by C. E. Murphy
She had time to scream as the horses launched themselves across the terrible divide. Above her scream, the leader of her escort shattered the air with a piercing whistle.
In the instant before they smashed into the vast mountain wall, it ruptured, rock twisting and exploding before them. A gaping mouth opened, a black maw that roared with the sound of tearing stone. Lara’s stomach rebelled, as if it had been wrenched sharply to the left, though her vision insisted she still rode straight ahead.
Hooves clattered against the cave’s broad stony tongue, which angled down at a desperate degree, as if swallowing them. The horses barely slowed, finding their pace again as what had been a diamond of riders around Lara became a long line with her in the middle.
A road stretched before them, a narrow strip of stone leading down. Rock face shot upward on their right and plummeted on their left: one misstep would see her at the bottom of the very chasm they’d just leaped across. Lara dared a brief glance over her shoulder. There was no glimpse of the ledge they’d jumped from or the cavern they’d come through, only their thin road melding seamlessly back into the rock face. To their left, across the broad divide, rose the canyon side they had leaped from.
Lara, grateful that she didn’t have to watch in order to stay safely on her horse, closed her eyes hard, and considered the possibility that the Seelie might be unable to find the Unseelie court if they were unwilling to be found.
She remembered, too, how the avenue leading to the Seelie citadel had also appeared only when they were already on it, apparently at will. They both seemed to be hidden people, Seelie and Unseelie alike, both inclined toward isolationism and the black and white boundaries it drew. She wondered how the two courts had even managed to communicate enough to make a bargain over their firstborn sons. She would have to ask Dafydd.
If she ever got the chance.
A new wave of nausea clenched her belly, fear rather than the twist of magic. Lara swallowed against it and raised her eyes to the path in front of them, shocked to see they’d nearly reached the bottom. Within seconds the leader disappeared, though not through magic this time: the road simply curved sharply at its base, delving deep into the rock.
They burst out its other side into a cavern so immense that Lara reined up her horse in awe, too goggle-eyed to care whether her escort disapproved.
The rock face they’d just ridden down had to be little more than a shell, so vast was its open interior. Walkways, most of them cordoned, ran up and down the walls, interrupted every few yards by balconies carved out of living stone. At the far end, distant enough to seem small, a waterfall crashed through the rock, its thunder a low comforting echo throughout the enormous chamber. Mist cooled the air, and the smaller sound of a river was nearer to where she sat astride, but the floor of the unending cavern was what held Lara’s eyes.
A town of black mother-of-pearl spread out before her, oily rainbows scattered in its curves. At its heart was a palace, the Seelie citadel’s antithesis, low and rambling, where the bone china city ran high and pale. They were both alien, both beautiful, both unwelcoming, both compelling. The leader of her escort barked an order for her to continue, and she edged her mount forward into the gleaming walkways with an eagerness that belied good sense.
Almost no one stood watching as they paced through the streets. A handful of children in bright colors; a handful of adults whose presence bespoke great age, though their faces were as youthful as any others. The rest had gone to war. Lara wondered if any of the children would lose a parent on the green battlefields. There was an emptiness to the city that reminded her of Emyr’s citadel, although she hadn’t seen that stripped of its people. It seemed possible that both courts simply lacked some spark of life that gave their homes heart.
At the palace door—there were no gates, simply a shining courtyard that joined the town to its castle—her escort dismounted. Lara stared at the ground, uncertain. Aerin hadn’t mentioned whether she’d be able to dismount if she wanted to, only that she couldn’t fall off.
Maybe if she was certain not to fall. She grabbed the saddle’s front with both hands, not caring how awkward she looked, and concentrated on swinging a leg over her horse’s broad back, all her weight on one stirrup. The feeling of being pinned in place vanished, and she reached for the ground, dismayed at how far away it was before her toes finally made contact. Pleased with herself, she disentangled from the stirrup and stepped back to discover her eight guards all looking somewhere else, as if they were trying not to laugh.
