Wayfinder (28 page)

Lara’s heart caught in her chest, then hammered again too hard, making her dizzy. “Wo—”

The old woman’s face brightened and she changed her grip, holding Lara’s hand instead. “Breaker who restores the land, keeps the world gates well in hand.”

“Mrs. Moloney, please don’t do that,” the nurse said wearily. She gently unwrapped the old woman’s fingers from Lara’s, offering an apologetic sigh as she did so. “She was a poet in her youth. I’m afraid she’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s now and imagines her little rhymes to have some sort of deep meaning. She doesn’t mean any harm.”

“No,” Lara whispered. “No, of course she doesn’t. But you might want to listen to her, nurse. There might be something in what she says, even if it sounds like nonsense.”

The nurse gave her a tired smile. “You’re a good soul, miss. Most people find Mrs. Moloney disturbing. Maybe you should think about a career in nursing.” She wheeled the old woman into the elevator, leaving Lara to massage her palm and stare after them.

“Poets and prophets.” Dafydd took her hand, squeezing it gently as he, too, looked after the old woman. “What do you suppose she meant?”

“I don’t think it’d be called prophecy if it wasn’t cryptic,” Lara said with a faint smile. “But that’s three variants on it now. Oisín did tell me to ask any other prophets I met for a reading. Do you believe in fate, Dafydd?”

“More and more every day,” he said in an odd tone. Lara glanced
over to find him watching her intently. A self-deprecating smile played at his lips, but his gaze was serious. Breath rushed out of her and she turned toward him, an arm wrapped around his back and her face hidden in his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she mumbled after a moment. “Thank you for that. My life has been turned upside down. You’ve turned it upside down. But somehow it just takes a look or a smile or a word from you and I find myself believing it’s going to be all right. That all these choices and decisions are the right ones, somehow. And I don’t know what Mrs. Moloney meant, but I think we needed to come here to hear what she had to say. Merrick might have done us more of a favor than he knew.”

“I believe I love you, too,” Dafydd murmured into her hair, and gave her a bright boyish smile as she pulled back, astonished, to gaze up at him. “I’m sorry,” he said without a hint of sincerity. “I could have sworn that was what I just heard you say. Am I wrong?”

“No,” Lara admitted. “No, I think you heard right. I just didn’t know that was what I was saying.”

“A truthseeker uncertain of her words. I have indeed shaken the foundations of the universe.” Dafydd’s smile lit up further as Lara blushed, but he stopped his teasing by kissing her. “Worlds come changed at end of day,” he whispered. “And how they have, Lara. How they have. I had not anticipated this.”

Kelly, brightly, said, “Well, I did. Boy, I leave you alone for two minutes and your whole relationship changes. You can get on with being kissy-faces later. Do I look okay now?”

Lara broke free of Dafydd with a laugh and gave Kelly a once-over before nodding in satisfaction. “You’ll do for someone I haven’t dressed.”

“Lara, if you’d made my scrubs, we’d still be back at my apartment with you working on them. I’m sure they’d be beautiful, but all they needed to be was functional. All right.” Kelly glanced from
Lara to Dafydd, then around like she sought the invisible Aerin before dusting her hands together. “Let’s go save Reg.”

By comparison to Reginald Washington, Ioan looked hale and hearty. The detective’s dark skin was ashy blue, healthy color leeched away. An oxygen mask covered half his face, but his eyes were sunken with ill health, and though at least one of the IVs snaked into his veins was saline, he looked dehydrated. Dehydrated and bloated both, Lara thought; his hands were swollen, and his torso was patchy under the hospital gown, suggesting there was still material packed against puncture wounds. Small tubes drained the wounds, and the private room was filled with machinery beeping and the oxygen machine’s rasp.

Kelly stopped inside the door, hands cupped over her mouth. “Oh my God. Can we even move him?”

Aerin set Ioan down in a chair, glamour disrupting as she did so. She rubbed her shoulders as she came to stand over the dying detective, a frown etched between her eyebrows. “He smells of infection. Will he live if we move him?”

