by Natalie Grey
When rocks clicked and clattered away nearby, I turned so fast I nearly tripped.
I should have been ready for Philip or Terric, power ready, attention focused, but all I could hope was that it was Daiman back again.
I hoped my smile didn’t die too obviously when I saw Lawrence.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I didn’t have the give-a-crap to make my voice sound nice.
“I’m coming with you.” He nodded decisively. “Bradach was supposed to protect you and he abandoned you, but I won’t.” His cheeks flamed slightly. “No Monarchist would.”
I nodded. It wasn’t a great recovery, but the sooner I pretended to accept it, the sooner we could move on.
“That’s all well and good, but I have no idea where I’m going,” I explained to him. “Not to mention, almost everyone wants to kill me, and I might very well be on a mission from the Coimeail. It is a terrible idea to travel with me—and if we don’t both die horribly, you might find yourself helping the Separatists.”
He stared at me for a long moment, and I hoped that would be enough to make him turn around and walk away.
But:
“Don’t you want help?” he asked. “Do you really want to do it alone?”
I closed my eyes on the hopelessness of answering those questions.
“I’m coming with you,” he said firmly. He made his way up the path and past me. “Anyway, I know where that ley line node is, so I’ll be useful for that, at least—and I know our cell’s password, so I can get us through Monarchist land. You couldn’t do better for a guide.”
There was something familiar, almost comforting, about his cockiness.
And anyway, some chatter might help keep the thoughts of Daiman at bay. I gave a small smile and followed him along the path.
“Right. Now I just have to figure out the domhan fior. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long walk.”
Chapter 13
In the end, though, it took me almost a week to figure out the trick to the domhan fior—and even when I did, I could only manage to slip into it for a few minutes before my head began to ache fiercely. I had the sense that I might be missing some important trick, but, well….
I wasn’t going to learn it from Daiman.
The whole exercise put me in a foul mood, which Lawrence accepted with the ease of the terminally besotted. Undeterred by my snapping, he brought me water and food, asked about my wellbeing, and, on the third day, led me directly into a city for a hot meal.
“Where are we?” I asked curiously.
“Bucharest.” Lawrence gave a small smile, oddly self-conscious. “I … this is where Harry found me.”
I looked over at him silently as we shouldered our way through the lunch crowds.
No one on the sidewalks was giving us a second glance. Our packs were homemade, and our boots were hand-stitched as well, but you wouldn’t notice that if you didn’t look closely. To these people, we were just two more humans, a bit grimy, possibly teenage runaways.
The sort of people you liked to pretend you hadn’t seen, so you didn’t have to feel guilty about not helping them. That was convenient.
Lawrence looked back at me like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell the story or not, and I shrugged.
“You don’t have to say more if you don’t want to. Of all people, I know how it is not to want to talk about the past.” I gave a rueful chuckle.
His face relaxed, though only a little. “I’m traveling with you. You should know.”
“Is it something that’s going to result in you stabbing me in the back? Or … otherwise getting me hurt or killed?”
He looked shocked. “No! Never.”
“Then it’s none of my business,” I said emphatically.
He looked a little shocked at my vehemence, but I had no desire to explain this particular mess of emotions.
Once, I had collected secrets like other people collected jewels or money—hungry for any advantage I could find. The instinct still called to me. Getting people to talk about their lives was such an efficient way to make them love you: let them talk, let them feel heard … and have a hold over them forever.
Lawrence would already put himself in harm’s way for me without hesitating, I knew that, and this would only put him further under my spell.
I felt dirty even thinking it, and part of me was disappointed when he began to speak.
“I ran away from my last Monarchist cell. My parents had taken me up on a mountainside and left me to die when I was four.”
I white-knuckled the straps of my pack. I hated these stories. I hated the way they whispered about a life I could only half-remember….
And the way they dragged me back toward the woman who had sworn vengeance on all of humanity.
“It wasn’t their fault,” Lawrence said quietly. He darted a glance at me. “Really, it wasn’t. They thought I was a changeling and killing me was the only way to get their child back.”
“You think that excuses it?” My voice was ugly. “You think they really believed that?”
“I have to!” He stopped, and several people in business suits pushed past him with looks of annoyance. “I have to believe they did what they did for love, otherwise … it would break me. To think that there are people out there who would kill a child, to think that the parents I loved would have killed me, knowing it was me, just because I wasn’t the child they wanted…. I can’t deal with that.”
I wanted to snap at him, tell him to look at the truth that was right in front of him, but on the other hand, where had the truth led me?
And maybe he was right, maybe their story was halfway true. Maybe his parents had clung to the hope of the “real,” non-magical Lawrence returning.
“Did you ever go back to see them?” I asked.
“Twice.” He hunched his shoulders. “I didn’t … they didn’t see me, I made sure of that. My older sister married. She had two children.” His mouth twitched in a smile that made me want to cry. “She looked just like our mother. And my father left.”
