Truthseeker

by C. E. Murphy

  “Only a truthseeker’s help.” Something in the words stood out, making their obvious content so shallow as to be meaningless. Lara got to her feet, suddenly uncomfortable. “Tell me what you mean by that.”

  “If our legends are revealed as history, then I’ll need a truthseeker’s vision to turn the tide of war in my favor.”

  “Emyr mentioned that,” Lara said thinly. “That truthseekers could say something and through force of will make it true.”

  “The most powerful, yes. If your skill isn’t that great, then I would give you maps of our lands so you might show me ahead of time where our enemy will strike, and give us the advantage.”

  Lara lifted her gaze to the far side of the pool. She heard music, not in Ioan’s words, though his conviction rang there, too. No, it was a chime, a warning that seemed to start behind her heart and fill her chest. “And if your legends are just that? Legends? If there’s no lost worldbreaking magic, if the Unseelie are trespassers on Seelie land?”

  Ioan’s silence drew out long enough to answer her without words. Lara’s heartbeat fluttered, a butterfly sensation that clawed her breath away. Her ears pounded with the relentless thin tone of bells, almost drowning out Ioan’s eventual response. The words came slowly, as if he was only just coming to realize the truth: “I’m sorry, Truthseeker, but I can’t let you go.”

  A breath hissed through her teeth. “So you’re not such a good guy after all. You’re very reasonable, but not a good guy. I can’t let you keep me.” She recognized the music now, recognized the feeling it built in her, though it had been far less intense in the forest outside the Seelie citadel. It rang so loudly a path appeared, striking its way through her heart and leading into the pool, where it reflected hard against silver stones.

  “I think you cannot stop me.”

  Lara whispered, “But I can,” and stretched out a hand toward the water. “There’s a true way through these woods. A true way home again.” Laughter akin to panic knotted itself in her throat, and she reached for the only phrase she could think of that would unlock a magical door: “Open, Sesame!”

  A silver-shot door tore apart the bottom of the pool, water draining at a tremendous rate.

  Lara dove in, leaving Ioan’s shout of protest behind.

  She hit muddy earth with a squelch, breath knocked away. Silence rang out around her, more than just a cessation of music. It had a quality that said an instant earlier the air had been full of voices and laughter, and that surprise had taken delight away.

  She ached with the impact against the ground, armor jabbing her uncomfortably, but not badly enough to force her to move. For a brief eternity she lay where she was, facedown in damp earth, struggling for breath. She thought she might be glad to lie there forever, except an uncertain voice said, “Lady, are you okay?”

  Lara flipped onto her back in a spray of wet sand. Sunlight burst in her eyes, blinding her before a ring of children leaned over her, curious faces blocking out the sun. A dozen or so, more children than she’d seen in total within the Barrow-lands, and all of them with ordinary round human ears and varied skin tones and eyes that ranged from brown-black to pale blue.

  “Are you okay?” a little boy asked again. He was dripping: all of the children were, despite the brilliant sunlight.

  “I think so.” Lara sounded hoarse, but no discordance rang with her answer, relief in itself. “Where am I?”

  “The farm park,” the boy said. “Where’d you come from?”

  “Fairyland,” Lara said without thinking, and a little girl smiled brilliantly.

  “Are you wearing fairy clothes? They’re all shiny!”

  “That’s armor, dummy,” the boy said scornfully. “Like the Power Rangers wear.”

  Lara sat up, the ring of children moving slightly to keep her surrounded. Sunlight glittered off a metal slide only a few feet away, her landing-place the sandbox at its foot. Swing sets and jungle gyms were strewn about, children arrested in their playing to watch the gathering around Lara. “The farm park? Is that in Boston?”

  The little boy looked nonplussed. “We live in Arlington. Are you crazy?”

  “I don’t think so. Thank you for …” Lara trailed off, words lost under a barrage of fairyland questions from the girls and a growing interest in her possible insanity from the boys. Her hand went to her hip, looking for a cell phone that was still back in her office at Lord Matthew’s. She encountered an empty scabbard instead, and dismay seized her. “I really must look like I’m from fairyland.”