“He’ll die if we don’t,” Lara said to both of them, grateful she would be understood. Truth made her response sharp, and she wished it away, knowing it would do no good. “Aerin, I know you’re not a healer, but is there any way you can use your magic to stabilize him a little? Stone is very stable …”

The Seelie woman pursed her lips, intrigued. “I would never have thought of such a use. But the earth here is very far away, Truthseeker, and iron spikes the space between us. I’m not sure if I can work a holding magic within these walls.”

“Maybe set a spell to trigger when we enter the Barrow-lands, then. Something to link his strength to the land, the way you linked mine to it through the horse.”

“The horses.” Aerin focused on Lara abruptly. “Will we abandon them, then? We cannot bring this
de-tek-tiv
to the green place, nor bring them here.”

Lara dropped her chin to her chest and swore. “We’ll have to come back for them later.”

“Will the time wrench us astray? Will the horses be lost to us, if we travel without them?” Aerin asked Dafydd.

He said “No” absently as he traced a door-sized rectangle in the air. “So long as I open the worldwalking spell on both sides myself, it should be fine. It’s not meant to throw travelers out of time when properly worked.”

“Lara? What’re they talking about?” Kelly pushed away from the door and edged forward to grasp Lara’s hand tightly.

“The balls we’ve dropped,” Lara breathed, and Kelly gave her a sharp twisted smile.

“Look, you’re Metaphor Girl again. How’s that feel? What balls did you drop?”

Lara wrinkled her nose, letting the question of metaphors go in order to answer the more relevant one. “We came here on horseback and left the horses hidden on the Common. We’ll have to come back for them.”

“You’ll have to come back to bring me home anyway,” Kelly announced, then arched an eyebrow at Lara. “What, you thought I was going to stay here while you go traipsing off again? Not a chance. Besides, speaking of dropped balls, I don’t want to be the one left holding the ball when Reg disappears out of the hospital room, so I have to go with you. How fast do we have to move once we’ve got all these beeping things unhooked?”

“Very,” Lara guessed. “In fact, Dafydd, maybe you should go ahead and open the worldwalking door now.”

“I am trying.” Tension distorted Dafydd’s voice. Lara turned in
concern, finding him with his fingers clawed in the air, trembling with the strain of attempting a downward pull. Gold glimmered around his hand, but his entire body trembled, as though someone had struck him like a bell. “I’m trying, Lara, but the Barrow-lands are rejecting me.”

“What does that even
mean?
” Kelly asked the question, but it echoed Lara’s stunned sentiment. She released Kelly’s hand, taking a few quick, useless steps to Dafydd’s side, but he warned her off with a sharp shake of his head.

“I’m not sure what will happen if more power is introduced to the magic,” he said through his teeth. “And mortal magic—”

“—disrupts elfin. It must be Mrs. Moloney, Dafydd. She’s still nearby, and Oisín and I didn’t have to be especially close to Emyr to ruin his scrying spell.” Lara backed away, though she couldn’t retreat far enough to remove herself from Dafydd’s space. “Is that it? Would the land itself reject you if it thought you were too influenced by mortal magic? Emyr said it was fond of Oisín.”

“And if Oisín was here, we might face less difficulty.” Dafydd ground his teeth. “Yes, it might well be unwilling to let the worldwalking door be opened if it feared a mortal influx. The spell is of the land itself, Lara. It has that ability. What concerns me more is I cannot break
free.
”

“I can free you.” Aerin sounded both certain and doubtful. “Reaching the earth here for you is unlike trying to stabilize the
de-tek-tiv
. He needs a light touch, and I am unsure if this world will allow me to connect with it so delicately. You need only be grounded. But it might—”

Dafydd gave a short hard laugh. “It might strip my power from me a second time. Better that than being caught with my hand in the cookie jar.” He fell into English for the last few words, making Lara bite down on an equally sharp laugh and garnering Aerin’s frown. She had understood the rest of what he’d said, though, and crossed to him, hands uplifted to call power.

