Evening had descended on the Sea of Solstices in swaths of rose and amber and fire where the sun was setting. Glitter stars dusted the sky behind clouds, some soft as wisps and others cotton-ball puffs. They drifted ever so slowly past in the same winds that bobbed the ship back and forth as Tárlach’s magic held it on course. Since Fedelmid’s visit, Tárlach had put more and more distance between them; for that, Johnathan had to be grateful.

He had left his coat in the captain’s quarters and stood at the bow; elbows resting on the railing, breeze brushing his ruffled collar, he breathed the tang of salt. It smelled like freedom: this far out, if they didn’t want to be found, then they wouldn’t be. And the farther they were from the Minister’s assistant, the fewer chances they’d have to antagonize each other. She had been the catalyst to their latest fight, after all.

The faerie, in typical fashion, appeared right behind him and plucked Johnathan’s hat from his head. Johnathan turned, scowling.

“Give it here,” he said.

Tárlach shrugged, slid it on, and set it just crooked enough to mimic the roguish attractiveness of storybook pirates. He grinned a glimpse of jagged canines, as if to tease: Look at me! I’m better than you!

Johnathan didn’t take the bait -- he never did.

Tárlach joined him in leaning on the railing and stargazing. “Given any more thought to their request?”

“Only thought I’ve had,” Johnathan replied, “is to go somewhere they will never find us. I’ve had my fill of government corruption and Unseelie antics.”

“Corruption?” Tárlach laughed, at once wry and genuinely amused. “You don’t often throw that one around, do you?”

Johnatha’s tone stayed serious as ever. “No, I don’t. Have you changed your mind about evading the Minister’s people?”

“Of course not.”

There came another pause, this one heavier than the last. Johnathan, suppressing a shiver from unease and not from cold, locked his gaze on his friend’s.

“If we didn’t need to evade them before, we sure need to now.”

“Tárlach... what did you do?”

In a tone of feigned calm, he said, “Threatened her.”

“Threatened her?” Johnathan snatched his hat back, disbelieving. “Why?”

“After how she insulted you, you think I wouldn’t?”

“You’re not my personal guard! Don’t be stupid!”

Tárlach snorted in annoyance. “I told her the same thing I told you -- I don’t expect his rule to last. It’s not democracy itself I’m opposed to; it’s the Minister. Someone should take him down a notch, and all of his little cronies with him.”

“And you’re saying that should be us? Make up your mind.” Johnathan could not help how dry his voice sounded, nor did he want to.

“That is not what I’m saying.”

“Then what are you saying?”

The wind, by now, had picked up speed; it whipped the water into choppy waves and spread seafoam over the surface. Tárlach stepped away from the rail and began to stalk in a circle. Johnathan tucked his hat on against the cold, watching.

“All I mean... is that someone, be they us or some rebel, should expose the Minister for what he is. A greedy, egotistical, fame-driven piece of shite. He blindsides the courts, then he ‘frees’” -- Tárlach held his fingers up like quotation marks -- “his country, and everybody loves him. Oh, he’s so pretty! So bonnie and fair and wise! But peek beyond the flowing hair and fancy new uniforms, and you’ll see the truth. He won’t listen to what the citizens want, or so I’ve heard. Don’t you agree with me?”

Johnathan, out of nowhere, found himself worn down by his friend’s ranting.

“Yes. Yes, I do. Just listen a moment.”

“Fine...” Tárlach’s hands came to rest at his sides. “Talk.”

Before he spoke, Johnathan chose his words with great care. “Going to war wasn’t my choice. Almost being killed wasn’t my choice. And being revived wasn’t my choice, either. Now, I can choose. So, I’m choosing peace and quiet over this failure of a situation.”

A silence fell between them, filled by the steady rushing of the sea.

“Even though we have to run,” Tárlach said at last, “I really hate doing it.”

“I’m sorry.” However much the Taking was not his fault, an apology felt right.

“I understand.” Tárlach gave Johnathan a pat on the shoulder, an unspoken promise that all was forgiven. “It’s your turn to listen to me, alright?”

“Alright, if you’re not going to be stupid again.”

“I’d assume this is smart enough. Johnny, after two hundred years, you know the Farraige just as well as I do.”

“Right, and don’t call me Johnny.”

“Whatever. My point is, how about you choose where to go?”

