Truthseeker

Seventeen

“Dafydd!”

For an instant the battle went still, Seelie and Unseelie alike looking to the sky, as though Lara’s scream had come from far above. She had cried out the night before, looking into the scrying pool, and she wondered which had arrested the soldiers: her horror then, or now.

Aerin, undisturbed by Lara’s shriek, straightened in her saddle, watching as whatever she’d said drove Dafydd into the enemy’s waiting arms.

Rage turned Lara’s vision red. She forgot the men and women around her were meant to protect her; forgot that she knew nothing of swordplay; forgot everything except evidence of her own errors in Aerin’s actions. She didn’t know how Aerin had escaped the compulsion Dafydd had laid on the courtiers to answer, nor how she had missed the lies in the white-haired woman’s voice. Maybe, if a spell could force a man against his will, another could hide falsehood from a truthseeker, especially one as infantile in her talents as Lara was.

In the moment, none of it mattered. Her horse rushed forward, Lara’s fear forgotten as she stood in her stirrups and shouted.

She should have fallen off, but the magics Aerin had placed on her were to Lara’s benefit. She couldn’t fall, and she couldn’t be expected to do as she was doing.

That, then, was the only reason she scored a blow across Aerin’s kidneys at all.

Lara had seen others take hits that looked harder, but the moonlight armor screamed and bent under the force of her strike. Aerin whipped around, pain shattering beneath shock as she recognized Lara. Lara swung again, wildly, as momentum sent her past Aerin. The Seelie woman didn’t even have to parry to avoid it, but she lifted her sword to block a third attack as Lara hauled her horse around in a tight circle.

Metal scraped metal, Aerin drawing her blade down the length of Lara’s to tangle the guards. A quick twist wrenched the sword from Lara’s hand, and Aerin grabbed the edge of Lara’s breastplate, hauling her close. “What mortal idiocy drives you now, Truthseeker?”

Lara balled her armored fist and threw the first punch of her life at Aerin’s beautiful face.

Aerin’s head snapped back satisfactorily, blood pouring from her nose and upper lip. The nosepiece of her helm had caught the brunt of the blow: it was bent, and a cut leaked red down the bridge of her nose to mingle with the rest of the mess.

Lara, still standing in her stirrups, shoved Aerin backward, snarling “Arrest her” to those nearest to them. The command broke their stillness, drawing their attention from the echoing cry that Lara had voiced both seconds and hours earlier. Within moments the sounds of battle roared around her again, chaos personified by glittering swords and splashing blood. The sun was in her eyes, blinding and somehow, gratifyingly, reducing her fear. Emboldened and not waiting to see if she’d been obeyed, Lara pulled her horse around a second time and sent it into the Unseelie battalion. Chasing Dafydd; chasing hope.

She broke through their defenses by speed and surprise, not skill, but it was enough. Surprise let her knock men aside with kicks and once with a bash of her fist, and that was all the time she needed. Time enough to see that, just beyond the Unseelie front lines, Dafydd’s silver-bridled horse stood empty-saddled and startled-looking amid surging black-clad warriors.

Dafydd was gone.

In defiance of what she saw, in defiance of what she was, a single thought hung in Lara’s mind: Dafydd could not be gone. It rang false, but it wouldn’t leave her. It wasn’t possible that he had disappeared. She’d seen no brilliant door open in the air, nothing to take him away from the Barrow-lands. But then, she’d seen very little, with the sun in her eyes, and the transition had taken hardly any time when Dafydd had brought her to his world.

There were suddenly dozens of Seelie around her, their bright armor splashing in a wave against the Unseelie dark. She remained unmoving, stuck in her saddle even as she recognized that they were protecting her. They were obeying Dafydd’s order, even though he was no longer there. She stared at the earth, half afraid she would see his slim body trampled beneath hooves and Unseelie feet, and then another thought struck her: that he’d become invisible. She redoubled her search of the ground, hoping for signs of such a thing—maybe footprints appearing in the earth—even as the larger part of her rejected the possibility. She had seen his magic. It was electricity, not the manipulation of light that might allow him to hide in plain sight. Perhaps others among the Seelie had that skill, but not, she thought, Dafydd ap Caerwyn.

Which led her back to the impossible: that he had vanished.

She was still struggling with that, searching for another answer, when an arrowhead contingent of Unseelie rushed through the surrounding Seelie army and fair-haired Ioan ap Caerwyn clobbered her alongside the head with a gauntleted fist.

Later, she thought she had not, quite, lost consciousness. Nor had she fallen from her horse: Aerin’s magic was thorough. Dazed, she’d been surrounded by Unseelie warriors, and they’d ridden through the army at an oblique angle to the fighting. The battle thinned, then suddenly turned to nothing, grasslands becoming forest as her escort picked up speed. By the time the ringing in her head—for once not born of truth or falsehood, but from simple, painful trauma—had faded, they were well beyond the battlefield, and she had lost any hope of finding her way back on her own.

Ioan was not among her captors. They were all dark-haired, their helms removed once they’d left the field behind. Three of the group were women; and a part of Lara was bemused they felt she required eight soldiers for escort. They had more faith in her than she did.

A crescendo came over her at the thought, piano chords pounding in her head. Truthseekers, she imagined, could be dangerous, if confronted at the height of their power. She had no doubt they knew what she was—why else take her at all?—but they wouldn’t necessarily know that her talents were meager.

That might be her sole advantage. Lara bit back questions, certain her armed guards wouldn’t answer them, and tried to bury fear under the strength of her magic as they rode. They left the forests behind, climbing upward, the land becoming less hospitable as they did. Lara built a vision of their destination in her mind’s eye: a granite citadel as imposing as the Seelie court’s home, cold and unfriendly as the barren mountaintops they strove for. A wall rose up in the distance, hinting that her imagination was true; impenetrable and unscalable, it drew her eye upward, searching for an impossible palace built at its farthest reaches.

There was no such thing nor, as they came closer, any hint of a path rising along its sheer face. Its foot was buried in darkness, and they were nearly upon it before Lara realized it was a chasm cutting hundreds of feet down into the rock.

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.”