by C. E. Murphy
Aerin slid off her horse and stripped down, collecting new clothing as she left the old on the floor. Her bared skin was pinker than Lara thought it should be, aftereffect of the infestation Lara had sung out of her.
Dafydd, in indiscreet agreement, said, “I haven’t seen her that color since the day my mother drowned. We don’t often stay in the sun long enough to burn. Our small healing magics make it take a long time, even as pale as we are.”
“That was more than I needed to know” was a common phrase Lara got more use from than many, but using it made Dafydd laugh anyway.
“I’m sure it was. My apologies. Here.” He offered her a hand down, and together, trailed by Ioan, they sorted through trousers and tops. Lara found a padded shirt to replace the one she wore, glad to be rid of the bloodstains, but shook her head as Dafydd began offering her pieces of midnight armor.
“I’m too short.”
“And we’re too narrow.” Aerin shrugged on a chestplate irritably, demonstrating with a flick of her fingers how the shoulders sat too widely. “But ill-fitted or not, it’s better than going unarmored. Oh, phaugh, Ioan, that it fits you is not a favor.”
Ioan did a poor job of hiding a smile as he drew on armor that fit him well. “Will it make amends if I ride in front?”
Aerin’s avid agreement was almost lost beneath Lara’s stern, “That doesn’t mean you get to shoot him in the back, Aerin.”
The Seelie woman spread her hands. “I’ve nothing to shoot him with. And why would I, when he’ll be riding into the heart of battle with the enemy? Where he leads will be danger enough to a traitor.”
“A detail that might be more comforting were we all not in Unseelie garb and wearing their armor,” Dafydd pointed out. Pleasure leached out of Aerin and she stomped away, searching through the remaining weapons for one that suited her.
“You could go without helmets.” Lara waved off Dafydd’s offer of a sword, gesturing toward the staff. “This is awkward enough, and I can’t use a sword. Without helmets your coloring would give you away as Seelie.”
“Except Ioan.”
“Ioan,” Lara muttered, “has made his own bed.” Sour music ran through the phrase and she scowled, having anticipated it. Ioan, after all, was accustomed to servants and had probably never made a bed at all, but she was growing used to using the vernacular. It grated that her own expectations now got in the way of her doing so.
“I suppose he has. Lara …” Dafydd had said her name that way repeatedly now, as if it was only the beginning of what he wanted to say. They both glanced around the armory, watching Aerin curse and discard weapons as Ioan finished cinching himself into armor that fit beautifully indeed. It was as close to privacy as they’d had since Dafydd’s awakening, and he let go a quiet rush of laughter before drawing Lara into his arms. Not comfortably: he wore an armored breastplate and thigh-coverings, but his hands were un-gauntleted as he brushed fingertips over Lara’s cheek and touched his mouth to her forehead.
“You are mad,” he said quite solemnly. “Facing Merrick. Crossing back to the Barrow-lands without me. Challenging my father, and risking the Drowned Lands. Lara, forgive me if you think I lie, but I cannot imagine that I am worthy of such hazards. I owe you everything.”
Lara smiled, relaxing into his touch. Armor made it less intimate than clinging to him as they rode, but that had been practicality, not sensuality. This was deliberate, and all the more comforting for it. “You’re right.”
He tensed, surprised, and she looked up with her smile blossoming into a grin. “I think I must be mad,” she agreed. “There’s no other explanation for following a strange man—even a handsome one, even the only one who’s ever recognized my talent without being bothered by it—back and forth across two worlds. No other reason that a mouse of a woman would throw caution away and chase a fairy-tale dream presented to her on a rainy winter afternoon. Passion is a kind of madness,” she said much more softly. “I’ve never met anyone else I really imagined building a life with, Dafydd. What else could I do, but come for you?”
His tension faded away, replaced by a hopeful smile of his own. “You imagine a life with me? Isn’t that a little dramatic, Truthseeker? You’ve known me—”
“A month,” Lara supplied. “Or two years, depending on which way you count it. But for me, a month.”
“A month,” he echoed. “So little time. Where’s the thoughtful regard, the considerations of positives and negatives?”
