Wayfinder

Fifteen

A flush of excitement pushed Lara through the door. It had only been days since she’d seen Dafydd, but they had been exhaustive days. Whatever lay ahead, it would be easier with him at her side.

If he had survived the Drowned Lands. Nervousness squelched her excitement, and as if in response, the firefly light and its accompanying single-note song abandoned her. For a moment she was blind, but phosphorescent light rose, replacing not only her candle spark but the black glow of the city. Aerin breathed a sound of astonishment, surprising Lara into soft laughter.

“I thought the lights in the citadel could be phosphorous. But they’re just magic?” Just, she teased herself, when a month ago she hadn’t believed in magic at all. But her world had grown beyond that, and now like so much else she encountered, the gifts of magic were as easy to accept as the air she breathed.

Given their sea-floor location, she pulled a face at herself and the very air around them as Aerin touched the green-glowing walls. “The light is a small magic from Rhiannon’s mother.”

“Caillech,” Lara remembered, garnering a startled look from the Seelie woman with her. “Llyr told me. I don’t understand your pantheon very well. Mine’s—” She broke off, thinking of angels and archangels, demons and devils, saints and even the most famous sinners, and cleared her throat. “Not simpler. Different,” she decided. “Mine’s different.”

“The old gods existed in the sea and the sky and the wind, immortal and untouchable as the sun.” Aerin dropped her fingers from the wall and tested the sloping floor in front of them, then began picking her way down as she spoke. “When Llyr and Caillech came together to make Rhiannon, daughter of the sky and sea, she could live in neither and so made the land her own. All her family gave gifts so she might make a people of her own body and not be alone. We came from her, and in giving us life she lost a spark of her eternal being, so that, like us, she could die. How are your gods different?”

“I only have one.” The steps were long and shallow, taking a stride and a half to cover two. Missteps made Lara’s shoulder ache, and she slowed, creeping down them as she struggled to find the vital differences between her faith and Aerin’s. Finally she shook her head, smiling crookedly at her half-shadowed feet. “Maybe they’re not so different after all, except in number. My God made the sun and the earth and the sea, too, and made Man in His own image.”

“Not so different,” Aerin agreed softly. “Halt, Truthseeker. Something comes this way.”

A wind blew over them as she spoke, air so cold it turned to crystals on Lara’s skin. Fog came with the cold, and brought with it a world of images. A world opened up in front of her, lush and green, a forgotten paradise in which slender long-limbed elfin youths ran and laughed as they played. Dafydd was among them, bright with life in a way she’d never seen him before. Vitality poured from him as though he had to run it off or risk being burned away. His golden hair was wild, the warm tones of his skin drinking down sunlight as he played in it. That was anathema to how Lara had seen the Seelie: they were a moonlight people, pale and delicate, uncomfortable in the light. Their Unseelie counterparts, driven beneath the earth or not, had the richer colors of people meant for the sun. The idea came to her once again that they were two halves of a whole, but it faded as the images in front of her unfolded further.

A girl as beautiful—more beautiful—than Dafydd struck out after him. Her hair bounced in a white braid falling past her hips, mark enough to say it was Aerin. She and Dafydd raced through thigh-high grass, laughter shouted with the exuberance of youth. Aerin was the taller and the faster: Lara saw the inevitable long before Dafydd gave in to it, and counted down the seconds until the young Seelie woman tackled Dafydd into the earth.

The rest, Lara would have preferred not to watch, though every time she looked away their entwined bodies came to focus in front of her again. Sunset came and they walked naked back through the meadows, fairy-tale creatures brought to life.

Years shifted, not through any obvious change of season but by a tightening of the cold fog binding Lara. Aerin and Dafydd, overlooked by a broad-shouldered, black-haired youth, bent their heads over a game very like chess. The third youth—Merrick ap Annwn—reached between them with an impatient gesture, finishing the game with two or three quick moves. Aerin’s features darkened, but Dafydd, tolerant, reached up to grab his adopted brother and hauled him into an affectionate wrestling match. Lara saw what she believed Aerin did: how hard Merrick tried to defeat his slightly taller brother, and his bitterness when Dafydd, victorious, went away with Aerin on his arm.

And more years: Aerin grew into her beauty, becoming austere with it. Dafydd lost much of his playfulness, though compared to the sword-bearing woman always at his side, he still seemed open-hearted and ready to laugh. Their opposites suited them everywhere from political arenas to the bedchamber, and through time marked in the citadel architecture and growth of trees rather than the mere counting of years.

