by C. E. Murphy
Heartbeat queer with the chime’s power, Lara got to her feet and followed her magic back into the heart of the Seelie court.
The glimpses she’d had going to and from Aerin’s chambers had been accurate: there were open spaces large enough to be called parks within the city’s heart, wilderness of the forest beyond tamed by ivory walls and open arches that, had it been a human park, Lara might have called gates or fences. They were neither: even the contained stretches of forest were too much a part of the city to be bound by such words, as if they had all grown up together, part and parcel of one another. She saw that clearly as the sound of the chimes drew her through the citadel’s halls.
Her sure feet led her to an arched doorway more elegant than any she’d seen so far. The music fell away suddenly, leaving silence broken by voices that seemed sharp and uncomfortable after the strength of chimes: Emyr, making demands. Demanding her presence, in fact, in such short commanding words that good sense deserted her and she stepped into the filigree doorway.
The king’s private chambers were chilly, silver-woven tapestries on the walls doing little to catch heat and keep it from escaping. The windows were rimed, and the floor beneath her feet crackled with hoarfrost. Heatless light rained from the tall ceiling as Lara had seen everywhere in the citadel, but in the heart of Emyr’s domain it caught silver and ice and brought the room to a shining, cool brilliance that only reinforced its chill. Looking around, Lara wondered if Dafydd had any real desire to assume his father’s icy mantle, or if he would as happily let that relentless cold power pass to Ioan. But then, they were Seelie: immortal in almost all ways, and perhaps a king’s heir was that in name only. Neither child might ever rule.
The second son stood a few yards away from his father, his whole body tensed for action: he was already turning toward the door, no doubt to do Emyr’s bidding, when Lara said, drily, “Don’t bother. She’s here.”
Both men flinched, a more gratifying response than Lara had expected. A smile swept Dafydd’s face, then disappeared, leaving a boyish hope in its wake. He didn’t want her to be angry with him, and Lara, searching for the emotion, found that it had largely washed away in the forest. Wry exasperation rose in its place: Kelly would say a man she couldn’t stay angry at was a keeper.
There was no such friendliness in Emyr’s gaze. He turned away from a basin-topped pedestal, mouth tight with displeasure. “How far did you go?”
Lara caught her fingers in the delicate archway to keep herself from backing up. “I went into the forest. I don’t know how far. Ten minutes or so, before—”
“Before?” Emyr glared down at her, such a picture of lordly pique that the impulse to retreat faded. She’d been second or third tailor to men who reminded her of the Seelie king: men whose self-worth was so invested in how they looked that they jumped on imagined slights. Emyr, she had no doubt, had the confidence those men didn’t, but the similarity was enough to let his irritation sluff away without bothering her.
“Before Oisín found me,” she said steadily. “We talked for a little while and then he showed me how to find my way back.”
“Oisín.” Distasteful resignation slithered across Emyr’s features. “That explains much.” He returned his attention to the basin, silver hair falling over his shoulders as he leaned in.
Lara muttered “Oh good,” and felt discordance race over her skin, inborn talent not caring for the sarcasm in her own voice. “What’s explained?”
“The Barrow-lands have only known one kind of mortal magic for a very long time. Yours is new, and disruptive. When it met Oisín’s—think of it as two waves coming together to create a larger one.” Dafydd brought his hands together in demonstration.
Lara looked between father and son, her gaze finally settling on Emyr’s stooped shoulders. “So you can’t do magic? I’m sorry. Is there anything I—”
“You do too much already,” Emyr snapped. “I had thought a simple spell to isolate your power would do, but with mortal magic met, there is a tide that would take a great binding to hold back. To work it would require the willingness of the land, and the land,” he said bitterly, “is very fond of Oisín. I cannot fight it to set you apart and work the scrying magic at the same time.”
“Can’t Dafydd—”
“The scrying spell is one of ice and water,” Dafydd murmured apologetically. “Neither is my element.”
“What is?”
