by C. E. Murphy
“Kelly’s apartment. We can go there for privacy, and you can get us all home from the …”
Home. She heard the word choice just as Dafydd did, though it garnered a slow hopeful smile from him and a gut-wrenching sense of displacement for her. “Back to the Barrow-lands,” Lara whispered. “You can bring us back to the Barrow-lands from there.”
“I believe so.” Dafydd’s voice remained steady despite the bright light of hope. “Lara, is the glamour still bothering you? You look pale.”
It was an excuse, and she knew it: a way for her to move beyond the astonishing reference to the Barrow-lands as home. Lara took it, grateful. “It’s not as bad as it was, but I wouldn’t mind getting away from it. I don’t know what to do about the horses, Dafydd. I can call Kelly—well, we can turn up on her doorstep, since I don’t have a phone or any money on me—but we can’t put two horses in her apartment.”
“I believe that will be unnecessary.” Aerin reached up to pat her horse’s nose. “They’re intelligent enough to remain hidden if we explain the need, but I can encourage them to, as well. The same sort of enchantment that keeps you in the saddle,” she explained. “A staying spell. A glamour cast over their presence should keep them comfortably out of sight until we return for them, and will allow you to escape the magic’s discomfort. Is there water nearby?”
“Nowhere as secluded as this, but there’s plenty of it. The frog pond is …” Lara glanced through the leaves like she could see the city and orient herself, then waved a hand. “That way, I think. Should we bring them there?”
“They’ll do well enough on their own, with glamours keeping them from prying eyes.” Aerin stood, dusting grass from her armor, and caught the horses’ bridles to draw the animals close and murmur to them. Lara watched a moment, then dropped her shoulders with a sigh.
“I wish I knew how much time has passed. You said it could easily be ten years here for a day there, if there was no spell worked to keep time in approximate alignment. I’d been there three days, Dafydd. My mother could be dead.”
He took her hand, fingers gentle around hers. “I don’t think so. The skyline is still familiar, isn’t it? In thirty years it would change. Even if it was still distinguishable, it would change. I think it’s been less time than that.”
“I hope so.” It didn’t matter that she’d been aware that following Merrick between worlds meant she might never return to the time and home she’d known. It was still a trepidatious thought. “You and Aerin should probably leave your armor here, too. Or glamour it into looking like normal clothes, anyway.” She winced at the idea, preparing for another headache, but Dafydd, chuckling, began to strip the metal garb away.
“I’ve been arrested once while wearing Seelie armor. I’d rather not risk it again.”
“Perhaps I should remain behind.” Aerin stood between the horses, hands on their bridles and increasing discomfort on her face. “I know nothing of your world, Truthseeker. I might be more hindrance than help.”
“And someone might accidentally stumble on you here, or get stupid out on the green and pick a fight you felt you had to stop,” Lara said. “Glamours or not, new world or not, I’d rather you were with us. Strength in numbers.”
“I would have no cause to interfere with mortal battles,” Aerin said in confusion. “Why should I do such a thing?”
“Imagine a man choosing to attack a defenseless woman, Aerin,” Dafydd said after a moment. “Would you stand aside and watch it happen?”
“Of course not, but who would do that? What woman wouldn’t fight back? Surely even mortals have some ability to defe …” Aerin let the words fade away as she tried not to scowl too obviously at Lara. “Perhaps they don’t, then. Very well. I will accompany you, but I will not leave my sword behind.”
“Well, it’s not a concealed weapon,” Lara said uncertainly. “But I’m not sure what the police would think of it. Maybe you should glamour it to look like a purse.”
“A purse.”
“A handbag. Like some of the women on the green were carrying.” Dizziness crept over Lara as Aerin begrudgingly worked the magic, sword blinking and twisting in Lara’s vision as it tried to convince her it was a leather purse, and not a weapon at all. “That’s better. As long as I don’t look at it.” She picked up her own staff and got to her feet, dismayed. “I don’t know what to do about this. I think carrying it glamoured would make me sick.”
“We’ll tell them we’re on the way to Pennsic,” Dafydd said with a grin. “Come, then. Let us find Kelly, and refuge.”
