Wayfinder (33 page)

“Is that supposed to make it better?” Dickon asked hoarsely.
“That we got away and they didn’t? Jesus
Christ
,” he said with obvious deliberation, and satisfaction lashed across his face when all three elves recoiled. “Does disaster just follow wherever you go?”

Dafydd, as softly as Lara’d spoken, said, “Not until very recently, I’m afraid. Worse, I fear there’s very little we can do to salvage what remains of Boston. Even a whole host of our healers would be no more than a bandage to a gaping wound.”

“What about her?” Dickon pointed an accusing finger at Aerin. “What about her earth thing? Can’t she put it back together again?”

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” Kelly said in a high voice. “Lara, are we really in the Barrow-lands?”

“Your world responds to my magic only sluggishly,” Aerin said to Dickon, more compassion in her voice than Lara had ever heard. “I might convince it to close where it’s been torn asunder, but you riddle your earth with iron. No one among the Seelie could ever heal it the way you ask. No more than magicless mortals could.”

“Then I want to go home so I can help clean up.” Dickon got to his feet, face pale beneath dust-covered ruddy hair. “I can’t just stay here and wonder what’s going on. Send me back.”

“Hang on.” Kelly climbed to her feet as well, a hand on Dickon’s wrist and conflicted hope in her eyes. “We’re in a whole different world, Dickon. Don’t you want to see some of it? It’s not that I don’t care what’s happening in Boston. I do. You must know that. It’s just … 
fairyland.
”

The look Dickon settled on her was one Lara had encountered innumerable times in her childhood: puzzlement so profound it went beyond anger. When people turned it on her, it was usually because she’d pressed an insistence for the truth far past the point of reason. She’d learned, as she’d aged, not to push it, but it made Dickon’s expression no less familiar. Kelly had once again moved so far outside his own boundaries that she’d become foreign to him, as alien in her own way as Dafydd or Aerin was. Lara had always loved her friend
for that adventuresome streak, but Dickon, it seemed, was stymied by it.

“Okay,” Kelly whispered after a long time. “Okay, Dickon. You go back. Good luck. Maybe I’ll … call you when I get home.” She turned to the others, lips compressed and her eyes bright as she asked, still in a whisper, “I mean, if it’s okay that I stay? Because … because, I mean, I sell bras back at home. It’s not like I’m going to be much help to a disaster relief effort, not unless there’s a sudden need for well-fitted thirty-eight double-H’s. So I know a war is going on here, but Lara’s my best friend, and … it’s fairyland. I’m never gonna get another chance. Am I?”

The last question was directed at Dafydd, who hesitated, but then shook his head. “Almost certainly not, I fear. Kelly, you’re as welcome to stay as Dickon is to go, but I might ask of you one thing. Remain here, in the safety of Ioan’s citadel, until we’ve resolved this dispute. There will be plenty to see and time to see it after, but until then, you would be—”

“A liability,” Kelly said clearly enough, though she sniffled as soon as she’d spoken. “No, that’s fair. I mean, no offense, Lara, but having to keep an eye on you in the middle of a war is probably enough work, without adding me to the mix.”

“At least you can ride a horse without being magicked to it.” Lara offered a fragile smile, and Kelly turned it into a shaky laugh of her own.

“Yeah, good point. Maybe I should be the truthseeker for the rest of this game.” Consternation crossed her face. “Nevermind, I remember what that was like. It was horrible. Okay. I’ll stay here awhile,” she promised Dafydd, and he gave her a grateful smile before looking back at Dickon.

“The worldwalking spell will take some time to prepare.”

“No. It won’t.” Another man interrupted, voice preceding him as he strode into the garden. Lara barely had time to recognize Hafgan,
now resplendent in shimmering dark blue silks and black velvets, before he tore open a door between the worlds and unceremoniously dumped both Dickon and Kelly back through it.

“Where … when … did you send them?” Lara gaped at the fading door, certain the only reason she hadn’t also been thrust through it was her distance from the other two mortals. “Why did you do that?”

