Wayfinder (39 page)

Gold ripped across the citadel, like the worldwalking spell turned the size of the land. The Barrow-lands folded around them, inverted, and spat them out its other side.

“You are not here,” Oisín whispered in Lara’s ear, but he wasn’t there when she looked for him. She retained a reassuring grip on the staff, but she was otherwise alone under a healing sky. Gold leached away, leaving a growing streak of blue behind, as if someone wove fabric together at an impossible speed to create a picture and hide what had been there before.

There was a wrongness about the streak across the sky; a wrongness that she’d felt time and again with the worldwalking spell, only much greater. The worldwalking spell was a tiny breach, a tear that even she could put to rights if she wanted to. The magic stitching itself together above her was primeval in its strength.

And its music was relentless. Like the earth’s song, it rang in deep tones that stretched so far that Lara couldn’t hear a beginning or an end to even one note, much less the entire symphony. Only divinity could sing that song. Lara shivered, pulling her gaze from the sky to study the world around her.

Familiarity struck a hard chord of surprise within her. She stood on an ocean shore, silver-gray water idling in an elegant cove. Behind her, green mountains rose. There were no roads, no signs of farmers or civilization, but the valley was unquestionably the hidden home of the remaining Unseelie people.

A woman walked out of the sea, water streaming down her shoulders and turning to soft flowing robes of shimmering blue. Slicked-back hair dried with each step, until it crackled full and white and fell well past her hips. Aerin’s hair had been like that, only somehow
less
so, as if this woman’s were the ideal, and everyone else’s a modest shadow.

This woman
. As if there was any doubt that she was Rhiannon, Llyr’s daughter and goddess of Annwn. She was slightly less alien than her father, but by comparison to her, the elfin races’ exotic features seemed as blunt and thick as humans. She was porcelain to their stoneware, so beautiful that Lara’s heart ached to look at her.

“None of us are here,” Oisín’s disembodied voice whispered, rich with sorrow. “We can only observe, and change nothing. Remember that, even when you would act.”

Time sped forward, Rhiannon exploring Annwn. At first she was clearly pleased, but as she explored, loneliness came over her. She returned to stand at the ocean’s shore like the little mermaid forbidden her home. In time she picked up a white sliver of shell from the beaches and split her palm open.

Where drops of blood fell, Annwn’s people sprang up. From sea-pale to earth-dark, they grew fast and tall and strong, denizens of the earth and of Rhiannon’s blood. Two among them were easily recognizable: Hafgan and Emyr, who laid eyes first on Rhiannon, and then on each other. Ice and fire snapped through the salt-laden air, and a rivalry was born that had not yet found its end.

Rhiannon cast aside her slivered shell, and took no notice when
Emyr and Hafgan both stooped for it, nor when they broke it apart and each secreted a piece safely away, physical symbols of the day of their creation.

Time rushed forward again. Rhiannon’s children multiplied and spread across the land. Rhiannon’s mother Caillech sent rain and warmth to soften the land as Kerne, god of the earth, taught them the ways of agriculture and of shaping stone and wood to build their homes. Others of the old gods passed through Annwn as teachers, then faded away.

Rhiannon herself worked among the Seelie and flitted between Emyr and Hafgan like a butterfly from flower to flower. She saw nothing of the dark looks they exchanged, though many of the Seelie over whom she ruled did.

One by one, over centuries, over millennia, the elders, the first of Rhiannon’s blood, died. There were accidents, there was weariness, there were fights between individuals that turned to doom, until almost none of them were left. Emyr and Hafgan survived it all, growing in power, growing in loathing. Rhiannon wandered to the mortal world and back again, bringing dalliances and lovers with her as she came and went.

Through it all, their jealousy grew. So did the citadels that were their individual homes: Emyr’s in the forests, and Hafgan’s at the sea, each of them like a peacock preening its feathers to attract the mate they both wanted. They were all still Seelie, vibrant and healthy as they lived and loved among each other, no one trend of coloration setting them apart.

Rhiannon opened a worldwalking spell and was gone; gone long enough that it became a lapse, then a gap, in the fast-forward history of the world. Hafgan and Emyr each blamed the other for her disappearance, though she’d been inconstant ever. For the first time a schism was born between forest and shore-dwellers. Emyr’s forest-folk claimed the name “Seelie” for themselves, degrading Hafgan’s
faction to the “Unseelie,” the unreal people. Individual dislikes became periodic skirmishes between groups. The land responded, encouraging one or the other. Lara heard confusion in its music, its uncertainty as it looked for a master with the strength and gentle confidence shown by Rhiannon.

By the time Rhiannon returned with a handsome mortal poet at her side, the rival kings had developed a taste for power.

It was in their eyes—in the way they watched her—and in the way the deference they’d once shown was now frayed. They were the last of the old ones, the last born direct of Rhiannon’s blood, and there was no one but their queen and goddess to hold their ambitions in check. But her attention was all for the blue-eyed mortal who told tales of love and rue.

Bit by bit, Hafgan and Emyr slipped away from her.

Time slowed suddenly, events now unfolding at a pace that made words and motivations comprehensible. Hafgan and Emyr stood at a forest’s edge, green growing up behind Emyr, the distant sea cool and protective behind Hafgan.

“She is lost to us,” Hafgan said.

“She has never been ours. The
land
is lost to us while she remains. Which do you want more, Hafgan? The woman or the crown?”

