Wayfinder

by C. E. Murphy

  Dafydd looked at the tennies she’d traded her soft Unseelie boots out for, then crooked a wry smile at her. “Far enough that you’ll be glad of those.”

  “Can we get there before Hafgan does?”

  “I may be able to help.” Aerin lifted her head. “The magic the horses use is a gift to them from the Barrow-lands, but it’s not far removed from my earth magics. With time—which we’ll have a-plenty, walking from here to there—I should be able to convince the land that we take seven steps for our every one.”

  “Aerin, that will leave you exhausted. You’ve already used more magics today than anyone normally would in years. Decades,” Dafydd amended.

  Aerin’s expression turned so sour it bordered on funny. The look she gave Dafydd said far more than words could, and he ducked his head in apology. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to state the obvious, but I fear for you. You could find yourself—”

  “I know. What choice do we have?”

  “Find herself what?” Lara straightened, concern washing through her. “Not mortal?”

  “Just useless for a very long time,” Aerin growled. “Useless, most particularly, in battle. My prowess is learned, but the strength that lets me fight inexhaustibly is the land’s. Without it, I’m no more than any other Seelie warrior, and if things go badly, we will need far more than ordinary fighters.”

  “I do not believe,” Lara said with unusual clarity, “that anything could make you less than extraordinary on the battlefield. I’ve watched a lot of you fight now, Aerin. Ioan’s better than you are. I haven’t seen anyone else who even holds a candle to you.”

  Surprise, then chagrined pleasure slid over Aerin’s face and she looked away. Lara wrinkled her eyebrows in confusion at Dafydd, and was only further confused at his quick smile. He leaned forward to kiss her and murmured, “You couldn’t have said anything better,” against her mouth, then lifted his voice to say, “Then we’ll rely on you, Aerin. Thank you.”

  Aerin grunted, and in a little while they gathered themselves, preparing to begin their journey. Lara took up the staff again, about to slid it crosswise over her back when a thought struck her. It responded to emotion and need, and emitted emotions and desires of its own. She said, “Thank you,” aloud, if quietly, and after a few long seconds felt a sullen sort of pleasure from the weapon. Grinning, she tucked it away and fell in with the others as they struck out toward the distant Seelie citadel.

  The Unseelie joined them, not so much willingly as with the air of people who had no other option. Ioan walked among them as they set out, offering what reassurances he could. They were scant, but Lara admired that he tried. Hafgan’s return had reminded them, sharply, that the man they’d called king for centuries was no more than heir to the throne. There seemed little resentment among them for the deception: as Ioan had suggested, they appeared more content with continuity than strict truth. Their distress now was for the betrayal laid upon them by the king who had returned; for the man who commanded fire, and who had burned their home to molten rock. A few came forward to walk with Lara, to verify she was a truthseeker, and that it was through her magic and Ioan’s that anyone had survived immolation in the fire. When those few fell back, satisfied, Lara thought Ioan had earned himself a small personal guard, men and women whose loyalty was to Ioan himself, not to the Unseelie crown. It could mean nothing or everything in the reshaping of Annwn that they intended, but either way, she was glad of it.

  It had been midday when they abandoned the citadel, but night came on more quickly than Lara expected. There was no chill in the air to suggest short winter days, and not until the moon’s light hopped unexpectedly high in the sky did she jog forward to catch up with Aerin. “Is this you?”

  “I’m already doing all I can. I had hoped I could move us as quickly as the horses would go, but two legs aren’t as quick as four, even magicked. The best I can manage is three steps for every one.” Aerin looked tired and alien, the long contours of her skull more easily visible with sweat matting short hair against it. “The horses would have us there by morning. The best I can do is three days, perhaps.”

  “The best you can do,” Lara echoed in astonishment. “I’ve read people can walk twenty or thirty miles in a day. You’re moving us sixty or ninety? How far do we have to go, Aerin? How long do you have to keep this up?”

  “Unassisted, it would take a sennight or more to walk this distance.” Aerin cast a glance back at the Unseelie, among whom were children. “Probably more.”

  The corner of Lara’s mouth turned up. “Thanks for looking at them, and not at me.”

  Aerin quirked an acknowledging eyebrow, then exhaled noisily. “This requires concentration, Truthseeker.”

  “Right. Just don’t … burn yourself out, if that’s what can happen. Be careful, Aerin.”

  “The time for care is long past.” Aerin quickened her pace by a step or two and Lara took the hint, falling back again. Night grew deeper in quick lurches, until she was certain midnight had come and gone. Only then did Aerin stop abruptly, and the travelers slept where they fell, only to rise and walk again not long after sunrise.