Hafgan made a dismissive gesture. “Annwn’s problems are not for mortals to interfere with, and from what I now see those problems run deep indeed. They are returned home, within a few minutes or hours of their departure. Nothing has changed for them. What are
they
doing here?” He thrust a finger toward Dafydd and Ioan.

Lara glanced at the brothers, but panic yanked her attention back to Hafgan. “You can’t have sent them home. Not right where they came from. The building is collapsing. They’ll
die.
”

Dafydd put a hand on her shoulder. “The spell isn’t that accurate. We never come and go from exactly the same place. That you hold Boston so close in your heart and mind as home is all that has kept us from arriving halfway across the country, or the world. It’ll be the same for Dickon and Kelly. And at least they’re alive, Lara. They’d have died when the building came down if the spell hadn’t taken them with us.”

Lara whispered “I hope you’re right,” then turned on Hafgan, anger rising. “That was completely unnecessary! Dickon was going home anyway and Kelly hasn’t got any magic to interfere with yours. She just wanted to see your world!”

“A world riddled by chaos and war. It is not the face we put forward to the mortals we lure here, Truthseeker, and we have problems that run deeper than even I knew. These two cannot be here.” Absolute conviction filled Hafgan’s voice, so jarring in the face of truth that Lara shuddered with it.

She wrapped her arms around herself, as if it might prevent her from falling apart. “Why not?”

Hafgan ignored her, stalking instead to Ioan and Dafydd to inspect them as if they were sides of meat that lacked in quality. Even in clear fury, he was graceful, moving like a predator as he circled the princes twice. Only when he stopped before them did Lara recognize how high his shoulders rode, and how his jawline bunched with tension.

Neither Ioan nor Dafydd reacted. Ioan hadn’t moved at all since Aerin’s attack, still staring dully at the ground. He looked exhausted, like Dafydd had after drawing on all his own remaining power after fighting the nightwings. The staff had done that to him: had burned through more of his magic than he had probably imagined possible. Lara folded it closer to her chest, less possessive than determined not to let another elf lay hands on it and wreak further havoc.

A thread of coldness came into Hafgan, as icy as Lara had ever seen in Emyr. “You are meant to be in the Caerwyn citadel. How came you here? And
you—
” he said to Dafydd, but Ioan drew himself up until he was as aloof as Hafgan himself.

“I haven’t been in the shining citadel since I was a child. These past several days I was the guest of mortal healers, whose best efforts were counterintuitive to my wellness.”

Hafgan’s attention lashed back to his adopted son. “Not three days ago I saw you crowned in Caerwyn.”

“Crowned?”
Four voices cracked the word together and rose toward the distant ceiling as an echo.

Hafgan looked from one to another of them, finally settling on Dafydd with a nasty crook to his smile. “Crowned, indeed. The war is over. Emyr ap Caerwyn is dead, and all of Annwn saw him fall at your hand.”

“What?” Dafydd’s faint question was all but lost under Ioan’s urgent, “No. No, he can’t be. Without him we have no
answers
, Father. No way of discovering history’s truth.”

“What does it matter? The Seelie king is dead and his son, my heir, sits on his thr …” Hafgan’s smugness faded to a slow frown. He repeated, “I saw you crowned,” then turned to Lara, angry incomprehension written on his features.

“Tell me what you saw.” Lara heard cool command in her own voice, so remote she barely recognized it, and king or not, Hafgan acquiesced.

More than acquiesced: a twist of his wrist brought living flame up from the dust-covered floor, each lick dancing apart to become an image. Armies clashed together, flame rolling over itself as one side overwhelmed the other or fell back, very near to the edge of the chasm protecting the Unseelie city.

It was eerily silent; this was no scrying spell, no method of looking across or back or forward in time, but only the reconstruction of
memory in an element that didn’t carry voices. Water carried sound, if poorly; enhanced by magic it made a viable conductor, but flame had only its own snapping, crackling song as it ate away at the fuel provided. Without that fuel, all it provided was imagery, noiseless when it should have been ear-splitting.