There was no need to respond: the answer was in Hafgan’s eyes. “Then she must be contained,” Emyr said. “She has no children birthed of her own body, and only we two left born of her blood. Together we can control her. Forget the poet. She will marry us, one or the other, and the other will ask for another wife of Llyr’s blood. For the good of the land, which is weaker than it was when Rhiannon’s children walked it with her.”

Hafgan looked thoughtful. “The truthseekers will never allow it.”

“The truthseekers,” Emyr said, “can be removed. A little time, a little patience, and I see no reason why they should stymie us. Rhiannon will be too charmed with the idea of birthing a child of her
own to notice. One of us will be its father, and with the union we’ll bind her power to ourselves.”

“No. Not ourselves. I won’t give you that advantage, if she should choose you.” Hafgan palmed the sliver of shell from so long ago, blood still red and visible on its edge. “From the sea as she is, and wetted by her blood. Bind her to this, and we have a bargain.”

Emyr reluctantly drew his own bit of shell and laid it alongside Hafgan’s. For the first time in millennia, they sealed together again, a single white shard streaked with ancient blood. “It’s not enough to contain her.”

“It will be.”

Once more, time leapt forward, hissing through decades as the rival brothers secretly, subtly, hunted down the truthseekers who were their world’s arbiters of justice. Their deaths were violent; the abrupt end to their songs shocking Lara each time, though she couldn’t look away.

At the same time, elsewhere, Rhiannon dallied with Oisín and flirted with the brother kings, until she was drawn away from the mortal poet by the enticing prospect of a child of her body. It was Emyr’s bed she came to, perhaps inevitably; he had more of Llyr’s pale look of the sea than Hafgan did, for all that he had made his realm the forests. Wedded, blissful, in love, Rhiannon gave herself up to the idea of bearing children, and Lara had a startling, piercing understanding of the elfin goddess’s innocence. She had created a world capriciously, peopled it out of loneliness, left it time and again in search of new amusements. Through none of it had she become other than what she was: a child of the sea and earth, dedicated wholly to the moment, never thinking beyond the now.

Hafgan and Emyr were not so limited, and with each year that passed, they made her a little more their queen, and a little less their goddess.

It took the hindsight of centuries passing in moments to see it
happen. To see how Rhiannon’s radiance faded until she looked like one of the Seelie: exceptionally beautiful, but not heartbreakingly so. To see how her concern for the land became ever-more entwined with concern for the child growing within her, until that son was born and her attachment to Annwn became an attachment to him. With each small change, a little of what she was slipped away.

And Emyr gathered it, weaving it, commanding it, holding it in his palm. Shared it, year in and year out, with Hafgan. The shard passed from one brother to the other, and Rhiannon faltered and shrank and became less than she had been. Lara’s heart pounded like a racehorse’s as she leaned against time’s constraints, desperate to warn Rhiannon of her fate.

Oisín did, even at the time. Still young, still handsome, but importantly, mortal and able to see treachery in a way that the stagnant Seelie could not. Rhiannon’s fondness for him never faltered, but neither would she hear the prophecies he made, and he was helpless then as Lara was now, watching a goddess crumble.

Níamh came from the sea early in the brothers’ plot, wedding Hafgan as Rhiannon married Emyr. She was fair and bright, like sunrise on the sea, and there was less of her to begin with than there had ever been to Rhiannon. Merrick’s birth was her ending, and had perhaps been so since the moment she left the waters.

For the briefest moment, in the scant handful of years after Níamh’s death, Rhiannon recovered some of what she had been, as if her sister’s loss awakened the goddess within her. For a little while she was vivacious and full of laughter, fascinated by the boy she’d given birth to, doting on Oisín once more, and freshly delighted to find herself with child again.

Emyr, though, was displeased, and Hafgan furious. That sparked the exchange of firstborn children, the exchange that led, on all paths, to Lara entering the Barrow-lands herself.

In the distant past, Dafydd was born. Rhiannon faded again,
Emyr working hard to strip away the energies she expended in giving birth so they could never return to her. The magics reminded Lara of the worldwalking spell, setting in motion things that were never meant to be, but which were made possible by the very godhead whose power they stole. The shell was as long as his arm now, Rhiannon’s bloodstain upon it still an indelible link between goddess and land.

The ending came in a rush, for all that Lara knew Rhiannon had only scant years to live once Dafydd was born; that she would drown in the sea saving Merrick, and everything would change for Annwn.

And it did, but not in the way Lara had imagined.

Rhiannon rushed into the water she’d come from, determined to save her sister’s child. The sea was her birthplace, her home, and sudden raw strength roared through her, a reminder of what she’d been. Tumultuous song filled Lara until she felt like she might fly apart with it, but Rhiannon had no such fears. She gathered that power, remembering what it had been to be Annwn’s goddess, and still within the sea, she pushed Merrick to shore on a wave of compassion and rage.

And there on the shore, at the edge of sea and sky and earth, Emyr drove the bloodied shell shard into sand; into the sea-laden earth at water’s edge, and worked a magic to put all history to shame.

The pieces to make the spell were Rhiannon’s, not his. The sea her father, the sky her mother, the blood her own, and so it was the magic of Annwn itself that Emyr commanded. But Annwn had no will of its own, and could only be directed.

Directed by a king, himself made of Rhiannon’s blood, who was the closest thing to the goddess herself the land recognized.

Everything Rhiannon threw at the shore, her impotent anger, her desire to save Merrick, her memories of what she had been and what
she might yet again be, came together at a single focal point. Emyr took them all in, draining Rhiannon of all the strength she might ever wield, and bound it in an item of power.

Lara opened her eyes, finally recognizing the rage within the staff as the terrible fury of a goddess confined.