Truthseeker

by C. E. Murphy

  “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.

  Fifteen

  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.”

  “I did finally learn to understand metaphor,” Lara admitted. “‘Truth will seek the hardest path’ sounds straightforward even to me. Truth is always a hard path. But if I’m supposed to be truth, then what about the new line you just said? Who’s the finder? Do your visions show you pictures?”

  “Only words, I’m afraid. Stories have only ever been words to me, even before I lost my sight to age. Your path will lead you to the finder, or you will become what you seek, and we will bend or break with the changes wrought.” A finality came into his voice, like a bell tolling the end of some solemn service. Lara caught her breath, searching for q
uestions that could be given quick, easy answers, but the music and the moment passed before she could voice any. Rueful with defeat, she looked around the wooded copse surrounding them and shook her head.

  “Well, right now the truth is going to have a hard time seeking the path out of here, because I wasn’t paying any attention when I came in.”

  “That,” Oisín said lightly, “I think I can help you with, Truthseeker. There is a path, a true way through these woods, and your eyes should be able to find it. Most could not.”

  “All I can do is tell if someone’s lying, Oisín. I can’t even do that if they think they’re telling the truth.”

  “Have more faith,” murmured the old man. “Close your eyes and look for the light.”

  Lara shot him a skeptical look that went unheeded, his blind gaze serene enough to hint at laughter. She pulled a face, drily certain that Oisín would know it, and closed her eyes as she muttered “Look for the light” to herself.

  The forest’s silence closed around her as her lashes came together. Wind trickled through trees, disturbing leaves, but there were no other sounds: no distant traffic, no whine of airliners, no voices raised in laughter or debate as there were at any hour in Boston’s streets. She had never known quiet to be overwhelming, but in the Seelie forest it had a presence of its own, surrounding her, cushioning her, pressing at her.

  Look for the light, she reminded herself, but truthfulness had never come to her as light or dark; it came as music. Music didn’t, as a rule, make paths, though “follow the yellow brick road!” popped into her mind at the thought. She smiled, imagining such a road unfolding a brick at a time in front of her, though in an instant its color faded to white: yellow brick was simply too much at odds with the deep forest surrounding her. The music changed as well, shying from the perky traveling tune to a more subtle ringing, so deep inside her that for long seconds she didn’t recognize it as a tone.

  Silver: moonlight on silver, so pure it had no earthly counterpart; that was its sound, and in her mind’s eye the brick road she’d built shot forward, drawing a line through the trees. She opened her eyes, unsurprised to find Oisín gone, and even less surprised to find a path leading straight and unbroken toward the ghostly white palace.