The golden Seelie prince turned his palm upward, fingertips curved in. Electric sparks flew between them, lightning made miniature before it faded away. Lara made fists against sudden embarrassment. “Right. The sword you fought the nightwings with was electricity. I should’ve known.”
Dafydd arched an eyebrow, the expression sympathetic. “Hardly. Truthseeking gives no hint to the elemental strengths and weaknesses of Seelie magics.”
“But the doorway you made to bring us here. And you healed yourself. Those weren’t lightning.”
“The healing is a matter of what we are. We die, Truthseeker, but not easily. Poison magic felled Merrick. And the doorway,” Emyr said sharply, “is a magic of the Barrow-lands itself, as setting you apart would be. Without its agreement, Dafydd would never have opened a passage to your world or back again. It’s a deeper magic than any he has ever worked, and it is an unwelcome one. Once we passed easily between the worlds, but no longer. The iron and steel of your world damages ours, and to open a pathway risks our very being.”
Lara swallowed an oh and wet her lips, hardly daring to look at Dafydd. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Am I—” Nerves closed her throat and she swallowed a second time, trying to clear it. “Am I going to be able to go home?”
“Oisín wouldn’t have sent me for a mortal truthseeker if he believed traveling between your world and the Barrow-lands would endanger us,” Dafydd said with quiet confidence.
Changes that will break the world. The last line of the rough poem whispered in Lara’s mind, freezing her thoughts. Never mind being able to go home; she wasn’t sure she’d dare, with the truthseeker prophecy hanging over her head. The life she’d lived there was hardly worth risking an entire world over.
Regret seized her at the idea, sudden tears blurring her vision. Her life wasn’t worth risking a world for, but the idea of never saying good-bye cut deeply enough to take her breath. Her friends, Kelly and Cynthia especially, would never understand; her mother would never stop grieving.
The need to move, to break away from the promise of a future that threatened to lock her in place, seized Lara in its grip. She jerked forward as though she’d been pushed, crossing the room with rough steps and only stopping when she came to Emyr’s side at the tall basin. She caught its edge, cold rising through her palms to make her wrists ache, and she lowered her head, blinking furiously to force tears away.
They fell regardless, striking the frozen surface of the pool and hissing. Heat spread, thinning ice, and Lara caught a glimpse of her own wide-eyed expression before blinding sunlight shot out of the basin. The reflection was painful, ricocheting migraine auras through her vision, and she jerked a hand upward, trying to cover her eyes.
Instead, Emyr’s hand came down over hers in an icy, unforgiving touch that forbade her to move. She yanked, trying to pull free, and his grip tightened, numbing her fingers until she thought they were frozen against the basin’s edge.
He nodded, one sharp silent motion, when her eyes met his: nodded toward the basin, returning her attention to it. Both furious and frightened, she gave up trying to free her hand and looked back into the brilliant water.
Sunlight still glared around the basin’s sides, but it had faded from the center, leaving a gem-blue sky over fields seething with green and black and white and red. It took long seconds for the writhing images to resolve in Lara’s mind.
Then, as if someone had taken blinders from her eyes, the inexplicable mass became men and women, hundreds of them, even thousands, all clashing together beneath the clear sky. Fewer than hal
f the warriors had the light-colored hair that marked the Seelie. The greater number had darker hair, black and brown and deep copper red: the Unseelie army, Lara guessed, whose coloring made them look like the other half of the too-pale Seelie people to her eyes. They looked complete, even coming together as enemies instead of as a homogeneous whole.
And to play up their differences—it could only be deliberate—the warring factions wore armor of moonlight and of sable, drawn together by nothing but the spatter of red blood as bodies fell. In the abstract, it was beautiful.
In truth, it was terrible. Lara cried out, a sound of protest she couldn’t stop, but her hands refused to obey a command to release the basin’s edge. Across the battlefield, the warriors stopped, looking skyward, as though they’d heard her voice and were searching for its source. Heartened by the idea that she could be heard, Lara drew breath to demand they stop.
