Wayfinder

Thirty-five

The others awakened more slowly. Dafydd and the other Seelie had unforgiving eyes for the sleeping kings, but Oisín, like Lara, gazed at the staff, grief aging his lined face even more deeply.

“You knew.” Accusation was beyond Lara. The best she could manage was soft horror, and that was enough.

Pain spasmed across Oisín’s features, but he nodded. “I suspected. The staff would not—will still not—abide the touch of royal hands. That, I think, was what drowned the lands, far more than any intent on their part.” He made a small gesture toward the kings, and Dafydd stirred.

“Then you didn’t see?”

Lara’s stomach twisted. “See what?”

“How Emyr raised the staff and unleashed its magic on the valley. He meant to destroy Hafgan’s court so Rhiannon’s power was his alone. No wonder we think of the seas as killing. They took Rhiannon and the valley all in the same day.”

“No.” Lara shivered, looking around the gathering. “I didn’t see that. I woke up when I realized what they’d done to Rhiannon. I thought the lands had drowned before she died. I thought …” She trailed off, not really doubting the truth in Dafydd’s voice. History so old it became legend was hardly reliable, even for those who had lived it. Not even her magic could winnow falsehood from truth at such a remove. She was reminded of her world’s stories of Robin Hood, none of which had ever satisfied her. Neither could this world’s tales of drownings and retributions, not until now, with the story played out for all of them.

“I almost remember.” Aerin’s eyes were closed, her voice faint and distant. “I do remember she went into the water after Merrick. I remember that the sea rose up and cast him out. I do not … quite … remember that it kept coming, only that we took to the horses quickly, and rode hard. Dafydd had seen only a handful of summers. He rode with me. That, I remember. How can I forget that which I was witness to?”

“You were young,” Oisín answered. “Young, and lied to, and memories slip into fog as time passes by. You’re not to blame for forgetting, Aerin, though I, perhaps, am.”

He took the staff from Lara, resting it across his lap, fingers light on its carved surface. “I wasn’t at the ocean that day, but I recall that tremors shook the whole of the land until Emyr cast this away. My eyesight was failing by then, and I took it up, never certain of why its presence felt so familiar. I imagined it to be my Rhiannon, returned from the sea, but I am a poet. Pretty stories are my trade.”

“I must have known Emyr had it when we left the shore that day. It always reminded me of my mother. Why did you refuse to give it to me?” Dafydd asked.

“Because you were too young to stand against Emyr, and the staff would have asked it of you.”

Lara gave Oisín a bemused look. “It doesn’t ask for anything.”

“It would have, of Dafydd. Of her son.”

“Ioan’s her son, too, and it was ready to burn through him and obliterate Boston!”

“But we were right.” Ioan spoke for the first time, interrupting Oisín’s drawn breath. He gestured at the staff, though he made no effort to actually touch it. “Emyr drowned the Unseelie lands. My people have been done wrong by, Truthseeker. Will you help us now?”

Lara, sourly, said, “Hafgan isn’t exactly innocent of wrongdoing himself,” but wiped her words and tone away with a movement of her hand. “It’s not your peoples’ fault, though. It’s these two. The kings who are the last of Rhiannon’s blood.”

“Not the last. Ioan and Dafydd are as much her blood as any of the firstborns,” Aerin objected. “Give them their fathers’ crowns, if the Barrow-lands need kings.”

Lara breathed a laugh. “Just like that? Depose Emyr, to whom you’ve been unswervingly loyal?”

Aerin shrugged, obviously untroubled by the notion. “He has never deserved it. The dishonor is not mine, nor any of those who served him. No one will doubt the truth when you tell it to them, and minds will be changed. We don’t cling to the past. If we did, someone would have clear memories about Rhiannon’s fate.”

“Is it that simple?” Lara asked with real curiosity. “Humans would complicate it. We’d question their loyalty, question the ambition of the sons who will become kings. We’d wonder if we’d been tricked. Somebody would form resistance cells, even if most believed the right thing had happened.”

