Wayfinder

against the earth before it sank harmlessly away. The rising ground took Lara with it, as if she’d been thrown into a game of blanket toss. Her knees buckled and she fell to them, but held on to the staff. Its heat was gone, though grumbling resentment washed through it. Lara dropped her forehead against it, panting for breath. “That’s better. Thank you.”

“You speak to it as if it lives. What …” Aerin trailed off under the sound of rushing water, and Lara looked up to watch the seas part along the silvered road that stretched into them. The ocean bubbled and spat, pulling open in an utterly unnatural manner. The Red Sea might have looked as the Barrow-lands bay did, pulling apart to leave a damp, glimmering pathway into the deeps. Not even fish were left gasping in the air; fistsful of water reached out, clawed them back into their retreating walls, and sent them swimming to safety. Waves continued to roll forward, splashing the beach to either side of the watery avenue, but where the sea defied physics, the tide merely roiled and crashed against itself, fighting to connect again with the space it had been banished from.

A man, expected only because Moses had once walked a similarly empty channel, strode out of the depths.

Hysteria swept Lara, cold sweat and a high laugh both breaking. She scrambled to her feet, unwilling to face what approached while on her knees. That was a posture reserved for devotion, and she was not—was not, despite every picture storybook she’d read as a child—was not in the presence of a literal, God-sent reenactment of the Red Seas. Not here. Not in Annwn, a land of elfin immortals whose own gods were, in her faith, pagan impossibilities. There was something else, another truth to be had, another way to explain the parting waters and the man coming from their heart. Her God had not sent him.

If He had, though, He had done so with an eye for artistry.

The man approaching wasn’t in the water; he was of the water. It shaped him, and each step he took left sprays behind even as they also pulled up water from the road’s surface. His hair was wild and white, not so much sea foam as the tide itself, alive with motion. His skin changed as Lara gaped, shifting in shade from Caribbean blue to slate gray and all the hues of ocean in between, so looking on him was watching an endless chase of color. He might have been Poseidon, except every depiction of that sea god Lara had seen was of a broad-shouldered, stern-looking bearded being armed with a trident and sometimes graced with a fish tail.

This creature was elfin through and through. Narrow-hipped, slim-shouldered, with long limbs and upswept ears. He carried no weapon. He didn’t need to: Lara had no doubt the ocean itself was all the armament he required.

And like the ocean, his canted eyes were filled with stormy potential, and his voice with the crash of waves. “How dare you strike at the heart of this land again? How dare you lift that weapon, and on my shores?”

“I need safe passage to the Drowned Lands.” Nothing gave Lara the right to make such a preposterous demand, but it came out steadily, even calmly. “Believe me, I have no intention of using the staff as a weapon. It has its own ideas, but for the moment I can control it.”

The sea man eyed her, air growing damper and cooler with his regard. “ ‘For the moment.’ ”

Lara cursed the impulse that had made her use the phrase. Cursed the truth that was her gift, in other words, and sighed as she recognized that not admitting to the caveat would have sounded a lie to her own ears. “It’s powerful. It has a will of its own.”

His skin, his gaze, his entire being, darkened as though a storm came over the ocean. “You have no idea what you bear in your hands, mortal woman.”

Lara looked at the staff, then over her shoulder at Aerin, hoping for guidance. Instead she found Aerin on her knees, wide-eyed and pale, knuckles pressed over her mouth. A posture reserved for devotion, Lara remembered, and her heart knocked. Aerin had shown no such reverence in discussing Rhiannon, whom she’d called their goddess. Whatever the elfin sea lord was, it was evidently well beyond Aerin’s expectations.

Lara turned back to the water-creature, just as glad she’d had no expectations to be shattered. “You’re probably right. I probably don’t. But I found it so I could heal with it, if it’s possible. If it’s not, I’ll bring it back to my world and hide it again rather than let it be used here to do more harm.”

