C. E. Murphy - Wayfinder

“There was an army of Unseelie out here,” Lara said in dismay. “If they know their city was destroyed are there going to be any Seelie left alive by now?”

A little silence met her question, and Dafydd finally sighed. “They’ll have fled, Lara. Even with Merrick’s fine speech, the truth is that with Emyr’s death, most of the army will have taken to the forests. If they even believe he’s Ioan, they won’t trust him, not with the change he wrought upon himself. They would have fallen with Emyr, and their first instinct will be to preserve those who are left. The citadel is a symbol, but not enough to rally them without—”

“You,” Lara finished. “Without Emyr’s heir, particularly when his other son apparently sits on the throne already, as one of the Unseelie.”

“Assuming I’m enough. First they saw me murder Merrick, and then they watched me kill Emyr, both in cold blood. Even having a truthseeker substantiate my story may not be enough.”

Cold dismay filled Lara’s chest. “You knew this all along, didn’t you? When we decided we were going to the citadel, you knew it wasn’t going to be full of Seelie ready to fight the good fight. And you didn’t tell me.”

“I told you exactly what we’re going to do.” Dafydd fixed his gaze forward, quiet determination in his posture and voice. “We’re going to depose a pretender and make a united stand against the Unseelie.”

“The four of us? You made it sound like—” Lara bit the words back. Dafydd had told the truth. Her way of interpreting that truth had been glossy, perhaps. Fanciful, full of hope, and none of them had seen fit to disillusion her during the exhaustive journey. Subdued, she asked, “How are we going to win this?”

“We may not.” Dafydd gave her a wan smile. “But that’s a problem for the morning.”

Are you sure this is going to work? wasn’t a question Lara was given to asking. She had always known whether someone was sure, and both Ioan and Dafydd were certain of their plan.

But surety wasn’t interchangeable with being right, and the problem with plans was she had no way of determining whether they would succeed. She’d laid down law with her voice once or twice, but the wholesale demand that events go her way lay beyond her. Perhaps only because she thought it did, but that was enough: the limitations she argued were her own.

The glamours disguising them were subtle enough to hardly bother even her. Aerin’s burned hair had been darkened to buttery yellow, and her eyes made blue, but her appearance was so altered from extended use of earth magic that little else needed to be done. Dafydd’s golden tones had been bleached, leaving him wraithlike, and he had taken on fuller-featured aspects: a lusher mouth, cheekbones less angled, and the sweep of his hair longer to help change the line of his jaw. Lara had observed once how alarmingly similar the Seelie looked to one another, and now the understated changes in Aerin and Dafydd reminded her of that. They weren’t themselves, but they could have been any of their people: a police witness would be hard-pressed to single them out of a Seelie lineup.

Lara’s glamour was little more than a change in her height, and the shape of her ears had been altered. She was pale enough already, and her features delicate, so stretching what she had over a frame seven inches taller did most of the disguise work by itself. Even with the headache it induced, she wanted to stare at herself in reflective water a long time, struggling to fully see and appreciate what she looked like as a Seelie woman. Alien and beautiful, but all the more extraordinary for knowing a human lay beneath the imagery.

Ioan stalked along behind them, darker of countenance and narrower in his features than normal. Of all of them, he was the only one armed: Lara and the others dragged along in ropes, Seelie prisoners to an Unseelie guard. None of them had needed begriming or theatrics to play the role of downcast prisoners, not after days of forced marching. Ioan had the hardest part, Lara thought: he was meant to be fresh and triumphant at having captured a handful of runaway Seelie.

“Why wouldn’t he just kill us?” Lara had wondered as the plan was laid out.

Aerin and Dafydd had exchanged glances, and once more Aerin answered when Dafydd clearly didn’t want to. “Merrick always resented being an outcast within the Seelie court. Rightfully, and I did less to mitigate that than I might have,” she admitted grudgingly. “But I think while he would have every Seelie in the Barrow-lands put to the sword, he would first want to have them captured and paraded before him.”

“So they could see his ascension,” Lara guessed.

Aerin nodded. “And so he could perhaps give them false hope of survival, and then enjoy their execution all the more. I’m sorry, Dafydd, but Merrick has always been petty.”

“Maybe he’d have risen above that if he’d been better-treated,” Dafydd said without heat. “It no longer matters. What’s important is I suspect Aerin’s right, and that will give us our best way into the citadel. The glamours will be too subtle to draw attention—we use such minor ones all the time, to straighten disheveled hair or smooth wrinkled clothes. It’s not like entirely hiding four people from sight, or changing our looks completely so we all appear Unseelie.”

“There are more Unseelie than Seelie,” Lara said. “Will the citadel be too full for us to get to the remembrance gardens without being noticed? Or would they expect us to go straight to the throne room?”

“Unlike you,” Ioan pointed out, “I can lie, Truthseeker. If necessary I can tell any curious passersby that you three are being taken to the gardens to meet and appreciate the Seelie dead before joining them yourselves.”

A sour twitch crossed Dafydd’s face, though he said nothing. He had been overruled: he’d wanted to go directly for Merrick, only acquiescing to searching for Emyr first when it was pointed out that the reappearance of two apparently dead Seelie royals would do more to dishearten the Unseelie than just he could.

“And if we find out Emyr really is dead,” Lara had said with more bloodthirsty pragmatism than she’d realized she possessed, “then no one, present or future, will blame you for taking action against Merrick. Not once the illusion is exposed.”

Dafydd had looked at her a long time, then nodded, and a few hours later they’d infiltrated the citadel that was his home. It remained unaltered, pearlescent stone bright with light of its own and hallways suddenly giving way to gardens large enough to be called parks. Only its people were different, making splashes of color against the white city walls where the Seelie had nearly blended in. Like the Seelie, they shared a greater homogeneity of features than any ethnic group Lara had ever encountered at home, but the range of hair colors—from coppery red through shades of brown and into shining black—gave them more distinction than the uniformly pale Seelie. Many scowled or sneered as Ioan herded his trio of captives by, but none of them questioned him. Authority, Lara supposed, was authority, regardless of what world it was in. Ioan acted as if he had every right to be there, and no one suggested otherwise.

Aerin, however, actually led the little band of outlaws, guiding them through the citadel through the quietest corridors. She finally veered under an ivy-coated archway and into sunlight. Sunlight, not the opalescent light of the citadel’s floating orbs. Lara squinted up through tall winding trees to see the garden was open to the sky. Shining towers made a sculpted framework above the garden, and light glittered down as if poured like water, soft and soothing. Lara exhaled so deeply her shoulders rolled inward. It took all her concentration to not simply fold up and rest on the mossy garden floor.