“Almost the first thing I thought when I met you was that I could make a life with you,” Lara replied. “And it was true, Dafydd. It was true. If you wanted it, it could be true.”
He pulled her close again, both warm and awkward, and long moments passed before he murmured a response into her hair. “There tends to be a price exacted when mortals mingle with immortals, Lara. The fairy tales are full of warnings. And you’ve met Oisín yourself.”
“There are prices for not mingling, too. Isn’t it just a matter of which ones you’re willing to pay?” Lara’s heart lurched and she tried stepping back, but Dafydd held her. Not too tightly: she could escape if she wanted, but it was clear he hoped she wouldn’t. “Unless you’re not willing to pay them,” she began in a whisper.
Dafydd laughed, a rough quiet sound. “I beg you, think more highly of me than that. I sought a truthseeker, Lara, never knowing I would find a woman of extraordinary strength and beauty. I would have died for you, fighting the nightwings, and counted it well worth the cost. Don’t think so badly of me as to imagine I wouldn’t far rather live for you. With you,” he amended. “I have no idea what lies beyond these halls. I don’t know if we’ll succeed or fail or even survive. I do know I would rather face whatever there is with you at my side than with any other.”
Lara glanced sideways, catching Aerin watching them surreptitiously. A blush built in Aerin’s cheeks, echoed in Lara’s, and her heart trebled in speed as she whispered, “Any other?”
Dafydd looked toward the Seelie woman, too, then back at Lara with solemnity in his eyes. “Aerin is my oldest friend and most trusted adviser, and we’ve been lovers on and off since I can remember. But she is a warrior, Lara, and I find that perhaps that’s not what I want. Perhaps not what I need. She will never be less than part of my life, but nor will she ever be all of it.” He traced her jaw again with a fingertip-light touch. “Is that difference enough?”
“It’s very convincing,” Lara admitted. “Especially to someone who can hear the truth in every word you say.”
Understanding flooded her as she spoke. It had never been like her to fall hard or fast for a man; that was her friend Kelly’s purview, and Lara had always gotten sufficient amusement and enjoyment out of Kelly’s travails. But neither had she ever met a man who was as relentlessly honest with her as Dafydd had been. Significant as the one deception he’d laid before her had been, she couldn’t argue that it had been well-intended, nor did she doubt that his regret over the choice was genuine. She had questioned her own depth of feeling, her own willingness to accept Dafydd and dream of a life with him, but it suddenly no longer seemed strange. Almost no one, perhaps no one mortal at all, had the capacity to accept her, to accept the magic that was part of who she was, the way Dafydd ap Caerwyn could.
Lara ducked her head, indulging in laughter, then looked up again. “I thought I might’ve lost my mind a little,” she admitted. “Coming with you, coming after you, the way I did. I don’t think so anymore, Dafydd. I think it’s just that my power is wiser than I am. It knew what it had, when it found you. I’ve trusted my truthseeking my whole life. There’s no reason to stop trusting it now.”
His smile broadened until it looked as though he struggled not to laugh with delight. As if, Lara thought, he was afraid too much emotion would chase her away, despite what she’d just said. She stood on her toes, unencumbered by armor herself, and slid her fingers into his hair to hold him for a kiss. A smiling kiss on both parts, more joyous than arousing, but when it broke warmth stung Lara’s ey
es with pinpricks of happiness. “I guess the thing to do now is go survive whatever is outside the city?”
Dafydd whispered, “An excellent plan, as we can do nothing beyond that until that hurdle is met. Ioan?” He raised his voice, and Ioan came to attention with a clatter of armament, which suggested he’d been deliberately keeping himself busy while they talked. “Ioan, if you would lead us out …?”
Ioan nodded, the four of them gathering at the horses. They were a ragtag bunch, Lara thought: she seemed fragile compared to the half-armored Seelie. Aerin swung onto her horse, all the more remote with obsidian armor contrasting against her pale skin and burned white hair. Even she appeared breakable, though, as Ioan took to his own saddle on the horse beside hers. The aftereffects of the healing still lingered on him, distorting and stretching his presence when Lara looked at him too long, but beneath that he looked competent and calm. “You’ll ride together again?” he asked Dafydd, who nodded as he mounted, then offered Lara a hand up.
