The king relaxed fractionally, evidently satisfied by the idea that Lara feared him. She wondered if Dafydd had been as impossibly arrogant as his father when he’d left the Barrow-lands to roam the mortal world, and wondered, too, how deep and shocking the change in him must be, if that were so. He must have lived half a dozen human lives in the century he’d spent in Lara’s world, but only a matter of days had passed here, in his own. He may well have returned a stranger to the life and people he’d known. The idea sent a pang through her, as though an unexpected wound had opened and left her with no way to heal it.

“If I may, my lord,” Dafydd offered, as much to Lara as his father. The king sniffed and lifted a finger in agreement. Refusing to be sullied by speaking with a mortal, truthseeker or not, Lara thought. She caught Dafydd’s gaze, struggling against the urge to roll her eyes. The Seelie prince’s mouth quirked, but he replaced the beginnings of a smile with solemnity as he lifted his voice to address the court.

“I have brought to you the truthseeker we sought. Born of the mortal world and carrying mortal magic, Lara Jansen has chosen to come here, a place so foreign to her home that it’s a thing of legend and children’s tales. She knew me from the moment we met: knew me to be other than what I claimed to be, and in so knowing proved her magic. We are all in her debt, myself most of all.” His voice softened as he brought his attention to Lara.

“Myself most of all, for the scant days that have passed in the Barrow-lands have been a full century in her world. Her willingness to join me and search for the truth of Merrick ap Annwn’s murder has ended an exile that has left my heart bereft. I would ask you to do her an honor, and offer her the thanks of all our people.”

A thunderous chant answered him, and Lara flinched straight. She patted the noise down with her palms toward the floor, embarrassment burning her cheeks, and mumbled, “Thank you.”

“I think you might be able to ask us as one, Truthseeker,” Dafydd said as the calls faded away. “Only if you sense discordance in the answers would you have to trouble yourself to ask us individually if we are guilty of this foul deed.”

Lara’s eyebrows shot up, her distress wiped away by Dafydd’s sheer pomposity. He pursed his lips, clearly judging what he’d said by her terms, and amusement creased his features as it had moments earlier when the king had been equally haughty. The impulse to tease him rose, then faded again: she was there to fulfill a duty she’d agreed to. “Dafydd, there ha—”

Another gasp rushed around the hall and Lara’s gaze went to the gathered courtiers, her eyebrows wrinkled in confusion before exasperated comprehension swept her. She’d breached protocol by using his name so casually. Well, the Seelie court would have to adapt: she wasn’t, despite an outward similarity, one of them. “There must be a thousand people in this room, Dafydd. There’s no way I can tell if a handful of them don’t answer, and if they don’t, there’s no truth or lie to sense.”

“A compulsion can be laid,” he offered. “One that will oblige speech, though it cannot force the truth.”

Lara’s eyebrows shot upward. “I take it you don’t have a Fifth Amendment. You can—” She turned away from the throne—turned her back on the king, eliciting yet another shocked intake of breath around the room—and put her fists on her hips. Only Dafydd, she thought, would see how her nails bit into her palms: how she used the bold stance to hide her own worry. “And you’d let him?” she demanded of the court at large. “You’d let him compel you to speak?”

“He is our prince,” Aerin said into a silence no one else seemed willing to break. “We have nothing to hide from him. Of course we’ll allow it.”

Lara, loudly enough to hear in the quiet of the courtroom, muttered, “You really aren’t human,” and turned back to Dafydd. “All right. If that’s acceptable within your justice system, it’s all right with me. But if it’s not someone here, what are we going to do about the rest of the Barrow-lands?”

Another smile spilled over Dafydd’s face. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Elves obviously didn’t say “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”: a rumble of comprehending bemusement rolled through the court before their prince began murmured words of enchantment. As when Aerin scolded Myfanwy, the sense of his words became clear to Lara. Then recognition leapt in her: it was the same tongue Dafydd had spoken in the fight with the nightwings, and she hadn’t understood it at all, then. A few hours in the Barrow-lands had changed her, had deepened her talent already. Lara folded her arms around herself, warding off a cold that came from within. A murder investigation might take days. By the end of that time, she wasn’t sure she’d recognize herself as the same woman who’d walked through a portal torn in the air.

Though, truthfully, she had already stepped so far beyond her customary boundaries as to be unrecognizable. I contain multitudes, she thought, and wondered if the poet who had written those words had ever found himself torn between worlds and choices.

Dafydd’s incantation ended and the court gave a collective sigh, their attention turning to Lara again. She tightened her arms around her ribs, then imagined how fragile and afraid she must look, huddled like that. It was the stance of a woman who didn’t want to be noticed, but she’d come here to offer help. She straightened, taking a breath deep enough to strain her tight-woven bodice, and met the eyes of those closest to her.

Light eyes: they all had light eyes, water blue to golden hazel and clear green, but none of them even close to the brown of her own. Lara stared from face to face for a few seconds, taken aback by uniformly translucent skin, pale hair, and eyes without a hint of darkness to them. For an instant their willowy forms and high-cheekboned faces looked not ethereal but inbred. Nowhere on earth could she imagine corralling a thousand passersby from any handful of streets in that city and finding such an unbroken similarity from one face to another.

They were dying, she thought very clearly, then threw the idea off with a shudder. “Is there a way to test if the compulsion is working?”

Dafydd made a nonplussed sound. “You’ll have to trust me. Or ask everyone individually if they’re obliged to answer, in which case we may as well have not bothered.”

“Fair enough.” Lara backed up until her heels touched the first step of the throne dais, then stood on her toes. “I wish I could see you all. All right. I think I’m going to have to ask a lot of very similar questions to cover all the bases, so I’ll start with … did anyone here murder Merrick ap Annwn?”

She braced for a tide of answers similar to the thanks offered moments before, but was instead greeted with a thousand chimes, like single notes struck from distant triangles. They lifted her, played at her skin and the fine hairs at her nape, making her tremble with their music and taking her weight from her feet. “No,” she whispered back into the purity of their response. “No one here murdered him.”

A sigh of relief tempered with concern washed over the court. Lara felt a stab of sympathy. It would have been easier if one false note had played; if one person had come up untrue and therefore offered an end to their uncertainty. At the same time, the truth reverberating in their answers meant none of their friends was guilty of murder, and that was soothing, too. Lara bit her lower lip. “Is anyone here responsible, in any way, for Merrick ap Annwn’s death?”

Sour notes echoed in the court’s response. Lara pressed her fingers against the sides of her nose and bared her teeth behind the steeple of her hands. “That was an awkward question. Let me try this: Does anyone here feel guilt over his death?”