Wayfinder

“The balls we’ve dropped,” Lara breathed, and Kelly gave her a sharp twisted smile.

“Look, you’re Metaphor Girl again. How’s that feel? What balls did you drop?”

Lara wrinkled her nose, letting the question of metaphors go in order to answer the more relevant one. “We came here on horseback and left the horses hidden on the Common. We’ll have to come back for them.”

“You’ll have to come back to bring me home anyway,” Kelly announced, then arched an eyebrow at Lara. “What, you thought I was going to stay here while you go traipsing off again? Not a chance. Besides, speaking of dropped balls, I don’t want to be the one left holding the ball when Reg disappears out of the hospital room, so I have to go with you. How fast do we have to move once we’ve got all these beeping things unhooked?”

“Very,” Lara guessed. “In fact, Dafydd, maybe you should go ahead and open the worldwalking door now.”

“I am trying.” Tension distorted Dafydd’s voice. Lara turned in concern, finding him with his fingers clawed in the air, trembling with the strain of attempting a downward pull. Gold glimmered around his hand, but his entire body trembled, as though someone had struck him like a bell. “I’m trying, Lara, but the Barrow-lands are rejecting me.”

Twenty-five

“What does that even mean?” Kelly asked the question, but it echoed Lara’s stunned sentiment. She released Kelly’s hand, taking a few quick, useless steps to Dafydd’s side, but he warned her off with a sharp shake of his head.

“I’m not sure what will happen if more power is introduced to the magic,” he said through his teeth. “And mortal magic—”

“—disrupts elfin. It must be Mrs. Moloney, Dafydd. She’s still nearby, and Oisín and I didn’t have to be especially close to Emyr to ruin his scrying spell.” Lara backed away, though she couldn’t retreat far enough to remove herself from Dafydd’s space. “Is that it? Would the land itself reject you if it thought you were too influenced by mortal magic? Emyr said it was fond of Oisín.”

“And if Oisín was here, we might face less difficulty.” Dafydd ground his teeth. “Yes, it might well be unwilling to let the worldwalking door be opened if it feared a mortal influx. The spell is of the land itself, Lara. It has that ability. What concerns me more is I cannot break free.”

“I can free you.” Aerin sounded both certain and doubtful. “Reaching the earth here for you is unlike trying to stabilize the de-tek-tiv. He needs a light touch, and I am unsure if this world will allow me to connect with it so delicately. You need only be grounded. But it might—”

Dafydd gave a short hard laugh. “It might strip my power from me a second time. Better that than being caught with my hand in the cookie jar.” He fell into English for the last few words, making Lara bite down on an equally sharp laugh and garnering Aerin’s frown. She had understood the rest of what he’d said, though, and crossed to him, hands uplifted to call power.

“Wait.” Lara’s voice broke and she fumbled for the worldwalking staff strapped across her back. Dafydd’s glamour still hid it, making her hands ache when she touched it, but its presence behind her had spared her the headache, and almost even the memory, of carrying a magicked weapon. “What would this do?”

“Oh, just destroy the hospital,” Kelly half-shouted. “Are you crazy, Lara? You saw what that thing did up in the Catskills, and you want to unleash it in the middle of Boston?”

“Dafydd might be able to mitigate its effects. Emyr said it didn’t like Seelie royalty, but Dafydd used it safely enough in the Catskills. It was only when I took it that things went wrong.” It was pure guesswork, music lying flat and useless rather than making a promise or a lie of what she hypothesized. Lara shook the staff, frustrated by her own magic’s tendency to cut in and out. A month earlier her inability to determine truth in conjecture would have only been normal; now it seemed a failure, and as if returning to her home world had reined in her talent’s exponential growth. It was a gift born of the human world, but to reach its full potential, it seemed the magic- steeped Barrow-lands were necessary.

