Truthseeker

by C. E. Murphy

  “You believe me?” Lara asked through her fingers.

  Kelly heaved a sigh. “No, but yes. If anybody else told me this, I’d never believe it. But it’s you, so.” She shrugged.

  “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, well, what are friends for?” She studied Lara, eyebrows drawn together. “So what do you do now, Lar?”

  “I don’t know. I make up a story for the papers.” The idea sent atonal vibrations under her skin. “I get Dafydd out of jail.”

  “Can you do that? I mean, with your …” Kelly trailed off, then, brightness coming into her eyes, giggled. “With your, um, your magic powers.” She laughed again, contagious enough to make Lara smile, too. “Sorry. I always kind of thought of it as your spooky power, but I never wanted to say that. And now it turns out it really is like magic.”

  “Just like,” Lara said drily. “Don’t worry. I’m not used to it, either. What were you going to ask?”

  “Oh! Can you do that, get him out of jail with your magic?”

  Lara blinked. “I don’t know. I was more thinking that I’d just tell them I wasn’t kidnapped. I mean, I’m back and I—”

  “Have no explanation for where you’ve been.” Kelly’s eyebrows rose. “It might not be that easy, Lara. David pled not guilty, but he wouldn’t say anything in his own defense. The only reason he wasn’t prosecuted for murder was nobody could find any evidence of foul play except that you were missing. And none of us wanted to have you declared dead,” she said more quietly. “It was too much like giving up hope.”

  “Oh, Kel.” Lara leaned forward to hug her friend again, mumbling “I’m definitely not dead” against her shoulder. “I’m just going to have to make them believe me somehow.”

  “Can you do that?” Kelly asked for the second time. Lara sat up, frowning, and Kelly spread her hands. “Look, all I’m saying is if you can make a path between Boston and fairyland, then just making somebody believe you weren’t kidnapped seems like small potatoes. Especially if it’s the truth.” A wobbly smile creased her face. “You’ve always been good with the truth.”

  “I don’t know if I have that much power here.” Lara’s protest shriveled under a rising chorus of song that lent credence to Kelly’s suggestion.

  Emyr and Dafydd had both made it clear that her magic was purely human, and even the little time she’d spent in the Barrow-lands had strengthened not just her ability, but her confidence in it. There was no reason an earth-born magic shouldn’t be as strong—perhaps stronger—here as it had been in the Barrow-lands. She pursed her lips, then turned her hands palm-up toward Kelly. “On the other hand, there’s really only one way to find out.”

  Kelly got up decisively. “I’ll bring you down to the station. Dickon and I got to know the detective on your case, Reg Washington. He’ll be the best place to start.”

  “What about—” Lara broke off both speech and action, stopping halfway to her feet, then sat back down abruptly, fingers steepled hollowly in front of her mouth. “What about my mom, I need to call her before I turn up on the evening news. And Cynthia, she didn’t believe me when I called. And … and look at what I’m wearing,” she whispered. The light woven shirt and breeches she still wore under the armored leggings would draw curious glances in the best of circumstances, which she didn’t foresee in her immediate future. “And I should call Dafydd. See him. Something. He must think I’m …” Dead. Lost. She wasn’t even certain what words to use. “Seventeen months,” she whispered into her palms, and Kelly, slowly, crouched to pull her hands away from her mouth. Lara let her, trying to control the trembling that rushed through her.

  “Okay. It’s going to be okay, Lara. Look, you stay here for a minute, okay? I’m going to call my boss and see if I can leave Ruth in charge, or if she can come in, or if I can close the shop early. This is an emergency,” she said gently. “I’ll take you home, we’ll get you changed, and we’ll go from there. Okay? Okay.” Kelly squeezed Lara’s hands, then went into the front of the shop to make the necessary calls.

  It was absolutely absurd, Lara thought, to fall apart now. She’d traveled between two worlds, ridden in battle, and commanded more power than she’d ever imagined possible. The prospect of dealing with a handful of mortal details shouldn’t be overwhelming enough to shut her down entirely, but even the endless music of truth was barely a static rush at the back of her mind. It was the disappearing time: that was the worst of it, the most bewildering. Lara put her face in her hands again, waiting silently for Kelly’s return.

