C. E. Murphy - Wayfinder

“We’re both better.” Lara prodded her shoulder, exploring undamaged skin. She hadn’t so much as noticed the pain evaporating. Being pain-free was normal, not remarkable, though now she remembered everything she’d done since reaching the beach: catching herself as she collapsed, reaching for Dafydd, pushing up to sit on her heels. Ordinary actions, except in light of having been dizzy with injury and blood loss not so very long before. “Who, um. Is it Llyr? Is he a god of healing as well as the sea? I feel like I should … thank someone, and my God doesn’t seem exactly appropriate here,” she said awkwardly. “I’m not sure He’d even hear me.”

“Oh, he would.” Dafydd pulled a moue. “Faith crosses boundaries. If not, your exorcism would have no power.”

“Nor your songs.” Aerin touched her hair, then let her hand fall. “Llyr is not our god of healing, but the waters are his. Thanks to him would not go unappreciated.”

Lara bowed her head, narrowly avoiding making the sign of the cross as she murmured thanks not only for her recovery, but for the help the sea god had offered her. Both Dafydd and Aerin were looking at her curiously when she lifted her gaze again, but neither spoke. “Ioan,” she said firmly. “If he can’t scry Emyr in time I’m afraid the Unseelie city will be wiped out by morning. I don’t know where the village they brought him to is, but I think I can find it focusing on him. Like I did with the staff back in Massachusetts,” she said to Dafydd, which earned her a faintly puzzled nod.

“I remember,” he said after a moment. “Just not … clearly.”

“You were sick.” Dying , truth’s music wanted her to say, but for once Lara quenched it, happier with chicanery. “Anyway, I can do it, but I don’t think we’ll be fast enough on foot. Aerin, do you have any idea how far we are from the horses?”

Aerin shook her head. “No, but they’ll come at my call.”

“All right, good. If you’ll call them …” Lara turned back to the dunes Hafgan had climbed, drawing breath to call him as well.

Only grass and shadows moved on the low beach hills. Hafgan was gone.

Aerin pierced the air with a long whistle, higher than a seagull’s call. Lara flinched, then caught Dafydd’s hand briefly, drawing his attention to Hafgar’s disappearance before climbing the dunes herself. Dafydd followed after, leaving Aerin to make a sound of disgruntlement that deepened into concern as she realized who they sought. She scrambled up the hill behind them, coming to stand so that Lara was dwarfed between the two Seelie. They all focused on the distance before glancing at one another. Dafydd and Aerin’s gazes sailed over Lara’s head and she straightened her spine, adding the last possible fraction of an inch to her height. Dafydd, looking like he was trying not to, cracked a smile.

“Little mortal,” Aerin said with such solemnity it became amusement. Her vantage point was a few inches higher than Lara’s, making her that much taller still, and she laughed when Lara bared her teeth. “You stand as tall as Oisín. Are you a giant among your people?”

“Oisín’s short, for a man in my era. I’m not a giant. I’m not short, either.” The last came out defensively. Even the smallest of the elfin adults Lara had seen stood four inches taller than she, and there was no obvious disparity between men and women in height.

Aerin grinned, holding a hand up for peace, then turned her attention back to the landscape. Humor draining away, she said, “The stones say nothing of his passage, Truthseeker. He may be lost to us.”

“Why would he do that?” Answers came unbidden before either Seelie had time to respond, and Lara lifted her own hand in turn, stopping whatever they would say. “Because Emyr’s out there and Hafgan’s got issues with him, if nothing else. Because he doesn’t owe us anything. Because—”

“He owes you his wakening,” Aerin disagreed, but shrugged in general acknowledgment. “Still, his element is heat, not air. I should be able to track him through the earth.”

Lara blinked at the taller woman, suddenly appreciating the breadth of possibilities granted by an affinity for stone. “You must be a fantastic hunter.”

Aerin fixed her gaze on the distant mountains, enough strain in her neck to suggest she deliberately avoided Dafydd’s eyes. “I have always captured what I sought, yes. But Hafgan is connected with this land. He can, perhaps, persuade it to show no signs of his passing.”

“Then we forget about him for a while.” Lara’s voice hardened. “The truth is, we know where he’s likely to end up. Right now Emyr probably thinks you’re dead and has no warning that Hafgan’s on the way. Finding Ioan and scrying Emyr is our best chance to avoid a catastrophic battle. We’ll worry about Hafgan later. Aerin, the—”

The sound of surf, soft enough before to have been unnoticeable, intensified abruptly, the earth rattling with it. Lara reached for the staff, making certain it hadn’t come unstrapped from her back, then turned to the beach, still afraid the weapon had somehow triggered a tsunami. They couldn’t run: there was no ground high enough within reach, even if they were as fast as the Seelie horses.

It was those horses that pounded down the shore, their striking hooves making the rumble under Lara’s feet. They slipped between moonlit shadows from one step to the next, only half existent in the world as Lara saw it, and were at the dunes in impossibly little time. One came to a full halt, the other dancing around it. Each touch of its hoof to earth sent another jolt deep into the ground, shaking Lara where she stood. She had never seen them run when she wasn’t astride, but that they struck the earth hard when they returned from their shift through space rang true with her. The Seelie army must have nearly shaken trees from their root beds as it rode. Impressed, she nodded toward them, then shot an abashed smile at Aerin. “The horses, I was going to ask.”

Aerin made a fluid gesture as though she’d conjured them, then slipped gracefully down the hill to catch and calm the prancing beasts. Their tack was gone, left somewhere else along the beach, but the Seelie woman leapt onto her horse so easily it was clear she didn’t feel the lack. Lara, alarmed, watched Dafydd do the same, and followed him down the hill muttering, “Remember that I’d never ridden a horse before coming here?”

He gave her a hand and pulled her onto the horse’s back with enough finesse that for a moment even she thought it was her own agility making the move. Wisdom caught up, though, and she blurted, “Aerin?”

“Feel the earth,” Aerin said smoothly. “Feel it rise through the horse’s legs, feel it embody you, feel the connection between you and the beast and the land. You cannot fall, when you are one with the horse.” It was the enchantment she’d used before to stick Lara in place. This time, though, Lara felt a hint of what she meant, a tenuous bond between herself and the horse and the ground below. The how of the spell suddenly came clear to her, Aerin’s stoneworking talent making that union between three separate things, and Lara’s confidence in it increased tremendously. Aerin gave a satisfied nod, then hi-yah’d ! the horses up the dunes as Lara, clinging to Dafydd, closed her eyes to search for a true path to Ioan.

It was easier each time she did it, even considering the delicacy that had been necessary to create the path to the tomb in the Drowned Lands. Ioan was a vital figure in her thoughts, details of what she knew about him tumbling into place. Passionate in protecting his people, even in protecting those who weren’t quite his anymore, like Dafydd. Willing to go to immoral lengths to find help. Lara’s own kidnapping was proof enough of that. A skilled warrior with no evident fear. A man dedicated enough to the life he’d been given to undergo physiological changes that would make him truly one of his chosen people.