Wayfinder (2 page)

The staff reacted to the emotion with an upsurge of its own, as if it had life and personality. She grasped it more firmly, half-formed thoughts rushing through her mind. It had sent tremors through her own world. She was certain that in this one, where it had come from, it was a force to be reckoned with.

Without fully considering her actions, Lara lifted the staff in both hands and slammed it end-down into the torn ground.

It groaned, waves rippling away from the epicenter she’d made. Discordant music erupted around her again, though this time she heard a thin true note buried in the sour tune. There was no time to follow it: keeping her feet took all her concentration, and the riders surging around her had no less trouble with their mounts. The sky boiled with a spiral of clouds, the staff’s magic reaching as high as it did low. It urged destruction, eager to lash out with pain and, it seemed to Lara, vengeance. She tightened her hands, feeling the carvings press into her palms, and whispered to the cool ivory. “A truthseeker of legend could make things come true by force of will alone. You will not destroy the Barrow-lands while I wield you. I will temper your magic and guide it, and you will bend to my will. This is true!”

The words built to a crescendo in her mind, then released with a flood of pure song that roared across the staff’s more static will. Strength surged from Lara so quickly that only her grip on the rod kept her upright, but the earth’s rumbling ceased, and the skies stopped boiling. She put her forehead against the stave, feeling its objection to the limits she’d enforced, but certain her desire to do no harm had mitigated the staff’s passion for destruction.

A fleeting thought crossed her mind: that the weapon was humoring her, and would only behave so long as doing so suited it. For anyone else, it would be a fanciful idea, but there was no inherent dissonance, suggesting there was truth to it.

That was a problem to be considered later. A voice broke through the other sounds of battle, and Lara lifted her gaze to find the man who bellowed
“Truthseeker!”
with such fury.

Emyr, king of the Seelie court, bore down on Lara with his sword bared and hatred raging in his cold blue gaze.

The part of her that had become bold in the past few weeks felt the impulse to stand her ground, to see if the Seelie king would swerve at the last moment. Pragmatism prevailed, though, and she ducked to the side, trusting Emyr’s guards not to trample her. They scattered, avoiding her and giving him room to wheel his horse. Dirt flew from beneath its hooves as it charged her a second time. This time the guards scattered to avoid Emyr, and Lara found herself abruptly alone on broken earth, awaiting a fate she had no way to avoid.

Then another rider was between her and the king, so sudden, so close, that a collision between them should be impossible to avoid. Lara saw a glimpse of fresh anger cross Emyr’s face before his horse gathered itself and leapt over the intrusive rider and Lara alike. Not effortlessly: it couldn’t be effortlessly, not with the scant feet the
beast had to prepare itself, not with the height it had to clear. But to Lara’s eye it looked as though Emyr’s mount had suddenly, carelessly, decided to ignore gravity, and by so choosing had ceased being in its thrall.

The crash with which it came down on her far side belied their apparent weightlessness. Soft earth gave way, the horse sinking to its ankles. Lara gasped in concern for the animal’s well-being, but it barely stumbled as it continued forward, then came around again under Emyr’s guidance.

“He’ll ride you down.” A gauntleted hand thrust itself into Lara’s vision, fingers grasping in invitation. Lara heard the truth in the words and seized the offered hand, then shouted with surprise as the rider hauled her bodily upward. She caught a glimpse of white hair and green eyes, and then she was seated behind the rider and gasping with astonishment. Her savior, Aerin, owed her nothing, much less a lifesaving gesture—especially since the last time they’d seen one another, Lara had broken the Seelie woman’s elegant nose.

“What audacity is this!” Emyr
did
ride them down, broadsiding Aerin’s horse with his own. Lara shrieked and slammed one arm around Aerin’s waist, holding on desperately while trying not to drop the staff. She had been horseback a countable number of times in her life. A second impact would dislodge her.

And Emyr knew it. He pulled his horse around, blade leveled at Lara, though his words were for Aerin. “The mortal is mine!”

