Smile lines made deep crevices around his mouth. “They say it used to be. They say the one it’s meant for will reveal its true form.” His eyebrows waggled with the last words, and Lara, despite herself, laughed.

“Do you believe any of this, Jake?”

He sat back with a laconic shrug. “I believed you’d be here today. Believed you’d be looking for this. Guess that means I believe it all enough. So how does the reveal work?”

Lara glanced at the cane again, squinting against another stab of unreliable vision. Dafydd’s glamour had done that to her, once she’d known it was in place. “Oh! Oh. I can almost see through—um, would you like to take a walk with me, Jake?”

“Can almost see through?” Jake finished his beer in a few long swallows, eyed Lara’s untouched ginger ale, then gestured to his cane as he stood up. “A walk sounds terrific.”

Lara folded her hands behind her back like a child resisting temptation. “I’d like you to take it out of here. I’m not quite sure what will happen when I touch it.”

“Curiouser and curiouser.” Jake scooped the cane up and made a show of using it to herd people out of his way as he led Lara to the door. The youths outside scattered guiltily as they left, though one of them whistled and called out a congratulations to Jake as he headed down the canal street with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. Lara grinned, and Jake gave an unapologetic shrug. “Small town. Everybody gets in everyone else’s business.”

“I grew up outside of Boston, but everyone still got in everybody’s business. I think a lot of people went to church just for the weekly gossip.”

“Big Irish-Catholic community?”

Lara nodded. “My family are mostly Dutch and Norwegian, but four of my friends growing up all had the last name Murphy. Different families.”

“Makes the paperwork easy when people get married.”

Lara laughed. “Except these were all girls. The laws might allow it now, but their mothers might never recover if any of them married each other. It was a pretty conservative community that way.” She looked over her shoulder, judging the distance they’d come and the other people out walking along the canal. “Okay. I don’t think anything really showy is going to happen, but I didn’t want to risk it in the bar.”

Jake offered her the cane again, ill-disguised interest in his eyes. “Risk what?”

“Looking at that gives me a headache.” Lara took a breath to steady herself. “That might mean it has a glamour on it, a …” She trailed off, uncertain of how to explain a glamour without sounding absurd, but Jake gave the cane a little shake, obviously eager for her to take it.

“Something to make it look different from how it really is.”

“Right. And I’m a truthseeker, so it’s possible that just holding it will strip away the glamour.”

“You’re killing me here, Miss Lara.”

Lara looked up at him with a smile. “No, I’m not.” Buoyed by that simple exchange of exaggeration and truth, she took the cane in both hands.

Power sparked dissonance against her palms, a vivid shock of what she felt not matching what she saw. A headache flared and she crushed her eyes closed. The cane’s gnarly polished surface faded from her mind’s eye, her hands instead telling her the truth. Patterns were marked against her skin, the cane’s circumference much larger and more varied than what she’d seen. Relieved song swept through her, washing away the last vestiges of untuneful falsehood. She whispered “It’s all right” as if she spoke to a living thing, and squeezed the column in her hands. “Show your true form. I’m the one you’ve been waiting for.”

Jake, reverently, said, “I will be God damned,” and Lara opened her eyes to look at the ivory staff lying across her palms.

It was as it had been in Dafydd’s vision: hollow, carved with intricate Celtic patterns, and considerably longer than Lara stood tall. The ends were solid, as if they’d been capped to give them strength to stand against the wear of use. Despite its age, the ivory was still a rich gleaming white, unyellowed by time, and it tingled with power, as if pleased to be reverted to its natural form.

Oisín, Lara realized very clearly, was more exceptional than she’d known. The staff in her hands wanted to be used, like it had a will of its own that it could work upon the bearer. If he’d carried it as long as he had without turning its power to any ends of his own, then his willingness to be no more than he was was extraordinary. She looked at Jake, who still gaped at the staff, and found herself shaking her head.

“Did you never have any impulse to try to use this for anything? Did it not … tell you it could be used?”

Jake’s eyebrows furrowed and he shook his head. “Not for anything more than a cane, Miss Lara. Why, does it say something to you?”

Maybe it responded to inherent magics. Lara tightened her fingers around the staff, hope surging through her. If her mortal magic could make the staff sing, then Dafydd’s Seelie talent might awaken it far enough to heal him. “It almost makes promises,” she whispered. “Like it’s alive. What it says …” She breathed a laugh, and gave Jake a lopsided smile. “What it says is, I’m going to have to be very careful with it. Thank you, Jake. Thank you for bringing this, and for trusting me.”

“The world needs healing, Miss Lara. Good luck to you, if you’re the one to do it.”

“That didn’t take long.” Kelly eyed Lara’s staff as Dafydd, looking a little refreshed, came from the largest copse of trees available in the park. He studied the staff even more avidly than Kelly, and Lara handed it to him wordlessly.

Color flooded back into his face within seconds. He sagged, but with an air of relief rather than the exhaustion that had dogged him. “It feels like home,” he whispered. “I can hardly believe an artifact of such power has been here for so long and I never sensed it.”

“It was in disguise,” Lara said carefully. “I’m not sure you’d have sensed it even if you’d known to look for it. Someone was waiting for me,” she added to Kelly. “I think they sort of had been for four hundred years. So it didn’t take long.”

Kelly looked faintly disapproving. “I thought finding mystical artifacts was supposed to take great trials. Or at least, I don’t know, Nazis chasing after you.”

“Only, I think, if you’re Indiana Jones.” Dafydd smiled at Kelly, then wrapped his arms around the staff, putting as much flesh against it as he could. “With this and a wild place, I would be well restored in a matter of days.”

“I don’t think we should wait days, but we can at least stop for the night in one of the state forests,” Lara offered. “We should be able to get five or six hours’ rest, even if we want to try to get to the Catskills by morning.”

“But perhaps we should just push through to the mountains,” Dafydd murmured.

Lara shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s already after ten and we’ve had a long day. I could use the rest.”

“A long day,” Kelly echoed. “Is that what you call it? I was thinking more like a horrible, terrible, no-good awful day, and I want a nap. Dafydd, is that thing going to make riding in the car easier for you? Because Lara’s right, we should get away from town sooner rather than later. We can head northeast and get a little farther away from where anybody might expect us and then sack out for the night.”

“The staff will make it much more comfortable, I think. All right.” Dafydd curled a hand around it protectively, then drew in a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. To Lara’s astonishment, his glamour slipped back into place, changing the staff to a cane and taking the elfin edge off his looks. His visage still fluctuated and twisted to her eyes, but to other people, he would look normal again.

Kelly muttered, “That’s flipping freaky, man,” and more clearly said, “Can you make yourself, I don’t know, short, forty, and balding? Because that would be a much better disguise for tromping back to the car in.”