But that was perhaps no surprise. Truthseekers had been hunted out of existence, in Dafydd’s world. The land, a living, active thing in its own right, had waited aeons for a magic like hers to come into it again. It wasn’t impossible that it had poured itself into her power, encouraging it to heights she never would have imagined possible.

“Do not.” Ioan’s exhausted voice stopped Lara. He was sitting up, braced in the chair Aerin had put him in, and his color had improved in the little while since they’d taken him from the secure hospital wing. “The last royalty to use that weapon shattered Annwn with it. I would not see such a fate visited on your land, Truthseeker.”

“It might not—”

“And it might.” Ioan sagged as if the few words had spent all his reserves. “Aerin. Will you lend me your strength? Perhaps two royal scions can do what one cannot.”

That, unexpectedly after the music’s silence in her own guesses, rang false. Lara shook her head, alarm spiking through her. “It won’t work, not as long as Mrs. Moloney and I are near each other, and I don’t know where the nurse was taking her. Maybe she’s gone, but—I don’t understand,” she added more fiercely. “Inherent magics work fine. Dafydd’s lightning wasn’t compromised by being around me. Why doesn’t spellcasting work?”

Dafydd lifted his free hand, the other still caught in the golden tear in space. “I haven’t tried the lightning with more than one mortal talent nearby, Lara. It could fail. Shall I?”

“Don’t you dare.” It was true, though: he’d never called lightning when Oisín and she had been near to one another. Lara knotted her hands around the staff, frustration surging through her. “We’re going to have to try Aerin’s magic to get you free, then. What happens if a grounding spell goes wrong?”

“Earthquakes,” Aerin said serenely. “But this is not a spell, Truthseeker, any more than that which makes you draw breath is a spell. It’s part of me, and can be extended as I extended it to you while you rode.”

“I thought that was a spell!”

“Your failure to understand doesn’t change its inherent qualities.” Aerin curled her arms around Dafydd, suddenly seeming more solid than ever before, as if becoming part of the earth in a way Seelie—and even humans —generally were not.

Lara’s power had objected to the worldwalking spell, to the wrongness of tearing through time and space. But of the magics possessed by the Seelie, only the glamours had been disruptive to her magic. Nothing else had a component that lied to the eyes; as Aerin said, the gifts they possessed were no more striking to a people born of magic than the ability to breathe.

And to her astonishment, the truth of that rose up as Aerin gathered Dafydd close. Song washed out from the Seelie woman in long slow notes, the same kind of profound fathomless music Lara had once discovered buried within the earth. Similar, not identical: there were aspects to Aerin’s magic that spoke of a connection to a land very far from Lara’s own. But there was enough in common that when she reached deep, searching for a response from Lara’s world, it was able to answer. Strength welled up, calm, steady, unhurried, and filled Aerin with the earth’s living magic. She caught her breath, clearly sensing the same off notes that differentiated the Barrow-lands from Earth, but she braced herself and the music changed ever so slightly, two disparate magics adapting to each other. “Mortal lands,” Aerin whispered roughly. “Immortal magic is uncomfortable being worked here. Release him, and we’ll disturb you no more.”

Power surged out of her, connecting Dafydd to Lara’s world in the same way Aerin herself was. No: the music changed instantly, not recognizing Dafydd and his lightning magics as it had recognized Aerin’s bond with the earth. It seized him like a cat with a rodent, shaking and rattling ferociously.

He tore free of the worldwalking door, a shout of pain accompanying the ripped magic. But the earth had no intention of letting the invader go. Its slow music had the tonality of a threat, a recognition of a thing that didn’t belong. Aerin’s presence intensified, her own slightly alien song determined to show the similarities between what she was and what Dafydd was. “Different from mortal lands and mortal magics,” she agreed, as though the earth itself could hear and respond to words. “But not dangerous.”

A lie, whether she meant it as one or not. The earth far below bellowed, a roar that reminded Lara all too clearly of how the ground and sky had been rent asunder by the worldbreaking staff. She