“There will be resistance and anger. We’ve fought for … ever.” Aerin smiled and Lara smiled back, hearing no mistruth in the phrase. “But no one will disbelieve you. Not with Dafydd’s return from the dead and with Emyr’s sleeping but living body here, and not with Merrick unmasked and alive. The evidence is in truth’s favor, even if we lacked a truthseeker to speak it, but we’re a people of magics, Truthseeker. With you to bear the news, there may be opposition, but there will be no doubt. Perhaps it’s an advantage we have over humans.”

“Maybe it is. I’ll try,” Lara said to Ioan. “Of course I’ll try to raise the lands. I’ve said that all along. But what are we going to do with these two?”

“Put them with Merrick in the chamber below. It’ll keep them out of trouble until we have a better idea.” Dafydd stood, gaze still grim as he studied the sleeping kings. Then he left the garden nook abruptly, and a few minutes later the entrance to the chamber cave open again. Ioan waved off Aerin’s help, carrying first Hafgan, then Emyr, to the biers below, and the four of them remaining walked together to meet Dafydd at the remembrance gardens’ entrance.

“The citadel is still filled with Unseelie. Shall we play at prisoners again to make our escape?” Aerin sounded resigned, but Oisín made a dismissive noise.

“The Truthseeker can open a way to the stables for us. No one will see us coming or going.”

“The Truthseeker will what?” Lara’s eyebrows shot up, despite the serene confidence in Oisín’s voice. “Oisín, I only made a walkable pathway with the staff’s help!”

“You made a very fine path out of the forest the very night I met you,” Oisín disagreed. “You need not cross chasms, Lara, only make a road from here to there visible to your companions alone. Or did you think following truth’s path would mean leaving us all behind? That would be lonely indeed.”

Lara put both hands to her head, as if the act could physically hold in her feelings of astonishment. “I can make roads the people with me can see but no one else can?”

Oisín pursed his lips. “A wayfinder would be of little use if she could not. I wonder at times if that’s how the very first roads between our world and Annwn were created, by wayfinders in search of new roads.”

“I thought that was a magic of the land. That only royalty could …” Lara trailed off, putting her hands over her face. “Except I did open a way between worlds. Maybe other wayfinders always could, but only the blood of the land has been able to since they were massacred. Assuming wayfinders and truthseekers are always the same. Are they?”

“It has been far too many millennia since either have walked this world for us to know. Now,” Oisín said gently, “open a pathway, Lara. Bring us to the stables, so we might go to the shore where this story began, and bring it to an end.”

They were a motley enough group, Lara thought, all of them wind-whipped and weary from a ride that had taken more hours, even on distance-eating horseback, than she could count. Aerin had frowned at the earth time and again, muttering about its discomfort, and when Lara reached for its rich music, she found shards and tones of dissonance, its song gone wrong.

“No one is guiding it,” she’d finally realized aloud. “It’s been listening to Emyr and Hafgan for aeons, and now they’re both asleep. The magic isn’t working as well as it should.”

“I’ve been Annwn’s king for centuries,” Ioan protested. “Shouldn’t it hear me?”

“Emyr and Hafgan stole the power to make it hear them, and they literally rose from the earth and from Rhiannon’s blood. I don’t think just being her son and wearing a crown will do the job, Ioan.”

They rode in silence after that, Lara searching out glimmers of true paths to help the horses cross the land, but even so, the journey was exhausting. Aerin, already worn to the bone, looked emaciated by the time she slid from her horse and leaned heavily against its side on the unwelcoming shore.

The seas were heavy, rolling slate gray and foamy white against shifting sands. The sky spat cold rain as if trying to drive Lara and the others back into the valley. Song turned against itself, disharmony in the clash of thunder and lightning. Lara bent beneath its clamor, trying to find the soothing slow notes that were a land at peace, and finding herself pummeled and headachy instead.

“Shh, shh. I can’t think, I can’t make sense of anything with all the noise.” The complaint was whispered into uncaring wind, words snatched away. Lara pressed her fingertips against her temples, struggling to concentrate. There was a truth buried deep in the land, the truth of Rhiannon’s deposal and of the slow corruption that had changed Annwn to the Barrow-lands. Rhiannon’s truth, her story, had been drowned, but it could be lifted again and Annwn set right, if Lara could only hear its song through the storm.

