C. E. Murphy - Wayfinder

Tension pulled at Emyr’s upper lip, like he’d smelled something vile and was just polite enough not to speak of it. But he withdrew a step, giving Lara her space and autonomy. She remained where she was, staring at him and glad that her hands still refused to shake. A month earlier she might have screamed if a man had come at her the way Emyr had just done. She might not have, too: society dictated foolish amounts of discretion in response to bad behavior, especially for women. But she could hardly imagine that she would ever have stood her ground, or thought of risking brute force against a larger adversary. The Barrow-lands, Dafydd, and her own burgeoning magic had lent her confidence she knew was growing, but coming up against it directly still surprised her.

Not quite as much as it surprised Emyr, perhaps. Lara lowered the staff by degrees, neither Seelie moving until it rested butt-down against the carpets again. “With all due respect, your majesty, Ioan’s probably the only one who has any idea where Dafydd is, or what kind of condition he’s in. Cutting off communications,” in a temper tantrum, she carefully didn’t say aloud, “wasn’t the most tactful thing you could have done.”

“With all due respect,” Emyr echoed flatly. “Truthseeker, I thought you were not given to embellishing your statements. I find that phrase difficult to believe.”

Lara gave him a pointed smile. “I assure you I meant it with every bit of respect appropriate to the moment, your majesty.” There were relatively few colloquial phrases she had been able to use throughout her life. With all due respect was one of them, because it could be invested with precisely as much respect as she felt was due.

Emyr made a sound that indicated he understood all too clearly what she meant. “Spoken in a child’s word,” he quoted, bitterly. “Changes that will break the world. What have you done to my people, Truthseeker?”

Guilt made a tight knot in Lara’s stomach before she banished it with indignation. “As far as I’m concerned it’s been barely a month since I first came here, Emyr. Even if you take the time that’s elapsed, it’s only been a year and a half.” She had, once again, become a time traveler. Skipping months at once, lurching from what had been a simple, linear life into the chaos of other lives moving on without her. At home, that had distressed her badly. Her attachment to the Barrow-lands was far less profound, and as she had left and returned in the midst of battle, worrying about a handful of disarrayed months seemed useless.

Useless except in terms of how Dafydd ap Caerwyn might have fared in those long months. He’d lived out the time she’d missed at home in jail, awaiting trial on charges of her kidnapping and presumed murder. Ioan, she hoped, would have treated his brother more humanely, but she couldn’t be certain of that until she saw him again. She made a fist, the staff’s reassuring carvings marking her palm. “Either way, I couldn’t have possibly affected Ioan’s choices. He decided to become Unseelie long before I came to the Barrow-lands. I may be destined to break your world, but you can’t lay that fracture on my head.” That was all you , she wanted to conclude, but had the wisdom to stop her tongue.

As a child wouldn’t. The prophecy Emyr had quoted sang through her mind in its entirety: Truth will seek the hardest path / measures that must mend the past. / Spoken in a child’s word / changes that will break the world. Finder learns the only way worlds come changed at end of day .

She was the truthseeking child, according to Oisín, the mortal poet who had first spoken the prophecy. A child by Seelie standards, who viewed her twenty-three years as inconsequential. And if she’d had doubts as to whether she might break or mend a world, the staff she now carried had clarified that: even on Earth, where its powers were muted, it had the strength to call up earthquakes and storms. Here, in the land of its making, she had every confidence it could destroy or create as its wielder desired.

God should have that kind of power, not Lara. She dragged in a steadying breath, then met Emyr’s eyes. “Is Ioan right, Emyr? Did you use the staff to drown the Unseelie lands? Is that what started your territory wars?”

“Ask Hafgan, if you would know what happened.” Emyr threw away the words with a sharp gesture and turned his back on her.

Exasperation flooded Lara. “I would, but he’s not here. You must’ve been there when the sea rose. Aerin? Were you?”

The Seelie woman stiffened and cast a discomfited glance at Emyr. “I don’t remember a time when the Hundred were not drowned, Lara. They may not have been, in my childhood, but …” She passed a hand over her eyes and shrugged. “The memories I have weigh in favor of them always being drowned. I remember swimming in the high tides with Dafydd and Merrick when I was a girl. I recall Rhia—” She broke off as Emyr hissed, and when she resumed again her voice was softer. “I recall the queen watching over us, and how she loved the waters.”

“Rhiannon.” Lara finished the name Aerin had not, and this time Emyr’s hiss was directed at her. She shook it off, more curious about the Seelie queen than concerned about the king’s anger. “Oisín mentioned her once. Even Dafydd barely remembers her. What … what happened to her?”

“She died,” Aerin said when it became obvious Emyr would not speak. “Saving Merrick, in truth. He swam out too far. The queen went into the water before anyone realized something was wrong. Merrick returned, but our lady …”

Lara put her fingers over her mouth, comprehension lurching through her. Ioan, so far as she could tell, had been embraced by the Unseelie king Hafgan, while Emyr had never warmed to his own adopted child Merrick. Now she understood why, and for the first time felt real sympathy for the Seelie monarch. It wouldn’t be easy for even a charitable man to forgive a child for costing a wife’s life, and nothing about Emyr had ever suggested he was of a lenient mind.

“Put her on a horse.” Emyr’s harsh voice cut across any thought of condolences Lara might have offered. “Put her on a horse, Aerin, and stick her there. We ride for my traitorous son’s head.”

Stick her there was a literal explanation of the magic used to keep Lara on her horse. She wasn’t uncoordinated, but her exposure to horses was limited. Rather than permit her to slow the Seelie riders down, she had twice now been be-spelled so that she simply couldn’t fall off her horse. She could climb down, slowly and carefully, but that wasn’t something she wanted to try at full gallop, in spite of her reservations about their task. And it would have been far worse to be left behind. At Emyr’s side she had a chance to mitigate his decisions, though the odds of the Seelie king listening to her were slim.

They rode now at the head of a host, Aerin and a dozen other guards behind them. Lara’s place just to Emyr’s left wasn’t a position of honor so much as a location from which she could be easily watched. Guards rode behind them to ensure she wouldn’t peel off and ride breakneck across the countryside alone.

Not that she would: the only two places in the Barrow-lands she knew at all were the Seelie citadel and the Unseelie palace. The one was hardly a refuge when Emyr was infuriated with her, and the other would be her destination regardless. It was the only chance she had at learning Dafydd’s fate. Whatever Emyr’s intentions, Lara’s own were to find the amber-eyed Seelie prince. The hope of seeing him again—of seeing him healthy and fit—urged her forward even if nothing else did.

Forest surged by, the horses crossing unnatural lengths with each step as they left Emyr’s war far behind. In very little time, even the forest was gone and the land sloped up toward rough mountains. In the distance a sheer rock face rose as though it had been thrust out of the earth so recently that erosion hadn’t yet thought to touch it. From what she’d learned of Barrow-lands history, it seemed possible that it had in fact erupted in living memory.