  The children scattered as running footsteps heralded an adult’s arrival. Lara lurched to her feet in time to be greeted by a scowling, worried woman who snapped the children farther away before demanding, “Where did you come from? A pool full of water fell out of the sky, and then you did. I didn’t seen a—an airplane?” She looked skyward, and Lara did, too, remembering urban legends she’d read about scuba divers found in the middle of forest fires, dropped there by helicopters scooping seawater to battle the fires with. She wished she had a similar story to explain away her arrival.

  “I’m not sure how I got here. I’m sorry, but could I possibly borrow a cell phone?” she asked, abruptly hoping she could brazen it out. “I left mine at work yesterday.”

  The little girl grabbed the woman’s hand. “I think she’s magic, Mommy. She says she was in fairyland.”

  Lara winced, painfully aware that “being in fairyland” sounded like a euphemism for drug use. The woman pursed her lips, looking Lara up and down, then wordlessly drew a cell phone out of her purse and offered it. “Thank you,” Lara whispered, and edged out of the sandbox to sit on the bottom of the slide as she dialed the only phone number she had memorized.

  “Lord Matthew’s Bespoke Tailoring Shop. This is Cynthia, how may I help you?”

  “Oh thank goodness, Cynthia.” Lara laughed in relief. “This is Lara. I’ve had the most incredibly strange night, and I’ll tell you about it, but right now I was wondering if you could grab my jeans and shirt from yesterday and bring them to, um, the Arlington farm park? I really need a change of clothes.”

  “Lara?” Cynthia’s voice cracked, then turned angry, clashing with the sound of bells. “This isn’t funny. Who is this?”

  “It’s—What? This is Lara, Cynthia. Lara Jansen. How many other Laras do you know?”

  “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but call this number again and I’ll report you to the police,” Cynthia snapped. “Lara Jansen disappeared seventeen months ago.”

  Nineteen

  The phone went dead, leaving Lara to stare sightlessly across the playground. Details filtered in, unattached from active recognition: things she’d noticed without thinking about them. The children wore shorts, T-shirts, sandals. The sun was high in the sky, pouring warmth over the city. There was no cold breeze, no slush, no leaden gray skies. The only dampness was in a ring around her.

  Lara handed the phone back. “It’s summer, isn’t it.”

  The woman gave her an odd look. “Yes.”

  It had been winter when she’d left. Lara nodded, the action mechanical. “Thank you. And thank you for letting me borrow your phone.”

  “You’re welcome.” The woman put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and drew her away.

  Lara watched them go, Cynthia’s angry words cutting through the rush of white static in her mind. Lara Jansen disappeared seventeen months ago. Tones of truth in the statement, deep melancholy bells that rang out slowly.

  Seventeen months. She would no longer have an apartment. No clothes, no credit cards, no cash. Her mother would be mourning; Kelly would have moved on with only the occasional regretful look back. And Dafydd had lied, twice. First about his own part in the murder, then about the magic that would hold the passage of time in her world to match the time in his.

  The music of truth flattened, souring with the last thoughts. Lied, Lara amended, or had been mistaken. She could bend that far, though doing so felt brittle. It hadn�
��t been his magic that sent her back home, but her own. Maybe truthseeker magic wasn’t meant to open paths between worlds, and had warped the spell.

  The how didn’t matter. Cold with disbelief, Lara stepped out of the sandbox and shuffled away from the playground toward a life that no longer existed.

  It took almost an hour to hail a taxi: most drivers looked right through her, and Lara, clad in Barrow-lands armor, couldn’t blame them. She wore a tunic and leggings under her armor, but she was reluctant to discard it: it was the sole tangible thing she could offer in explanation, or excuse, for her disappearance. She did tuck her gauntlets, awkwardly, into the belt meant for her sword.

  The cabdriver who eventually picked her up regaled her with stories about fighting somewhere called “Pennsic” with a reenactment group specializing in medieval costuming. Lara, too grateful for words, listened silently and wondered what he would think of the real battle she’d seen.

  He was now parked outside of the brassiere specialty shop Kelly had worked at a year and a half earlier, waiting for Lara, who pushed the door open with nerves making a pit of sickness in her stomach. A blond girl she didn’t know looked up with a smile that turned plastic with astonishment. “Um, hello. Can I help you?”

