Wayfinder

“So you were up to no good.” Dickon sounded vindicated.

Kelly gave a stiff shrug. “I’m not going to apologize for causing a scene, if that’s what you’re expecting. If you can just drive us over to my car we’ll get out of your hair.”

“Kelly, you’ve got a twelve-year-old two-door Nissan. They won’t all fit.”

“I’m hardly leaving them with you.”

“For Christ’s sake, I’m trying to help—”

Lara interrupted. “Will you take us to Kelly’s apartment, Dickon?” and he shot her a scowl.

“Yes. Okay? Are you happy now, Kel? Your truth-hearing friend will tell you I’m not lying. Unlike some people I know. Where are you parked?”

Kelly tightened her jaw in a way Lara recognized as trying to prevent tears, and whispered directions to her Nissan. When they reached it, she jumped out of the Bronco and held up a hand to stop Lara. “I’d rather you went with them.”

“You don’t trust me?” Injury lashed through Dickon’s voice, though Lara thought Kelly’s distrust was at least a little justified.

Kelly obviously felt it was more than a little, her eyes flashing with anger as she looked past Lara toward her ex. “You’re the one who couldn’t handle any of this less than a week ago, Dickon. You’re the one who walked out. So no, I really don’t trust you even if Lara says you mean it. You might change your mind. Just drive them to my apartment, and then maybe we can talk.”

“Whatever.” Dickon flinched when Kelly slammed the door, looking like he wished he could have done that, rather than her. He slid a sharp glance at Lara. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes.” It seemed like there should be something else to say, an explanation or a platitude, but her wit deserted her and Lara was left to wait silently on Dickon’s response.

Surprise, then churlish gratitude coursed over his features, and without another word he drove them to Kelly’s apartment.

“You first,” Kelly said to him when they’d all reached that comparative safety. Ioan still faded in and out of consciousness, but he looked more comfortable sprawled on Kelly’s couch than he had in either the hospital or the Bronco. Aerin stood in front of him, arms crossed over her chest and a scowl dark enough to be a credible threat on its own marring her flawless features. Lara perched on the edge of a straight-backed chair from the kitchen, while Dafydd, beside her in one of the armchairs, was the only one in the whole room with an air of relaxation. It was a lie: Lara could see that in the jump of small muscles around his eyes and the unconscious tapping of a fingertip, but the performance made some difference to the atmosphere, which was dominated by Kelly and Dickon facing off at the doorway.

“You came into Reg’s hospital room like you were going to have us all arrested,” Kelly went on, voice low with accusation. “Why’d you change your mind?”

“The doctor said Reg had stabilized. He was dying, Kelly. I’ve been there most of the last four days, listening to the doctors, and nobody ever said anything about stabilizing. That was what they said the first day, critical but stable. After that they dropped the stable part and kept trying not to look too worried when I was around. So I want to know what the hell happened back there, and if David had something to do with it, at least that’s—”

“Wiping the slate clean?” Dafydd asked, just loudly enough to be heard across the room. “It might make some amends, but it doesn’t forgive the sin of having lied to you about who and what I really am.”

“Not that I would’ve believed you anyway,” Dickon said bitterly. Kelly’s chin came up in clear surprise at the admission, and Dickon left the door to sit across from Dafydd. Well across from him, Lara noted: the second armchair was on the long end of the coffee table, putting the two men as far apart as they could be within the confines of Kelly’s living room. Still, it was a gesture of willingness to talk that Dickon sat down at all.

“There is that difficulty,” Dafydd agreed. “One of several reasons to keep the truth hidden. I came to your world to find Lara, Dickon. Lara or someone like her. A truthseeker, to help my people find a murderer in their midst. I’ve been looking a very long time, and I swear to you, I meant for none of this to happen. Detective Washington never should have been injured, and I’m given to understand one other man died. That was never my intent. I would have protected them, and healed Reginald Washington when he fell protecting all of us, if I could have.”

“But you couldn’t because your fairy magic doesn’t work that way, except she”—Dickon pointed accusingly at Aerin—“managed.”

“It was not a healing,” Aerin repeated impatiently. “That skill is not mine to own. I have a gift of earthspeaking, and even this iron-ridden world was willing to respond. Your de-tek-tiv shares the strength of the land he was born to for a little while, is all. It will lend him what he needs to recover, if he has the will for it.”

“Yeah, well, what I get out of that is in the end Reg owes you his life, and regardless of how fucking weird this all is, he probably wouldn’t like it if the babe who saved his ass ended up on a dissection table for her troubles.”

Aerin flicked a glance at Lara, obviously wondering if the magic that allowed them to communicate had interpreted Dickon’s words correctly. Lara wrinkled her nose, but nodded, and Aerin’s eyebrows darted up in dismayed comprehension.

Dickon ignored the byplay, looking instead at Kelly. “And you. You can just run with all of this? Just like that? I don’t get it, Kelly. I just don’t.”

“I’ve known Lara since we were freshmen in college.” Kelly sat down on the edge of the couch, trying not to disturb Ioan. “I thought she was kind of bonkers at first, because she was always so careful with what she said and always looked sort of pained when somebody said, like, ‘Oh I’m fine’ when you’d ask how they were. After a while I figured out she just always knew if somebody was telling her the truth, and that she never told lies herself. It’s hard not to believe somebody like that when you’ve known them for years, even when they’re telling you something preposterous. It’s not really that I just ran with it. It’s more that I’ve had a lot of time to get used to Lara, and that’s what I ran with. That and I still think I was right. There was no happy way out of what happened at the garage and wasting any time at all would have cost David his life. It’s what I tried telling you in the first place, and now even you came around to it.” She made a gesture at Aerin, then fell silent, rubbing the ring finger of her left hand.

“Yeah, great, I’m the one who didn’t want to run away from a crime scene and somehow I end up the asshole in this scenario.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Dickon—”

Dafydd sat forward, interrupting Kelly with an uplifted palm. “We could spend hours throwing accusations and recriminations around, but I’m afraid we don’t have the time. I very much doubt Merrick has been sitting idle in the hours we’ve been gone.”

“Assuming it’s only hours,” Lara said. “Does the worldwalking spell automatically tie time together, or is that a separate component decided by the spellcaster, like deciding what buttons to use on a suit?”

Regret hit her unexpectedly. Less than a month ago in her personal timeline, she’d been given the opportunity to create a wardrobe for a client at her boss’s tailoring shop, a chance that would have made her a master tailor in her own right. The client’s suits had all been determined by the beautiful antique ivory buttons he’d brought in, salvaged from his own grandfather’s suits a century earlier. Someone else would have completed Mr. Mugabwi’s wardrobe, because the scant weeks of her own timeline had been well over a year in the mortal world. There were things she would never get back, no matter how the undertakings in the Barrow-lands played out.

Dafydd fluttered his fingers as if trying to pluck the answer out of the air. He looked exotic and prosaic all at once, an elfin prince sitting comfortably in Kelly’s living room, and despite the flash of regret, Lara smiled. There were things she would never have discovered, either, had she not risked stepping between worlds.

“It doesn’t bind the timelines together automatically, no. When I cast it to come here it was my will that let a decade pass for every day in the Barrow-lands. When I brought you there the first time, it was my intent to bind them more closely, so you would lose almost no time to the travel. But left on its own, without a deliberate concept of how much time should or might pass, it’s desperately arbitrary, Lara. Oisín hadn’t been in the Barrow- lands so very long when he first left us, but hundreds of years had passed in his native Ireland.”