The focus came closer, picking out individuals: Hafgan rode with his army, intent on reaching Emyr, whose icy pale countenance was somehow reflected in warm flame. But before Hafgan reached the Seelie king, Dafydd slammed through the Unseelie ranks, riding from behind them, his presence unseen by Hafgan until he was already past. Astounded Unseelie fell back; delighted Seelie made a path, silent faces lifted in cheers.

Dafydd ap Caerwyn rode straight for Emyr, and slammed a sword through the sovereign’s chest when he reached him. Lara, knowing it wasn’t true, knowing it to be impossible, still gasped at the impact, and Aerin let go a child’s cry of horror.

On the battlefield, delight turned to dismay, cheers to howls, as Dafydd caught the falling king and tore the silver circlet from his brow. He jammed it onto his own head, triumphant in the midst of a mob that could no longer be called an army. Even Hafgan drew his horse up, too agape to ride on, and so no one was there to stop Ioan ap Annwn as he followed in Dafydd’s wake, and slew his brother with the same efficient brutality Dafydd had shown Emyr.

This time the yelp of dismay was Lara’s. She jerked forward, reaching for the fiery images against all sense, against everything she knew. Dafydd drew her back, his hands icy on her shoulders as they all gawked, horrified, at unfolding events.

There was no triumph on the flame-made Ioan’s face, no joy as there’d been in Dafydd’s. He slid from his horse, bearing Dafydd’s body to the ground. It was too late by far to show Emyr such gentleness, but Ioan stood when both bodies lay at his feet, and lifted his silent voice to the stunned armies.

“The war is over,” Hafgan echoed, putting words into the simulacrum’s mouth. “Emyr and Dafydd are dead. I am Ioan ap Caerwyn, changed but still the last son of the shining citadel, and I will have no more of this war. We will bear these bodies back to Caerwyn and put them to rest, and there I will take the crown and embrace Seelie and Unseelie alike, so both my adopted people and my blood people might finally know peace. Do not defy me, my Seelie family. There are still far more Unseelie than there are of you, and I will have peace at any cost.”

Flame melted away, leaving Hafgan staring at Lara with angry expectation. “Three days,” he said, his voice his own again. “Three days later, three days ago, Ioan was crowned in Caerwyn, with Emyr and Dafydd buried in the barrows as they ought to have been. These two
cannot be here.
”

“All of that was Merrick.” Even the attempt at further explanation defeated her. Lara took Dafydd’s hand instead, trying to impart comfort. He flinched at her touch, then turned a suddenly haggard gaze on her.

“Is my father dead?”

Lara pressed one hand against her eyes, then shook her head. “I don’t know. If I were Merrick, I’d have murdered Emyr in your guise, then built the illusion of Ioan coming for you, and switched from one role to the other when they came together. But I don’t know. The way flame dances, Dafydd … it disguises any hope I might have of seeing through the illusions. If I’d
been
there, maybe …”

Hafgan waited a heartbeat, then two, before bursting out with, “
Merrick?
My own son sits on the Seelie throne, behind Ioan’s face?”

“What bitter dregs those must be for Merrick,” Dafydd said with a thin smile. “To plot and plan so long and be left wearing another man’s mask when victory is in his hand. The war is not over, Hafgan. I will not allow Merrick to sit on my father’s throne for long, no matter what the cost to myself or the Barrow-lands.”

“You cannot be such a fool,” Ioan protested. “Emyr is dead, our chances of learning the past’s truth have slipped away, and you would still continue with these endless skirmishes, the eternal war? To what end, Dafydd? To what purpose?”

Dafydd whispered, “I might have let it go, if it were you. Changed or not, beholden to the Unseelie or not, beneath it all you are my brother and Rhiannon’s son. Had you come to the throne of—”

“Of Annwn,” Ioan put in strongly, and Dafydd broke off to stare at him a moment before continuing.

“Had you come to Emyr’s throne I might have found my way past the differences between us. But Merrick has tricked and murdered his way there, and I will not let it stand. He was my brother, closer to me than you ever were, and this betrayal runs too deep. My father is
dead.
”