Wayfinder

by C. E. Murphy

  “No one is guiding it,” she’d finally realized aloud. “It’s been listening to Emyr and Hafgan for aeons, and now they’re both asleep. The magic isn’t working as well as it should.”

  “I’ve been Annwn’s king for centuries,” Ioan protested. “Shouldn’t it hear me?”

  “Emyr and Hafgan stole the power to make it hear them, and they literally rose from the earth and from Rhiannon’s blood. I don’t think just being her son and wearing a crown will do the job, Ioan.”

  They rode in silence after that, Lara searching out glimmers of true paths to help the horses cross the land, but even so, the journey was exhausting. Aerin, already worn to the bone, looked emaciated by the time she slid from her horse and leaned heavily against its side on the unwelcoming shore.

  The seas were heavy, rolling slate gray and foamy white against shifting sands. The sky spat cold rain as if trying to drive Lara and the others back into the valley. Song turned against itself, disharmony in the clash of thunder and lightning. Lara bent beneath its clamor, trying to find the soothing slow notes that were a land at peace, and finding herself pummeled and headachy instead.

  “Shh, shh. I can’t think, I can’t make sense of anything with all the noise.” The complaint was whispered into uncaring wind, words snatched away. Lara pressed her fingertips against her temples, struggling to concentrate. There was a truth buried deep in the land, the truth of Rhiannon’s deposal and of the slow corruption that had changed Annwn to the Barrow-lands. Rhiannon’s truth, her story, had been drowned, but it could be lifted again and Annwn set right, if Lara could only hear its song through the storm.

  “You’ll need this.” Oisín offered her the staff, warmth from his hands still marking the ivory as she took it. “Not even a truthseeker can raise the lands without Rhiannon’s help.”

  “I can’t.” She had learned so much, come so far, but this truth was a stark and simple one. “I can only just manage to control it when things are stable, and this is chaos. I’ve used the staff here before and nearly destroyed everything. I don’t know how to master it in the middle of a storm.”

  “Dafydd will help you.” Oisín fell back a few steps, gesturing to the blond Seelie prince.

  He looked, Lara thought, very much as he had the day she’d met him. His clothes were different, no more slim-cut suit and long raincoat, but the Unseelie garb he wore added enough breadth to his shoulders to remind her of his more-human form. His hair was dark with rain and plastered around his temples, as it had been that day a few weeks and many months earlier. She could see the upward drift of his ears, pointed elfin tips something he would never allow to be visible in her world, but there was enough humanity in him that she smiled.

  Smiled, then laughed with dismay as Oisín’s words settled in. “You didn’t see what happened last time one of Emyr’s sons held the staff, Oisín. Dafydd can’t do anything to help.”

  “He could not,” the old man agreed serenely, “if he was Emyr’s son.”

  Gongs crashed through the storm’s cacophony, dismissing everything else from Lara’s hearing. Images, the memory of time gone by, rose in her vision and replayed themselves, making clear things that had gone unnoticed before. Days played out with impossible rapidity, but not so fast that Lara couldn’t separate them, couldn’t mark details of what happened, and when.

  Rhiannon rallied after Níamh’s death, after Ioan’s birth. Became a little of what she had been before, a bright and beautiful goddess, in love with her son and doting once more on Oisín, the mortal poet who had been her companion for so long. Delighted to find herself with child again, so soon after birthing Ioan.

  With child, when Lara was certain that she had not gone again to Emyr’s bed. Only her mortal lover had come into Rhiannon’s arms, and in all the world, only three of them knew it.

  Confrontation, so quick it had slipped by unseen in the greater view of history: Emyr, outraged, threatening Rhiannon; threatening the unborn child. Rhiannon, cool-eyed and not so capricious after all, warning that Annwn itself would come unleashed should she die or should the coming infant be harmed. She already lacked the power to stop his thievery, but she knew of it. She knew of it, and had made her single move against him.

  And Oisín, watching, knew that Annwn’s footing changed, but not how or why. He would have stayed anyway, even beyond Rhiannon’s death, because the land was now his home, and like Rhiannon, it was fond of him. But he stayed for the child, as well, even knowing that Rhiannon’s blood would breed true, that there would be no mark of mortality on the bright-haired boy born to a fairy queen and a mortal poet.