  It was preceded by “God, you look awful. Here,” and as Lara looked up, Kelly rustled a candy bar from her purse. “When was the last time you ate?”

  Lara whispered, “Apparently about a year and a half ago,” and took the candy hungrily.

  Kelly snorted laughter and sat, looking like she wanted to hug Lara again but was trying to let her eat. “Trish is on her way. We can leave Ruth in charge, so you eat that and we’ll go back to my place. I kept some of your clothes.” A wistful smile played over her lips. “I just kept thinking how sad you’d be if you came home and it was all gone. So I kept some of them, and look, you came home, and now you don’t have to be sad.” Her voice broke on the last words and, candy bar or not, Lara surged forward to give her an awkward hug.

  “S’okay,” Kelly whispered into her hair. “S’okay, Lar. We’ll get it figured out. C’mon. C’mon, let’s go, okay, hon? It’s going to be okay.” She drew Lara to her feet and led her out of the back room, repeating, “It’ll be okay.”

  And Lara, grateful, heard nothing but truth in the promise.

  Twenty

  Boston’s streets were unimaginably loud after a single day in the Barrow-lands. Lara stood on the tiny balcony that Kelly’s apartment sported, red and white lights of traffic blurring in her tired vision. The day had disappeared into reuniting with her mother, whose disbelief and relief at Lara’s return had led, for the second time, to the telling of where she’d been. The second and, Lara expected, the last: no one else would accept the truth for what it was.

  She had more than half imagined her mother would tell a story of some old family legend, a story of some ancestor who claimed she’d been stolen away to fairyland, and had borne a child to an elfin lover. It would be the sort of tale Gretchen Jansen would never have told her truth-sensing daughter for fear of upsetting her in the same way stories of Santa Claus had.

  But there had been no such story, nothing to laugh or wonder over. If such a thing had ever happened, it was long lost to history, but Lara thought it more likely that Emyr and Dafydd were right: that her magic was only human, and all the more unique for it.

  Gretchen had reluctantly returned home as night fell, leaving Lara both glad to have seen her and utterly exhausted. There would be more of the same tomorrow and, she feared, for days to come: she hadn’t even yet been to Lord Matthew’s, much less to the police. Sharing her story with her mother and Kelly was by far the easiest of what she would face over the next several days. They knew her well enough to accept it, even in all its wondrous impossibility.

  Her bones ached from weariness, and probably from having ridden horses and carried swords and flinging her armored self through a breach between worlds and landing hard in a sandbox. Despite tiredness she let out a rough laugh and leaned hard on the balcony’s iron fence. Sleep evaded her: the streets were too loud, or, more likely, her emotions were too high. She, who had spent a lifetime rooted in pedantic truth, who had never believed such a thing could happen, had become a time traveler, and was lost in both the awe and horror of that fact.

  The clothes Kelly had kept for her had been tucked into boxes whose lids were dusty, and the tissue paper her jewelry had been wrapped in was fragile and creased with a year’s disuse. Proof, in small ways, that yesterday had been a long time ago.

  And there were other matters to dwell on, too, if she let herself. Not just Dafydd’s imprisonment, but the history Ioan had hinted at. There’d been no mistruth in what he
’d recounted, but she was unaccustomed to trying to sort history from legend. The way humans turned men into legends often rang false with her; she had no idea what the reality behind Robin Hood was, but no version of that story, passed off as history, had ever struck a true chord in her mind. By those lights, Unseelie legend might have been born of fact, which opened a window on a much larger landscape than she’d originally been asked to see.

  She said, “Changes that will break the world,” to the street below. Ioan’s worldbreaking weapon nagged at her; if it was something she could find, or wield, it might help bring answers to light. But it was long lost, whatever it might have been. Or lost, at least, to the Barrow-lands; that was what Ioan had said. Lara’s gaze went unfocused, city horizon turning to a blur.

  Lost to his world, and what better place to lose it than hers? They were linked, but only royalty could work the worldwalking spell, and if Emyr had cause to hide a weapon in her world, it would shed more light on why he was so displeased with Dafydd’s hundred-year sojourn across the breach.

