C. E. Murphy - Wayfinder

“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 man 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.

It was a young man—a boy, really—with finer, longer features than Ioan possessed. Even in ice, his hair seemed wheat-pale, not the white or silver sported by Aerin and Emyr, but touched with sunlight. His eyes, like all Seelie’s, were light-colored, but less deep-set in his face than Ioan’s. The boy wore Seelie clothing: winged shoulders and light, fluting fabrics that wove in and out to make snug-fitting patterns against his torso. Despite the differences in coloration, Lara had no doubt this was Ioan as a child; Ioan as his father remembered him.

Ioan turned his attention from Emyr to the sculpture, then twisted away to gesture at the pool behind him. A third image rose from the water, as colorless and as vivid as the ice child Emyr had wrought. First the boy, and then a youth who bore a striking resemblance to Dafydd, though he wore his pale hair long and smooth, rather than the jagged rock-star cut that Dafydd favored. Still, the height of his cheekbones, the expressive mouth, and the slenderness of his frame all called Dafydd to Lara’s mind.

But then he changed, the image evolving more rapidly than Lara thought possible for its living counterpart. Though it was only water, it called darkness the same way Emyr’s ice scryings did, coloring hair to black and skin to a darker shade of pale. The water-Ioan lost height, shaping it to breadth, and his Seelie garb was put away for the heavier stuff worn by the Unseelie. Within moments the transformation was complete, leaving an almost-perfect echo of the Ioan whose image Emyr had called forth.

Almost perfect: the real Ioan wore the ebony circlet, where the younger version did not. The latter turned up his palms as if to say what else did you expect? , then fell away into the pool with a splash. The remaining image sought out Lara’s gaze. Despite the diminutive size demanded by the scrying pool, she found as much presence and command in his simulacrum as she had when she’d met him in person.

“Welcome,” Ioan ap Annwn said with genuine warmth. “Welcome back to Annwn, Lara Jansen.”

Emyr smashed the image to pieces with his fist.

Lara flinched backward with a yelp, and even Aerin’s hand went to her sword, as though the ruined vision might somehow prove a threat. Emyr’s harsh panting filled the tent, then disappeared as he stalked from the scrying pool to shove Aerin aside and catch Lara’s dress.

Or very nearly: his hands came together, grasping. Lara’s heartbeat shot up, fear and anger rising to the fore. She lifted the staff crosswise over her chest, making it a barrier between them. Eagerness thrummed through the ivory, as if Emyr were a recognized opponent. His hands splayed and his lip curled as he stilled his action. “How dare you—”

“How dare you ,” Lara said incredulously. Her hands were icy, as though Emyr had caught them in his grip and called his element into play, but they gripped the staff with conviction. She could probably manage a single blow if she needed to: neither Emyr nor Aerin would expect her to respond physically to his advance. “I don’t care if you’re the king of Heaven. You don’t go around manhandling people.” Beyond Emyr, Aerin’s astonishment suggested that, as king, Emyr both could and did behave so aggressively. Offended at the idea, Lara spat air, not quite uncouth enough to draw liquid for the full effect. “You damned well don’t do it to me. ”