“So it’s not necessarily Unseelie magic?” Lara used the word cautiously, uncomfortably certain that the Seelie court regarded it as synonymous with evil or dark.

For all his pale icy colors, Lara saw fire rise in the Seelie king. “Not,” he said with too much precision, “necessarily. But that court has made use of their magics before in ways that this court and these people had never considered and would not condone. This is such a use. I think it more likely, if my son has been used as a weapon, that the wielder is of the Unseelie court, and not this one.”

“Even though they’d be killing their own king’s son? Why would they do that?” Even as she asked Lara knew, and answered her own question: “To provoke war. To create a chance at seizing the land they want. How long did you say you’ve fought over the Barrow-lands?”

“It has been this way for—” Dafydd shrugged, spreading his hands. “Forever.”

“Forever,” Lara heard herself say in a light, disconcerting tone, “is a very long time, to immortals.” Her dress suddenly wasn’t warm enough, cold rushing over her as though she’d stepped into a northern wind. Uncertainty crossed Dafydd’s face, a sign that the strangeness in her voice wasn’t something only she had heard, but it was his father who answered her.

“It is, and yet even I would rest easy with saying it has been this way forever to a truthseeker.”

“And have there been wars over it before?” Lara folded her arms around herself as she turned back to Emyr, not caring that it made her look small and defensive.

The first hint of humor she’d seen in him ghosted across the king’s pale features. “Not in forever. Battles, yes, but never war. The Unseelie have never gathered in such force as will greet us in the morning.” Humor passed, leaving sharpness in its wake. “All of us who live in the citadel are gathered in this room, Truthseeker. If you cannot point us at a murderer tonight, then we who must fight on the morrow will retire, the better to protect our lands and people with dawn.”

“All I have right now is Dafydd,” she said bitterly. “The same as the rest of you. He believes utterly that he was the weapon but not the killer, and no one else in here has even a hint of guilt about them. You might as well go to bed.”

Courtiers scattered away from Lara, from their disgraced prince, and most of all from their bleak-eyed king. Lara watched them break into groups, gossip rising up in whispers before they’d escaped earshot. Even Aerin slipped into the heart of a small gathering, ducking her head to catch the murmurs and speculation of those around her. It was easier to watch them, to wonder at what they said, than to look at Dafydd again, knowing he had betrayed her trust with full and deliberate intention.

Oh, he hadn’t lied, and Lara perversely admired that, but it did nothing to ease the cut of betrayal she felt. He hadn’t lied, but neither had he told her anything like the whole truth, nor laid out the clues that might have led her to asking questions he couldn’t refuse to answer.

Kelly would call him a piece of work for that particular success. Lara cast one hard glare at the floor, then made herself lift her gaze to find Dafydd’s, to see what she could read in his expression.

Humility, even self-disgust, marred his handsome, alien features, and his glance skittered away guiltily before he brought it back to her, seeking forgiveness he in no way deserved. She met that plea coolly, feeling the same well-controlled condemnation in her gaze as she’d laid on him the first time they’d met, in the moment he’d given her a false name.

She ought to have been wiser from that moment on. Subtle complexities of truth were so rare as to be intriguing and exciting to pursue, but at the heart of it he had lied to her from the moment they’d met. When she had been so uncomfortable over his name, she should have known better than to trust that he had been wholly honest with the story that had convinced her to join him in the Barrow-lands.

“Don’t tell me you had no other choice.” Her voice was as clipped as Emyr’s had ever been, and she wondered if she could be as arrogant as the Seelie king. “You could have said you’d been framed. I’d have heard the truth in it.”

“But would you have come with me, knowing I’d murdered a man? You just said I believed what I told you was the truth. That’s not exoneration, Lara. It’s only enough to hang the jury.”

It was a curiously human expression from the Seelie prince, and had her anger been a little less, she might have smiled. Instead she snapped, “Do you even have juries here?”

“No.” Emyr stepped down from the throne dais, regal presence needing no other clarification: he was the beginning and end of the law, uninterested in troubling with juries or trials. “Take your truthseeker away, Dafydd. I have magics to work, and I would have them removed from her influence.”

“And her mortal taint?” Lara asked under her breath. Emyr’s shoulders pinched and he turned a sharp look on her. Lara scowled back, sullen in her defiance and not particularly caring. Nor did she expect an answer, and a touch of her outrage was mollified by the fact that he bothered.

“Yes. Your nearness pulls at the warp and weft of Seelie magic. Oisín was not cursed with immortality without youth; that he ages was the unintended price of magics worked on a man of mortal birth. Now go, as far away as my son can take you without leaving these lands.”

“Who’s Oisín?” For the second time, Lara forwent Emyr’s answer, turning to walk away, arms folded under her breasts. Dafydd scrambled after her, offering an answer she wasn’t certain she wanted, given that it offered him an excuse to talk to her at all.

“Oisín is our seer, the one who sent me to your world to look for you. There are stories about him, legends.”

“I don’t like fairy tales.”

Dafydd, ill-advisedly, breathed, “And yet here you are, participating in one.”

“You son of a bitch.” Shrieking discordance rushed through Lara, infuriating talent picking apart impossibilities and untruths. Furious, frustrated, she spun and rushed away from him, strides just short enough to not be called a run. A moment later she pushed through the audience chamber’s great doors, the violent slap of her palms against them shocking through her elbows. They were obviously meant to open with a mere touch: under her thrust they flew back, startling everyone but her with their bang.

Wind, as if affronted by the assault, snatched at her gown and hair, making her feel like she’d been transformed into a wild thing in the space of an instant, and then fell away again as abruptly as it had risen, leaving Lara with the impression that the air itself was shocked by her mere mortality and how easy it was to rumple her.

“Lara …” Dafydd’s placating voice came after her.

She turned back to him in such a snap of skirts it seemed the wind hadn’t left her at all. “Don’t try to charm me right now, your highness. You’re right, maybe I wouldn’t have come here if you’d told me you’d killed Merrick yourself. But you should have given me the choice. Or did you just think you were being clever, hiding things from the naïve human truthseeker?” Her lips peeled away from her teeth, her expression feral enough that it drove Dafydd half a step backward.

Lara’s snarl turned to a sneer, belittling his cowardice in the face of her wrath. “I’ll help,” she said. “I’ll help because I said I would, but I’m going home the second this is over. In the meantime, stay out of my way.” She whipped around again and stalked away, leaving Dafydd to stand alone on the citadel’s steps like Cinderella’s prince.