  “Hi, I’m—” Lara blushed, stumbling over an explanation she knew wasn’t necessary, but couldn’t help offering. “I’m not here to shop. I don’t need a bra. I’m just a thirty-four B, it’s not like it’s hard to find bras that fit, and I know I look really weird—” She bit her lower lip, trying to stop babbling. “Sorry,” she said after a moment. “I was wondering if Kelly Richards still works here?”

  The girl’s smile had turned increasingly panicked all the way through Lara’s fumbling explanation, and turned to a squeak of relief at the eventual question. “Yeah, she’s my manager. Hang on and I’ll get her.” She disappeared into the back and Lara returned to the door, waving to let her driver know she was still there. He was on his cell phone, chatting, she imagined, to some other reenactor, telling him about her armor.

  “Hi!” Kelly’s voice came from behind her, loud and cheerful. Lara’s hands went cold and she turned jerkily. Nerves seemed ridiculous when it had been only a day or two since she’d seen Kelly, but she still heard Cynthia’s anger. Seventeen months.

  Both color and cheer drained from Kelly’s face. She said nothing, only stared with disbelief so profound it didn’t even allow for hope. In her wake, Lara saw the shop assistant shift uncomfortably.

  “I need to pay the cabdriver,” Lara finally whispered. “I’m sorry, I just—I don’t have any money, and I didn’t know who else to come to. Mom’s so far out of the city. …”

  Kelly jolted like someone had run electricity through her, flipping from shock to business in an instant. “Right. Right, hold on.” She grabbed a purse from behind the counter and swept out of the shop.

  Lara reached for a display rack as her knees failed, relief stronger than nerves had been. The assistant squeaked and scurried toward her in concern, but Lara waved her away. “I’m all right.” Polite fiction, not exactly a lie, but not true enough to sit comfortably on her tongue.

  The shop doorbell jangled as Kelly charged back in. Lara turned halfway around and Kelly caught her by the shoulders, her color returned and burning hot in her cheeks. “What’ve you—Where’ve you—What’re you wearing? Oh my God, Lara, is it you?”

  She burst into tears before Lara could answer. Heart aching, Lara pulled her into a hug and sought the shop assistant’s gaze. “Can we go in back?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, of course.” The blond girl ushered them toward the back of the store, Lara guiding Kelly as she sobbed. The assistant—Ruth, Lara finally saw on her name tag—whispered, “I’ll get some coffee,” and rushed out again. A moment later the doorbell rang again, and the distinctive click of a lock told Lara they were safely alone and wouldn’t be disturbed.

  With Ruth’s retreat, Kelly dragged in a hiccuping breath and swiped tears from her eyes. “I’m sorry. I just thought I’d never see you again. Lara, what happened? Where have you been?”

  “It’s okay. And … Kel, this isn’t something I say a lot, but you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Kelly grabbed her hands hard enough to hurt, eyes wide, like if she blinked Lara would disappear again. “Of course I’ll believe you. You never lie.”

  “I know. It’s just that it’s unbelievable.”

  “We thought you were dead,” Kelly whispered. “You’re not. Anything’s believable, if you’re alive. My God, Lara. What—You have to tell me. You have to tell me.” Then dismay contorted her features even more, words tumbling on top of one another: “Unless, I mean, unless you don’t want to. If it’s been horrible and of course it probably has been—”

  “It’s only been a day,” Lara blurted, stemming Kelly’s apology more thoroughly than she’d imagined possible. “I know,” she said as confusion and worry overwrote the dismay on Kelly’s face. “I know, it’s impossible. But it’s not like I have amnesia or am missing a year and a half of my life. It’s been barely twenty-four hours since we helped Rachel move, as far as I’m concerned. Do you still have the Nissan?” she asked wistfully.

  “Yeah, it’s been a great little … Lara, it’s been seventeen months. You can’t go around telling people it’s only been a day. That’s insane.”

  “It’s true.”

  “How?”

  Lara pulled a smile into place, feeling it fracture around the edges. “David Kirwen turned out to be a prince of fairyland, and he brought me there for a day.”

