by C. E. Murphy
Aerin nodded regardless, then leaned close to shout, “Can I stop him this way?” into Lara’s ear.
“No!” It seemed like explanation should follow, but the effort necessary to be heard was daunting. Aerin, unconcerned, only nodded and let Lara go again, though the earthbound magic that gave her sure footing remained in place. The Seelie woman was full of contradictions, willing or unwilling to help on what seemed to be whim.
There would be time to wonder about Aerin’s motivations later. Lara, teeth set together, ran forward as the floor collapsed into concrete rubble and rebar beneath her feet. Song surged, one part delight from the staff, one part a distrustful awakening from the earth below. “Aerin, soothe it!”
She caught a glimpse of Aerin dropping to her hands and knees, head lowered in concentration as she bent her magics toward a world only half willing to recognize her. Far below, the ground groaned with reluctance, then shuddered, sending a ripple through the building. Through the whole block, Lara feared, though the shake threw her over disintegrating floors and let her crash full-bodied into Ioan.
Panic made his youthful face age. “The spell isn’t set! You can’t take it from me!”
“You’re going to destroy Boston!” Lara knotted her hands around the staff and felt its power lurch, suddenly torn between two users. Not masters: she could master it, if necessary; Ioan could only use it. The difference came clear in her mind with the sound of chimes, and again played up the possibility that the destruction of Unseelie lands had been accidental. Falsehood shot through the idea a second time and Lara struggled to shake it off, wondering abruptly if the thought came from the staff itself, its near-sentience trying to make it, in effect, a victim. Agreement ricocheted through her as the sound of deep brass horns, but her own exasperation flattened the staff’s response. Being manipulated by living, breathing people was aggravating enough. To be the focus of trickery from an ivory staff was absurd, and she was in no mood for it.
A roar opened up inside her skull, a vast crash of magic that seized her own power and wedded it to Ioan’s. Golden light flared everywhere, disguising the destruction around them, and exultation flared across Ioan’s face. A familiar white streak bolted through the gold, not at all the simple doorway of the worldwalking spell, but Lara’s magic creating a true pathway from one place to another.
To the horses, she realized with horror: a straight brilliant line smashing from Kelly’s apartment all the way to the Common. Unified with the staff’s wont for devastation, that path became a far more physical thing than she’d ever built before. It had been a guide in the past; now it lay down a presence of its own, ripping through streets, through homes, through buildings, which all began to fall in on themselves in the path’s aftermath. Even over the sound of music and magic, Lara could hear cries of bewilderment and pain.
She released the staff, trying to claw back her magic, but it was already far too late. True vision showed her the havoc wreaked in mere seconds: a broad swath of the city was a disaster zone, as if struck by earthquakes. Girders jutted from ruined buildings, glass clattered and fell to the earth, bricks and steel creaked and collapsed for mile after mile. Cars lay askew in giant ruts that had torn open beneath them, astonished and frightened people climbing free all over the city. Everything was hazy with golden light that emanated not from the setting sun on the horizon, but from Ioan’s magic, still pouring into the worldwalking spell. Half the city would be pulled with them into the Barrow-lands, if he didn’t let go of the staff.
Kelly’s apartment had become a quiet point, the eye of the storm. The floor stabilized under Lara’s feet and she glanced down, dismayed but not surprised to see the hard white flare of her true path supporting her. Supporting all of them, as she’d once imagined it could do. That was still the staff’s power, clinging to the magic she’d released, rather than her own active will. Hands clenched, she tried to quiet the music in her mind, searching for a static softness to drown it out and quell magic.
Instead, hoofbeats filled her ears as the horses burst down the road she and Ioan had laid. He yelled in delight, reaching for a mane to swing up by as one passed him, and letting the staff hang from only one hand as he did so.
Dafydd, wielding a broken chair leg like a baseball bat, smashed it into Ioan’s forearm as he mounted. Ioan’s arm spasmed with the strength of the blow, and he shot a look of astonished injury at Dafydd as his numb fingers dropped the staff.
Lara snatched it up, and the worldwalking door closed around them all, leaving Boston’s destruction in their wake.