Oisín, glimpsed now and then, went from a young man to an old one, and then to the ancient blind sage she had met, and he, Lara recalled, had claimed to have been old for eight hundred years, but young a very long time before that. Like Oisín, the Seelie lost vitality as they aged, though it showed in different ways. Aerin’s beauty became ever more remote; Dafydd’s warm golden skin became moon-touched as the endless scenes turned more and more to night instead of day. But through it all, Aerin walked with Dafydd, even up to the last minutes when he nocked and pulled the arrow meant to take Merrick ap Annwn’s life. Even when, disgraced, he worked the worldwalking spell, and left the Seelie court behind.

Chilly fog released her with a shock. Lara’s breath steamed on the air, but warmed immediately. Aerin turned to her, green gaze discomfited, and Lara shrugged despite the pain.

“Llyr said this path would lead safely to the healing chambers. He also said it would show me things I probably wouldn’t want to see. I wish you hadn’t gone through the wrong door, Aerin. I’m tired of battles I didn’t really have to fight, and I don’t know what more we’ve got to face.”

“Perhaps you would find consolation in knowing that I, too, have seen things I would have prefered not to.” Aerin turned away, fog thinning with her motion. “But this is the end of our journey, Lara Jansen. Look.”

A small chamber lay before them, littered with exquisitely carved tombs. Almost a dozen bodies lay atop them like stone effigies, resting in silent repose for eternity.

Closest to the entrance, closest to where they stood, Dafydd ap Caerwyn lay like the others, waiting patiently for a breaking of the world.

Aerin breathed, “Dafydd,” but remained still, as if ice still held her. Lara jolted forward, relief hammering in her chest so hard it dwarfed the pain of her injury. There was nothing visibly wrong with him, but then, there hadn’t been when Ioan had taken him from her, either. He had only—only!—burned up the power that sustained him in Lara’s world, leaving him a paper shell. Fragile, yes, but not physically damaged.

Some of the frailty had gone from him. His skin looked healthier, no longer dried and ready to crack. There was luster to his hair instead of the golden strands being strawlike and dull. But beyond that, he might have been dead, with no sign of breath in his body, no flicker of movement behind his eyelids. Nor did his Unseelie garb lend him any hint of life: black and silver were too harsh for his coloring, even when the chamber’s soft green light was accounted for.

“How do we wake him up? Them up?” There were others in the room, after all, though she’d barely looked beyond Dafydd. One of the others had to be Hafgan, the Unseelie king, and by all rights he was the more important of the two. Annwn’s fate rested with him; Dafydd’s survival bore no such burden.

No, Lara thought. Only her own fate lay with the elfin prince. Much less important, and yet.

Aerin made a small, nonplussed sound. “I would not know, Truthseeker. The invocations to awaken someone from a healer’s sleep are known only to the healers. No one else can work them.”

Lara barked a tiny laugh. “We don’t have invocations like that at all, unless you want to count people in movies yelling, ‘Nooo!’ and ‘Live, damn you! Live!’ ”

“Does it work?”

“Only in stories that end happily ever after.” Tightness caught her throat. “And I don’t know if this one ends that way. Besides, in the movies those scenes usually follow something violent or tragic. Nobody just comes across a body and starts shouting for it to live.” She fell silent, realization creeping up before she whispered, “I’m wrong. We do have a magic spell to awaken the dead who’ve been resting peacefully. Except it only works in fairy tales.”

“And what, Lara Jansen, do you imagine this to be?”

“You people keep saying that.” Lara pressed her eyes shut, trying to reduce pique. “Which doesn’t even make sense, since you don’t call yourselves fairies.”

“No, but your folk do. It may have been long since your world and ours collided, but stories linger on. What is this spell?”

“Love. The greatest power known to man. True love’s kiss,” she clarified, and backed away from Dafydd to gesture Aerin at him.

The Seelie woman stared at her without comprehension. Lara set her teeth together and repeated the motion, sharp and small. “I saw you two when we crossed into the chamber. You’ve been together for hundreds of years.” Mistruth jangled and she said, “Thousands,” through her teeth, settling the sour music in her mind.

“And what,” Aerin asked after a bitter silence, “do you think I saw, Truthseeker?”

Confoundment rose in Lara before understanding came. “… me?”

“And Dafydd, with all the vitality and joy in life I remember in him restored. Perhaps I’m wrong, but my ego will be far more salved by coming second than by acting first and being found wanting.” Aerin turned away, slender body held rigid enough that her armor, so well-fitted, suddenly looked uncomfortable.

An awkward sting of empathy pricked at Lara. She wanted to be proven wrong no more than Aerin did, but if she was, it was only weeks, not aeons, lost to her. It seemed a fair trade, somehow, for the chance of embarrassment. Graceless, she lurched forward to press her lips against Dafydd’s before her own ego reasserted itself.