A thought flew through her mind: this would be her best opportunity to attempt an escape. If, at least, she had a weapon, an idea how to use one, or a plan. She had none of those, and shrugged with resignation as the Unseelie mastered their expressions and fell in around her again, guiding her into, and through, the palace.
Gardens sprang up with the same regularity as they did in the Seelie citadel. These, though, were of metal and stone: trees had marble trunks and golden leaves, and vines of emerald wended their way around them. Sea-clear pebbles littered the garden floors, and when a nightingale sang, Lara was certain it was a mechanical wonder, and not a real bird. Her guard followed the path of a silver-bedded stream, its color that of a northerly ocean, as it fed into a pool set with the same silver shimmer.
A man stood before the pool. He was broader than Seelie men, partly in fact and partly thanks to the doublet he wore: heavier material than any of their costumes, with rounded stuffed seams at the shoulders. Practical, Lara thought; the cavernous city was chilly, cooled by the waterfall and perhaps by being too close to the surface to retain a steady temperature. The handsful of people who’d watched them come through the city had been similarly dressed.
But this man wore black, and it suited him. His hair was inky beneath an ebony and ruby circlet, and his skin golden in comparison to the pale Seelie. He held up a hand, and Lara instinctively obeyed the command, freezing in place.
Irritation swept her before he gave her permission to move. She made fists, surprised at how stiff her fingers were inside their metal casings, and walked forward. “What do you want with me?”
The Unseelie king turned to face her, eyebrows elevated in surprise. He was handsome, Lara realized with her own small shock of surprise. More handsome by far than Emyr, whose coldness left its mark, and better-looking than Dafydd in a classical sense, though she preferred Dafydd’s angular lines. He studied her a moment, then bent to make a cup of his hands and scoop water into them. When he straightened, it was with a worked silver goblet in his hand, which he offer to her. “I am Hafgan ap Annwn—”
Wind instruments shrieked objection, turning Lara’s skin to ice beneath her armor. “You are not.”
The Unseelie king stopped midword, staring at her. Lara thrust out her jaw and glared back, anger flaring high enough that she hardly knew herself as she snapped, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re sure as hell not Hafgan. I’m a truthseeker. There’s really no point in lying to me.”
A long silence met her accusation, ending, finally, in a twitch of the crowned man’s eyebrows. “I had not meant to test you, but it seems I have done so regardless. I have been Hafgan for many centuries, Truthseeker. Long enough that even the oldest among us have forgotten that someone else once bore the name, and that he now lies above the salted earth and below the bitter sea. Drink,” he added more prosaically, “and I will do my best to explain. Drink,” he said again, when she hesitated. “You must be thirsty.”
As he said it, Lara became aware of how dry her throat was, how sticky her tongue was in her mouth. She scowled at the cup, determination very slightly greater than thirst. “Who are you?”
The man sighed. “I am, and have been, for a very long time, the king of the Unseelie people. But once upon a time, and this is the name I think you seek, I was called Ioan ap Caerwyn, and I was the son of Emyr on the Seelie throne.”
Eighteen
Lara’s heartbeat thudded in her ears, drowning out all othe
r sound. Thumped at her skin, for that matter, washing away cold and replacing it with heat, but also bringing a static numbness to every inch of her body, as though she’d received one shock too many and could no longer feel anything at all.
Truth, though, wouldn’t let her go. Its power pecked at the numbness, soundless chimes cracking armor her mind needed, until it shattered and left her able to move, if not to think clearly. She shuffled forward and took the silver cup from the king’s hands, then drained it. The water was cold and bright-tasting, and the cup disappeared as she drank, until the last sip swallowed the last curve of silver and she was left staring at a trace of water on her gauntleted fingers. An insipid comment welled up, the only thing she could find to say: “That was really cool.”
Ioan smiled, a rueful expression that made him look much more human than any of the Seelie court. More human, even, than Dafydd, who’d had a century of pretending to be one. “Merely a trick so old that it no longer holds wonders for our kind.”