“We’ll ride for Emyr first, if the Seelie army awaits us as the truthseeker expects. If not, we’ll decide our route once we’re above-ground. Agreed?” There were nods all around, and Ioan kicked his horse into motion. Dafydd fell in behind him with Lara, and Aerin rode behind them. Offering protection to her vulnerable back, Lara was aware, but had no impulse to argue. The idea that Aerin could catch her if she fell when they leapt the canyon made her stomach flutter, but then they were thundering up the ridge, glamour pulling and stretching her vision, and there was very little time to think.
Ioan’s horse broke free from the cavern maw and soared across the crevasse easily. Ioan bellowed something incomprehensible but sounding full of satisfaction as he landed on the chasm’s far side, and Lara’s fears fell away as their horse gathered itself for the leap.
A golden door ripped open in the air before them, and they crashed through it onto the Boston Common.
Twenty-one
Sunlight, ferocious and bright, was accompanied by shrieks of human astonishment. Summer colors flashed in Lara’s vision as the horse stumbled to a halt, obviously bewildered. Well-kept emerald grass spread out around them, littered with goggle-eyed picnickers sprawling on blankets beneath droopy-branched trees. Low chain links made barriers between greenery and paved pathways, and a familiar cityscape rose beyond the park’s boundaries.
Aerin’s horse leaped through the gap a handful of seconds behind them, making people scramble aside, though the more enterprising among them snatched up cell phones and cameras even as they gawked. Aerin reined up hard, and for the first time Lara heard her words as a distinctly different language, though the sentiment was clear enough: “What the hell?!”
“Glamours!” Lara gave Dafydd’s ribs a desperate hug, hoping he would feel it through the armor. “Dafydd, tell Aerin to work a human glamour, now!”
He barely missed a beat before his dumbfounded voice lifted in command. Liquid language, full of wet sounds, entirely incomprehensible, though Lara still caught their meaning. She had heard the Seelie tongue as English in the Barrow-lands; it made a certain perverse sense that in her own world it would revert to its own sound. That would be a difficulty later, but in the moment Lara reached past Dafydd and caught the horse’s reins, pulling it around to watch Aerin.
The worldwalking door shriveled behind her, shimmering gold effect barely visible in full daylight. Aerin’s countenance shifted, sending sparks of a headache through the back of Lara’s skull, but she ground her teeth and kept her gaze fixed on the Seelie woman, willing herself to see the glamour as it settled into place. The changes were subtle, Aerin’s upswept ears dulling to a more human roundness, her elegant long features broadening until her cheekbones and chin were less dramatically sharp, and her new-leaf green eyes faded to a darker shade. With her shorn white hair, she was still remarkable, but not-quite-inhuman. She gave Lara a panicked look, clearly seeking approval.
Relief knotted Lara’s gut and she nodded once as the horse came around in a full circle. Half the people who’d seen their entrance were on their feet now, cameras and cell phones recording, and more people were running their way, voices lifted in curious excitement. For the first time since they’d recovered Dafydd, Lara wished she was in the saddle, so she could stand in the stirrups. Instead she whispered, “For God’s sake, keep the horse still,” and drew her legs up.
Any untrained mortal horse would, she was sure, react badly to her shifting weight, and to the pressure of her feet against its backside as she slowly came to standing, one hand on Dafydd’s shoulder for balance. The Seelie animal, though, simply settled into his stance, becoming solid and comfortable as she stood. Lara had a moment of shrill amusement as she remembered the enchantment sticking her to the horse, and it was with more confidence than she’d thought she could command that she raised her voice.
“Good people of Boston! You see before you the prowess and dignity of a prince! I would like to invite you to Pennsic, a war of the kingdoms to be held in the great state of Pennsylvania! And with this invitation delivered, we must bid you adieu!” She slid down to sitting and wrapped her arms around Dafydd’s middle, trying to fight down hysterical giggles. “Go! Go go go! Go! Glamour us out of their vision if you can, but for heaven’s sake, ride!”
