Within minutes, embarrassment outweighed Lara’s anger. Running away was a child’s trick, and like a child, she’d failed to pay any attention to her path. The citadel’s vast ghostly shape above the trees wasn’t enough to guide her back on the path she’d taken, though she might be able to work her way back by heading toward its graceful spires. Might: the idea of briar rose patches and moats, things of fairy tales, presented themselves to her as likely deterrents surrounding the heart of the Seelie court. The forest seemed improbably thick so close to the palace, wild and grown-over rather than the widespread oak trees and soft undergrowth she’d seen surrounding ancient castles in photographs.

But those were images captured in a different world. Magic bent the rules here; there was hardly any reason to suppose things like forests or landscaping would follow the same patterns they did at home.

The thought felt too big, too unwieldy to be accepted. Lara, overwhelmed, sank into a huddle of moss and branches that softened to make a comfortable seat for her weight. For long minutes she sat with her head in her hands, eyes dry as she stared at the forest floor.

She had no way home except through Dafydd’s goodwill. Scorning him, despite his treachery, had been a mistake, though even as she admitted that, irritation washed through her. He ought to have followed her, for all that she’d told him not to. The contradiction pulled a reluctant smile to her lips: men, whether human or fae, were right to be confounded by women.

“And so we are,” came a voice from the forest. Lara jolted in her mossy chair, too entangled to come to her feet. “Forgive me,” the voice added. “I forget how silent the forest is until the silence is broken. I am Oisín.”

He came out of the trees as he spoke, a bent and ancient man with a heavy staff and filmed-over white eyes, though his step was more certain than Lara’s had been as she’d run from the palace. Like everyone she’d seen, he was dressed beautifully, but there was nothing ethereal or inhuman about the soft robes he wore. The collar was high, the shoulders winged, the colored wraps around his middle of the finest material: each piece was as richly made as anything that graced the Seelie, and yet the whole was somehow imbued with a solidity that made the old man as human as Lara herself was.

Oisín settled into a hummock across from her, smile flitting across lips thinned with age. “It’s only in our youth that they can dress us and make of us a semblance of what they are. You carry Myfanwy’s gown well, better than I ever wore their fashions, and I have not been young for a long time.”

“How long?” Lara cleared her throat, trying to erase the crack in her words and her discomfort at asking the question.

Another smile danced over the old man’s mouth. “Oh, forever, to be sure, by the reckoning of those such as you and I. Eight hundred years,” he added more softly, and gave a shrug as easy as a younger man’s. “Perhaps longer. Time here is not the same.”

“Eight hun—” Lara broke off, staring at the old man.

He spread his fingers, promise of a story, and made a song of his answer. “Another truthseeker of human origin might have sought the heart of ancient legends, delving into their truths, but that seeker would have lived a life unfulfilled, Lara Jansen. Legends are born of men, and men must die, and with them the truths only they can tell. Not even the strongest of magics can draw honest tales from the dead: memory is too fragile, and deeds done to greatness are easier remembered as wonders, even by those who did them. You’ve chosen a wiser path, creating beautiful things for the world around you. There is joy in that, where there is rarely joy in truth.

“But here I am neither dead nor mortal, and so I can give you a truth that no one in the world we both came from will know or believe: it is, after all, only part of another story.

“There are things that open passages between the worlds. Magic, such as that which brought you here, but mortal words, as well: poetry or song, when it’s crafted just so. I was a poet even before I came here, and that gift let me glimpse my lady Rhiannon across the breach between the Barrow-lands and our own home world. I followed her here. They will say in the stories that I fell back to my own world a blind old man, but in truth I stepped back a youth with all my own strength still mine.”

“But time had passed you by,” Lara whispered. “How much time?”

“Enough. Enough that I no longer knew the young men, or even their grandfathers. We were less careful in the keeping of years then, but when I heard my own name in a song about the fair folk, I knew that it had been time enough that I no longer belonged with mortal kin. I began to write again,” he murmured, “and in time the walls faded a second time and I returned to the Barrow-lands. Here I was granted immortality, but even Seelie magic isn’t enough to hold youth on a once-mortal frame.

“I have not been young in eight hundred years,” he said again, then smiled on a sigh. “But I lived among the Seelie, not yet old, for such a very long time before that.”

“Forever,” Lara said in a small voice, and the unwelcome ache of truth rang through it.

“Forever,” Oisín agreed. “There’s my tale, Truthseeker, and now I have yours to spin for you. It’s my own fault you’re here, and for that I offer apologies and gladness. If we have time, I would like to hear what’s become of the world I left; there have been no visitors in so long that I’ve lost all sense of it.”

“I don’t think I’d know where to begin.”

The old man’s smile came again, a comfortable expression, as though he’d long since given up regrets and found pleasure in each moment as it passed. “My story for you is the more important. Did young Dafydd tell you of the prophecy?”

Lara’s eyebrows arched. “Young? How old is he? And, yes, some kind of chant that I don’t remember. Except the part about breaking the world. I can’t do that. How could I do that?”

Oisín, wryly, said, “Here, everyone is young except for me.” His voice dropped into a singsong, losing the music of his earlier tale. “Truth will seek the hardest path, measures that must mend the past. Finder learns the only way, worlds come changed at end of day. I know,” he added, amused. “The poetry lacks. My own work is, I like to think, better, but these are words that come to me in fits, as visions of the world to come.”

“But that’s not what Dafydd said. He said—” Lara pressed her fingertips to her eyelids, trying to draw up the memory. “The first part was the same, but the second part changed. Something about … spoken in a child’s word, because he apologized for that. Spoken in a child’s word, changes that will break the world. That’s what he said. Why did it change?” She glanced up to find a frown etched between Oisín’s eyebrows.

“Prophecy … flexes. It alters as circumstances do. Changes that will break the world, spoken in a child’s word, or finder learns the only way, worlds come changed at end of day. There’s something gentler about the newer version, is there not? Though I fear either way this land will not be what it was, Lara Jansen, when you are finished here. If you meet any other seers, ask them for a foretelling. The differences may be important.”

“If I meet—Am I likely to?” Lara stared at him, uncertain if interest or fear dominated her emotions.

“No,” Oisín said, suddenly genial again. “The gift is as rare as truthseeking, and no one else in the Seelie court bears it. Still, you’ll return to our world, and we mortals have a knack for surprising even ourselves.”

“I think I’ve had enough surprises for one day. What do the rhymes mean?” Lara shook her head before the ancient poet spoke. “You can’t tell me, can you?”

“Not the way you would like me to, no.” He leaned forward, offering a hand. Lara put her fingers into his, surprised at his warmth, and at the strength with which he imparted comfort with a squeeze. “I could tell you of mystical journeys and unfolding power, but I think even the most literal-minded of truthseekers might gather that much from the prophecies.”