The Barrow-lands were easier to adapt to than Lara’s own world. Pastoral, forested magic and slender alien warriors were less of a shock than mid-afternoon Boston traffic, or the myriad people in all sizes and colors. Aerin, usually so confident, wedged herself between Lara and Dafydd without seeming to realize she’d done it. Her eyes were round with alarm, mouth pinched tight as people swept past them by the hundreds, and she held her purse with a white-knuckled grip on a strap that Lara knew full well was the sword’s hilt.
Dafydd was murmuring to her in their native language, narrating the brash world she was encountering: that man in the twisted hat is from a land called India, that smell is a human favorite named pizza, these noisy boxes are cars.
“I know that one,” Aerin said in a harsh voice. “Lara told Ioan of them. She did not say they were so loud. How can you live like this?” She turned accusing eyes on Lara. “So many people, so much sound.”
“I grew up around here. I’d never been anywhere as quiet as the citadel until I came to the Barrow-lands with Dafydd. It is too loud,” Lara agreed, then caught Dafydd’s arm behind Aerin’s back and pointed up the street with her free hand. “Newspaper vendor. I don’t have any money, but at least I can see what day it is before he chases me off. Don’t let Aerin panic.”
“I do not panic!”
Lara flashed a smile at the glamoured pair and darted ahead of them, stopping beneath the vendor’s canopy. He shared a stall with a hot dog seller, and her stomach rumbled as she peered at magazine covers and newspaper dates.
It was reassuringly, unexpectedly familiar. Only four days had passed in both worlds. Lara picked up one of the papers with a shaking laugh and turned it over, glancing over the lead stories while the vendor gave her a warning look. Guilty, she started to put it down, but a headline caught her eye: Extreme Surgery Troubles Doctors.
Below it was a photograph of Ioan ap Annwn.
Glamours worked even on photography: the camera’s eye didn’t see what Dafydd’s magic hid, or his career as a television weatherman would have been short-lived indeed. But Ioan was in no way glamoured. He was lying down in the photograph, eyes closed, but that did nothing to disguise their elfin slant, or the inhumanly high cheekbones that added to the angled effect. Nothing about his bone structure was human: even the comparative breadth of Unseelie jaw and cheekbone was far too delicate for even the most gracile human males. And his ears were exposed, inky hair falling back from the sharp, upswept points that marked the elfin races. For an instant she imagined the mental space that would have prompted the headline: extreme surgery, indeed. Not just extreme, but of such a quality as to be almost inconceivable. He looked sculpted, not natural, and as such was both utterly beautiful and tremendously alien.
He was also, according to the scant handful of sentences she was able to comprehend, suffering from a profound head wound. Students had found him on the Common two days earlier, and had rushed him to the hospital. Doctors were still uncertain whether he would survive.
“Lady, are you all right?” The news vendor lost his hostility, edging past a stack of papers to come into Lara’s line of sight, face now crinkled with concern.
“No.” Her abrupt response alarmed the vendor, who went so far as to put a hand on her arm in cautious support. Lara lifted the paper, shaking it slightly to emphasize the story. “I know him.”
“Jesus, they’ve been looking for somebody who does for day
s. Where’ve you been, with your head in the sand? Who did all that surgery on him?”
“He did it himself.” It was technically true, if physiologically impossible in human terms. Lara wet her lips, trying to pull her thoughts together enough to hold some sort of normal conversation. “I’m sorry. I just got back into town and I literally have no cash on me, no bank card, nothing. May I have this paper? I’ll come back and repay you, I promise, but I have friends I need to show this to, and …” Her voice was shaking by the time she finished. Ioan couldn’t, by any comprehensible measure, be in Boston, much less in a hospital. She’d seen him only minutes ago, whole and well.
Outrageous dissension rang through the thought. They couldn’t both be true: either he was here and hadn’t been in the Barrow-lands, or the photo was some kind of glamour. Lara crumpled the paper, eyes crushed shut against the sour musics vying for dominance.
Worry crept into the vendor’s voice. “I guess I lose enough off stolen papers that letting one go on purpose this once won’t hurt. Go ahead and take it, lady. I hope your friend will be okay.”
