Wayfinder (10 page)

“I’m a truthseeker,” Lara said cautiously. “My name’s Lara, Lara Jansen. I don’t know if I’m an arbiter of justice. I do know that two men of royal blood are somewhere in the Drowned Lands, and without them I’m never going to find out the truth of what happened to Annwn, or have a chance at setting it right. And I know this staff is God damned dangerous.” Twice. That was twice in ten minutes she’d used a phrase that almost never passed her lips. Kelly, back at home, thought Lara’s reluctance to damn in God’s name was quaintly amusing. In the Barrow-lands, though, Lara had learned that naming the Holy Trinity was a magic in and of itself, and the curse carried a particular weight. Lara turned a brief glower at the staff, as though it had prompted her to swear, then gave her attention back to the watery man. “I’d be just as happy to finish what I need to do with it and give it to someone with a record of being able to handle its power.”

“And who would that be?” This time real interest lightened the sea elf’s voice, and Lara wondered if answering would be condemnatory. She was certain, though, that
not
answering would carry a price of its own, and after a moment shrugged.

“Another mortal. A poet named Oisín.”

“Mortals,” the water creature growled, then, more approvingly, “Poets. There may be wisdom in that; poets cross the boundaries of age and time. But that staff is not meant to be ruled by anyone, Truthseeker. Not for long.”

Lara hesitated. “Not even by one such as you?”

Something complex happened in his eyes, ancient sorrow rising
to mix with chagrin and unequivocal acceptance. “I was never meant to rule it at all. I learned that long ago.”

The corner of Lara’s mouth curved up. “All the more reason to help me get into the Drowned Lands, so I can rescue the prince, save the world, and return it to neutral hands.”

“Neutral.” The sea man’s eyebrows, barely noticeable until he spoke with them, rose. “This poet is neutral?”

“I think he loved her. Rhiannon, the one whose staff it had been.”

The sea lord stiffened, the water coursing beneath his skin going still. Lara bit her lower lip, then rushed on. “I think he went to great lengths to protect it so no one else could use it. No one unworthy. Maybe it’s not neutrality, but it’s a different path from the one it seems Emyr and Hafgan took. It looks more like neutrality, and from where I’m standing, that might be close enough.”

Slowly, incrementally, he relaxed again, until his was a body in motion once more, all the moods of the ocean reflected in him. “An arbiter indeed. Tell me, mortal woman, Lara Jansen, Truthseeker. The journey into the Drowned Lands is not a gentle one. Are you prepared to undertake the trials?”

“I am.” A twinge of honesty struck her and she added, “I don’t understand what that means, really, but I’m willing to try. This land, Annwn, it’s damaged. Even I can see that, and I’ve only been here a little while. Oisín made a prophecy about me. He called me a truthseeker and a worldbreaker, and said I’d find the way to mend the past. The only way I can see to do that is going in there.” She nodded at the sea beyond him, marveling briefly that she’d become accustomed, in a few short minutes, to the way it held itself apart from the silver road. “I want to help,” she said quietly. “Please help me
to
help.”

“And your companion?” The sea lord took apparent notice of Aerin for the first time, and Lara heard her flinch to attention.

“I will join her if you’ll permit me, Lord.” Aerin’s soprano was
ragged with emotion, and she came forward roughly to stand beside Lara when he gestured for her.

He pressed his thumbs against their foreheads, a cool watery touch. Power staggered Lara, power unlike any she’d encountered so far. The entirety of the world’s oceans were in the caress, thundering, calm, corrosive, sustaining; he encompassed all of that in his fragile elfin form. Sea life in all its myriad shapes, with its cleverness and dull-wittedness, inquisitive or reclusive, light-filled and shadowed, ran through him so that he
was
their life, and they were his. Temperature spread through his touch, from the heat of sunlight on the water to the great blocky ice floes that hid black water from the light for decades on end.

“You will see the lands as they are,” he said mournfully. “Not as they once were, but the ruin that they are now, for even I cannot bring them back to their glory. But you will walk among the ruins as though you walk through air, and you will touch them as if they are dry land raised from the waters. You will survive the drowning, Truthseeker, but only the Hundreds will tell whether you survive the trials. You have three days before the water takes you.”

He dropped his hands. Lara nearly fell as the surge of power retreated. She was left gaping after him as he returned to the depths without another word, and not until the silver road was empty again did she dare to ask, “Who
was
he?”

“That was Llyr,” Aerin whispered. “Father of the sea, and father of my people, for he is Rhiannon’s father, too.”

“That was …” Words fell away, leaving Lara staring down the silver-sheened road that led into the ocean. Llyr was gone, taken back by the water without a ripple, though the bay remained as it had been, stricken by a parting that went against the laws of nature. Lara’s chest was overfull, awe and astonishment poured into her until she couldn’t breathe. Her first impulse had been right: not Poseidon, perhaps, but surely the same elemental power by another name. She still felt his thumbprint against her forehead. The power sweeping from it heralded changes in her body, changes wrought by the will of a creature so far beyond mortal, even so far beyond immortal, that she had only one name for it.

“That was a god,” she finally managed, though it was still half a question. “An actual, honest-to-God … god.” Truth rang through it, expanding what she thought she knew into new spaces. She had faith in her God, singular or triumvirate, but His words came back to her:
Thou shalt have no other gods before Me
. She had always thought that meant other gods were false, and so not to be worshipped. Not
once had she considered it could lend credence to their existence, and was meant to establish a hierarchy of belief.

