There was no chill in the air to suggest short winter days, and not until the moon’s light hopped unexpectedly high in the sky did she jog forward to catch up with Aerin. “Is this you?”
“I’m already doing all I can. I had hoped I could move us as quickly as the horses would go, but two legs aren’t as quick as four, even magicked. The best I can manage is three steps for every one.” Aerin looked tired and alien, the long contours of her skull more easily visible with sweat matting short hair against it. “The horses would have us there by morning. The best I can do is three days, perhaps.”
“The best you can do,” Lara echoed in astonishment. “I’ve read people can walk twenty or thirty miles in a day. You’re moving us sixty or ninety? How far do we have to go, Aerin? How long do you have to keep this up?”
“Unassisted, it would take a sennight or more to walk this distance.” Aerin cast a glance back at the Unseelie, among whom were children. “Probably more.”
The corner of Lara’s mouth turned up. “Thanks for looking at them, and not at me.”
Aerin quirked an acknowledging eyebrow, then exhaled noisily. “This requires concentration, Truthseeker.”
“Right. Just don’t … burn yourself out, if that’s what can happen. Be careful, Aerin.”
“The time for care is long past.” Aerin quickened her pace by a step or two and Lara took the hint, falling back again. Night grew deeper in quick lurches, until she was certain midnight had come and gone. Only then did Aerin stop abruptly, and the travelers slept where they fell, only to rise and walk again not long after sunrise.
Lara awakened to muscles and feet so sore that every step was a challenge. No one else complained, and she wondered if mortal weight connected with the land harder, or if she was simply outrageously unconditioned compared to everyone else. They all shared a certain drudgery of intent, but she caught no one else wincing with each footfall. That evening Dafydd silently stripped her shoes from her feet and massaged the tender flesh.
The second day was worse, grime and hunger building up. Ioan, Dafydd, and a few of the others broke away to hunt. There were always streams for water, but Lara could hardly feel her body, numbed from repeated impacts against the earth. Even Kelly’s relentless good nature and enjoyment of adventure vacations would be hard-pressed to find much fun in the trek. Lara was torn between worry about when and where she and Dickon had landed back on Earth, and weary envy that they probably had access to showers.
Aerin stopped them earlier that evening, not long after sunset. She was slender to begin with, as all the Seelie were, but she looked as though she’d been eaten from the inside out, her muscles thin and ropey and her eyes sunken with fatigue. “We should arrive by midday,” she told Dafydd. “If we hunt and eat well tonight, and sleep well, we may be in some condition to face whatever awaits us. Ioan might scry to see what lies ahead.”
“It could alert Merrick to our presence.” Ioan had recovered from his injuries as they walked, though like everyone else his shoulders slumped with weariness. “We might be better unannounced. The surprise would be as much theirs as ours.”
“Can you cast a glamour to get us inside unseen?” Lara asked Dafydd. A darker thought spun out of that: if he could get them inside the citadel unseen, there was no reason they couldn’t assassinate Merrick under that same cloak of invisibility. She met Dafydd’s eyes, and saw the same idea flash through his mind before he shook his head.
“Glamours are much more successful against mortals. The constant use of power gains notice among our own kind. Call it what you will, paranoia or curiosity, but there’s always someone looking for it, and a glamour large enough to hide even a handful of us would be observed long before we found Merrick.”
“Then isn’t what Aerin’s doing going to draw attention, too? She must be using huge amounts of power.”
“But the horses use a version of this magic all the time,” Aerin reminded Lara. “It’s a constant draw, so typical as to go unnoticed. Far more likely that the destruction of the Unseelie citadel has been noticed than my call on the earth’s magic.”
“There was an army of Unseelie out here,” Lara said in dismay. “If they know their city was destroyed are there going to be any Seelie left alive by now?”
A little silence met her question, and Dafydd finally sighed. “They’ll have fled, Lara. Even with Merrick’s fine speech, the truth is that with Emyr’s death, most of the army will have taken to the forests. If they even believe he’s Ioan, they won’t trust him, not with the change he wrought upon himself. They would have fallen with Emyr, and their first instinct will be to preserve those who are left. The citadel is a symbol, but not enough to rally them without—”
“You,” Lara finished. “Without Emyr’s heir, particularly when his other son apparently sits on the throne already, as one of the Unseelie.”
“Assuming I’m enough. First they saw me murder Merrick, and then they watched me kill Emyr, both in cold blood. Even having a truthseeker substantiate my story may not be enough.”
Cold dismay filled Lara’s chest. “You knew this all along, didn’t you? When we decided we were going to the citadel, you knew it wasn’t going to be full of Seelie ready to fight the good fight. And you didn’t tell me.”
“I told you exactly what we’re going to do.” Dafydd fixed his gaze forward, quiet determination in his posture and voice. “We’re going to depose a pretender and make a united stand against the Unseelie.”
“The four of us? You made it sound like—” Lara bit the words back. Dafydd had told the truth. Her way of interpreting that truth had been glossy, perhaps. Fanciful, full of hope, and none of them had seen fit to disillusion her during the exhaustive journey. Subdued, she asked, “How are we going to win this?”
“We may not.” Dafydd gave her a wan smile. “But that’s a problem for the morning.”
Thirty-one
But surety wasn’t interchangeable with being right, and the problem with plans was she had no way of determining whether they would succeed. She’d laid down law with her voice once or twice, but the wholesale demand that events go her way lay beyond her. Perhaps only because she thought it did, but that was enough: the limitations she argued were her own.
The glamours disguising them were subtle enough to hardly bother even her. Aerin’s burned hair had been darkened to buttery yellow, and her eyes made blue, but her appearance was so altered from extended use of earth magic that little else needed to be done. Dafydd’s golden tones had been bleached, leaving him wraithlike, and he had taken on fuller-featured aspects: a lusher mouth, cheekbones less angled, and the sweep of his hair longer to help change the line of his jaw. Lara had observed once how alarmingly similar the Seelie looked to one another, and now the understated changes in Aerin and Dafydd reminded her of that. They weren’t themselves, but they could have been any of their people: a police witness would be hard-pressed to single them out of a Seelie lineup.
Lara’s glamour was little more than a change in her height, and the shape of her ears had been altered. She was pale enough already, and her features delicate, so stretching what she had over a frame seven inches taller did most of the disguise work by itself. Even with the headache it induced, she wanted to stare at herself in reflective water a long time, struggling to fully see and appreciate what she looked like as a Seelie woman. Alien and beautiful, but all the more extraordinary for knowing a human lay beneath the imagery.
Ioan stalked along behind them, darker of countenance and narrower in his features than normal. Of all of them, he was the only one armed: Lara and the others dragged along in ropes, Seelie prisoners to an Unseelie guard. None of them had needed begriming or theatrics to play the role of downcast prisoners, not after days of forced marching. Ioan had the hardest part, Lara thought: he was meant to be fresh and triumphant at having captured a handful of runaway Seelie.
“Why wouldn’t he just kill us?” Lara had wondered as the plan was laid out.
Aerin and Dafydd had exchanged glances, and once more Aerin answered when Dafydd clearly didn’t want to. “Merrick always resented being an outcast within the Seelie court. Rightfully, and I did less to mitigate that than I might have,” she admitted grudgingly. “But I think while he would have every Seelie in the Barrow-lands put to the