“That staff should not be taken from Annwn or the seas,” he snarled. Lara could see Emyr in him suddenly, the two of them both creatures of such elemental power and great age that arrogance was their greatest stock in trade. But the sea man relented a fraction, not precisely softer, but indulging in a clear curiosity: “I hear truth in your words, mortal female. Are you an arbiter of justice?”

“I’m a truthseeker,” Lara said cautiously. “My name’s Lara, Lara Jansen. I don’t know if I’m an arbiter of justice. I do know that two men of royal blood are somewhere in the Drowned Lands, and without them I’m never going to find out the truth of what happened to Annwn, or have a chance at setting it right. And I know this staff is God damned dangerous.” Twice. That was twice in ten minutes she’d used a phrase that almost never passed her lips. Kelly, back at home, thought Lara’s reluctance to damn in God’s name was quaintly amusing. In the Barrow- lands, though, Lara had learned that naming the Holy Trinity was a magic in and of itself, and the curse carried a particular weight. Lara turned a brief glower at the staff, as though it had prompted her to swear, then gave her attention back to the watery man. “I’d be just as happy to finish what I need to do with it and give it to someone with a record of being able to handle its power.”

“And who would that be?” This time real interest lightened the sea elf’s voice, and Lara wondered if answering would be condemnatory. She was certain, though, that not answering would carry a price of its own, and after a moment shrugged.

“Another mortal. A poet named Oisín.”

“Mortals,” the water creature growled, then, more approvingly, “Poets. There may be wisdom in that; poets cross the boundaries of age and time. But that staff is not meant to be ruled by anyone, Truthseeker. Not for long.”

Lara hesitated. “Not even by one such as you?”

Something complex happened in his eyes, ancient sorrow rising to mix with chagrin and unequivocal acceptance. “I was never meant to rule it at all. I learned that long ago.”

The corner of Lara’s mouth curved up. “All the more reason to help me get into the Drowned Lands, so I can rescue the prince, save the world, and return it to neutral hands.”

“Neutral.” The sea man’s eyebrows, barely noticeable until he spoke with them, rose. “This poet is neutral?”

“I think he loved her. Rhiannon, the one whose staff it had been.”

The sea lord stiffened, the water coursing beneath his skin going still. Lara bit her lower lip, then rushed on. “I think he went to great lengths to protect it so no one else could use it. No one unworthy. Maybe it’s not neutrality, but it’s a different path from the one it seems Emyr and Hafgan took. It looks more like neutrality, and from where I’m standing, that might be close enough.”

Slowly, incrementally, he relaxed again, until his was a body in motion once more, all the moods of the ocean reflected in him. “An arbiter indeed. Tell me, mortal woman, Lara Jansen, Truthseeker. The journey into the Drowned Lands is not a gentle one. Are you prepared to undertake the trials?”

“I am.” A twinge of honesty struck her and she added, “I don’t understand what that means, really, but I’m willing to try. This land, Annwn, it’s damaged. Even I can see that, and I’ve only been here a little while. Oisín made a prophecy about me. He called me a truthseeker and a worldbreaker, and said I’d find the way to mend the past. The only way I can see to do that is going in there.” She nodded at the sea beyond him, marveling briefly that she’d become accustomed, in a few short minutes, to the way it held itself apart from the silver road. “I want to help,” she said quietly. “Please help me to help.”

“And your companion?” The sea lord took apparent notice of Aerin for the first time, and Lara heard her flinch to attention.

“I will join her if you’ll permit me, Lord.” Aerin’s soprano was ragged with emotion, and she came forward roughly to stand beside Lara when he gestured for her.

He pressed his thumbs against their foreheads, a cool watery touch. Power staggered Lara, power unlike any she’d encountered so far. The entirety of the world’s oceans were in the caress, thundering, calm, corrosive, sustaining; he encompassed all of that in his fragile elfin form. Sea life in all its myriad shapes, with its cleverness and dull-wittedness, inquisitive or reclusive, light-filled and shadowed, ran through him so that he was their life, and they were his. Temperature spread through his touch, from the heat of