Wayfinder

choice. The only chance. I could imagine so clearly how it would work …”

Lara, grudgingly, said, “It might not be his fault. The staff has a circle of influence. I thought it was just when it was close to me, but I’m not elfin. It might have been … encouraging him.” She stood up, using the staff for leverage, and let herself forget about Ioan’s travails for a few seconds.

Most of Kelly’s apartment had come with them to the Barrow-lands. Broken furniture, half-framed doors; even the bedrooms were spewed across the marble and metal garden. Everything was covered in dust, and bubbles of escaping air rose from rubble in the pool, sometimes hissing as a block of concrete fell in.

“My whole building’s going to collapse,” Kelly whispered in horror. “Oh my God. Jesus Chr—”

“Kelly. Don’t use those words here.” Lara kept her voice quiet, but it cut her friend off and earned Lara a look of bewilderment.

“Just because you don’t swear doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t. What the hell, Lara, you never cared bef —”

“They’re words of power here,” Lara said just as quietly. “I destroyed nightwings with an exorcism. When I called on the holy trinity it made Dafydd flinch, and I almost burned Aerin from the inside out with a hymn. I don’t think it matters if you believe, Kel. Just … watch your tongue, okay?”

Kelly put her hand over her mouth, eyes wide above it, then loosened it enough to whisper, “But my apartment, Lara …”

“I know. And it’s worse, the destruction goes halfway across Boston.” Lara swallowed, unable to look at Ioan. Unable to look anywhere but at Kelly and the increasing dismay on her friend’s face. “Aerin’s right. A lot of people are going to have died. Any later and I think we’d have been among them.”

“Is that supposed to make it better?” Dickon asked hoarsely. “That we got away and they didn’t? Jesus Christ,” he said with obvious deliberation, and satisfaction lashed across his face when all three elves recoiled. “Does disaster just follow wherever you go?”

Dafydd, as softly as Lara’d spoken, said, “Not until very recently, I’m afraid. Worse, I fear there’s very little we can do to salvage what remains of Boston. Even a whole host of our healers would be no more than a bandage to a gaping wound.”

“What about her?” Dickon pointed an accusing finger at Aerin. “What about her earth thing? Can’t she put it back together again?”

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” Kelly said in a high voice. “Lara, are we really in the Barrow- lands?”

“Your world responds to my magic only sluggishly,” Aerin said to Dickon, more compassion in her voice than Lara had ever heard. “I might convince it to close where it’s been torn asunder, but you riddle your earth with iron. No one among the Seelie could ever heal it the way you ask. No more than magicless mortals could.”

“Then I want to go home so I can help clean up.” Dickon got to his feet, face pale beneath dust-covered ruddy hair. “I can’t just stay here and wonder what’s going on. Send me back.”

“Hang on.” Kelly climbed to her feet as well, a hand on Dickon’s wrist and conflicted hope in her eyes. “We’re in a whole different world, Dickon. Don’t you want to see some of it? It’s not that I don’t care what’s happening in Boston. I do. You must know that. It’s just … fairyland.”

The look Dickon settled on her was one Lara had encountered innumerable times in her childhood: puzzlement so profound it went beyond anger. When people turned it on her, it was usually because she’d pressed an insistence for the truth far past the point of reason. She’d learned, as she’d aged, not to push it, but it made Dickon’s expression no less familiar. Kelly had once again moved so far outside his own boundaries that she’d become foreign to him, as alien in her own way as Dafydd or Aerin was. Lara had always loved her friend for that adventuresome streak, but Dickon, it seemed, was stymied by it.

“Okay,” Kelly whispered after a long time. “Okay, Dickon. You go back. Good luck. Maybe I’ll … call you when I get home.” She turned to the others, lips compressed and her eyes bright as she asked, still in a whisper, “I mean, if it’s okay that I stay? Because … because, I mean, I sell bras back at home. It’s not like I’m going to be much help to a disaster relief effort, not unless there’s a sudden need for well-fitted thirty-eight double-H’s. So I know a war is going on here, but Lara’s my best friend, and … it’s fairyland. I’m never gonna get another chance. Am I?”