Astonished cheers erupted behind them as they charged across the Common and into invisibility.
“What,” Dafydd asked, mystified, “is Pennsic?” His glamour was at full strength, ripping at the world, and sending sour music through Lara’s bones, but it did disguise them. Of that, at least, she was confident. She’d felt it come over them, twisting her stomach and making her sick, but the fade-out had probably been as dramatic to viewers as their arrival had been. Lara imagined there were dozens of people searching for mirrors and other effects to explain their theatrical performance. Part of her wanted to search the Internet to see what stories people were already concocting. But once out of sight thanks to the glamour, they had merely ducked into one of a multitude of secluded areas in the fifty-acre park. Summer green meant heavily leafed low-hanging branches, which made excellent screens even without magic’s aid.
Lara slid off the horse all the way to sitting on the ground, knocking the staff loose from its bindings with the impact. She let it lie where it fell, looping her arms around her knees and dropping her head instead of rescuing it. Her heart and breath came hard, like she’d been running, not riding, and she gulped air before responding. “I really don’t know. It’s something where people dress up in armor and participate in a mock war. A cabdriver told me about it a few weeks ago, when I opened a worldwalking window myself. It was the only story I could think of. Could you … let most of the glamour go? Maybe keep enough to make people glance past us, but being inside one …” She shuddered, head still pressed against her knees. “It feels like the world is shredding. It keeps screaming at me. Nails on chalkboards and steam whistles and teakettles and—”
The cacophony faded abruptly, leaving comparatively mild dissonance in its place. Lara sagged and swallowed against bile, finally daring to look up. Dafydd retained his headache-inducing glamour, humanity a facade over his elfin features, but the improvement as a whole was indescribable. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. I should have thought to do it before.” Dafydd dismounted and nodded for Aerin to do so as well. “It was a well-told story, Lara. Four sentences, not one of them a lie, but together creating a context that wasn’t true, either.”
Lara smiled tightly. “I hate it when people do that, but I hate telling lies even more. Aerin, can you understand me?”
The Seelie woman flinched, then nodded as she took to the ground. “Well enough. Your words sound strange to my ears. I cannot understand Dafydd at all, though I can hear that he speaks the same language you do.”
Lara’s shoulders dropped in relief. Aerin’s speech still sounded more liquid than usual, but she was comprehensible now. “You sound strange, too, but a minute ago I couldn’t understand you at all
. Did you have to learn English when you got here, Dafydd?”
His eyebrows rose. “I did. The worldwalking spell doesn’t offer translation services. I thought, though, that your magic did.”
“It does. It just took a minute to start. Maybe it was the shock of transition? Anyway, good job, both of you, on the glamours,” Lara said. “People will probably have photos of you before they set in, but more will be of you looking human. I don’t know what else to do about that.”
Aerin, carefully and in English, said, “ ‘Photos’?”
Lara cast a helpless glance at Dafydd. “Instant artistic renditions. Perfect ones, so looking at them is like being in front of us. I’ll show you later, if there is a later. Dafydd, what happened?”
“I hoped you would tell me. I worked no worldwalking spell.” He repeated himself in the Seelie language, earning an exasperated look from Aerin.
“Of course you didn’t. It was Ioan, eager to separate us.”
“While he rode into the back side of the Seelie army?” Lara asked dubiously. “Dafydd, can you get us back?”
“Yes, but not immediately. The magic …” He sighed and sat down beside Lara, gesturing for Aerin to do the same. “The spell takes some time to prepare, Lara. Hours with very little other distraction.”
“As Ioan had while we rode,” Aerin said.
“Yes,” Lara said, aggravated, “but Emyr’s already upset with him, and he looks like an Unseelie. He’d have to be suicidal to go in there without our support, and I don’t think he’s spent this many centuries playing the role of Hafgan just to get himself killed now. There must be another explanation.” Determination, if not absolute truth, sang through it, and she subsided grumpily.
“I had the spell prepared the first time we traveled to the Barrow-lands,” Dafydd said mildly, as if there’d been no disagreement. “All that was required to trigger it was the will to do so. Any of us coming to your world would have that ready, so in times of great danger we could escape easily.”