My lips parted uncertainly.
“I never got to ask, but I always figured it was me,” Lawrence said quietly. “They couldn’t bear to have another child, or they just couldn’t live with what had happened. I don’t know. I think my mother remarried, I saw her on a farm, but maybe she was a servant.”
“Lawrence, I’m … I’m so sorry.” I could see him in my mind’s eye, ever-youthful, watching a sister with the same cheekbones and grey in her blonde hair, watching nieces and nephews he would never know, watching the mother who had left him to die.
“I wanted to be a changeling,” he said. He looked up at me, his brown eyes seeming painfully young and thousands of years old at once. “Changelings don’t die when you leave them, you see. They just go back to the fairies, and the fairies give the true child back. That’s the myth, anyway. They were my parents. I wanted to make them happy. I thought I really was a fae child.”
I was trembling. I didn’t know what to say to this. Hesitantly, I reached out to lay my hand over his, where it clutched the straps of his pack.
“A Hunter found me before the fairies did.” He smiled bitterly. “And then the Monarchists found him. What they did to him—it wasn’t pretty. There are still a lot of cells that think the way you did. And they didn’t like the way I went to check back in on my family. So they threw me out. I found my way to Harry a few years later, but for a while, I lived here.”
Realization dawned on me. I had seen the ease with which he navigated these streets.
“I think I can get us close to the mountain,” he explained. “At least to the border. You were right, it’ll be a long walk. We might as well take any advantage we can, right?”
His smile was too bright. He didn’t want to be thinking about the past any longer.
I went with his cues. “Right.” I nodded. “And a good meal, you said. That’ll make a nice change.”
“Oh, yes.” He flashed me another too-
bright grin and jerked his head. “This way. We’ll have a bowl of goulash—it’s good, I swear—and I’ll see if I can get us a ride.”
He did get us a ride, as it happened. The men he talked to looked a little bemused at the idea of us wanting to get into Russia, but they were businessmen, and not about to turn down a little spare cash on what would normally be the empty leg of their smuggling runs.
Two long days later, with our teeth nearly rattled out of our heads from jolting over back roads, we arrived in the middle of nowhere and watched the truck drive off in a cloud of dust.
“Well,” Lawrence said after a moment. “Here we are.”
“Yep.” I looked around myself. The landscape was green, but surprisingly empty under a huge sky, stretching away flat in all directions. The only exception was the city nearby. I could smell the scent of running water from somewhere; there must be a river.
If there were mountains around, though, I wasn’t seeing them.
“So where to?” I asked him.
“South.” He gave a wry smile. “To the Caucasus.”
I groaned, and he laughed.
“We might be able to hitch another ride,” he suggested.
“We might, but I like my teeth. The ones I have left, anyway.” I started walking. “Let’s get some provisions and try walking a bit more. I, uh … I want to try something.”
Lawrence watched me out of the corner of his eye, radiating a justifiable wariness, as we turned south and began to follow the broad, unpaved road.
I tried to find the domhan fior, but took the better part of four hours for anything to happen at all. I tried, in increasing desperation, picturing everything I could remember about Daiman’s forest world. There had been snowbells, a high note of life, and trees with their slow pulse, moss that rustled as it grew, the sharp pulse-jump-flash of rabbits and the sleek flare of life as squirrels ran overhead. I tried to remember the way the loam smelled, and the dirt felt on my fingers.
Nothing. I looked around myself at the relentlessly solid landscape and hated myself for this whole, humiliating episode.
“Uh … if you don’t mind me asking, what are you trying to do?” Lawrence asked me.
“Find the domhan fior,” I said grumpily. “It’s a … well, the druids think it’s the real world. You know how those tunnels to the hideout went through alternate worlds? It’s like that.”
“Oh.” Lawrence’s eyes were wide.
“You wouldn’t … know how to do that, do you?” I asked suddenly. “Since you all had those.”
Why had I not thought to ask this sooner?
I was getting stupid in my old age.
To my mingled relief and regret, Lawrence shook his head. “Those paths were made before the cell. We just used them. There were runegates there to take us into them. If you want to get in without a gate … I wouldn’t have the first idea how to help. Plus, you’re trying to find a specific one, right?”
The thought that the domhan fior might be just one of a stack of universes, all sitting right on top of one another, was enough to make my head spin. I sank my face into my hands, feeling all the more inadequate for not managing to stumble over a different world by accident … and jerked my head up when Lawrence gave a yell.
Stone—everywhere. It stretched away in a plane, cracks worn smooth with time, boulders and arches flickering against a morning sky that boiled with coming storms, clouds piling high and going slate grey at the bottoms, and a wind that whistled across the landscape.
I saw just a flash of that world before it disappeared, and I staggered.
“What the hell was that?” Lawrence looked at me.
“I … think it was the domhan fior.” I looked around me, closed my eyes, and tried to recapture the world. It was right there. I could almost trip over it—hadn’t that been what I was thinking when it appeared the first time?