“You’ll need this.” Oisín offered her the staff, warmth from his hands still marking the ivory as she took it. “Not even a truthseeker can raise the lands without Rhiannon’s help.”

“I can’t.” She had learned so much, come so far, but this truth was a stark and simple one. “I can only just manage to control it when things are stable, and this is chaos. I’ve used the staff here before and nearly destroyed everything. I don’t know how to master it in the middle of a storm.”

“Dafydd will help you.” Oisín fell back a few steps, gesturing to the blond Seelie prince.

He looked, Lara thought, very much as he had the day she’d met him. His clothes were different, no more slim-cut suit and long raincoat, but the Unseelie garb he wore added enough breadth to his shoulders to remind her of his more-human form. His hair was dark with rain and plastered around his temples, as it had been that day a few weeks and many months earlier. She could see the upward drift of his ears, pointed elfin tips something he would never allow to be visible in her world, but there was enough humanity in him that she smiled.

Smiled, then laughed with dismay as Oisín’s words settled in. “You didn’t see what happened last time one of Emyr’s sons held the staff, Oisín. Dafydd can’t do anything to help.”

“He could not,” the old man agreed serenely, “if he was Emyr’s son.”

Gongs crashed through the storm’s cacophony, dismissing everything else from Lara’s hearing. Images, the memory of time gone by, rose in her vision and replayed themselves, making clear things that had gone unnoticed before. Days played out with impossible rapidity, but not so fast that Lara couldn’t separate them, couldn’t mark details of what happened, and when.

Rhiannon rallied after Níamh’s death, after Ioan’s birth. Became a little of what she had been before, a bright and beautiful goddess, in love with her son and doting once more on Oisín, the mortal poet who had been her companion for so long. Delighted to find herself with child again, so soon after birthing Ioan.

With child, when Lara was certain that she had not gone again to Emyr’s bed. Only her mortal lover had come into Rhiannon’s arms, and in all the world, only three of them knew it.

Confrontation, so quick it had slipped by unseen in the greater view of history: Emyr, outraged, threatening Rhiannon; threatening the unborn child. Rhiannon, cool-eyed and not so capricious after all, warning that Annwn itself would come unleashed should she die or should the coming infant be harmed. She already lacked the power to stop his thievery, but she knew of it. She knew of it, and had made her single move against him.

And Oisín, watching, knew that Annwn’s footing changed, but not how or why. He would have stayed anyway, even beyond Rhiannon’s death, because the land was now his home, and like Rhiannon, it was fond of him. But he stayed for the child, as well, even knowing that Rhiannon’s blood would breed true, that there would be no mark of mortality on the bright-haired boy born to a fairy queen and a mortal poet.

Not until the day Dafydd asked if he might have the staff that so reminded Oisín of his mother. Not until the ivory stave had reacted eagerly, images of destruction sluicing through Oisín. Destruction and then temperance, even against the weapon’s own desires: the very land whispered a promise that it would not be ruined, not if Rhiannon’s younger son wielded the staff against his nominal father. Annwn might be restored, if that battle came to pass.

But not when Dafydd was still little more than a boy, uncertain of his own elfin powers, much less the mortal blood that connected him to a cycle of life in a way no Seelie could ever quite echo. He was ephemeral, capable of choosing a mortal existence, and in that way, didn’t belong to Annwn at all. And only those who were other, whose magic the staff couldn’t subsume, could master.

Dafydd was a dying goddess’s last stand against the kings who had taken her power.

Lara shook herself, throwing visions off to gawk at Dafydd, whose expression mirrored her own. When he finally spoke, it was with a child’s incomprehension, picking one irrelevant detail out of the mass of information he’d come into: “But Emyr’s already dead. Or out for the count, at least.”

“Not even a goddess can plan for everything.” Oisín gestured to Lara and the staff. “She awaits you, Dafydd. Together you will master the magic and raise the lands, and Annwn will be restored.”

Dafydd looked from Oisín to Lara and back again, then swore. Clearly refusing to give himself time to think, he stalked forward and caught the staff on either side of Lara’s hands.

Magic and music erupted around them.