Johnathan, indignance forgotten and arms crossed, turned to face him. “Are you so sure that won’t end in disaster?”

“I’m positive. Clarity and I can handle whatever destination you decide.”

The beginning of an idea flickered, just a candle flame in a storm, but there nonetheless. He guided Tárlach down the stairs and into the captain’s quarters; behind them, a single thread of light snaked out and swung the door shut. As his friend reclined in his velvet armchair, Johnathan pulled open the top drawer in his desk. It was packed to the brim with scrolls; they remained as crisp as they’d been all that time ago, most bearing minor dents and frayed edges. All except for one. He tugged free the ribbon holding it and let it unfurl across the desk.

“Come here,” he instructed -- politely, of course -- as he picked up a pen and inkwell.

Tárlach approached, the glamour fading from his hair one shade at a time. Ginger locks deepened to forest green. Gazing down upon the map, he began to smile.

Their home was drawn in strokes crisp as Clarity, as though Johnathan himself had seen through the eyes of magic when he had charted by Tárlach’s guidance. To the left sat the Realm’s mainland, a broad shape the top of which drifted apart, piece upon piece. Like a pointing finger, the lower half tapered, then curved, and cradled within was a grouping of islands. East stretched the Sea of Solstices, vaster than the sky, deeper than the mainland’s oldest caves, and it reached to the torn landmasses of the west. War had not torn them so, but the power of the planet, heaving from the inside and shattering continents and melding them anew. And it was the west, not the east, not the barren north or ice-encrusted south, that sent chills pouring over Johnathan’s skin. There, in the center of the right hemisphere, were the British Isles.

But they weren’t the British Isles.

These were Y Tir Drych: the Mirror Lands of the neighboring Kingdom Annwn, from whence came fae to Wales of Earth. A great many tales were told as to why they looked the way they did. From creator gods’ jokes to prophecies of doom, Johnathan did not believe them. But there was no Wales here -- not in Annwn, and not in the Realm, the name of which was written on the east and brought curses if spoken aloud: Tir na nÓg. The Land of the Young.

Even further west, the sailors couldn’t chart. Unless, that is, they died. Beyond what they dubbed the Lifeline, a dotted path on Johnathan’s map, lay an area of emptiness. Both knew, for Tárlach’s childhood stories had warned him, that within this void where nothing was drawn lay Tech Duinn: the House of the Dark Ones. The land of the Dead. Perhaps it was only a portal from Bitu, the Living Planet, and perhaps an island in its own right.

Nowhere near Tech Duinn did Johnathan place his pen. Instead, he trailed it back to the middle of the Sea of Solstices.

He motioned for his sextant, adorned with magnifiers and triangular besides a curved bottom, then his chronometer, mistaken often for a pocket watch. Tárlach plucked both from the deskside bookshelf and handed them forward. From a lower drawer, Johnathan produced a black lacquer box of cleaning cloths. He wiped each part of the sextant, and he shined the chronometer, and he placed them aside.

“Those are for later,” he muttered. “Now. Look.”

His pen nib rested, dry, by a pair of numbers directly on the East-West Boundary. All that accompanied them was a dot, but in Tárlach’s eyes gleamed sudden intrigue. Eagerness to belittle the Minister became eagerness for risk.

“You want me to take us to Equinox Point?”

Tárlach spoke with a wondering whisper in his voice, and by it, Johnathan felt the pull in turn. If their minds were the keys and danger was the lock, then Equinox Point was the door. The island sat at the crux of the Realm’s most perilous trans-hemisphere route. There, mountains rose, black and jagged, from waters as cloaked in secrecy as the real-life mythos of the fae. A glass-plane surface hid crevasses said to have swallowed a continent. Currents with the gravity of the Sun gulped ships that strayed too close. The tales told of the Mirror Lands were unsettling, but these -- these were nightmarish. And when Annwnic traders sailed east, they would first face the freezing south or the northern gales, all to avoid Equinox Point. The Supreme Minister’s vessels were nothing compared to the trade fleets of Annwn: because they didn’t dare try the Point, neither would he.

In two words, Johnathan summarized. “It’s perfect.”

Tárlach dug his nails into dips in the desk varnish left by decades of picking.

“So why are we sitting around here?”

“It’s going to take a lot of magic,” Johnathan said. “You know that.”

