Wayfinder

flicked an eyebrow upward. “Perhaps it always will.”

“I hope not. I don’t think that would be good for you.” Lara edged in a circle, studying the garden walls around her. She could imagine them as such, now: where lichen and coral grew, ivy and moss might have, in years long past. Stone archways, still picked out in now-softened black light, glimmered here and there beneath the coral, but they led to paths and other gardens, not into the ground. Aerin had seen nothing like that, exploring the space. “On Earth we had kings who hid the entrances to their tombs to keep graverobbers from disturbing them. Do you do that?”

Disgust struck deep lines around Aerin’s mouth. “Graverobbers? Who would do such a thing?”

Lara laughed. It jarred her shoulder and sent another wave of dizzy pain over her, but it helped somehow, too. “The poor. The greedy. The ambitious. Ceremonial entrances, then? Do you do something like that?”

Reluctant, still visibly horrified, Aerin nodded. “But there are none here, Truthseeker. I would have seen them.”

Conviction sang in her voice, but Lara shook her head. “Not if time had changed them enough, and not if it was hidden. I understand you don’t hide entrances as a matter of course, but if you were building more than a tomb, you might. If you were making a sanctuary to preserve the living, or to heal the dying, especially somewhere already poisoned by trouble, wouldn’t you want to keep it secret?”

A thread of certainty wove into the words, delicate as Lara could make it. Llyr hadn’t lied when he said she would find Dafydd and Hafgan in the gardens, nor had Aerin lied in saying she could find no biers. Something lay between the two truths, subtle and cautious. There was a path to be followed, one only Lara’s power could bring to light, but like all magic in the Drowned Lands, it took a careful approach. Lara’s eyes drifted shut, single notes touching against her skin like fireflies. They became tiny spots of light in her inner vision, slowly dancing together to shape a path.

Hushed awe came into Aerin’s voice: “Truthseeker …?”

“Follow me.” Lara put her hand out for Aerin’s blindly, trusting the Seelie woman to take it. “I can see a pathway.”

“So can I!”

Lara’s eyes popped open. The tremulous filament of light remained visible, darting forward and coming close again, reluctant to stray too far from its maker. Astonished, she whispered, “I thought it was in my head. I didn’t know other people could see it.” It would have been vastly easier in the Catskill mountains, she thought sourly, if she’d realized Kelly might be able to see the light-built pathway that had led them to Merrick ap Annwn. But then, Annwn, drowned or not, was friendlier to magic than her world. The light and song that showed her a true path might well be invisible on Earth. “Can you hear it?”

Aerin shook her head and disappointment flashed through Lara before she remembered Kelly’s dismay at her brief exposure to the world as Lara heard it. For Kelly, truth’s song had been a terrible thing, tearing away at boundaries and driving her into herself. Aerin might well fare no better, especially so soon after Lara had ripped into her with music and faith from another world. “It doesn’t matter. Come on, let’s—” She broke off in a gasp, one or two quick steps more than enough to send her injured shoulder into spasms again.

“Perhaps at a moderate pace,” Aerin suggested straight-faced, and fell into step with Lara’s hobble.

The firefly thread sparked forward and back, dashing down side paths and around clumps of sandy earth. Where it alighted, the city’s dark glow faded, though it returned as soon as the path-seeking brightness fled. Lara, following slowly indeed, watched with bemusement. Every true path she’d opened before had been a blazed trail, leading without correction to her goal. “I guess I hadn’t looked for anything hidden before.”

Aerin picked up on her meaning with a casual gesture around the drowned gardens. “Nor in a place so laden with its own corrupt magic. A seeking spell that works for its answer is safer than one that demands it, here. I’ve felt the power you can command firsthand now, Truthseeker. I think your little questing light is wiser by far.” She hesitated, then admitted, “And I fear for my own existence, should you need to call on greater magics than these a second time.”

“It would defeat the point of having saved you.” The firepoint light ahead of them darted between twists of coral and disappeared. Lara stopped with a wobble, staring at the darkness their guide had been swallowed by. “Something has to be there. Come on. Let there be light.”

Coral shivered and melted, not into the fine dust Lara imagined it would naturally degrade to, but into nothingness. Llyr had disappeared the same way, becoming part of the water—or air—surrounding them. Lara shook herself, hissing as the motion sent fresh pain through her shoulder. “I’m not good at being hurt.”

“But you’re very good at finding hidden things.” Aerin’s voice was low with respect again. She stepped forward, brushing her fingers over the door revealed by the dissolving coral.

Unlike everything else in the drowned city, the door looked fresh and new, its carvings still sharp-edged and the glass set within it brilliant with color. Even the city’s black light couldn’t tarnish the image of a kind-faced man set against a bed of greenery and knotwork. “Llyr’s brother,” Aerin whispered. “Kerne, god of renewal. He gave seasons to the land, so Rhiannon’s children could watch in wonder as their world changed around them. It was from her uncle that Rhiannon learned the gift of healing that every Seelie carries in their blood. This will be the place, Truthseeker. If there is any hope for Dafydd, this is where he will lie.”

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