Lara, still feeling dull-witted, said, “It’s a good trick,” and pulled her helm off. She put it down by the pool, then sat beside it and stared toward the black pearl palace. Shock was good for one thing, at least: she had no fear left at all, only utter bewilderment. “Who was on the battlefield, then?” she asked eventually. “The blond Unseelie, I mean.”
“Another trick. A glamour to dishearten Emyr, or so I hoped. I haven’t looked like that for a long time.” Ioan sat beside her. Peculiar behavior, Lara thought, for a kidnapper and the leader of an enemy people.
“Start there,” she said after a while. Putting words, thoughts, together was taking a long time, but a sense of the absurd rose at the idea. The people of this world lived forever. A mortal taking a few minutes to scrape intelligent conversation together would hardly be noticed. “Start with being dark-haired and dark-eyed and golden-skinned. Nobody in the Seelie citadel is. Nobody at all.”
“Nor was I when I came here. I was as my seeming was, there on the battlefield, pale-skinned, light-eyed. I chose to become what my friends and family here were.” Ioan gestured to the far-distant cavern ceiling and to the myriad dwellings littered along the towering walls. “We lived under the sky, once, and this land was known by another name.”
“You did? It did?” Lara bit her tongue as Ioan chuckled.
“We did, and it did. It was called Annwn, which meant ‘the land beneath,’ and I think once upon a time your people found your way here through fairy mounds and underground paths.”
Uncomfortable truth left Lara’s skin a mess of goose bumps beneath her armor. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t like fairy tales.”
Ioan gave her a strangely sympathetic glance, far gentler than the one Dafydd had given her when she’d said the same thing to him. The unexpected kindness felt like a punch, and she looked away, searching for something else to say. Static was fading, leaving her thoughts clear, though she still felt as though she’d been sent to an advanced class in a subject she hadn’t studied the basics of. “Annwn’s the name you said was yours. Hafgan ap Annwn. Your last name.”
“My father—Hafgan, not Emyr—would say that he had no last name, and that he simply was of Annwn. That word has become less than it was, though, and if it carries any meaning now, it is perhaps only ‘the people of the earth.’ The Unseelie were once as fair as the Seelie. They—we—lived on and worked the lowlands of the sea, and were colored silver and blue and gray and green, all the shades of water. But we have dwelled so long under the earth that it has stained us, and so Emyr named us Unseelie, the dark ones, and we took the name as our own.”
Lara blurted “That’s not possible” over the hum of truth in his words. “I mean, people don’t—That would take generations of evolution. It doesn’t work that way.”
Amusement creased lines around Ioan’s eyes. He scooped up another goblet full of water, offering it to her with a cocked eyebrow. “And in your world, I think it doesn’t work this way, either.”
Lara stared at him, then, realizing she was still thirsty, accepted the cup and drank it into nothingness. “No,” she said when it was only droplets on her gauntlets. “No, it doesn’t. And I’m having a hard time with that.” She’d questioned her talent more in the past twelve hours than she could remember doing in her life, though each time she’d recognized the basic truth of the situation she faced. Dafydd had disappeared in front of her; the Unseelie had undergone physical change in a way that humans simply would not. Ioan himself had, evidently by choice.
For the first time, she felt a twist of compassion for those who didn’t share her gift. I don’t believe it had never been a phrase that made any sense to her, not when someone was confronted with irrefutable truth. She’d always been impatient with it, unable to understand why someone would deny what was real, even when the reality was terrible. If she could hold on to the fumbling sense of disbelief this world had confounded her with more than once, it might make her relationships at home a little easier.
If she ever got home. Lara pressed cold metaled fingers against her mouth, and felt the weight of Ioan’s hand on her armored shoulder.
“This is Annwn, Truthseeker. These are the Barrow-lands. What governs your world does not hold true here. Best keep that in mind, if you can.”