After a lifetime of immersion in it, she more than half expected truth’s song to rise up in a crescendo: a dramatic, moving sound track to accompany the scene. Instead its silence coiled around her, carrying darkness instead of the light she had recently become accustomed to. There was nothing, nothing, on the far side of sleep’s deadly veil. Not for him, at least. There were no dreams, no hopes of new life or old friends revisited, only an emptiness that went on forever. And for all its stillness, for all that the music had died, it was true. Annihilation lay beyond death for the elfin peoples, an utter ceasement of being.

Lara flinched back, breaking the kiss to gaze at Dafydd with bewildered regret. Regret for herself: neither Aerin nor Ioan had shown concern over the potential ends of their immortal lives, nor did she think Dafydd would. They had forever, or near enough to it, in the days they walked the earth. It was only Lara and her kind who left mortal bodies behind after a few short decades, and she had always found reassurance in the thought of seeing missing friends again. But her brief span of years—even if they could be elongated by staying in the Barrow-lands, as Oisín had done—would be all she ever had with Dafydd. There would be no eternal reunion in a spiritual homeland.

“So you better wake up,” she heard herself whispering. “Because if this is a limited-time offer, I don’t want to lose out on it. Live,” she added, now smiling. “Live, damn you. Live.”

Dafydd ap Caerwyn drew breath, and with that first breath, laughed.

Aerin gasped, a short sharp sound mixed with relief and sorrow, but only Lara heard it. Dafydd was still chortling, gaze coming into focus as he smiled at Lara. “You’ve been watching too many movies. ‘Live, damn you, live’? Was I—” His attention went beyond Lara, not so far as to Aerin, but simply up to the phosphorescent glow of the curved ceiling. “Lara, there are things I would like to say to you, but I suddenly think now is not the time. Sunrise,” he added in a measured voice, “seems to have taken on an unlikely tint.”

Lara lowered her head over his chest, biting back a tiny sob. “There are things I might like to hear. This has been …” She inhaled deeply and shook herself. There would be opportunities for talking later, when Aerin wasn’t in such close earshot, and until then there were innumerable things Dafydd needed to hear. She told herself that fiercely, then steadied her voice.

“You’re back in the Barrow-lands. In the Drowned Lands. You nearly died fighting the nightwings, Dafydd. Ioan opened the worldwalking spell and brought you back here to heal. That was …” Time’s broken passage left her at a loss for words, but she tried again after a few seconds: “Two mornings or six months ago, depending. Two mornings, for me.”

Dafydd went motionless, eyes still fixed on the ceiling. When he spoke, it was with careful neutrality. “And six months for the Barrow-lands? Does my home still exist in any meaningful manner, then, or have Emyr and Hafgan—Ioan—destroyed it in battle?”

“We have about a day to get back to Emyr before he obliterates the Unseelie.” Lara reconsidered her phrasing too late: Dafydd lurched to sitting, and finally saw Aerin standing in the chamber’s entrance. Delight swept his features and he surged off the bier to pull her into a hug. The words he spoke into her armored shoulder were unclear, but their sentiment was not: his gratitude for her presence knew no bounds.

Lara, lips pursed, glanced away, and was overly pleased when Aerin, wryly, said, “Not that I’ve lost faith, Dafydd, but I’m here at Emyr’s behest. And were it not for your truthseeker, he would ride on the Unseelie city tonight; my life is in her hands.”

“And your hair?” Dafydd touched Aerin’s burned locks. “What happened?”

“We fought a chimera,” Lara said into Aerin’s uncomfortable silence. “The only way I could think to defeat it was with a hymnal. It was hard on Aerin.”

Astonished gratitude lit the Seelie woman’s eyes as Dafydd spun to face Lara again. “A chimera? Lara, you must tell me everything. The nightwing battle, what happened? I remember—” Chagrin slipped into his words, slowing him, and he stood arms akimbo. “I seem to remember you throwing a crowbar at me.”

“A bar of crows?” Aerin’s eyebrows shot up, garnering a laugh from the two familiar with the mortal realm.

“A length of iron with one clawed end.” Dafydd made claws with two fingers. “Hence its name, I presume. You might have killed me, Lara,” he said with a bit more seriousness.

“You were already killing yourself. I was just trying to stop you from working any more magic. And it worked. Ioan came through a world-door and killed the nightwing. One two, one two, and through and through,” Lara said more softly, recalling the ease and speed Ioan had moved with. “He brought you back to Annwn, then to the Drowned Lands and their healing waters, because you weren’t recovering on your own.”

“You said that. And you came here how? Not through Ioan’s spell, if time is yesterday and half a year since.” Dafydd strode the chamber as he spoke, leaving Lara and Aerin to watch in bemusement. He paused at each tomb, examining the sleeper atop it, then moved on until Lara’s answer brought him to a full stop:

“I followed Merrick, Dafydd. He’s alive.”