Rubble shattered against black mother-of-pearl flooring and splashed into Ioan’s scrying pool at the heart of the Unseelie city. Lara ducked, arm folded over her head as iron bars clanged, bouncing down from above. Kelly let go short, repeated screams as more debris fell around them. Dickon hovered over her protectively, broad shoulders taking some of the scree that dropped, though he began to swear when a handful of larger pieces pelted him.
Lightning exploded everywhere, turning wreckage to dust. Lara lowered her arm to peer at Dafydd, a few feet away with his hands curved upward and satisfaction twisting his mouth. “I am accepted home again.”
“And you are a raging fool!” Aerin strode past Dafydd to haul Ioan off his horse and smash a fist into his jaw all in one smooth motion. The two horses bolted away as Aerin stood over Ioan, fury making her voice harsh. “Did you not forbid the Truthseeker to use that weapon? What idiocy compelled you? How many mortals now lie dead because of you?”
Ioan sagged under the assault, though not, Lara thought, because he lacked the means to defend himself. She’d seen them both in battle, and Aerin’s prowess, indubitably greater than Dafydd’s, paled before Ioan’s. But he made no attempt at defense, only gazed past her at where Lara crouched with the staff. “It seemed to be the only choice. The only chance. I could imagine so clearly how it would work …”
Lara, grudgingly, said, “It might not be his fault. The staff has a circle of influence. I thought it was just when it was close to me, but I’m not elfin. It might have been … encouraging him.” She stood up, using the staff for leverage, and let herself forget about Ioan’s travails for a few seconds.
Most of Kelly’s apartment had come with them to the Barrow-lands. Broken furniture, half-framed doors; even the bedrooms were spewed across the marble and metal garden. Everything was covered in dust, and bubbles of escaping air rose from rubble in the pool, sometimes hissing as a block of concrete fell in.
“My whole building’s going to collapse,” Kelly whispered in horror. “Oh my God. Jesus Chr—”
“Kelly. Don’t use those words here.” Lara kept her voice quiet, but it cut her friend off and earned Lara a look of bewilderment.
“Just because you don’t swear doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t. What the hell, Lara, you never cared bef—”
“They’re words of power here,” Lara said just as quietly. “I destroyed nightwings with an exorcism. When I called on the holy trinity it made Dafydd flinch, and I almost burned Aerin from the inside out with a hymn. I don’t think it matters if you believe, Kel. Just … watch your tongue, okay?”
Kelly put her hand over her mouth, eyes wide above it, then loosened it enough to whisper, “But my apartment, Lara …”
“I know. And it’s worse, the destruction goes halfway across Boston.” Lara swallowed, unable to look at Ioan. Unable to look anywhere but at Kelly and the increasing dismay on her friend’s face. “Aerin’s right. A lot of people are going to have died. Any later and I think we’d have been among them.”
“Is that supposed to make it better?” Dickon asked hoarsely. “That we got away and they didn’t? Jesus Christ,” he said with obvious deliberation, and satisfaction lashed across his face when all three elves recoiled. “Does disaster just follow wherever you go?”
Dafydd, as softly as Lara’d spoken, said, “Not until very recently, I’m afraid. Worse, I fear there’s very little we can do to salvage what remains o
f Boston. Even a whole host of our healers would be no more than a bandage to a gaping wound.”
“What about her?” Dickon pointed an accusing finger at Aerin. “What about her earth thing? Can’t she put it back together again?”
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” Kelly said in a high voice. “Lara, are we really in the Barrow-lands?”
“Your world responds to my magic only sluggishly,” Aerin said to Dickon, more compassion in her voice than Lara had ever heard. “I might convince it to close where it’s been torn asunder, but you riddle your earth with iron. No one among the Seelie could ever heal it the way you ask. No more than magicless mortals could.”
“Then I want to go home so I can help clean up.” Dickon got to his feet, face pale beneath dust-covered ruddy hair. “I can’t just stay here and wonder what’s going on. Send me back.”
“Hang on.” Kelly climbed to her feet as well, a hand on Dickon’s wrist and conflicted hope in her eyes. “We’re in a whole different world, Dickon. Don’t you want to see some of it? It’s not that I don’t care what’s happening in Boston. I do. You must know that. It’s just … fairyland.”
