Which made the emerald-clad girl in the middle of the room all the more remarkable. She was vivid, the first Seelie besides Dafydd whom Lara’d seen wearing anything but moonlight shades. Her hands were gathered in her skirts and her green eyes were wide with excitement, making her look rather like Cynthia Taylor when her attention was caught by a new project at the bespoke shop. Lara offered a swift, surprised smile to the girl, whose own smile lit up with youthful delight. “I’m Myfanwy, Aerin’s sister. She said you wanted to borrow one of my dresses?”

Lara gave Aerin a startled look, and the other woman shrugged. “We aren’t, with close friends and relations, relegated to mere vocal speech. Impulses, ideas, emotions can be shared, if not words. I sent ahead to let Myfanwy know we were on our way.”

“I think I have the perfect dress,” Myfanwy said breathlessly, and within minutes Lara found herself in the unusual position of playing dressmaker’s dummy. She had spent so many hours as the tailor that she was surprised to discover she was self-conscious, and kept stiffening as the sisters adjusted a gown meant for a taller woman. It wasn’t, she told herself with some despair, that she was short. The Seelie were just unnaturally tall. Aerin, kneeling to stitch a hem, was still more than half Lara’s height.

“How long have you known him?” Aerin glanced up at Lara with studied nonchalance. Pretending to try to put Lara at ease but in reality testing the waters; it was very much the same indifference Lara had affected when Dafydd had offered Aerin his hand. Faintly amused at their awkward camaraderie, Lara smiled.

“In hours? About eleven, over the course of five days.”

“Oh,” Aerin said with an odd note. “Our stories tell us we find your kind easy to glamour and pull into our world at a cost to your own lives. If that’s what Dafydd’s done, I’m sorry.”

“He didn’t.”

Aerin’s eyebrows shot up. They were nearly white, like her hair: the blue tones had faded once moonlight was left behind, and her yellow eyes had proved spring green. “Would you know?”

The question hung between them, marking out the silence between heartbeats. Lara felt heat crawl into her cheeks, an admission of uncertainty broken by a light tug on her hair and a shy, fascinated trill of laughter as her ears were uncovered.

Aerin reached around Lara and smacked her sister on the thigh without losing hold of the work she did. “Behave. The Truthseeker is a guest here.”

The words twisted in Lara’s ears, the sense of them clear, but the language itself wholly unfamiliar to her. She shook her head once, a sharp motion, and frowned at the woman kneeling in front of her. “What did you say?”

“I said behave.” This time Aerin’s speech was clear again. “I apologize for Myfanwy’s impudence.”

“But I heard—” Lara drew a slow breath. “You’re not speaking English, are you. Of course not. Why would you be? What are you speaking? Why do I understand you?”

“It will be part of the spell Dafydd’s cast to bring you here,” Aerin said after a moment. “If you didn’t understand me, it’s because I used our high tongue to scold her.”

“I understood what you meant.” Lara pressed her lips together as too many thoughts fought for precedence. Aerin’s question was a good one: she had come so willingly she might well have been influenced, unknowingly, by magic.

Might have been. There was one clear risk to that gambit, one that she put into words slowly. “I understood what you meant,” she repeated. “Not the words, but the idea of it. The truth behind it. If I can sense the true idea behind words I don’t even know, you tell me: Would you dare cast a glamour to trick me into coming to your world?”

Aerin folded her hands in her lap, studying Lara. “Perhaps not. Not if I thought there was any chance you might realize it, and I would assume a truthseeker would. You should still be cautious of us, Lara. All of us. Even Dafydd.”

Chimes poured from her words, ringing true and clear. Lara, fist still knotted in the fine fabric, nodded, and Aerin lifted a hand to gently loosen Lara’s grip on the skirt. “Then I think you’re ready to greet the court.”

She had not expected Dafydd to be at his father’s side.

In the moment after she assimilated the sight of the slim golden prince beside his father’s iron throne—no, it wouldn’t be iron, a small part of her recognized: fairies weren’t supposed to be able to bear the touch of iron, and so for all of its cold metallic weight, the king’s throne could not be iron. His father’s silver throne, and that was an idea even more overwhelming than Dafydd’s cool remote presence at the king’s side. The throne, tall and spired and shining, engulfed Emyr. Lara felt embarrassingly mortal for being so impressed at a chunk of precious metal.

A very large chunk of precious metal, to be sure: more than most humans might expect to see in a lifetime, much less displayed ostentatiously at the head of a courtroom. Lara shook herself, not caring that every eye would see her do it: she had no reason for pretense. She was a stranger and meant to be awed.

It would have been all right, though, if it hadn’t worked quite so well. And Dafydd, as if catching a hint of her thoughts, quirked a corner of his mouth, which went much further in restoring her equilibrium than she had imagined possible.

He would, of course, be at his father’s side. He was a prince of this realm, and for all she gathered he wasn’t precisely the favored son, there was nowhere else he could be without presenting the appearance of a schism within the royal house. Lara knew enough of politics to understand personal feelings fell a distant second to the illusion of a united front. And they did: the rest of the Seelie court rippled away from them, fading into obscurity when viewed alongside the king and prince. There were hundreds of people pressed into the throne room, all of them slim and ethereal and inhuman, but it was the royals who arrested Lara’s attention.

She, though, held everyone else’s. She’d known she would: that was the purpose of being presented to the court. Knowing it, though, and feeling the weight of so many gazes were different things. If it weren’t for a fear of doing her elegant gown an injustice, Lara thought she might turn and flee. She was a tailor, almost invisible to even the people she worked for, and she had spent most of her life trying not to call attention to herself or the discomfiting gift she possessed.

A gift that every person in the room knew she had, and which they all hoped might give them the answers they sought. Lara, quite certain royalty was supposed to break the silence, cleared her throat and squeaked, “Look, if I’m supposed to ask everybody in this room if they murdered Merrick ap Annwn, we’d probably better just get started.”

A ripple of subdued laughter turned Lara’s hands into slow fists beneath the long pointed sleeves of her borrowed dress. She looked the part of one of Dafydd’s people, or very nearly: she’d seen that in Myfanwy’s mirror.

The gown was probably the finest thing she had ever worn, despite having been made for someone else. Its tall, open-throated collar brushed her jaw and plunged to a narrow V that spilled down the bodice, making the most of her height. The bodice was wound gold and russet velvet, woven alternately until it made a textured cinch that shaped her figure to remarkable slenderness. It loosened at a dropped waist to float into the long, light lines of the skirt, layers upon layers of thin silken gauze. The colors were perfect for her, bringing vitality to her pale skin, and in the gown, she might well have been one of the Seelie, if unusually petite.

And then she opened her mouth, and marked herself as absolutely and unquestionably alien to the Seelie realm. The king stiffened, becoming a blade of ice. Dafydd touched a hand to his father’s shoulder, murmuring, “She means no offense. Her country has no king and no protocol in speaking with royalty. She’s afraid, and trying to hide it.”