never return to the time and home she’d known. It was still a trepidatious thought. “You and Aerin should probably leave your armor here, too. Or glamour it into looking like normal clothes, anyway.” She winced at the idea, preparing for another headache, but Dafydd, chuckling, began to strip the metal garb away.
“I’ve been arrested once while wearing Seelie armor. I’d rather not risk it again.”
“Perhaps I should remain behind.” Aerin stood between the horses, hands on their bridles and increasing discomfort on her face. “I know nothing of your world, Truthseeker. I might be more hindrance than help.”
“And someone might accidentally stumble on you here, or get stupid out on the green and pick a fight you felt you had to stop,” Lara said. “Glamours or not, new world or not, I’d rather you were with us. Strength in numbers.”
“I would have no cause to interfere with mortal battles,” Aerin said in confusion. “Why should I do such a thing?”
“Imagine a man choosing to attack a defenseless woman, Aerin,” Dafydd said after a moment. “Would you stand aside and watch it happen?”
“Of course not, but who would do that? What woman wouldn’t fight back? Surely even mortals have some ability to defe …” Aerin let the words fade away as she tried not to scowl too obviously at Lara. “Perhaps they don’t, then. Very well. I will accompany you, but I will not leave my sword behind.”
“Well, it’s not a concealed weapon,” Lara said uncertainly. “But I’m not sure what the police would think of it. Maybe you should glamour it to look like a purse.”
“A purse.”
“A handbag. Like some of the women on the green were carrying.” Dizziness crept over Lara as Aerin begrudgingly worked the magic, sword blinking and twisting in Lara’s vision as it tried to convince her it was a leather purse, and not a weapon at all. “That’s better. As long as I don’t look at it.” She picked up her own staff and got to her feet, dismayed. “I don’t know what to do about this. I think carrying it glamoured would make me sick.”
“We’ll tell them we’re on the way to Pennsic,” Dafydd said with a grin. “Come, then. Let us find Kelly, and refuge.”
The Barrow-lands were easier to adapt to than Lara’s own world. Pastoral, forested magic and slender alien warriors were less of a shock than mid-afternoon Boston traffic, or the myriad people in all sizes and colors. Aerin, usually so confident, wedged herself between Lara and Dafydd without seeming to realize she’d done it. Her eyes were round with alarm, mouth pinched tight as people swept past them by the hundreds, and she held her purse with a white-knuckled grip on a strap that Lara knew full well was the sword’s hilt.
Dafydd was murmuring to her in their native language, narrating the brash world she was encountering: that man in the twisted hat is from a land called
“I know that one,” Aerin said in a harsh voice. “Lara told Ioan of them. She did not say they were so loud. How can you live like this?” She turned accusing eyes on Lara. “So many people, so much sound.”
“I grew up around here. I’d never been anywhere as quiet as the citadel until I came to the Barrow-lands with Dafydd. It is too loud,” Lara agreed, then caught Dafydd’s arm behind Aerin’s back and pointed up the street with her free hand. “Newspaper vendor. I don’t have any money, but at least I can see what day it is before he chases me off. Don’t let Aerin panic.”
“I do
Lara flashed a smile at the glamoured pair and darted ahead of them, stopping beneath the vendor’s canopy. He shared a stall with a hot dog seller, and her stomach rumbled as she peered at magazine covers and newspaper dates.
It was reassuringly, unexpectedly familiar. Only four days had passed in both worlds. Lara picked up one of the papers with a shaking laugh and turned it over, glancing over the lead stories while the vendor gave her a warning look. Guilty, she started to put it down, but a headline caught her eye:
Below it was a photograph of Ioan ap Annwn.
Twenty-two
Glamours worked even on photography: the camera’s eye didn’t see what Dafydd’s magic hid, or his career as a television weatherman would have been short-lived indeed. But Ioan was in no way glamoured. He was lying down in the photograph, eyes closed, but that did nothing to disguise their elfin slant, or the inhumanly high cheekbones that added to the angled effect. Nothing about his bone structure was human: even the comparative breadth of Unseelie jaw and cheekbone was far too delicate for even the most gracile human males. And his ears were exposed, inky hair falling back from the sharp, upswept points that marked the elfin races. For an instant she imagined the mental space that would have prompted the headline: extreme surgery, indeed. Not just extreme, but of such a quality as to be almost inconceivable. He looked sculpted, not natural, and as such was both utterly beautiful and tremendously alien.
He was also, according to the scant handful of sentences she was able to comprehend, suffering from a profound head wound. Students had found him on the Common two days earlier, and had rushed him to the hospital. Doctors were still uncertain whether he would survive.
“Lady, are you all right?” The news vendor lost his hostility, edging past a stack of papers to come into Lara’s line of sight, face now crinkled with concern.
“No.” Her abrupt response alarmed the vendor, who went so far as to put a hand on her arm in cautious support. Lara lifted the paper, shaking it slightly to emphasize the story. “I know him.”
“Jesus, they’ve been looking for somebody who does for days. Where’ve you been, with your head in the sand? Who did all that surgery on him?”
“He did it himself.” It was technically true, if physiologically impossible in human terms. Lara wet her lips, trying to pull her thoughts together enough to hold some sort of normal conversation. “I’m sorry. I just got back into town and I literally have no cash on me, no bank card, nothing. May I have this paper? I’ll come back and repay you, I promise, but I have friends I need to show this to, and …” Her voice was shaking by the time she finished. Ioan couldn’t, by any comprehensible measure, be in Boston, much less in a hospital. She’d seen him only minutes ago, whole and well.
Outrageous dissension rang through the thought. They couldn’t both be true: either he was here and hadn’t been in the Barrow-lands, or the photo was some kind of glamour. Lara crumpled the paper, eyes crushed shut against the sour musics vying for dominance.
Worry crept into the vendor’s voice. “I guess I lose enough off stolen papers that letting one go on purpose this once won’t hurt. Go ahead and take it, lady. I hope your friend will be okay.”
“Thank you.” Lara managed a weak smile for the man as she backed away. “I promise, I really will pay you. I just can’t right now. I’m really sorry.” Then she turned and fled, meeting Dafydd and Aerin where she’d abandoned them on the street. The prospect of explaining what she couldn’t understand overwhelmed her and she simply thrust the paper into Dafydd’s hands with a feeble attempt to smooth the wrinkles she’d put in its surface.
Even Aerin, unable to read the words, understood in seconds. “This is a ‘photo,’ ” she half-asked, and then with more certainty if no more comprehension, “A photo of Ioan. The likeness is very good.”
“That’s what photographs do,” Lara whispered. “A nearly perfect replica. But it doesn’t make any sense.” Her head throbbed, Dafydd and Aerin’s glamours playing havoc with her vision and only made worse by the incomprehensibility of Ioan’s presence in her world. Her head had hurt for
“Then either this is not Ioan,” Dafydd said slowly, “or the man we journeyed with in the Barrow-lands was not.”
A pure clear chime rang through Lara’s migraine, sweet vibrations breaking it away at Dafydd’s last words,