The whistle of the wind greeted me and I opened my eyes.
I could remember Daiman’s words: “because it is the true world, it will someday be easier for you to walk in the domhan fior than in the world you first knew. But for now, when you must bend your mind to see it, it will exhaust you.”
He wasn’t wrong. It was draining me to keep this portal open.
I just didn’t want to leave. I took a few steps, marveling at this strange landscape. It wasn’t, as I had first thought, totally barren. Tiny purple flowers were springing up between the cracks in the rock, and I could smell the scent of them on the air.
And….
I turned my head, looking for the distinctive note.
A snowbell, blooming alone in a tiny patch of moss on the stone.
“Daiman?” I whispered. My voice broke on the word.
The wind swirled around me, but there was no answer, and the world flickered away the next moment.
I sat down heavily on the side of the road, and the next moment, I felt strong arms lowering me back to lie in the grass. Lawrence’s face swam above me, so close I could feel the heat of him.
I turned my head away. I was too tempted to take the comfort he was clearly about to offer. I could see the images racing through his mind, and there was a sense of familiarity there. How easy would it be to lose myself in someone else, drown out thought with pleasure?
It wasn’t going to take the hollow feeling in my chest away, though. I closed my eyes, and was greeted at once with the image of the snowbell, practically seared onto the backs of my eyelids. Had I made it, or had Daiman—
No. Daiman was gone.
I pushed myself up. “Let’s keep walking.”
“You should rest,” Lawrence said worriedly.
“I should find Fordwin and figure out what Terric Delaney is up to, is what I should do.” I looked back at him. “You coming?”
We didn’t talk much over the next three days. I transported us into the domhan fior when I could, and we flickered out of it again when my concentration broke. It left me drained, with the one thought in my mind that I wanted to figure out whatever the hell was going on with Terric.
On the one hand, as soon as I had, I was going to be purposeless. That thought was terrifying.
On the other hand, it was literally the only thing I had to distract me from everything else in my life … until we reached the Caucasus.
It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen in my life. I’d thought the same thing about the strange, almost-barren beauty of the domhan fior, but it was even more true of the Caucasus. I found myself looking around in awe as I walked, my jaw hanging open.
Mountains rose sharply on either side of the road and grass and moss nearly coated the tumbled boulders that had accumulated over millennia. We seemed so close to the sky that the clouds could drift down to blanket us in soft mist.
I had never seen anything like it.
I could also tell, from the increasingly sick feeling in my stomach, that we were getting close to ley lines.
So I wasn’t exactly surprised when a man with artfully tousled dark hair strolled out from between two boulders. The cleft in his chin rivaled Lawrence’s, and his eyes were so dark that the pupils might have swallowed them entirely.
It made him look somewhat like a demon.
It helped, I thought, that this was a distinctive face—because I recognized it immediately.
“Hello, Fordwin.”
Chapter 14
Lawrence had a runeblade out within a moment. The blade seemed to hum in his hands, and I had a sudden rush of understanding about the truly ostentatious number of knives he carried.
Lawrence’s specialty, I saw now, was metal.
Interesting. Well, he’d been born in the right century, that was for sure … although he didn’t seem to be capitalizing on guns as much as I’d think he would.
“So the rumors were all true,” Fordwin said.
Once, no doubt, his face had looked painfully young. I could see him as he’d been, a boyish youth with a lopsided grin and that luxurious head of hair.
And then probably throw a party. Something with confetti and lots of cake.
All in all, a charming dude.
But I was curious, “Which rumors, exactly?”
“That you had resurfaced.” He gave me an even more unpleasant look than his usual one. “And that you had a Hunter following you around like a lap dog.”
I could only grin at Lawrence’s look of pure outrage.
“This isn’t a hunter,” I pointed out.
Fordwin gave Lawrence another, slower look. His eyes took in the runeblade, and whatever those runes said, his eyebrows rose several notches. He looked back at me.
“So he’s not. And you…” He shook his head. “Apparently you are back to your old ways, then.”
“Given that you were determined to think the worst of me from the start, I don’t think much of that fake disappointment you’re oozing.” I gave him a look. “Besides which, you’re wrong.”
Fordwin lifted a single brow.
“Look.” I threw the word at him. “We don’t like each other. However, you like Terric—presumably—and I like the world not being destroyed, so maybe we could team up just for a few minutes to make sure he’s not doing something wildly dangerous, hmm?”
The corners of his mouth twitched at the presumably, and a wary look emerged on his face.
He considered my words.
“So how did you get involved?” he asked finally. “And don’t think you can lead me into a confidence. That’s all I’ll say on the matter.”
“No need to be cagey. The Coimeail hired me.”
It only occurred to me as the words left my mouth that they might come as a shock to him. I should probably have held that information so I could deliver it for maximum impact, but it was still pretty fun to see Fordwin jerk back as if I’d hit him.
“The Coimeail,” he said carefully, “hired you.”
