Wayfinder

“Hafgan?” Dafydd shook his head above Lara’s. “No. After all this trouble, it seemed foolish to strike him down, though the temptation still remains. If he’s conscious, he may even have cauterized the wound by now, and be waiting on us to make some small error upon which he can capitalize.”

“How did he even get in here? The cairn wasn’t opened, or knocked over, or whatever you had to do to trigger the chamber opening.” Lara craned her head toward Ioan, surprised she could move that much.

“There’s a magic built into the cairn, something old and strong. Rhiannon’s, maybe. I stood and watched as, once taken apart, the stones rolled together again and rebuilt themselves.”

Lara put her forehead against Dafydd’s chest carefully and mumbled, “That sounds like something out of a fairy tale. Oh, my head hurts. You know, we’re lucky he tried to kill me instead of just grabbing the staff. It might be all over now if he’d done that.”

“An oversight I will not make again.” Hafgan, pale with pain, lifted his head and reached for the hilt of the sword pinning him to Emyr’s bier.

His features contorted as he tried to free the blade, but he lacked the leverage and the strength to pull it out. Lara almost admired that he even tried. She hurt badly enough herself that moving much was still nearly inconceivable, without having a length of metal still jammed through her body.

Dafydd, less admiring, rose and crossed to crouch before the Unseelie king, his hand just above Hafgan’s on the short hilt. “An oversight you won’t have the opportunity to make again. Don’t be a fool, Hafgan. Try to escape and I may not be inclined to let you wake a second time. I have the Truthseeker here, and I doubt your state of consciousness will matter to her ability to gather answers from you. Ioan, help me.”

Ioan took a handful of quick steps across the room before fully realizing he’d obeyed without question. He slowed, obviously annoyed, then hunched his shoulders and went to Dafydd’s side. Lara laughed, sparking a new wash of dull pain through her, but humor gave her the strength to stand. She would do no one any good huddled on the floor, and had an idea of what Dafydd intended.

He nodded once as if in warning, then withdrew the blade from Hafgan’s shoulder and dropped it on the floor. The Unseelie king went white, making a sound so sharp it couldn’t reach the volume of a roar. He retained a hold on consciousness, but barely, and when the princes heaved together to lift him from the earth, his head fell back, somnolence claiming him again.

They put him on the bier closest to Emyr’s, dark king and fair lying head to head. Lara took a few unsteady steps toward the unconscious kings, digging into herself for resolve and for magic.

“A step closer,” Merrick ap Annwn murmured, “and she dies.”

She dies seemed an unlikely way to phrase it, though the Unseelie prince’s voice was silken with truth. You die, Lara thought; that would make more sense, and that was what made her turn toward Merrick in puzzlement, despite the threat to her life.

Not hers, she understood an instant later. Not hers at all.

Merrick stood on the earthen rampway with Aerin wedged in his arms. Her eyes were glazed, more than just the exhaustion of extended magic use. Merrick had one arm around her throat and the other under one of her arms so he could grasp his own wrist, giving her no room to maneuver. The muscle playing in his arms said he put pressure on her throat, rendering her into a state of semiconsciousness.

She didn’t so much as claw at him, suggesting he’d caught her entirely by surprise. Had caught her sleeping, no doubt, and recognized her as the valuable hostage she was. Lara took a breath to whisper “Let her go,” and Merrick’s grip on the Seelie woman tightened. Lara raised her hands, placating, and pressed her lips together to seal off any threat of using her voice against him.

“Of all of us in this room,” Dafydd murmured, “Aerin is the one you least want dead, Merrick. My brother,” he said even more softly, an ache in the words. “Merrick, how can this have come to be?”

“How else could it have come to be? Sons are nothing to immortal fathers. What power is there but that which we seize ourselves? Step away from them,” Merrick ordered. “I thought keeping Emyr alive would draw my father here, but I had no idea I would find all the royal blood of Annwn gathered in one room. I was meant to be long-since rid of you. The human world should have destroyed all of you by now.”

“And it might well have, had we not had a truthseeker at our side.” Dafydd took a few steps forward, his hands spread wide and empty. “Let Aerin go. Pitch your battle with me instead. I think you owe me that much, for having me branded a murderer and traitor among my own people.”

“I owe you nothing. I owe none of you anything at all.” Merrick’s grip on Aerin’s throat tightened and what little support she’d been able to offer herself slipped away as she went boneless.

Lara whispered, “May I speak?”

Merrick’s gaze sharpened on her. “If you watch your words.”

Lara nodded once, a promise as binding as language, and breathed a silent prayer that her conjecture would prove right. “You have almost everything you want. You kept Emyr alive to draw Hafgan here, maybe, but there’s more to it, isn’t there? Emyr was Rhiannon’s husband and that might make him first heir to this land. You can’t be sure what happens if he dies, so he has to be kept alive, here in a stasis room. You must have known it was here from stories of the Drowned Lands, and knowing how closely twinned they were with the Barrow-lands. That was clever. More clever than anyone else has been.”

A flash of smug pride lit Merrick’s face, and for a moment she could see his father in his narrow features. He was handsome, as they all were, though anger and pride marred the lines of his face, and the breadth of shoulder that so suited Ioan and Hafgan was less filled out in the Unseelie prince. He wore that like a wound itself, his physicality a little less than those around him, and therefore, she suspected, his need to be praised all the greater.

It seemed a lifetime ago that Lara had made suits and coats for similar men in her own world; arrogant with wealth but always hungry for compliments. It helped that Merrick had been clever, that his plans were well-laid and his deceptions layered, so that truth could align with what she needed to say. “And now you have Emyr and Hafgan both where you need them to be. Resting here, where they’ll lie undisturbed and unawakening while you rule. It’s only Rhiannon’s sons in the way now.”

“I was her son, too,” Merrick insisted, full of childish defiance. “She died saving me. Who would do that for another than her own son?”

There was enough conviction, enough truth, in his voice to draw Lara up. She cast a glance at the supine Hafgan, wondering: no one had mentioned his wife, or Merrick’s mother. “Níamh died birthing him,” Ioan murmured on cue.

The name struck Lara like a gong, music reverberating through her. A professor of Irish studies had mentioned her as another queen of fairyland, a thing Lara had never thought to pursue. “Who was she?”

“Rhiannon’s sister. Another of Llyr’s daughters, but not the goddess of Annwn. She came to us after Rhiannon made this world, and lived in it as her sister did.”

Lara, unwisely, said, “No wonder they hated you,” to Merrick. “To cost them Níamh and Rhiannon both, no wonder they hated you. And no wonder you’re looking to make your own mark,” she added hastily as his expression blackened. “You have nothing else, do you? Only your own worth, which needs to be proved to fathers and cousins who see you as nothing more than the vessel which took their wives and mothers.”

Clanging objection slammed through the words, making her head hurt more, though the truth she spoke was, Lara thought, very close to the one Merrick believed. The rage and hurt on his face spoke to that.

She stepped aside with as careless a gesture as she could make. “They tell me truthseekers were the arbiters of justice in Annwn, once upon a time. This is my arbitration, then: defeat Emyr’s heir in single combat, and I will name you king over all these lands.”

Dafydd gave her one shocked look, and then Merrick cast Aerin away and came toward him in a swarm of swords.

Thirty-three

Lara shrieked a useless protest as two blades glittered in Merrick’s hands. She’d seen the sword at his hip, but not the long dagger on the other, where Aerin’s slumped form had hidden it. Bad enough that she’d thrown