  “Lar?” The bedroom door opened, Kelly’s voice pitched just loud enough to carry. Lara waved from the balcony and Kelly came in to lean in its doorway. “I heard you talking. You okay?”

  “I don’t know. I’m confused.”

  “I can’t imagine why.” Kelly made a face as she came out to the balcony. “Sorry. I lost the habit of not being sarcastic out loud.”

  “It’s okay. I’ve been gone a long time, and you only ever had to do it with me.”

  “But I’m probably a nicer person when I keep the snark on the inside.” Kelly peeked down at the street nervously, fingers knotted around the rail. “I never come out here.”

  “I know. I don’t understand why you’re willing to spend an extra hundred dollars a month for an apartment with two balconies when you’re afraid of heights.”

  “Hundred and fifty. Rent went up. But Dickon and I are moving in together soon, so it won’t matter.” Kelly gave the railing a tentative shake. “You could probably stay here, if you wanted. Move in, I mean, and have the place to yourself when we get married. It’d be easier than looking for a new place to live.”

  Surprise cascaded through Lara like cold water pouring down her insides. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

  Kelly chuckled and stepped back to the safety of the doorway. “Are you lying to me, Lara Jansen?”

  Lara opened her mouth and shut it again, Kelly’s teasing jangling at her nerves. “Yes and no. If I had thought that far, I thought—”

  “That you were going back to the Barrow-lands with David?”

  “Yeah.” Truth, for once, wasn’t a comfort, drawing a note as discordant as lies under her skin. “And no, Kel. I can’t quite believe it’s been a year and a half. I can’t quite believe I won’t just get up and go to work in the morning. That my job’s not even there anymore, probably. It was just yesterday.”

  “Wow,” Kelly breathed. “That must be really bizarre. Not believing, I mean. That must be like gravity stopped working.”

  “Or like magic started.” Lara shook her head. “I have no idea how anybody lives with this level of uncertainty. I thought always knowing if something was true or false was hard, but this is worse. So beyond getting Dafydd out of jail, I just don’t know. I think they might need me, in Dafydd’s world, and I’m starting to think maybe there’s something I need to find here, in this one. And I don’t know what happens if I do. This is my home.” Lara sighed, pulling herself back from the larger scope of worries. “And this is a great apartment. It’d be a good place to move in to.”

  “Plus that way I could leave as much stuff here as I wanted and just stop by to pick things up when I missed them,” Kelly said cheerfully.

  Lara laughed. “But you’re only thinking of me, right?”

  “I would never say that. You’d call me on the terrible lies in my voice.” Kelly reached for Lara’s elbow, pulling her back toward the door to hug her. “Look, it was just a thought, okay? You don’t have to make a decision right now. First things first. Get your weird-ass boyfriend out of jail, and we’ll figure out the next step after that.”

  Lara grunted at the strength of Kelly’s hug and returned it just as hard. “Okay.”

  “Ooh. I note she didn’t deny the ‘boyfriend’ part of that sentence.” Kelly waggled her eyebrows as Lara spluttered a protest, then pointed at the bed. “Get some sleep, Truthseeker. You’ve got an elf to rescue tomorrow.”

  “I can’t do this.” Lara reached across the car—the same little blue Nissan she’d helped Kelly pick out barely a week ago in her memory and nearly a year and a half earlier in Kelly’s—and grasped Kelly’s wrist. “I can’t do this.”

  Kelly pried Lara’s fingers off her wrist. “Your hands are freezing, Lara, jeez. And you have to do it, unless you want to let David rot in a jail cell for the rest of his life. How long do elves live, anyway?”

  “Dafydd,” Lara whispered, correcting the hard American way Kelly said the name to the softer Seelie pronunciation. “They live forever.”

  “Well, somebody’s going to notice if he lives forever in jail, so let’s go.”

  “But look at them.”

  Dozens of reporters crowded around the front door of Boston police headquarters. They were barred from entry by a couple of grumpy-looking cops, but mostly they didn’t appear to want to go inside. They were waiting, and Lara had a too-clear idea of what they were waiting for. “How could they even know I was here?”