“Wait.” Lara’s voice broke and she fumbled for the worldwalking staff strapped across her back. Dafydd’s glamour still hid it, making her hands ache when she touched it, but its presence behind her had spared her the headache, and almost even the memory, of carrying a magicked weapon. “What would this do?”

“Oh, just
destroy the hospital
,” Kelly half-shouted. “Are you crazy, Lara? You saw what that thing did up in the Catskills, and you want to unleash it in the middle of Boston?”

“Dafydd might be able to mitigate its effects. Emyr said it didn’t like Seelie royalty, but Dafydd used it safely enough in the Catskills. It was only when I took it that things went wrong.” It was pure guesswork, music lying flat and useless rather than making a promise or a lie of what she hypothesized. Lara shook the staff, frustrated by her own magic’s tendency to cut in and out. A month earlier her inability to determine truth in conjecture would have only been normal; now it seemed a failure, and as if returning to her home world had reined in her talent’s exponential growth. It was a gift born of the human world, but to reach its full potential, it seemed the magic-steeped Barrow-lands were necessary.

But that was perhaps no surprise. Truthseekers had been hunted out of existence, in Dafydd’s world. The land, a living, active thing in
its own right, had waited aeons for a magic like hers to come into it again. It wasn’t impossible that it had poured itself into her power, encouraging it to heights she never would have imagined possible.

“Do not.” Ioan’s exhausted voice stopped Lara. He was sitting up, braced in the chair Aerin had put him in, and his color had improved in the little while since they’d taken him from the secure hospital wing. “The last royalty to use that weapon shattered Annwn with it. I would not see such a fate visited on your land, Truthseeker.”

“It might not—”

“And it might.” Ioan sagged as if the few words had spent all his reserves. “Aerin. Will you lend me your strength? Perhaps two royal scions can do what one cannot.”

That
, unexpectedly after the music’s silence in her own guesses, rang false. Lara shook her head, alarm spiking through her. “It won’t work, not as long as Mrs. Moloney and I are near each other, and I don’t know where the nurse was taking her. Maybe she’s gone, but—I don’t
understand
,” she added more fiercely. “Inherent magics work fine. Dafydd’s lightning wasn’t compromised by being around me. Why doesn’t spellcasting work?”

Dafydd lifted his free hand, the other still caught in the golden tear in space. “I haven’t tried the lightning with more than one mortal talent nearby, Lara. It could fail. Shall I?”

“Don’t you dare.” It was true, though: he’d never called lightning when Oisín and she had been near to one another. Lara knotted her hands around the staff, frustration surging through her. “We’re going to have to try Aerin’s magic to get you free, then. What happens if a grounding spell goes wrong?”

“Earthquakes,” Aerin said serenely. “But this is not a spell, Truthseeker, any more than that which makes you draw breath is a spell. It’s part of me, and can be extended as I extended it to you while you rode.”

“I thought that
was
a spell!”

“Your failure to understand doesn’t change its inherent qualities.” Aerin curled her arms around Dafydd, suddenly seeming more solid than ever before, as if becoming part of the earth in a way Seelie—and even humans—generally were not.

Lara’s power had objected to the worldwalking spell, to the wrongness of tearing through time and space. But of the magics possessed by the Seelie, only the glamours had been disruptive to her magic. Nothing else had a component that lied to the eyes; as Aerin said, the gifts they possessed were no more striking to a people born of magic than the ability to breathe.

And to her astonishment, the truth of that rose up as Aerin gathered Dafydd close. Song washed out from the Seelie woman in long slow notes, the same kind of profound fathomless music Lara had once discovered buried within the earth. Similar, not identical: there were aspects to Aerin’s magic that spoke of a connection to a land very far from Lara’s own. But there was enough in common that when she reached deep, searching for a response from Lara’s world, it was able to answer. Strength welled up, calm, steady, unhurried, and filled Aerin with the earth’s living magic. She caught her breath, clearly sensing the same off notes that differentiated the Barrow-lands from Earth, but she braced herself and the music changed ever so slightly, two disparate magics adapting to each other. “Mortal lands,” Aerin whispered roughly. “Immortal magic is uncomfortable being worked here. Release him, and we’ll disturb you no more.”