“I’ll kick you in the shins.” Wet hair was in her mouth, across her face, and the storm screamed around them just as the staff roared impotence in their hands, but Lara laughed as Dafydd looked disappointed. “I’m sorry. It’s the best I’ve got. Now, listen—”
“I am.” The laughter was gone from his face, wonder replacing it. “Lara, there’s song in the storm. Kettlehead drums and rainsticks and cymbals and—”
“That’s its power,” she whispered beneath all those instruments and more besides. “You’ll be here forever, naming them. But I was talking to the staff.
Resentment churned through the weapon, but its acquiescence was never in question. Not to Lara, at least; she had carried it long enough now to understand its rage wanted release in whatever manner it could get it. Dafydd, though, raised a startled gaze to her as the staff quieted, readying itself to be used. “How do we direct it?”
“Listen to the song.” Lara closed her eyes, reaching for the land’s song, so long drowned by the sea and corrupt kings. It lay below the surface fury, below the thrashing music of the storm, below the stirring earth that responded to the lashing waves. Those were mutable, and had been in so many ways mutated, with Emyr and Hafgan remaking the world in their own image.
But beneath that lay the music of the sea and of the sky; of Llyr and Caillech, who had come together to make the child who became Annwn’s goddess. That song remembered everything, its notes stretching so far back through time that even now the reverberations were from a tune plucked aeons in the past. That music knew how the land and sea had once been, and how it might yet be again, if the crushing weight of Seelie magic was lifted.
Lara whispered, “Sing to me. Show me the way,” and light flew apart from every aspect of the universe.
It was almost like the true path she’d laid down to escape the burning Unseelie city. Almost like the great golden tear through time that had shown them the story of Rhiannon’s fall. Almost, and yet entirely unlike either.
Ancient land formations rose as crescendos of music, fixed in place by light that pinned them to the sky. Orchestras drove the waters back, chased by pathways of light and held where they belonged by an archaic sense of rightness. This, Llyr’s voice sang to her, this was how the valley once was; this was the land she had walked beneath the waters, gifted with his ability to survive there. This was an image of how it was, a true vision, but not even a truthseeker’s magic could unmake the past.
Lara hung on to the staff, hands aching with effort as she held in mind the true landscape, long since drowned. Time fought her, demanding its due: it shot piercing notes through the brilliance holding magic in place. Here and there it won, shattering the way it had been into something new and different. No one and nothing could stop time forever; its ravages would have left their mark whether Emyr drowned the lands or not. Lara held against it as best she could, clinging with all her failing strength.
And then joy ripped from the staff, pure, undiluted madness, held in check by nothing more than Dafydd’s will. The land responded to an influx of familiar power, of Rhiannon’s power guided by Rhiannon’s blood. Where Lara clung to images of what a drowned land had looked like, the world surged up to fill those memories and gaps with earth, and to drive back the seas. Astonishment rippled through Annwn’s song, a sigh of relief that went to the backbone of the world.
Once begun, it went on forever. Rich soil spewed forth, sucking down the salt-laden sand to disperse it deep in the earth, so greenery could grow at the surface. Mountains tore upward, young forests aging rapidly on their slopes. Clouds boiled across the sky and faded, then came again as the atmosphere grew less humid, then more so, then found a balance it was content with. Nothing remained untouched: Lara felt the Unseelie citadel’s granite cavern collapse into the earth, and knew meadows stretched to cover the land it had once claimed. Devastation wracked its way across the countryside, reshaping, remaking, rebirthing a world murdered thousands of years in the past. Time was given its free hand to shape Annwn, but all at once, changes coming in a rush instead of gradually.
Lives would be lost to it, Lara thought, and then felt Dafydd’s determination that it would not be so. The earth changed beneath their feet; beneath the feet of thousands across the countryside, but never heaved them upward nor clawed them down: that was the limitation Dafydd put on the staff’s desires. The land was its to change; the people were his to protect.
The sun was red and raw on the horizon when Annwn’s song finally settled again, content with the new shape it had been given. The wrong horizon: it should have set over the water, and instead rose bloody on fresh mountains. Lara dropped to her knees, releasing the staff and staring without comprehension at the sky. Time had passed, but how much she had no idea. Days, months, even years seemed possible, though a wavering hand passed over her clothes suggested they hadn’t disintegrated so far as months or years might encourage. That was good. There was some hope, then, that she might return home within her friends’ and family’s lifetimes, at least to say good-bye. To make certain, if nothing else, that Kelly and Dickon had returned safely, and to see Boston’s reconstruction in the wake of the staff’s rampage.
“This is more than I might have dreamed.” Ioan’s whisper wasn’t so much unwelcome as jarring, pulling Lara back into the world when she’d hardly been aware of leaving it. The elfin prince had wandered a few feet away and turned slowly, gazing over land that had risen and renewed itself. “I had thought … the Drowned Lands uplifted, nothing more. I had thought of decades working the soil, returning it to health. I never imagined this kind of gift. Truthseeker, we owe you everything.”
“You owe Dafydd and Rhiannon just as much. Dafydd, the staff …?” Lara put one hand in the dirt, bracing herself, and heard a quiet upswell of music, contented earth welcoming her. It wouldn’t last: she was mortal, but for these few moments, the land itself felt she belonged. Muscles watery with exhaustion, she put her other hand out for the staff.
“It’s as tired as we are, I think. That surge of sentience, its desires …” Dafydd shook his head. “It’s quiet now. Almost satisfied. Its work is done.”
“No. There’s one more thing.”
“Can’t it wait?” Dafydd asked, voice low with concern as he knelt before her. “Merrick is punished for his misdeeds, two conniving kings are put to rest, and the Barr—
“No.” For all the uplifting song in Dafydd’s voice, there was even more resolute truth in Lara’s. “I might not ever be connected to my power and this world like this again. It has to be now.”
“You’re not Seelie,” Dafydd whispered. “Mortals who burn themselves out in youth rarely recover, Lara.”
Lara took her fingers from the dirt to slide them along his jaw, drawing him close for a kiss. “Some things are worth the risk.”
She grasped the staff with her free hand, and went searching for the song she knew lay within it.
Dafydd was right: the staff’s magic was as exhausted as they were, lying quiescent even when she brought her power to bear. There was no struggle, no eager leap for domination, only the faintest spark of awareness that said a goddess still lived within the ivory.
True song whispered that she would recover, in time. That the staff would eventually become as dangerous and destructive as it had always been, bent on a revenge it might never have.
Lara, in the depths of that song, whispered, “No.”
It was nothing, that denial. In the face of everything she’d tried, everything she’d learned, the one small word was impossibly soft and almost meaningless. There was no pain of harsh truth written in it, hurting her very being in the way forcing others to hear true things had done in the past.
And it was all the more powerful for its gentleness. It lay down a single line of melody, thin and true, which became a thread of light winding its way into the heart of the ivory staff. It picked up notes as it coiled deeper: single instruments taking up the song of Annwn as it had been and as it should be. Sun, earth, sea; together they were the land, and that, too, was Rhiannon’s music, reflected here and there within the staff’s intricate carvings.