Her words were blocked by fingertips over her lips, Dafydd’s eyes regretful as he shook his head. Lara jerked her head away, looking back to the basin, but the moment was lost: on the field, battle heat overtook the brief pause, and soldiers again began to fall beneath swords and arrows.
An arrowhead of midnight-armored warriors appeared, coming out of the massed ranks as though magic had guided them to thrust deep into Seelie territory. It wasn’t impossible that magic had. Seelie warriors fell on the dark-clad soldiers, but their leader caught Lara’s eye, drawing her attention.
The images in the basin shifted, closing in on the arrowhead like a lens pulling in for a close-up. Once; then a second time, narrowing down to a youth in black armor who used his sword as though it were a part of himself. It took a moment for Lara to understand why he’d caught her attention, and then her breath disappeared from her lungs. He was fair-haired, fair-skinned, and leading a host of fighters much darker than he was. She knew who he was, knew it with the ringing clarity of truth that dogged her even when she might have preferred ignorance. Knew it, and knew that Emyr would not forgive her for showing him what they all now saw.
Ioan ap Caerwyn, son of the Seelie king, led the Unseelie army against his own people.
Sixteen
Lara flung herself back, escaping Emyr’s grip. The images in the water ruptured in a burst of ice and fog, Ioan’s face lingering for a few seconds in the shards that fell to the floor. Dafydd stared at them, then jerked his attention to Emyr, and to the failed magic of the scrying pool. Lara, trembling, looked from man to man, and whispered, “What happened?”
“It shouldn’t have happened,” Dafydd said when it became clear Emyr would not speak. “The pool, the magic, they belong to the king, but he didn’t—” He broke off, staring at Lara again, then passed a hand over his eyes as if trying to pull composure together by hiding his face. “He had not yet cast the scrying spell, Lara. He couldn’t, with your presence pulling the warp and weft of the Barrow-lands’ magic.”
“Scrying spell,” Lara breathed. “That’s what that was? It was—It was like somewhere else came to life in the ice.”
“As you say.” Dafydd carefully didn’t look toward his father, but Lara did, and cringed at the coldness of his expression. “No one should have been able to awaken what is Emyr’s to command, Lara, least of all a mortal. And even if someone else had the power to awaken it, you shouldn’t have been able to call forth future visions.”
“Fut—Is that what that was?” Not for the first time, Lara thought it would be easier to take refuge in disbelief, but the strength and tenor of Dafydd’s voice brooked no room for lies.
“It was.” Dafydd crossed to the pool, staring into its waters again, and spoke more to Emyr than Lara, but more to himself than anyone else present, she thought. “Truthseekers could once predict a thing, and make it true through force of will.”
“The pool,” Emyr said icily, “is meant to show things that are, not what may be.”
“Is it so different?” Dafydd kept his gaze on the still waters. Lara retreated from them both, falling into silence in lieu of disappearing from their presence entirely. “Perhaps in a truthseeker’s hands it’s as easily a tool to show what will be. I wonder what it might have shown had Merrick lived.”
“You mean would it show him fighting for our people as Ioan has chosen to fight with the Unseelie?” Sarcasm ran thick through Emyr’s voice. “You would expect him to don our moonlight armor and fight at your side, and be betrayed should he choose otherwise. And yet I am betrayed that Ioan sides with his foster family.” He released the basin and stepped away more slowly than Lara had, expression too remote to be angry. “What have you done?” he said softly, and the question was for neither Lara nor Dafydd. It might have been for Emyr himself: he, after all, had sent his son away as hostage, and in so doing had, it seemed, given Hafgan a coveted second heir.
“You never saw Merrick as your son,” Dafydd whispered unexpectedly, hearing something in Emyr’s question that Lara couldn’t. “You never dreamed that Ioan might accept another as a father. He was a child, Father. He was a boy when you sent him to the Unseelie court. They were the family he knew. Yes, I would have expected Merrick to fight by my side, and so I can believe that Ioan might fight by Hafgan’s. That’s what he’s done. Why he’s done it.” Silence drew out before he murmured “I’m sorry” with such an ache Lara’s heart hurt to hear it.