“Thank you.” Lara managed a weak smile for the man as she backed away. “I promise, I really will pay you. I just can’t right now. I’m really sorry.” Then she turned and fled, meeting Dafydd and Aerin where she’d abandoned them on the street. The prospect of explaining what she couldn’t understand overwhelmed her and she simply thrust the paper into Dafydd’s hands with a feeble attempt to smooth the wrinkles she’d put in its surface.
Even Aerin, unable to read the words, understood in seconds. “This is a ‘photo,’ ” she half-asked, and then with more certainty if no more comprehension, “A photo of Ioan. The likeness is very good.”
“That’s what photographs do,” Lara whispered. “A nearly perfect replica. But it doesn’t make any sense.” Her head throbbed, Dafydd and Aerin’s glamours playing havoc with her vision and only made worse by the incomprehensibility of Ioan’s presence in her world. Her head had hurt for days, it seemed like: almost since they’d left the Drowned Lands themselves. A lack of sleep no doubt exacerbated the pain, and certainly clouded her thoughts against any real hope of figuring out what had happened. “He can’t be in two places at once.”
“Then either this is not Ioan,” Dafydd said slowly, “or the man we journeyed with in the Barrow-lands was not.”
A pure clear chime rang through Lara’s migraine, sweet vibrations breaking it away at Dafydd’s last words, and the impossible fell into place: “Merrick.”
The willpower necessary to cast an illusion of the depth Merrick had commanded staggered Lara. Almost literally: she had a hard time putting one foot in front of the other as Dafydd guided her through the streets toward Kelly’s apartment. It had begun—had to have begun—with Braith’s village in the valley. It hadn’t just been A glamour hiding the town that had triggered her headache. The town itself had been an illusion, and her truthseeking sense had tried desperately to correct what it knew to be wrong. But it was more than that: in the Catskill mountains Merrick had only built an illusion to fool Lara. Kelly had seen through it, rescuing Lara from her own folly. This one, like the spell Merrick had created to mastermind his own apparent murder, had fooled more than one person into believing the same story.
“The magic would be easier to control and maintain in the Barrow-lands,” Dafydd explained. “In your world, tricking a single person with an in-depth illusion might take all of Merrick’s talent. I fooled everyone with my glamour, but it’s so very minor that the effort necessary to maintain it is almost negligible. Making you, a truthseeker, believe I had rejoined you in your world … that requires—”
“It requires my willing acceptance and belief in the scenario. And I think it required the same thing in Annwn. Maybe the real village was a little farther down the same road, and he created the illusion on the path I saw in order to waylay us. And we just delivered him into the heart of the Seelie army, Dafydd. Your father could be dead because of us.”
“As you said, riding into their midst could well be his undoing. I wouldn’t think, though, that it’s Merrick or even Ioan they’ll be seeing. I’d think it would be—”
“You,” Aerin finished grimly. “The son and heir returned, perhaps with a tale of vanquished enemies. There is no one left in the Barrow-lands to protect the Unseelie city now, Dafydd.”
“I’m surprised you care,” Lara said with more honesty than wisdom.
Aerin’s human countenance did nothing to spoil the cool arrogance in her gaze. “I dislike being made a fool of, Truthseeker.”
“Hafgan remains,” Dafydd said with the air of a man trying hard to defuse a fight. “He might yet be the Unseelie peoples’ savior. What I want to know is how he worked the scrying spell.”
“He didn’t.” They stopped at a crosswalk, Lara so grateful to stop moving that she didn’t look to see if they could jaywalk the section. It was a Bostonian pastime, striking out into traffic with the air of one indestructible. The trick was never making eye contact with the enemy: it lent jaywalkers the moral right of way, obliging drivers to hit the brakes. It was infuriating, but everyone participated while on foot, even if they’d only minutes earlier been in a car, swearing violently at jaywalkers themselves.
Dafydd, obviously as familiar with the game as she was, did walk out into traffic, eliciting a gasp of horror from Aerin. As if reminded of the danger, he skipped back—scoring one for the vehicles, Lara supposed—and settled in place to hear Lara’s explanation while they waited for the light.