  “Da—” Kelly gaped at her, then grabbed her hands. “Lara, David Kirwen was arrested on kidnapping charges two days after you disappeared. They indicted him within a week, and flagged him as a flight risk because of his dual citizenship. He’s been in jail all this time. The trial’s coming up soon.”

  Only then did what Lara had said seem to catch up with her. Her hands loosened, something Lara saw more than felt: her own fingers had gone cold. She whispered “Arrested?” at the same time Kelly said “Fairyland?”

  “Two days after I disappeared?” Lara got up and began shedding her armor, an awkward enough task that she was glad she hadn’t tried it at the playground.

  Kelly, visibly restraining herself from questions, got up to help. “The last anyone saw of you was at that AA meeting on Sunday morning. When you didn’t show up for work Cynthia was worried, and I went over to your apartment and no one was there. The door wasn’t even locked, Lara. The last person you’d called was David Kirwen, and the next morning you still weren’t anywhere, but he came parading down Cambridge Street in a ridiculous—”

  Her hands flew from the binding straps on the armor to her mouth, eyes large above her fingertips. “In this ridiculous suit of armor,” she said through her fingers. “My God. It looked just like this, Lara. It was just like this.”

  Lara unlatched the last bit that held the arm pieces in place and set them aside, then loosened the breastplate. Her next breath came easier, for all that the moonlit armor was as weightless as metal could be. “We’d been in battle.”

  “Battle,” Kelly said after what felt like hours of silence. Lara heard the attempt to hold back disbelief and caught Kelly’s hands again, squeezing her fingers apologetically. Diamond glittered, catching the light and fading again as she made herself meet Kelly’s eyes.

  “Go ahead. Say it.” Then her gaze jerked back down to the clear jewel in the ring on Kelly’s finger. “Oh my God, Kelly, are you engaged?”

  “What?” Kelly looked at her own hands as if they belonged to a stranger, then pulled them back from Lara’s grip, hiding the solitaire ring. “No. I mean, yes, but this didn’t really seem like the time to mention it.”

  Lara sat down in a clatter of armored legs, light-headedness sweeping her. The summertime heat, the phone call to Cynthia, Kelly’s reaction to her appearance—she had believed months had gone by, but the evidence presented by a half-carat ring brought home
the passage of time in a way nothing else had. “It was only yesterday,” she said faintly, and it rang with a dichotomy of truth and falsehood. “Who is he? An undertaker?”

  Color rushed along Kelly’s cheeks. “No. That stopped seeming funny after you disappeared. It’s Dickon, Lar. Dickon Collins, David’s cameraman. We were both looking for you, he was determined to find you to prove David was innocent, and I don’t know, I’d liked him in the first place and … I wasn’t going to have a maid of honor,” she whispered. “I wasn’t going to, because there wasn’t anybody but you I wanted to ask.”

  “Oh, God, Kel.” Lara leaned forward to hug her friend. “Congratulations. And I would love to be your maid of honor, if you’re asking.”

  “I am.” Kelly returned the hug hard, then sat back with tears staining her cheeks again. “I am, and I want to tell you everything about Dickon and the wedding and everything, but fairyland, Lara? Battle? I know you don’t lie, but that’s …”

  “Delusional?”

  “Crazy talk,” Kelly agreed. “Seriously, Lar. Fairyland?”

  “I know. I do know, Kelly. But he was looking for me, for someone with my stupid ability to hear the truth. That’s what upset me so much a couple nights ago at Rachel’s. He’d asked me to go with him, to help him at home. He called me a ‘truthseeker,’ and it felt like it fit.” Lara muffled the words in her hands as she told the story of the past day, ending with the clarity of power that had allowed her to open a doorway back home. Kelly listened in expressive silence, her eyebrows and lips shaping comments she didn’t give voice to.

  “Well,” she said eventually, “you’re going to have to come up with a different story for the papers. Yes, the papers,” she said before Lara asked. “Your disappearance, the kidnapping, it was huge, Lara. Kirwen’s a celebrity. Maybe just a local one, but still. Local weatherman arrested for kidnapping? Everybody was talking about it. So you’re going to need a story.”