her face. “Except I did open a way between worlds. Maybe other wayfinders always could, but only the blood of the land has been able to since they were massacred. Assuming wayfinders and truthseekers are always the same. Are they?”
“It has been far too many millennia since either have walked this world for us to know. Now,” Oisín said gently, “open a pathway, Lara. Bring us to the stables, so we might go to the shore where this story began, and bring it to an end.”
They were a motley enough group, Lara thought, all of them wind-whipped and weary from a ride that had taken more hours, even on distance-eating horseback, than she could count. Aerin had frowned at the earth time and again, muttering about its discomfort, and when Lara reached for its rich music, she found shards and tones of dissonance, its song gone wrong.
“No one is guiding it,” she’d finally realized aloud. “It’s been listening to Emyr and Hafgan for aeons, and now they’re both asleep. The magic isn’t working as well as it should.”
“I’ve been Annwn’s king for centuries,” Ioan protested. “Shouldn’t it hear me?”
“Emyr and Hafgan stole the power to make it hear them, and they literally rose from the earth and from Rhiannon’s blood. I don’t think just being her son and wearing a crown will do the job, Ioan.”
They rode in silence after that, Lara searching out glimmers of true paths to help the horses cross the land, but even so, the journey was exhausting. Aerin, already worn to the bone, looked emaciated by the time she slid from her horse and leaned heavily against its side on the unwelcoming shore.
The seas were heavy, rolling slate gray and foamy white against shifting sands. The sky spat cold rain as if trying to drive Lara and the others back into the valley. Song turned against itself, disharmony in the clash of thunder and lightning. Lara bent beneath its clamor, trying to find the soothing slow notes that were a land at peace, and finding herself pummeled and headachy instead.
“Shh, shh. I can’t think, I can’t make sense of anything with all the noise.” The complaint was whispered into uncaring wind, words snatched away. Lara pressed her fingertips against her temples, struggling to concentrate. There was a truth buried deep in the land, the truth of Rhiannon’s deposal and of the slow corruption that had changed Annwn to the Barrow-lands. Rhiannon’s truth, her story, had been drowned, but it could be lifted again and Annwn set right, if Lara could only hear its song through the storm.
“You’ll need this.” Oisín offered her the staff, warmth from his hands still marking the ivory as she took it. “Not even a truthseeker can raise the lands without Rhiannon’s help.”
“I can’t.” She had learned so much, come so far, but this truth was a stark and simple one. “I can only just manage to control it when things are stable, and this is chaos. I’ve used the staff here before and nearly destroyed everything. I don’t know how to master it in the middle of a storm.”
“Dafydd will help you.” Oisín fell back a few steps, gesturing to the blond Seelie prince.
He looked, Lara thought, very much as he had the day she’d met him. His clothes were different, no more slim-cut suit and long raincoat, but the Unseelie garb he wore added enough breadth to his shoulders to remind her of his more-human form. His hair was dark with rain and plastered around his temples, as it had been that day a few weeks and many months earlier. She could see the upward drift of his ears, pointed elfin tips something he would never allow to be visible in her world, but there was enough humanity in him that she smiled.
Smiled, then laughed with dismay as Oisín’s words settled in. “You didn’t see what happened last time one of Emyr’s sons held the staff, Oisín. Dafydd can’t do anything to help.”
“He could not,” the old man agreed serenely, “if he was Emyr’s son.”
Gongs crashed through the storm’s cacophony, dismissing everything else from Lara’s hearing. Images, the memory of time gone by, rose in her vision and replayed themselves, making clear things that had gone unnoticed before. Days played out with impossible rapidity, but not so fast that Lara couldn’t separate them, couldn’t mark details of what happened, and when.
Rhiannon rallied after Níamh’s death, after Ioan’s birth. Became a little of what she had been before, a bright and beautiful goddess, in love with her son and doting once more on Oisín, the mortal poet who had been her companion for so long. Delighted to find herself with child again, so soon after birthing Ioan.
With child, when Lara was certain that she had not gone again to Emyr’s bed. Only her mortal lover had come into Rhiannon’s arms, and in all the world, only three of them knew it.
Confrontation, so quick it had slipped by unseen in the greater view of history: Emyr, outraged, threatening Rhiannon; threatening the unborn child. Rhiannon, cool-eyed and not so capricious after all, warning that Annwn itself would come unleashed should she die or should the coming infant be harmed. She already lacked the power to stop his thievery, but she knew of it. She knew of it, and had made her single move against him.
And Oisín, watching, knew that Annwn’s footing changed, but not how or why. He would have stayed anyway, even beyond Rhiannon’s death, because the land was now his home, and like Rhiannon, it was fond of him. But he stayed for the child, as well, even knowing that Rhiannon’s blood would breed true, that there would be no mark of mortality on the bright-haired boy born to a fairy queen and a mortal poet.
Not until the day Dafydd asked if he might have the staff that so reminded Oisín of his mother. Not until the ivory stave had reacted eagerly, images of destruction sluicing through Oisín. Destruction and then temperance, even against the weapon’s own desires: the very land whispered a promise that it would not be ruined, not if Rhiannon’s younger son wielded the staff against his nominal father. Annwn might be restored, if that battle came to pass.
But not when Dafydd was still little more than a boy, uncertain of his own elfin powers, much less the mortal blood that connected him to a cycle of life in a way no Seelie could ever quite echo. He was ephemeral, capable of choosing a mortal existence, and in that way, didn’t belong to Annwn at all. And only those who were
Dafydd was a dying goddess’s last stand against the kings who had taken her power.
Lara shook herself, throwing visions off to gawk at Dafydd, whose expression mirrored her own. When he finally spoke, it was with a child’s incomprehension, picking one irrelevant detail out of the mass of information he’d come into: “But Emyr’s already dead. Or out for the count, at least.”
“Not even a goddess can plan for everything.” Oisín gestured to Lara and the staff. “She awaits you, Dafydd. Together you will master the magic and raise the lands, and Annwn will be restored.”
Dafydd looked from Oisín to Lara and back again, then swore. Clearly refusing to give himself time to think, he stalked forward and caught the staff on either side of Lara’s hands.
Magic and music erupted around them.
Thirty-six
Lightning spattered, Dafydd’s elemental gift seized by the storm. It arced toward the water and the sky, reached for Oisín and the others, and the staff shrieked anger when Dafydd’s wordless howl called it back and refused its unleashing upon his friends.
It tried again, throwing forth an impulse to drive ivory into the sand, so it might ground itself and break the world apart. Lara shouted that time, familiar with the desire, and called on a strength she didn’t know she had to keep Dafydd from upending the weapon and doing as it asked. “Stop it, stop it, don’t listen to it!”
Dafydd bellowed, “I’m not!” but the lie of it was in his voice, and he knew it as well as she did. Lightning flared again, making a cage around them. Triumph surged through the staff and the electrical cage collapsed, dropping close enough to singe Lara’s arms before it dissipated under Dafydd’s frantic control. “It wants, it wants —”
“It wants to command your magic and destroy the Barrow-lands!” Lara shouted. “Like it did with Ioan’s in Boston! But it’s
A completely boyish grin broke through his panic, disarming not only Lara’s warning but also the staff’s strength, as though it relied on terror to overwhelm him. “You’ll what, Miss Jansen?” Dafydd asked with cheery confidentiality. “What threat does a tailor make? Seven at one blow? Will you slay me a giant, then?”