  Not until the day Dafydd asked if he might have the staff that so reminded Oisín of his mother. Not until the ivory stave had reacted eagerly, images of destruction sluicing through Oisín. Destruction and then temperance, even against the weapon’s own desires: the very land whispered a promise that it would not be ruined, not if Rhiannon’s younger son wielded the staff against his nominal father. Annwn might be restored, if that battle came to pass.

  But not when Dafydd was still little more than a boy, uncertain of his own elfin powers, much less the mortal blood that connected him to a cycle of life in a way no Seelie could ever quite echo. He was ephemeral, capable of choosing a mortal existence, and in that way, didn’t belong to Annwn at all. And only those who were other, whose magic the staff couldn’t subsume, could master.

  Dafydd was a dying goddess’s last stand against the kings who had taken her power.

  Lara shook herself, throwing visions off to gawk at Dafydd, whose expression mirrored her own. When he finally spoke, it was with a child’s incomprehension, picking one irrelevant detail out of the mass of information he’d come into: “But Emyr’s already dead. Or out for the count, at least.”

  “Not even a goddess can plan for everything.” Oisín gestured to Lara and the staff. “She awaits you, Dafydd. Together you will master the magic and raise the lands, and Annwn will be restored.”

  Dafydd looked from Oisín to Lara and back again, then swore. Clearly refusing to give himself time to think, he stalked forward and caught the staff on either side of Lara’s hands.

  Magic and music erupted around them.

  Lightning spattered, Dafydd’s elemental gift seized by the storm. It arced toward the water and the sky, reached for Oisín and the others, and the staff shrieked anger when Dafydd’s wordless howl called it back and refused its unleashing upon his friends.

  It tried again, throwing forth an impulse to drive ivory into the sand, so it might ground itself and break the world apart. Lara shouted that time, familiar with the desire, and called on a strength she didn’t know she had to keep Dafydd from upending the weapon and doing as it asked. “Stop it, stop it, don’t listen to it!”

  Dafydd bellowed, “I’m not!” but the lie of it was in his voice, and he knew it as well as she did. Lightning flared again, making a cage around them. Triumph surged through the staff and the electrical cage collapsed, dropping close enough to singe Lara’s arms before it dissipated under Dafydd’s frantic control. “It wants, it wants—”

  “It wants to command your magic and destroy the Barrow-lands!” Lara shouted. “Like it did with Ioan’s in Boston! But it’s your magic, Dafydd! Yours, and if you’re part mortal, then it can’t just take over the way it did with Ioan! You have to let it and so help me God, if you let it, I’ll … I’ll …”

  A completely boyish grin broke through his panic, disarming not only Lara’s warning but also the staff’s strength, as though it relied on terror to overwhelm him. “You’ll what, Miss Jansen?” Dafydd asked with cheery confidentiality. “What threat does a tailor make? Seven at one blow? Will you slay me a giant, then?”

  “I’ll kick you in the shins.” Wet hair was in her mouth, across her face, and the storm screamed around them just as the staff roared impotence in their hands, but Lara laughed as Dafydd looked disappointed. “I’m sorry. It’s the best I’ve got. Now, listen—”

  “I am
.” The laughter was gone from his face, wonder replacing it. “Lara, there’s song in the storm. Kettlehead drums and rainsticks and cymbals and—”

  “That’s its power,” she whispered beneath all those instruments and more besides. “You’ll be here forever, naming them. But I was talking to the staff. Listen,” she said to it again. “You recognize Dafydd’s power, don’t you? You can’t make it do what you want, but it connects you to this world in a way I can’t, so if he lets you use it, if you let him and me direct you, then you’ll have your chance. You want to wreak havoc, we can do it. We can uplift the land and send the ocean back. Changes that will break the world. Those are your choices. Take it or leave it.”

  Resentment churned through the weapon, but its acquiescence was never in question. Not to Lara, at least; she had carried it long enough now to understand its rage wanted release in whatever manner it could get it. Dafydd, though, raised a startled gaze to her as the staff quieted, readying itself to be used. “How do we direct it?”