With another laugh, the faerie clapped him on the back. “But I’ll have you right by my side, won’t I?”

“Just as always,” he sighed. “How long do you need to prepare?”

“Eh, give me two days.” Tárlach opened the door to leave, admitting a rush of chilly air.

Johnathan, as he lifted a half-empty bottle of rum from the shelf, said, “Wait.”

“What now?”

“No matter how much I complain, this is how things are. And you might be enormously annoying, but --” Here, he hesitated. “But, like hell I would ever change it.”

Tárlach, with a smirk and a wink, closed the door behind him. As night fell in earnest, the traitor and the traitor’s savior awaited their chance to flee.

❦❦❦

Shadows and moonlight dappled the Minister’s office. In silver-prism shards, it streaked down through glass and stretched across the room; the tree trunk table was the brightest, illuminated by a moon at its zenith. And without the sun, darkness danced in corners and around edges, against faces and after movements.

The day had ended with the palace’s highest level being blocked off. Guards lined every possible passage, unquestioning; wonder as many might what was happening in the locked office, nobody asked. Only the Minister and Fedelmid were present, and neither spoke.

Before him sat a tall stack of papers, and a short stack, and a blank scroll. He took a paper from the former, read it, and placed it atop the latter. After that, he wrote on his scroll, feather plume swishing as he did. Though his expression was hidden, tension grew in the air with every cycle. It was a sickly feeling, which needed no words; being near him was enough to prove that his mood balanced on the brink of a storm.

“Fedelmid, listen.”

She straightened her posture, at attention. “Sir?”

The Minister cleared his throat, slid free the first paper he’d seen, and read out loud.

To our collaborators, the People’s Supreme Ministry of the Realm:

As promised in our last communication, we have gathered the information asked of us. After interrogation of Target Manchester Twenty-Three, we can tell You who is involved.

The branches with current direct involvement are English, Irish, and Scottish.

Our Northern Irish branch is likely to know but has not acted. They may act without prior instruction if Dublin Command Center is endangered.

The Welsh branch is, for now, unaware. If the Taking culprit crosses the Welsh border, Dublin will order Cardiff into the investigation.

Onto what we have gathered about the culprit.

General location: England.

Exact location: Unknown.

Gender and approximate age: Unknown.

Origin and species: Death-aligned faerie of the Realm.

Probable affiliation: Unseelie Monarchist faction.

Probable political motivation: Disrupt the Seelie Monarchist faction and unbalance the Realm’s democratic party.

Probable emotional motivation: Revenge.

From Agent Avery and Officer Leary, we will be in touch.

Fedelmid watched, wide-eyed, as her leader tossed the letter down; it landed on the table and fluttered in his wake when he began to pace.

“COURT is aware of rebels’ dissent, sir?” she asked.

“I kept their knowledge from you for good reason.” He turned on his heel, clasped his hands together, and stared up at the unforgiving moon. “It would have worried you. I couldn’t have my assistant doubting me, could I?”

Fedelmid scrambled to answer. “No! No, sir. I would never doubt you. How dare these monarchist scum undermine our rule --”

“That’s enough.”

Flinching, she fell silent.

“You are in no trouble for Johnathan’s disobedience. That one has had problems with authority from the start.”

Fedelmid had not told the Minister of the pair’s threats; she didn’t plan to.

“Thank you, sir,” she whispered. Then, “Minister, sir?”

“Go on.”

“Johnathan is English. And the Taking monster fled there. How the fates align.”

A faint, cool smile appeared on the Minister’s lips. “Morrigan blesses us. We will tell COURT to monitor the Welsh and Scottish borders. Regarding our lands, it’s time we renew a search that has lain dormant for far too long.”

“What search? Sir?”

His smile grew while his tone darkened. “Twelve years have passed since we stopped looking. The human changeling hid well back then, and he will hide better now, but we will look closer. He may even remember who took him, which I plan to ask him. Under one condition, Fedelmid.”

“What is it?”

“That once we find him, our questioning does not resemble interrogation. We don’t want our people knowing of rebel factions. No, we want to stay in their good graces, right? Off with you, now.”

He motioned to the door; Fedelmid stood, curtsied low, and crept backwards toward it, so as not to turn away from him. On the other side, one guard opened it; three more guided her out. And before her, they swung it shut with a thud that rolled like thunder.