The look Dickon settled on her was one Lara had encountered innumerable times in her childhood: puzzlement so profound it went beyond anger. When people turned it on her, it was usually because she’d pressed an insistence for the truth far past the point of reason. She’d learned, as she’d aged, not to push it, but it made Dickon’s expression no less familiar. Kelly had once again moved so far outside his own boundaries that she’d become foreign to him, as alien in her own way as Dafydd or Aerin was. Lara had always loved her friend for that adventuresome streak, but Dickon, it seemed, was stymied by it.
“Okay,” Kelly whispered after a long time. “Okay, Dickon. You go back. Good luck. Maybe I’ll … call you when I get home.” She turned to the others, lips compressed and her eyes bright as she asked, still in a whisper, “I mean, if it’s okay that I stay? Because … because, I mean, I sell bras back at home. It’s not like I’m going to be much help to a disaster relief effort, not unless there’s a sudden need for well-fitted thirty-eight double-H’s. So I know a war is going on here, but Lara’s my best friend, and … it’s fairyland. I’m never gonna get another chance. Am I?”
The last question was directed at Dafydd, who hesitated, but then shook his head. “Almost certainly not, I fear. Kelly, you’re as welcome to stay as Dickon is to go, but I might ask of you one thing. Remain here, in the safety of Ioan’s citadel, until we’ve resolved this dispute. There will be plenty to see and time to see it after, but until then, you would be—”
“A liability,” Kelly said clearly enough, though she sniffled as soon as she’d spoken. “No, that’s fair. I mean, no offense, Lara, but having to keep an eye on you in the middle of a war is probably enough work, without adding me to the mix.”
“At least you can ride a horse without being magicked to it.” Lara offered a fragile smile, and Kelly turned it into a shaky laugh of her own.
“Yeah, good point. Maybe I should be the truthseeker for the rest of this game.” Consternation crossed her face. “Nevermind, I remember what that was like. It was horrible. Okay. I’ll stay here awhile,” she promised Dafydd, and he gave her a grateful smile before looking back at Dickon.
“The worldwalking spell will take some time to prepare.”
“No. It won’t.” Another man interrupted, voice preceding him as he strode into the garden. Lara barely had time to recognize Hafgan, now resplendent in shimmering dark blue silks and black velvets, before he tore open a door between the worlds and unceremoniously dumped both Dickon and Kelly back through it.
“Where … when … did you send them?” Lara gaped at the fading door, certain the only reason she hadn’t also been thrust through it was her distance from the other two mortals. “Why did you do that?”
Hafgan made a dismissive gesture. “Annwn’s problems are not for mortals to interfere with, and from what I now see those problems run deep indeed. They are returned home, within a few minutes or hours of their departure. Nothing has changed for them. What are they doing here?” He thrust a finger toward Dafydd and Ioan.
Lara glanced at the brothers, but panic yanked her attention back to Hafgan. “You can’t have sent them home. Not right where they came from. The building is collapsing. They’ll die.”
Dafydd put a hand on her shoulder. “The spell isn’t that accurate. We never come and go from exactly the same place. That you hold Boston so close in your heart and mind as home is all that has kept us from arriving halfway across the country, or the world. It’ll be the same for Dickon and Kelly. And at least they’re alive, Lara. They’d have died when the building came down if the spell hadn’t taken them with us.”
Lara whispered “I hope you’re right,” then turned on Hafgan, anger rising. “That was completely unnecessary! Dickon was going home anyway and Kelly hasn’t got any magic to interfere with yours. She just wanted to see your world!”
“A world riddled by chaos and war. It is not the face we put forward to the mortals we lure here, Truthseeker, and we have problems that run deeper than even I knew. These two cannot be here.” Absolute conviction filled Hafgan’s voice, so jarring in the face of truth that Lara shuddered with it.
She wrapped her arms around herself, as if it might prevent her from falling apart. “Why not?”