“The scrying spell is one of ice and water. Merrick doesn’t command those elements. He just created an illusion, and we probably made it easier by giving him that tiny jug of water instead of a pool or a basin like Ioan and Emyr use. He must have been being so careful.” Lara closed her eyes, trying to recall exactly the words and phrases “Ioan” had used. “A direct lie would have triggered my truth-sensing no matter how good his illusion was. He never said he was Ioan. He didn’t even say he’d use the scrying power. He said he had duties to attend to, and was thirsty. It was all true. It just wasn’t—”
“Connected,” Dafydd said. “In the same way you intimated we were from Pennsic. My adopted brother is canny,” he added in a mutter. “I always thought him more honest than that.”
“You were always more willing to forgive him his birth than the rest of us,” Aerin said. The light changed and she strode into the street, boldness an illusion Lara could see through.
Dafydd’s jaw tightened and he moved swiftly to keep up, leaving Lara a few steps behind. “Had the rest of you been more forgiving, perhaps we wouldn’t have come to this.”
“Would we not have? Would you have always been content to be the prince, Dafydd, and never the king?”
“Your ambitions were always greater than mine.” Dafydd fell back again abruptly, rejoining Lara in not so much a retreat as a strategic commentary. Aerin’s fists clenched, but she said nothing else, and let Dafydd and Lara take the lead again as they cut down another street toward Kelly’s apartment complex.
“Does it work that way?” Lara wondered aloud. “I thought maybe there was no real inheritance, not when you all live so long. Heirs in name only, for all intents and purposes.”
“For all intents,” Dafydd agreed. “Even royalty dies, as my mother did, but Emyr was never likely to set aside his crown from grief, even if Ioan and I hadn’t been children by our standards. Even almost by human standards,” he added. “We were very young. Ioan was only nine or ten when I was born and he and Merrick were exchanged as hostages to good behavior.”
“I thought you didn’t have very many children. I’d think two children in ten years would be unheard of.”
“It was. And perhaps Rhiannon paid the price for breeding at such a mortal rate, as I was only a child myself when she died.”
“I’m sorry. Oh, good, here we are.” Lara ran forward, suddenly eager to get out of the street as she buzzed Kelly’s apartment. Aerin scowled at the sh
arp sound, hand tightening on her “purse” again, and Lara shot her a sympathetic smile. “It’ll be quieter insi—Hello? Hi, Kelly? It’s Lara!”
Momentary silence followed Kelly’s initial “hello?,” which had been half-drowned under Lara’s reassurance to Aerin. Then Kelly gave a short incredulous laugh. “Oh my God. Come on up, I’m buzzing you in.”
She met them in the hallway outside her apartment, eyes wide above a cheek swollen with medical staples. Lara made a dismayed sound, but Kelly charged forward to grab her in an astonished, breathless hug. “When you said ‘see you later’ I thought you meant in about ten years. Oh my God, Lara, you’re home already? You’re okay? What’s going on? And David!” She nearly yelled his name, releasing Lara to haul the slender Seelie man into a hug. “You’re not dead! And—oooh.” Her voice dropped as she took in Aerin, then put a hand out to shake. “I didn’t get your name, but you’re obviously the other wom—Uh, I mean, you’re Dafydd’s frie—I mean, aw, shit, I mean, hi, I’m Kelly.”
Aerin looked dubiously at Kelly’s hand, then carefully took it in her own. “I am Aerin.” She glanced at Dafydd, curiosity raising her white eyebrows. “Her injury appears profound. Why has she not healed it?”
Kelly shot Lara a look of bewilderment and Lara groaned. “She only speaks Seelie and my magic’s not enough to make you understand her. Or her understand you. This is Aerin. She wanted to know why you haven’t healed your cheek yet.”
“Are you kidding? The best doctors in Boston say it’s healing up really well. I won’t even need plastic surgery, probably, to hide the scar, it should be that unnoticeable.” Kelly grabbed Lara’s shoulders. “Speaking of plastic surgery—”
“I saw the newspaper story. Have you—?”
“I’ve been trying for two days to get in to see him. There are mooks in black suits and Ray-Bans lurking around the hospital. I can’t believe they haven’t taken him out of Boston yet.”