“The mortal,” Aerin replied with remarkable calm for a woman bellowing to be heard over the battle, “is our only chance at learning what’s happened to your son and heir, my lord.”

Dismay turned to a cold weight in Lara’s stomach, beating back the heat of the day. Her whole purpose in returning to the Barrow-lands was to make certain of Dafydd’s safety. She hadn’t even considered the possibility that something had gone wrong with the magic meant to bring him home. “Dafydd didn’t make it back?”

Aerin half-turned in the saddle, giving Lara a cool look. “Dafydd ap Caerwyn disappeared on the battlefield this half-year ago, moments before you joined forces with the Unseelie heir.”

“Joi—” Lara thunked her head forward, not caring that it met Aerin’s cold silver armor. “You mean before he seized me. Or kidnapped me, more accurately. Not that it was actually Ioan …” She trailed off as the difficulty of explaining her adventures washed over her.

“Half a year,” she said much more quietly. She had been torn from her own timeline when she’d traveled from the Barrow-lands back to Earth, but had hoped this journey might not have thrown time so badly askew. “Aerin, I have a lot—”

She broke off again, realizing it wasn’t the Seelie warrior with whom she needed to speak. She straightened her spine and called for an unfamiliar form of address, putting as much deference into it as she could: “Your majesty, the last I knew, Dafydd was alive.”

Not
well:
she couldn’t go so far as to intimate that, not with her talent for truth-telling. But alive, and she hoped that would offer some reassurance. It had been enough for her, until Aerin’s grim announcement that they hadn’t seen him in months. Still, it was all she had, and she thrust burgeoning worry out of mind.

“I understand I have a lot of explaining to do. This obviously isn’t the place to do it.” She gestured at the battlefield, feeling a thrum of eagerness from the ivory staff she carried. It saw the potential for destruction in the surrounding war, and was willing to help express that potential to its fullest. Fingers tightening, she quelled it and turned her attention back to Emyr. “If I might beg clemency until the day’s fighting is through, your majesty, so I can tell you what’s happened under quieter circumstances …”

It wasn’t cold. Six months may have passed, but the weather was as it had been when Lara left: clear, hot, beautiful. She’d passed from winter to late summer when she’d traveled to Earth under her own
power, but what little she knew of the Barrow-lands made it seem possible that there was no winter season, only endless summer.

Summer or not, though, a cold front rolled over her as Emyr grew ever-more frigid. The king’s element was ice. It imbued him even when he was at rest, his skin so pale its shadows were cool blue, and his hair silvered with it. She’d seen ice grow around his throne and up the walls of his chambers when he was angry. It now crept across muddy grass, turning stalks to crystalline streaks in the muck. Aerin’s horse lifted an impatient foot and smacked it down amid crackling earth, and blew a frosty breath into the summer afternoon.

“Call my guard back,” Emyr said after long moments. “Sound the retreat. Hafgan’s army will not press the advantage. They are as weary as we, and it will cause worry that we fall back. I will hear what the truthseeker has to say.”

Lara lowered her gaze and murmured “Thank you,” an instant too early. Emyr spat his final words as though they were knives: “And if her answers are unsatisfactory, I will see her executed before dawn.”

The Seelie court had changed in the months she’d been gone. Months for them: it had been only weeks for Lara, though a more complex and busy few weeks than she could otherwise remember. But in that time something darker had come over the Barrow-lands.

They did not, as she expected, retreat to the pearlescent Seelie citadel hidden in deep oak forests. Instead there were encampments at the borders of the meadow, tall silken tents bright against the tree-line. Bright until Aerin rode them closer, at least: then Lara could see the stains and worn points that spoke of travel and use. Their lifted spires and swooping peaks aflutter with bright banners were magnificent, but in places the banners were threadbare, and the cords that held tent doors open were yellowing with lack of care. In the hours Lara had spent with the Seelie, their penchant for maintaining unruffled beauty had impressed her. The small signs of deterioration struck her as symbolic of deeper fraying within their society.