Hafgan ignored her, stalking instead to Ioan and Dafydd to inspect them as if they were sides of meat that lacked in quality. Even in clear fury, he was graceful, moving like a predator as he circled the princes twice. Only when he stopped before them did Lara recognize how high his shoulders rode, and how his jawline bunched with tension.
Neither Ioan nor Dafydd reacted. Ioan hadn’t moved at all since Aerin’s attack, still staring dully at the ground. He looked exhausted, like Dafydd had after drawing on all his own remaining power after fighting the nightwings. The staff had done that to him: had burned through more of his magic than he had probably imagined possible. Lara folded it closer to her chest, less possessive than determined not to let another elf lay hands on it and wreak further havoc.
A thread of coldness came into Hafgan, as icy as Lara had ever seen in Emyr. “You are meant to be in the Caerwyn citadel. How came you here? And you—” he said to Dafydd, but Ioan drew himself up until he was as aloof as Hafgan himself.
“I haven’t been in the shining citadel since I was a child. These past several days I was the guest of mortal healers, whose best efforts were counterintuitive to my wellness.”
Hafgan’s attention lashed back to his adopted son. “Not three days ago I saw you crowned in Caerwyn.”
“Crowned?” Four voices cracked the word together and rose toward the distant ceiling as an echo.
Hafgan looked from one to another of them, finally settling on Dafydd with a nasty crook to his smile. “Crowned, indeed. The war is over. Emyr ap Caerwyn is dead, and all of Annwn saw him fall at your hand.”
Twenty-nine
“What?” Dafydd’s faint question was all but lost under Ioan’s urgent, “No. No, he can’t be. Without him we have no answers, Father. No way of discovering history’s truth.”
“What does it matter? The Seelie king is dead and his son, my heir, sits on his thr …” Hafgan’s smugness faded to a slow frown. He repeated, “I saw you crowned,” then turned to Lara, angry incomprehension written on his features.
“Tell me what you saw.” Lara heard cool command in her own voice, so remote she barely recognized it, and king or not, Hafgan acquiesced.
More than acquiesced: a twist of his wrist brought living flame up from the dust-covered floor, each lick dancing apart to become an image. Armies clashed together, flame rolling over itself as one side overwhelmed the other or fell back, very near to the edge of the chasm protecting the Unseelie city.
It was eerily silent; this was no scrying spell, no method of looking across or back or forward in time, but only the recons
truction of memory in an element that didn’t carry voices. Water carried sound, if poorly; enhanced by magic it made a viable conductor, but flame had only its own snapping, crackling song as it ate away at the fuel provided. Without that fuel, all it provided was imagery, noiseless when it should have been ear-splitting.
The focus came closer, picking out individuals: Hafgan rode with his army, intent on reaching Emyr, whose icy pale countenance was somehow reflected in warm flame. But before Hafgan reached the Seelie king, Dafydd slammed through the Unseelie ranks, riding from behind them, his presence unseen by Hafgan until he was already past. Astounded Unseelie fell back; delighted Seelie made a path, silent faces lifted in cheers.
Dafydd ap Caerwyn rode straight for Emyr, and slammed a sword through the sovereign’s chest when he reached him. Lara, knowing it wasn’t true, knowing it to be impossible, still gasped at the impact, and Aerin let go a child’s cry of horror.
On the battlefield, delight turned to dismay, cheers to howls, as Dafydd caught the falling king and tore the silver circlet from his brow. He jammed it onto his own head, triumphant in the midst of a mob that could no longer be called an army. Even Hafgan drew his horse up, too agape to ride on, and so no one was there to stop Ioan ap Annwn as he followed in Dafydd’s wake, and slew his brother with the same efficient brutality Dafydd had shown Emyr.
This time the yelp of dismay was Lara’s. She jerked forward, reaching for the fiery images against all sense, against everything she knew. Dafydd drew her back, his hands icy on her shoulders as they all gawked, horrified, at unfolding events.
There was no triumph on the flame-made Ioan’s face, no joy as there’d been in Dafydd’s. He slid from his horse, bearing Dafydd’s body to the ground. It was too late by far to show Emyr such gentleness, but Ioan stood when both bodies lay at his feet, and lifted his silent voice to the stunned armies.