“You’re not what I expected,” Lara said distantly. Aerin had given her a similar warning, though about the people rather than the place itself. Hearing it echoed in the Unseelie king’s advice made her consider more sharply why she’d agreed to come to the Barrow-lands. Kelly’s teasing had been part of it, and Dafydd’s appeal another part. But she’d had no idea at all what she was agreeing to, and now Dafydd was missing and Lara had been taken from the people who ostensibly had a reason to protect her. She wasn’t afraid, but neither did she imagine there was much she could do to help, anymore.
“I am not, or we are not?”
“Either. Both. You’re not much like Emyr.”
“My father would have reminded you more of Emyr. He was of that generation, though life for our people is so long it scarcely seems it should matter.” Ioan studied the pool waters. “My father might have known the answers I now seek, but the pain of lost Annwn drove him back to the sea long ago, and he left no secrets behind. Without him, I need your help, Truthseeker. It’s why I brought you here.”
“Brought me, is that what you call it? Did it occur to you to ask, rather than kidnap me?”
“No,” Ioan said with shocking honesty. “How might I have asked? In the midst of battle, or by hunting down Emyr’s citadel and knocking politely on the door? Emyr barely tolerates his own kind, much less Unseelie.”
“You’re his son!”
Ioan gestured at himself. “If he saw me like this, he would reject me. He would say I’d turned my back on my people.”
“Which is true,” Lara said, startling herself. Extrapolation lay outside of her talents.
Or it had; Ioan gave her a wry look that suggested she was right. “Why should I not? I was a child when I came here, and what I found, as I grew, were a people who had lost their history, lost their sense of selves. Legend that laid blame for that at Seelie feet.”
“The Seelie think all their problems are your fault, too. That you’re overrunning their land.”
“And perhaps somewhere in the middle lies the truth.”
The words were a challenge. Lara’s spine straightened, though her armor didn’t permit much slumping. “If I help you figure it out, are you going to let me go?”
He, after a moment, bowed his head. “Perhaps.”
Lara laughed, surprised at the truth for all that there was no point in him lying to her. “That’s not very convincing.”
“I know.” He glanced up again, dark-eyed and earnest. Kelly, Lara thought, would find him incredibly attractive, although even Kelly’s libido might stop short of falling for a man who’d kidnapped her. Lara felt her expression shadow at the thought, and watched Ioan’s earnestness fade, as though he recognized he was play
ing his hand too far. “I would like to say I’d release you, but you’d know if I lied. If you can help me find the clear path of our history, the truth is I may need you further.”
“To do what?” Lara lifted a hand. “Wait. First tell me what you think happened in your past, and then tell me why you can’t remember. I thought you were supposed to live forever.”
“Living forever doesn’t mean remembering forever. The past fades as it does for mortal memory as well, but for us, it stretches so far back that our own lives become legend. Only a truthseeker can strip away the fog and tell us what truly happened.”
“Which you think is …?”
“I believe—my people believe—that we were once, if not masters of this land, at least equals in its governing.” Ioan fell silent, leaving an air of expectation that Lara sighed into.
“And? Do you know what that answer sounds like, to me? It sounds like a half-tuned orchestra. The strings are groaning against each other and the wind instruments are creaking like they’re falling trees. Whatever it is you’re not saying makes what you have said sound like a lie. Half-truths aren’t enough.”
Ioan pulled his face long, another expression that seemed more human than the Seelie usually indulged in. “Very well. We also believe it was Emyr, or his court, who called worldbreaking magic and drowned our lands and drove us underground.”
Lara interrupted, “Worldbreaking magic.” Oisín’s prophecy danced through her mind and sent hairs rising over her skin. If the power was something that lay outside her, it suggested there was some hope of returning home, rather than her very travel between worlds presenting a threat. “What kind of magic was that? How do you break a world?”
“With a weapon long since lost to us.” Ioan shrugged, hands spread in loss. “If such a thing existed outside of legend, I think it can no longer be in Annwn. I’ve searched,” he said more softly. “What can break a world can perhaps heal it as well. But without it, all we have are stories that say we’ve been persecuted by the Seelie for longer than memory allows us to recall. Without it, only a truthseeker’s help may permit us to regain our rightful place in this world.”
