Wayfinder

“Your idea of ‘so very long’ and mine might be very different,” Lara pointed out. “Either way, I followed you back to Annwn less than half a day after Ioan brought you home. Whether Merrick meant for it to be or not, it was still six months there. We’ve spent most of a day here now. If it’s been another six months …”

“Then it’s possible the power balance has shifted entirely.” Dafydd turned his hand up in a familiar gesture: Lara had seen him call sparks of lightning between his fingertips that way before. This time, though his brow furrowed with concentration, nothing happened, and he closed his fingers again, loosely. “And I now lack the power to open the worldwalking spell myself.”

“It had to be done,” Aerin protested roughly. “You would still be caught there, or—”

Dafydd shook his head, stilling her objections. “It’s commentary, not accusation, Aerin. Lara’s opened a worldwalking path once. Perhaps she can do it again.”

“The Barrow-lands are a lot more receptive to magic than this world is, Dafydd. I don’t know if I can breach the walls if I start on this side, not unless I use the staff.”

For a moment everyone, even Dickon, looked toward the ivory staff propped in the corner of Kelly’s living room. Out of Lara’s hands, it was nothing more than an ornate and beautiful art piece, but the memory of its eagerness to be used sent a shiver over her skin. “There’s Ioan,” she said without much hope, and everyone looked from the staff back to the sleeping prince.

“Even if he were conscious, I think the magic would be his undoing,” Dafydd said quietly. “The Barrow-lands are not forgiving, and I fear what they might take from him in return for the magics.”

“There lies your problem, brother.” Ioan spoke without opening his eyes, though his voice was stronger. “You, as always, seek the magic of the Barrow-lands, which by their very name we know to be the lands of the dead. I will call on the magic of Annwn.”

Twenty-seven

Dafydd, after a moment’s long silence, turned to Lara and with utmost sincerity gathered her hands, kissed her knuckles, and, dismayed, asked, “Do I sound that pretentious?”

A giggle erupted and Lara pulled her hands free to cover her mouth. “Once in a while, yes.”

“Oh dear.” He looked back at Ioan, whose offense was written plainly across his features. “Regardless of what you call it, brother, the land is one and the same. I—”

“But it’s not.” Lara straightened as Dafydd’s words filled with an orchestra’s worth of untuned instruments. “He’s right, Dafydd. Annwn is what your world was when it was whole. The Barrow-lands are dying. You’re all dying. You must know that.”

Not for the first time, Aerin spoke when it became clear royalty would not. “We see that we are stagnant, but it is something we … ignore,” she finally chose. “Immortality grants that leisure. It’s difficult to believe or accept that we are dying when so few of us ever do.”

“Hell,” Kelly muttered, “it’s easy enough to ignore when you’ve only got threescore and ten. Nothing would convince humans they were a dying race if individually we lived for millennia.”

“There are ways in which we are not so different,” Aerin allowed, then transferred her attention back to Lara. “Dozens of us have died in this war already, Truthseeker. Perhaps hundreds, by now. No one imagines it to be a blow we can easily recover from, which is part of why we must win at any cost.”

“You do see the inherent contradiction in that attitude,” Lara half-asked, but she was watching Dafydd now, watching tension play in his shoulders and hands. “Annwn’s magic might respond differently than the Barrow-lands’, Dafydd. Ioan may be able to reach an aspect of your world that the Seelie have forgotten. And even if he can’t, at least there’s just one mortal magic user right now. Nothing should interfere with his attempt to build the spell.”

“Nothing except his head injury,” Dafydd snapped. Envy, Lara thought: Dafydd was envious of his older brother, the brother Emyr had always favored, for all that Ioan had been a child when he was made hostage to the Unseelie king. Maybe because he’d been made hostage: out of sight meant out of the possibility of wrongdoing, where any mistakes Dafydd made were in Emyr’s eye. Envy could be born of that easily enough, and for the moment, Ioan had access to magics that Dafydd had been cut off from.

“Try to prepare the spell,” she said abruptly, to Ioan. “We’ll have to go back to the Common to get the horses before you cast it, but you should be able to tell if you can draw down the magic if you try preparing it now, right?”

Ioan nodded once and Lara got to her feet as brusquely as she’d spoken, offering Dafydd a hand as she did so. He looked askance at her, but took her hand and stood as she said, “I need to talk to you. Kel, can we use the bedroom you lent me?”

Kelly nodded, shooing them away with a gesture, then glanced at Ioan before saying to Dickon, “Maybe we should give him a little while to concentrate.” She got up and went into the kitchen, which was only nominally a separate room, but offered the semblance of privacy without the intimacy of inviting Dickon into her own bedroom. Dickon hesitated a few seconds, then shrugged and followed her as Lara led Dafydd into the bedroom that had been hers for a few scant weeks.

“It’s not so bad, you know,” she said as the door closed. The room was as she’d left it only four days earlier, down to the pair of shoes she’d decided not to wear to court and had put on the bed with the intention of putting them away when she returned. She did that now, returning them to a box in the closet before she clarified, “I mean, being only mortal.”

Almost gently enough to take the sting out, Dafydd asked, “How would you know?”

A knot in her belly forced a small breathless sound free as she looked back at him. There was a full-length mirror just beyond him, angled so she could glimpse herself as well as Dafydd. By human standards, Lara was delicate, small-boned, and fine-featured, but compared to the ethereal Seelie prince, she looked blunt and rough- cut. “Don’t be cruel. Until the last few weeks my truth sense was never enough to make me more than quirky, not extraordinary. And even if it had been, you said yourself that there’s no doubt it’s a mortal magic. I’m only human, Dafydd. And I’m sure that having your magic stripped away makes you feel less than whole, but it’s not that bad. Mortal existence isn’t that bad.”

“Would you have me stay here, then? Half of what I was, forever hiding my face?” Tunelessness ran through the questions, not because they were a lie, but because they were true. Because Dafydd had no wish to remain in Lara’s world as any less than he had been for the century he’d spent searching for her. As any less than a chameleon, able to blend in; as a visitor, able to return to his immortal homeworld when the whim suited him.

“So instead I’d come to your world?” she wondered, though the question didn’t really need asking. “Never see my mother or Kelly again, but knowing I’d outlive them? Becoming like Oisín, a single mortal among immortals?”

“You would be more, there, than you are here,” Dafydd said softly. “The land would welcome and encourage your magic, Lara. You could become something great to my people, a long-lost arbiter of justice returned.”

“I would be different,” Lara corrected. “Not more. I make beautiful things here, Dafydd.” She smoothed a dress in the closet, one of several Kelly had kept in the months Lara had been missing. It was handmade, as nearly all her clothes were, perfectly fitted and subtle with stitching. Even her experienced fingertips could hardly tease out the feeling of seams; that was the joy of tailoring, for her. All the pieces fit together flawlessly, her talent turned to a physical creation of a true thing. “I would be different. Maybe more powerful, and all for the cost of nothing more than a mortal life.”

“I will bring you home again,” Dafydd said in a low voice. “When this is over, if it’s what you desire, Lara, I will bring you back to Boston and disturb you no more.”

“I know you would.” Lara released the dress and crossed to Dafydd, putting her arms around his waist and her head against his chest. His heartbeat was quicker than she expected, his distress echoing her own. “But would you stay? Such a short time for you, Dafydd. In less than the century you’ve already lived here, my life would be over. Would you stay?”

“If you would have me,” he finally whispered, “yes.”

Regret scored wounds through the music in his voice, but he spoke the truth. Lara laced her fingers behind his head and pulled his mouth to hers for a kiss that grew in urgency until Dafydd broke free with a laughing groan.