  “Listen to the song.” Lara closed her eyes, reaching for the land’s song, so long drowned by the sea and corrupt kings. It lay below the surface fury, below the thrashing music of the storm, below the stirring earth that responded to the lashing waves. Those were mutable, and had been in so many ways mutated, with Emyr and Hafgan remaking the world in their own image.

  But beneath that lay the music of the sea and of the sky; of Llyr and Caillech, who had come together to make the child who became Annwn’s goddess. That song remembered everything, its notes stretching so far back through time that even now the reverberations were from a tune plucked aeons in the past. That music knew how the land and sea had once been, and how it might yet be again, if the crushing weight of Seelie magic was lifted.

  Lara whispered, “Sing to me. Show me the way,” and light flew apart from every aspect of the universe.

  It was almost like the true path she’d laid down to escape the burning Unseelie city. Almost like the great golden tear through time that had shown them the story of Rhiannon’s fall. Almost, and yet entirely unlike either.

  Ancient land formations rose as crescendos of music, fixed in place by light that pinned them to the sky. Orchestras drove the waters back, chased by pathways of light and held where they belonged by an archaic sense of rightness. This, Llyr’s voice sang to her, this was how the valley once was; this was the land she had walked beneath the waters, gifted with his ability to survive there. This was an image of how it was, a true vision, but not even a truthseeker’s magic could unmake the past.

  Lara hung on to the staff, hands aching with effort as she held in mind the true landscape, long since drowned. Time fought her, demanding its due: it shot piercing notes through the brilliance holding magic in place. Here and there it won, shattering the way it had been into something new and different. No one and nothing could stop time forever; its ravages would have left their mark whether Emyr drowned the lands or not. Lara held against it as best she could, clinging with all her failing strength.

  And then joy ripped from the staff, pure, undiluted madness, held in check by nothing more than Dafydd’s will. The land responded to an influx of familiar power, of Rhiannon’s power guided by Rhiannon’s blood. Where Lara clung to images of what a drowned land had looked like, the world surged up to fill those memories and gaps with earth, and to drive back the seas. Astonishment rippled through Annwn’s song, a sigh of relief that went to the backbone of the world.

  Once begun, it went on forever. Rich soil spewed forth, sucking down the salt-laden sand to disperse it deep in the earth, so greenery could grow at the surface. Mountains tore upward, young forests aging rapidly on their slopes. Clouds boiled across the sky and faded, then came again as the atmosphere grew less humid, then more so, then found a balance it was content with. Nothing remained untouched: Lara felt the Unseelie citadel’s granite cavern collapse into the earth, and knew meadows stretched to cover the land it had once claimed. Devastation wracked its way across the countryside, reshaping, remaking, rebirthing a world murdered thousands of years in the past. Time was given its free hand to shape Annwn, but all at once, changes coming in a rush instead of gradually.

  Lives would be lost to it, Lara thought, and then felt Dafydd’s determination that it would not be so. The earth changed beneath their feet; beneath the feet of thousands across the countryside, but never heaved them upward nor clawed them down: that was the limitation Dafydd put on the staff’s desires. The land was its to change; the people were his to protect.

  The sun was red and raw on the horizon when Annwn’s song finally settled again, content with the new shape it had been given. The wrong horizon: it should have set over the water, and instead rose bloody on fresh mountains. Lara dropped to her knees, releasing the staff and staring without comprehension at the sky. Time had passed, but how much she had no idea. Days, months, even years seemed possible, though a wavering hand passed over her clothes suggested they hadn’t disintegrated so far as months or years might encourage. That was good. There was some hope, then, that she might return home within her friends’ and family’s lifetimes, at least to say good-bye. To make certain, if nothing else, that Kelly and Dickon had returned safely, and to see Boston’s reconstruction in the wake of the staff’s rampage.

  “This is more than I might have dreamed.” Ioan’s whisper wasn’t so much unwelcome as jarring, pulling Lara back into the world when she’d hardly been aware of leaving it. The elfin prince had wandered a few feet away and turned slowly, gazing over land that had risen and renewed itself. “I had thought … the Drowned Lands uplifted, nothing more. I had thought of decades working the soil, returning it to health. I never imagined this kind of gift. Truthseeker, we owe you everything.”

