handsome than either his father or his brother, though now that he stood in proximity to Emyr, Lara could see more of the Seelie king in his eldest son than she’d remembered.
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.