  Lara awakened to muscles and feet so sore that every step was a challenge. No one else complained, and she wondered if mortal weight connected with the land harder, or if she was simply outrageously unconditioned compared to everyone else. They all shared a certain drudgery of intent, but she caught no one else wincing with each footfall. That evening Dafydd silently stripped her shoes from her feet and massaged the tender flesh.

  The second day was worse, grime and hunger building up. Ioan, Dafydd, and a few of the others broke away to hunt. There were always streams for water, but Lara could hardly feel her body, numbed from repeated impacts against the earth. Even Kelly’s relentless good nature and enjoyment of adventure vacations would be hard-pressed to find much fun in the trek. Lara was torn between worry about when and where she and Dickon had landed back on Earth, and weary envy that they probably had access to showers.

  Aerin stopped them earlier that evening, not long after sunset. She was slender to begin with, as all the Seelie were, but she looked as though she’d been eaten from the inside out, her muscles thin and ropey and her eyes sunken with fatigue. “We should arrive by midday,” she told Dafydd. “If we hunt and eat well tonight, and sleep well, we may be in some condition to face whatever awaits us. Ioan might scry to see what lies ahead.”

  “It could alert Merrick to our presence.” Ioan had recovered from his injuries as they walked, though like everyone else his shoulders slumped with weariness. “We might be better unannounced. The surprise would be as much theirs as ours.”

  “Can you cast a glamour to get us inside unseen?” Lara asked Dafydd. A darker thought spun out of that: if he could get them inside the citadel unseen, there was no reason they couldn’t assassinate Merrick under that same cloak of invisibility. She met Dafydd’s eyes, and saw the same idea flash through his mind before he shook his head.

  “Glamours are much more successful against mortals. The constant use of power gains notice among our own kind. Call it what you will, paranoia or curiosity, but there’s always someone looking for it, and a glamour large enough to hide even a handful of us would be observed long before we found Merrick.”

  “Then isn’t what Aerin’s doing going to draw attention, too? She must be using huge amounts of power.”

  “But the horses use a version of this magic all the time,” Aerin reminded Lara. “It’s a constant draw, so typical as to go unnoticed. Far more likely that the destruction of the Unseelie citadel has been noticed than my call on the earth’s magic.”

  “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 f
orests. 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.

  Of the others, Aerin had no compunctions against doing exactly that. She caught herself on a bench that looked grown, not carved, for all that parts of it appeared to be marble. There were others like it scattered along green pathways and under the twisting trees, some few of them backing up against latticework fences riddled with ivy. Water burbled over a short wall, though once it must have been as tall as the stonework surrounding it: its edges were worn down and smoothed by centuries, perhaps aeons, of water drifting over it. The little waterfall’s music was soothing, as was the breeze that drifted through the gardens, carrying a sweet scent too subtle to be cloying. The entire space had the aura of holy ground, unspoiled by divisiveness or conflict.

  Dafydd crouched by Aerin, brushing a thumb over her temple as she coiled on the bench. “Rest awhile,” he whispered. “You’ve done more than your part. The gardens will revitalize
you.”

  “Wake me when you leave. I would see this through.”

  Dafydd nodded, but Aerin came awake enough to give him a sharp look, and Lara a sharper one. Bemused, Lara promised, “We will,” and only then did Aerin settle again, trusting the truthseeker’s word. She was asleep within a breath or two, and even in that little time looked healthier, as though the garden had revitalized her already.

  “It would have been better to refuse her,” Dafydd said quietly as he came back to Lara and Ioan. “She’s exhausted and probably needs the rest more than we need her blade. Metaphorically,” he added, glancing at his own weaponless hands.

  “Probably, but she’d never forgive you.”

  Dafydd quirked a smile. “I seem to recall someone saying forever is a very long time, to immortals.”

  “And it appears we can hold a grudge that long,” Ioan said drily. “Truthseeker, can you find a way?”

  Lara nodded, glad she hadn’t sat for fear she would never have gotten back up. Even so, her eyes fluttered shut in the garden’s quiet. The music in her mind was soft, unhurried, as if the garden itself affected it, and Lara shook off its effects with an effort. “Do Seelie ever just give up on living and come here to fade away?”

  A startled silence met her and she blinked her eyes open again to find Dafydd examining her with consternation. “Occasionally. How did you know?”

  “It’s just that peaceful here. A little like a hospice, as much as holy ground. It seems like the kind of place people might come to die.” Unexpected truth sang through the last words, finally wakening her thoroughly. “Where would they go?” she asked, but not of the men.

  Of the music, which flared in trumpets, then lay down a path through the garden, zipping forward. Suddenly reinvigorated, she ran after it, chasing it through doorways and down paths that extended through a far greater area than she’d imagined possible. Ioan and Dafydd came after her, catching up as her bright truthseeking path plunged into the earth and Lara stopped, frowning at it.