  “You owe Dafydd and Rhiannon just as much. Dafydd, the staff …?” Lara put one hand in the dirt, bracing herself, and heard a quiet upswell of music, contented earth welcoming her. It wouldn’t last: she was mortal, but for these few moments, the land itself felt she belonged. Muscles watery with exhaustion, she put her other hand out for the staff.

  “It’s as tired as we are, I think. That surge of sentience, its desires …” Dafydd shook his head. “It’s quiet now. Almost satisfied. Its work is done.”

  “No. There’s one more thing.”

  “Can’t it wait?” Dafydd asked, voice low with concern as he knelt before her. “Merrick is punished for his misdeeds, two conniving kings are put to rest, and the Barr—Annwn. Annwn is whole once more. You have done everything, and more, that was asked of you. Can it not wait?”

  “No.” For all the uplifting song in Dafydd’s voice, there was even more resolute truth in Lara’s. “I might not ever be connected to my power and this world like this again. It has to be now.”

  “You’re not Seelie,” Dafydd whispered. “Mortals who burn themselves out in youth rarely recover, Lara.”

  Lara took her fingers from the dirt to slide them along his jaw, drawing him close for a kiss. “Some things are worth the risk.”

  She grasped the staff with her free hand, and went searching for the song she knew lay within it.

  Dafydd was right: the staff’s magic was as exhausted as they were, lying quiescent even when she brought her power to bear. There was no struggle, no eager leap for domination, only the faintest spark of awareness that said a goddess still lived within the ivory.

  True song whispered that she would recover, in time. That the staff would eventually become as dangerous and destructive as it had always been, bent on a revenge it might never have.

  Lara, in the depths of that song, whispered, “No.”

  It was nothing, that denial. In the face of everything she’d tried, everything she’d learned, the one small word was impossibly soft and almost meaningless. There was no pain of harsh truth written in it, hurting her very being in the way forcing others to hear true things had done in the past.

  And it was all the more powerful for its gentleness. It lay down a single line of mel
ody, thin and true, which became a thread of light winding its way into the heart of the ivory staff. It picked up notes as it coiled deeper: single instruments taking up the song of Annwn as it had been and as it should be. Sun, earth, sea; together they were the land, and that, too, was Rhiannon’s music, reflected here and there within the staff’s intricate carvings. Lara sought those similar places, binding notes together to bolster their sound. The pathway she created ran a little ahead of her, intensified enough to shake away calcification and find new elements of music to respond to and grow with.

  It went slowly, so slowly. Lara’s weariness was mirrored in the staff’s passiveness, and the terrible amount of time since Rhiannon’s binding handicapped them both even when eagerness might have hastened the journey. But finally the ivory began to shift, carvings growing indistinct, then fading entirely. The staff lost length, turning from a rod to a long shard, then bit by bit shrank to a stained bit of shell stolen from the beach.

  Lara smeared her thumb across still-red blood, wiping most of it away, and in the distance, a woman walked free of the sea.

  Dafydd and Ioan went still as stone. Aerin fell to her knees, and Lara sagged, eyes closed against the astonishing song that accompanied the woman. Viewing Annwn’s history hadn’t warned her of a music so deep and strong that it connected Rhiannon to all the myriad aspects of the world and universe. Lara had barely touched those herself, and already knew she could never stand against them. Looking at Rhiannon was looking into those secret symphonies, and she lacked the strength to even try just then. Someday, perhaps, but not today. A headache tightened a band around her skull, so mundane that Lara laughed wearily and put her hand over her eyes.

  The song lessened abruptly and two fingers touched her under the chin, tilting her head up. Lara frowned upward and met Rhiannon’s equally frowning gaze, then climbed to her feet as the white-haired goddess’s fingers remained beneath her chin. Sympathy tempered Rhiannon’s voice as she said, “Truthseeker and mortal. I can change neither, but let me banish the pain in thanks for your services.” She trailed her finger from Lara’s chin to her forehead, tapping the latter, then turned away, utterly unconcerned as Lara’s headache vanished and she slumped in astonished relief.