Aerin said, “I told you ours walked the land with us,” though the acerbic note Lara expected was missing. “But Llyr is one of the old gods, and it has been long on long since he’s been seen. My grandmother would not remember the last time an old one spoke to us. Who are you,” she added more falteringly. “What are you, Truthseeker, that you bring back our ancient gods and shake the order of our world?”

“I don’t know.” Half a truth: the answer,
worldbreaker
, stood out in Lara’s mind, but that was more than she wanted to face, much less voice, even if she was certain of what it meant. “All I know is that I mean no harm.”

“What we mean and what we do can be oceans apart.” Aerin turned away, still quiet with trouble, and, one-armed, stripped the horses of their tack while Lara watched with a sense of incompetence. “Llyr didn’t grant them the ability to go into the water,” the Seelie woman explained as she worked. “We’ll have to go alone. They’ll be fine. Not even the Unseelie would harm them. They know too well the value of a good horse.”

Lara glanced at the ocean, then at Aerin. “If you trust them so little, why did you agree to come when Llyr asked?”

“What would you do if your god threw down such a challenge?” Aerin collected her saddlebags with a grunt and nodded for Lara to take up her own. “I still believe the Drowned Lands are cursed for my people, but surely there’s no better way to enter them than with the blessings of a god.”

Without looking back, she struck down the silver road, and Lara ran to catch up.

The sea fought its forced boundaries as they walked deeper into the parted waters, sloshing over to wet their feet and dripping from above as if they’d entered a network of damp caves. The air turned heavier, weighing at Lara’s hair and clogging her lungs until a deep breath turned to a wracking cough. She crouched where she was, one hand wrist-deep in water to balance herself against the road, and tears spilled down her cheeks as she hacked for air. “I thought Boston could get muggy.”

Aerin put a hand out, offering to draw Lara to her feet. “Llyr said we would survive the drowning. It will be worse, though, before it is better.”

“Survive the—” Those had been the sea god’s words, but Lara had put no real thought into them. She took Aerin’s hand and stood, still struggling to breathe freely as she glanced back the way they’d come.

The path behind them was thick with water. Not just on the road, but in the air, droplets mingling to form globs that spun and shivered as they grew. Aquariums were easier to see into: Lara felt like she was underwater with her eyes open, no protection between them and the element. Primal fear thickened her lungs even more, making air harder yet to pull in. “It’s filling up.”

“Not even a god can part the waters forever.” Aerin turned Lara away from shore, back down the path they faced. It was clearer than the road behind them, though a spike of pain shot through Lara’s vision, warning that what she saw was very likely a glamour meant to distract and reassure.

She crushed her eyes shut, not at all eager to have the glamour displaced. Better to believe she walked into clean, clear air, if she could. For a rarity, she envied people for whom belief was subjective. Even with her eyes closed, music crept around her thoughts, assuring her of the truth: she walked into the ocean. That it hadn’t drowned her was an oversight soon to be rectified.

“Oh, to hell with it, I’m just making this worse.” Lara let go of Aerin’s hand and dragged in the deepest breath she could, then put on a surge of speed and ran forward. Ten steps; twenty; then thirty before her lungs began to burn. An athlete would do better, she thought. Even Kelly, with her love of adventure sports, would do better. Lara staggered forward, tears in her eyes again as her heart beat a painful protest at the sudden lack of oxygen. Her eyes were still closed, letting the glamour trick her as best it could. Water dampened her skin, full-on humidity, but not the immersion of having splashed into the sea. The lie of it sang through her mind, but she shied away from admitting it, concentrating instead on one more step. One more. One more.

She lost count of how many she’d taken before instinct ripped away deliberation and her jaw gaped open to suck down air.

Water flooded her lungs, cold and deadly and relentless. Lara hacked it out and tried again, fingers clawing at her chest as if she could rip it open and find sustaining breath that way. Salt stung the welts that rose and she thrashed, trying to escape both the drowning and the itching pain. Gravity lost its hold on her, the silver path below no longer a road but simply a watery gravemarker. She rose up, kicking and coughing, drawing more water in with every panicked inhalation, but the surface was impossibly far away. The sun was a distant dot refracting through gray waves, parted waters long since closed above her head. They hadn’t been so deep when she’d crushed her eyes shut and begun her mad rush; she was sure of it. Maybe she’d run farther than she’d thought. Maybe the glamour, once acknowledged, had swept her into the ocean more quickly, its primary mission already accomplished.

Her chest
hurt
. It weighed so much, filled with water the way it was, and its weight wanted to pull her back to the ocean floor. That was closer by far than the receding spot of sunlight up above, and seemed vastly easier to reach. She’d stopped flailing; her arms and
legs, like her chest, were absurdly heavy. Waving them seemed futile, a waste of what little energy she had left. An idle thought crossed her mind: if she could kick her way down to the sandy earth below, she could curl up there and rest a while. Perhaps the pressure in her chest would ease then, and she could swim to the surface after a few minutes of relaxing.

Swimming down was much easier than struggling upward. Within a few seconds she reached the ocean floor and listlessly curled into a ball.

Sand rose up at the pressure of her descent, tiny particles floating into her nose and mouth. Lara dropped against the earth with an unexpected soft thud, the jarring thump knocking water from her lungs. She coughed, then rolled onto her hands and knees, gagging and choking on water as it came up again, emptying from her lungs as quickly as it had filled them. Floating sand collapsed into rich loamy soil, darker brown where Lara spat up mouthful after mouthful of bitter saltwater. She gasped and wheezed, tears streaming from her eyes once more, until there was nothing more to force out of her body and she collapsed in the dirt, rolling over to stare skyward.