Lara found her voice in the echoes of Dafydd’s speech, and pushed herself away from the wall, determined to understand more clearly. Emyr focused on her as she moved, and Dafydd made a short, awkward motion, like he wanted to warn her away from coming to his father’s attention. Too late: having captured it, she stood tall and met the monarch’s gaze. “Why wouldn’t you let me go, or let me talk?”
“Because when the pool is awakened only the spellcaster can guide or release the magic, and I had things I needed to see before you let it go.” There was no anger in Emyr’s voice, but his control, his containment, was worse. Dafydd, apparently liking it no more than she did, stepped forward a second time, almost putting himself between Lara and his father. Emyr gave him a withering glance, then looked back at Lara. “Speech travels through the scrying spell, and we looked on a day that has not yet dawned. You couldn’t be allowed to speak and perhaps affect that day through what you do not know of its making.”
“How do you know it was the future?” There was no doubt in either man’s voice, but hope flashed through Lara and died again at Emyr’s cold look.
“It could hardly be the past. I can assure you I have never yet seen my son ride against me in battle. And it could hardly be the present.” He gestured toward a window, where dark-leaved trees whispered against the night. “It was a day yet to come, and I do not thank you for showing me what it holds.”
His bleak gaze turned on Dafydd, pinning him in place. The Seelie prince shifted uncomfortably, casting his gaze downward. It struck Lara that she found it easier to meet Emyr’s eyes than his own son did, and wondered what it said that she could stand under his gimlet glares as calmly as she did.
“It seems you are my only heir,” Emyr said to Dafydd. “As such, you will ride with the army tomorrow.”
Dafydd lowered his head, shock whitening his face, but his whispered “Your will, my lord,” was nearly lost under Lara’s incredulous, “That can’t be a good decision!”
Emyr turned on her, angry enough that spots stood out on his cheeks, but she stepped into his space, frustrated beyond thoughts of caution. “Send your only heir onto the battlefield? Especially when, given that he’s now leading an army that I assume wants to wipe you out, Ioan is the most likely candidate for having murdered Merrick ap Annwn in the first place?”
From their expressions, it was clear neither of the men had considered the possibility, which did nothing to change the ring of truth Lara heard in her own words. “It wasn’t someone here,” she said, exasperated. “Not in the citadel, anyway, if you really did gather them all into the courtroom earlier. And you did,” she added, “at least as far as you know, you did
. I’d have known if you were lying. But come on.”
She looked from king to prince and back again, hands opened in demanding supplication. “Aerin didn’t think a spell could be cast that would sunder someone’s will, but isn’t it starting to add up? You said you might be able to do it, right, Emyr?”
Too late she realized she should have used an honorific. Emyr’s expression, dark to begin with, blackened entirely. Lara ground “Your majesty” through her teeth, and judged she’d done very little to alleviate her error. It didn’t matter that much; the worst he could do was kill her, and it was far more likely he’d send her back home. “You thought you might be able to do it, because you’ve got greater scope to your power than most people do. Ioan is—was—your heir. Wouldn’t he have to have talent on the same level you do?”
Emyr nodded grudgingly. Buoyed, Lara went on. “And he’s been raised in the Unseelie court, which is where most of your court thinks that kind of magic would be condoned.”
“But why?” From another, the question might have been plaintive. From Emyr, it somehow bordered on a threat.
“Power. Sympathy for the people he’s been raised with. Even just trying to save his own hide. I don’t know. He’s your son.”
“No longer. Dafydd—” Emyr swung toward his son, dismissing Lara. Incensed, she stepped closer, almost daring to catch his sleeve. It wasn’t necessary: he went still, then turned his head toward her incrementally, clearly disbelieving her audacity.
“If I’m right, and I don’t know if I am”—Clarity rang in that, too: her talent couldn’t differentiate between reasonable possibilities and the genuine truth—“then Dafydd is the only thing standing between you and the Barrow-lands falling into Unseelie hands. It is not wise to put him on the field, Emyr.”