The last question was directed at Dafydd, who hesitated, but then shook his head. “Almost certainly not, I fear. Kelly, you’re as welcome to stay as Dickon is to go, but I might ask of you one thing. Remain here, in the safety of Ioan’s citadel, until we’ve resolved this dispute. There will be plenty to see and time to see it after, but until then, you would be—”

“A liability,” Kelly said clearly enough, though she sniffled as soon as she’d spoken. “No, that’s fair. I mean, no offense, Lara, but having to keep an eye on you in the middle of a war is probably enough work, without adding me to the mix.”

“At least you can ride a horse without being magicked to it.” Lara offered a fragile smile, and Kelly turned it into a shaky laugh of her own.

“Yeah, good point. Maybe I should be the truthseeker for the rest of this game.” Consternation crossed her face. “Nevermind, I remember what that was like. It was horrible. Okay. I’ll stay here awhile,” she promised Dafydd, and he gave her a grateful smile before looking back at Dickon.

“The worldwalking spell will take some time to prepare.”

“No. It won’t.” Another man interrupted, voice preceding him as he strode into the garden. Lara barely had time to recognize Hafgan, now resplendent in shimmering dark blue silks and black velvets, before he tore open a door between the worlds and unceremoniously dumped both Dickon and Kelly back through it.

“Where … when … did you send them?” Lara gaped at the fading door, certain the only reason she hadn’t also been thrust through it was her distance from the other two mortals. “Why did you do that?”

Hafgan made a dismissive gesture. “Annwn’s problems are not for mortals to interfere with, and from what I now see those problems run deep indeed. They are returned home, within a few minutes or hours of their departure. Nothing has changed for them. What are they doing here?” He thrust a finger toward Dafydd and Ioan.

Lara glanced at the brothers, but panic yanked her attention back to Hafgan. “You can’t have sent them home. Not right where they came from. The building is collapsing. They’ll die.”

Dafydd put a hand on her shoulder. “The spell isn’t that accurate. We never come and go from exactly the same place. That you hold Boston so close in your heart and mind as home is all that has kept us from arriving halfway across the country, or the world. It’ll be the same for Dickon and Kelly. And at least they’re alive, Lara. They’d have died when the building came down if the spell hadn’t taken them with us.”

Lara whispered “I hope you’re right,” then turned on Hafgan, anger rising. “That was completely unnecessary! Dickon was going home anyway and Kelly hasn’t got any magic to interfere with yours. She just wanted to see your world!”

“A world riddled by chaos and war. It is not the face we put forward to the mortals we lure here, Truthseeker, and we have problems that run deeper than even I knew. These two cannot be here.” Absolute conviction filled Hafgan’s voice, so jarring in the face of truth that Lara shuddered with it.

She wrapped her arms around herself, as if it might prevent her from falling apart. “Why not?”

Hafgan ignored her, stalking instead to Ioan and Dafydd to inspect them as if they were sides of meat that lacked in quality. Even in clear fury, he was graceful, moving like a predator as he circled the princes twice. Only when he stopped before them did Lara recognize how high his shoulders rode, and how his jawline bunched with tension.

Neither Ioan nor Dafydd reacted. Ioan hadn’t moved at all since Aerin’s attack, still staring dully at the ground. He looked exhausted, like Dafydd had after drawing on all his own remaining power after fighting the nightwings. The staff had done that to him: had burned through more of his magic than he had probably imagined possible. Lara folded it closer to her chest, less possessive than determined not to let another elf lay hands on it and wreak further havoc.

A thread of coldness came into Hafgan, as icy as Lara had ever seen in Emyr. “You are meant to be in the Caerwyn citadel. How came you here? And you—” he said to Dafydd, but Ioan drew himself up until he was as aloof as Hafgan himself.

“I haven’t been in the shining citadel since I was a child. These past several days I was the guest of mortal healers, whose best efforts were counterintuitive to my wellness.”