  Kelly’s eyebrows shifted upward. She killed the Nissan’s engine and took the keys out of the ignition before leaning on the steering wheel and pointing, with the keys, toward the crowd of cameramen and microphone-bearing press. “I can think of at least six different ways they found out. The woman you talked to in the park. The cabdriver. Either of them might have eventually recognized you from the news. And you said you called Cynthia. Or there’s Ruth, or me, or your mom. Hey!” She sat up, lifting her hands in a protestation of innocence. “I said I could think of six ways, not that they were all likely. I didn’t tell anybody, and I’m sure your mom didn’t, either. But Cynthia could’ve called the cops.”

  “Cynthia didn’t believe it was me.”

  “Doesn’t mean she didn’t call the cops and somebody didn’t make a note of it. Look, Lara, I told you. You’re a news story. You’re going to have to face these people eventually. Might as well get it over with.”

  “Would you be this phlegmatic if you were in my shoes?”

  “Of course not, but all I’ve got to do is have your back, sister. Come on.” Kelly cracked her door open and elbowed Lara to do the same. “It’s only forty feet. How bad can it be?”

  Lara, climbing out of the car, shot her friend a despairing glance. “That’s one of those questions you should never ask.”

  Kelly’s apology was lost beneath a triumphant, “There she is!” from within the midst of the press corps. Dozens of faces turned her way, and Lara squeaked with dismay, fumbling for the Nissan’s door handle. Kelly, much bolder, all but slid across the car’s hood to grab Lara’s hand and pull her forward as reporters surged toward them.

  “They’re not as bad as a dark elf army,” Kelly whispered. “Come on, you can do it.”

  It hit Lara like a gong, like she was the gong, her chest reverberating with a truth so obvious it became understatement, and then became funny. A day earlier she’d ridden into actual battle, albeit reluctantly. A mob of men and women armed with cameras and microphones was nothing, in that context. Chin lifted, she stepped ahead of Kelly, meeting a tide of bodies and questions with a sudden calm that felt like arrogance.

  Even with newfound determination, there were simply too many reporters, all pressing close and shoving microphones or cameras into Lara’s face. Questions made the air thick, shouts hurting Lara’s ears, but she set her jaw and pushed forward.

  And hit a wall, jostling bodies vying for position and creating a deadlock. Even the battlefield hadn’t been qu
ite like this: there, though they wanted to hold a line, the soldiers had also wanted a chance at their enemy, and had let people slip and step through so they could fight.

  They might well still be fighting, that same battle not yet ended, given the radical differences in time’s passage between her world and Dafydd’s. If she could get through, if she could obtain Dafydd’s release, they might yet be able to make a difference in his world; might yet stop that fight before it became a genocide. Chords sounded in her mind, thunderous sounds that made truth of the possibility.

  But the reporters wouldn’t make a path.

  Lara drew breath and focused the pounding music in her mind into her voice, turning it to an answer for the most-oft asked question: “I was not kidnapped!”

  Power burst in it, opening a passage through the mob. Lara surged forward, driven by Kelly’s hands in the small of her back. She stumbled into the small empty space at the police station doors and turned to face the press corps with indignation boiling through her.

  For a few astonished seconds, they gaped in silence. Kelly lurched to her side, and the officers who’d been manning the doors stepped up to flank them.

  “They believed you,” Kelly whispered. “Keep talking.”

  Lara wasn’t certain at all that they’d believed her, but they had let her through, and had gone quiet, which was enough. A distant part of her found that interesting: typically she would have been deeply concerned about the truth, that it be accepted, but not now. She stared from face to face in the crowd, and just as the power of her voice started to wear off, she spoke again.

  “David Kirwen and I are friends. I know I’ve been missing for months, but that wasn’t by his design.” Technically true: Dafydd’s intention had been to bring her back very close to the time she’d left. The language could be used to play fine notes, a tuning Lara had never cared for. No one else would hear the dissonance in the words in quite the way she did, though she could see many of the reporters latching on to her careful phrasing. A new wave of questions inundated her before she could say anything else. Exasperation reached its breaking point and snapped.