Despite the threat hanging over her head—and there’d been no mistruth in Emyr’s voice, making it credible—Lara laughed into Aerin’s shoulder. She knew almost nothing about the Seelie. Certainly not enough to read meaning into details of well-worn battle gear, but she had, at home, studied psychology. It was difficult not to apply human psychoanalysis to an alien race.

Aerin pulled her helm off, sending threads of white hair around her face as she glowered over her shoulder at Lara. “Something amuses you?”

“Only my own arrogance. Aerin—” Half a dozen topics fought for precedence, and Lara settled on an apologetic, “I’m sorry for hitting you. I completely misunderstood what was happening that day. I thought you’d driven Dafydd into the Unseelie army on purpose. That you were a traitor.” An echo of the horror she’d felt then came back to her, feeding on her new concern for Dafydd. Lara clenched her teeth, fighting it down. She needed to be clearheaded now, not tangled with emotion. Struggling for something nonconfrontational to say, she blurted, “Your nose looks all right.”

Aerin’s mouth thinned. “I gathered that was your assumption, when you ordered me arrested. All Seelie have some talent for healing themselves. I’ve come away from greater injuries unscathed.”

“Recently?”

A spasm crossed Aerin’s face. Rather than answer, she urged their horse forward again, guiding it through the encampment until they reached what was unmistakeably Emyr’s tent. No larger than the others, its fabric walls were sheened blue, as though glacier ice had touched them, and the snapping banner that flew from its peak showed the white citadel in outline. Aerin gave Lara a hand, dropping her from the horse’s back as readily as she’d lifted her earlier, then swung down with a grace so far beyond Lara’s capability she couldn’t even envy it.

“Rub him down, if you will,” the Seelie woman said to a guard who stood at attention. “He’s seen no battle, but he’ll go in again more readily if he feels spoiled.”

“Do horses really look that far into the future?” Lara asked as the guard led the animal away.

“Any beast as wound with magic as our horses certainly can, if they wish.” Aerin flipped the tent flap open, gesturing Lara in. “We keep them happy, so when we ride to battle we know it’s to battle we go. You’ve ridden with us before.”

Lara made a sound of agreement as she stepped into the tent. The Seelie horses did something inexplicable to the distance they traveled, diminishing it, as if each step they took covered six or eight paces. According to Dafydd and Aerin, the horses themselves worked the spell, so it was easy to believe a badly tended animal might decide to go elsewhere rather than take itself into the dangers of battle.

Easy to believe
. She pressed the heel of her hand to one eye, partly adjusting to the dimness inside the tent, but more in weary acknowledgment of a phrase she had never used before. Her truthseeking talent had always shown her the world in terms of black and white, of true and false. Nothing was easy or difficult to believe; they simply
were
. Only in the past few days had she begun to hear and use shades of gray in the form of half-truths or vernacular phrasing.

“Are you well, Truthseeker?”

“Well enough.” Lara dropped her hand, glancing around the tent’s interior as Aerin let the entrance door flap fall back into place. It was markedly cool within, and she wondered if every Seelie tent was affected by the element its owner wielded. Probably not: Emyr’s tent was dominated by a scrying pool and a table of maps, beyond which hung another door flap, pulled open to reveal a sumptuous bed with a deep silver tub at its foot. This was the king’s tent and the king’s tent alone. Lara doubted many others in the army were as singularly
well-provided for, and therefore as able to leave an impression of themselves in the air itself. “Where’s Emyr? I thought he wanted to talk to me.”

“His majesty,” Aerin said with the slightest emphasis, “is bound to no one’s whim. Not even a truthseeker’s.”

“I didn’t mean …” Lara sighed and glanced around for a chair, finding none. The tactical meetings she presumed were held in the front part of Emyr’s tent must not last long, then, or his commanders would spend uncomfortable hours standing with increasingly itchy feet. Unless Seelie didn’t suffer from that kind of circulation problem, which seemed probable. Lara thrust her chin out and glanced roof-ward, trying to pull her thoughts into a semblance of reason.