by C. E. Murphy
And it was here, in her world. Choir music filled her, a host of soprano notes striking a triumphant path forward. Lara staggered as power splashed through, and out of, her. It leaped forward, racing across the countryside to briefly illuminate the image of a roaring waterfall pouring from a narrow point in a broad river. Surprised laughter broke from her throat, and Lara opened her eyes to flash an exultant smile at Dafydd.
He whispered, “Lara,” and her clarity of vision faded in a rush as he collapsed in her arms.
Twenty-Seven
“Dafydd? Oh my God, Dafydd!” His weight was inconsequential, even though Lara didn’t think of herself as physically strong. Kelly sprinted out of the car and around to the passenger side, helping Lara to pour him into the backseat.
“Buckle him in,” Kelly snapped. “We’re leaving. Now.”
Lara, mute, did as she was told, then took her own seat, barely able to pull the seat belt on as Kelly pulled away from the curb. It took two tries to clip the belt in place, and she buried her face in shaking hands when she’d managed it. “I don’t think our world is really meant for using magic. Closing the breach in the garage wiped me out, and this was worse,” she said into her palms. “And I think I just ripped away most of what Dafydd had left to power my own search. Kelly, if he dies—”
“It won’t be your fault,” Kelly said shortly. “Where do we need to go?”
“West.” Lara parted her fingers to stare at the road in front of them as she tried to bring the clarity of vision back. “It’s hidden in a waterfall west of here, a big one. It’s got to be on the Connecticut River.”
“West and what? North? South? It’s a big river, Lara.”
“Almost due.” A hint of music returned, merely a thin bell tone compared to the earlier song. “It’s almost due west of Peabody. There can’t be that many waterfalls on that parallel.”
“We’ll get a map.” Anything else Kelly intended to say was interrupted by Dafydd’s sharp intake of breath. Lara twisted to find him pressing both hands against his temples.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured after a moment. “I seem to have fallen asleep.”
“Lara put a whammy on you,” Kelly said over Lara’s apology. “When was the last time you ate?”
“This morning, I suppose,” Dafydd murmured, then continued in a hazy voice: “Some unpleasant second cousin to oatmeal, a last meal by the standards of the Massachusetts penal system.”
“Well, it’s about four o’clock now. Your blood sugar’s probably low, besides everything else. We’ll hit a drive-thru.”
Lara’s stomach, reminded of something as mundane as food, rumbled loudly enough for Kelly’s tension to break into sharp laughter. “Yeah, me, too. All right, we have a plan. Fast food, then a waterfall in western Massachusetts where there’s a weapon of unimaginable power.” She added “Tally-ho” in a mutter, and Lara squeezed her shoulder.
“You’re a rock, Kel. Thank you.”
She got a crooked smile in return. “Don’t thank me. I’m … what’s that kind of rock that breaks off into a million slivers? Shale? I’m like that. I look really solid but any minute now I’m going to fly apart. I just want to get somewhere quiet and safe before that happens. David, do you have a hideout anywhere?”
“I never thought I would need one. I had always thought if I couldn’t return home, if I was in danger, that I’d go …”
Lara turned to look at him when he trailed off, catching a grimace marring his features, though he smoothed his face as she frowned in turn. “To a great wilderness,” he said. “Even in this world, the wild places are kind to my people. I could have remained undetected in the Catskills forever, if necessary, but that was alone, and with all my skill.” His voice hardened at the end, hiding nothing from Lara: he was denying fear, denying so much as considering what it meant that he was cut off from the Barrow-lands.
Kelly, though, startled and straightened, looking at him in the mirror again. “You know, that’s a brilliant idea. It’s a thousand miles from Wales—”
“Three thousand,” Lara said pedantically, as mistruth shivered over her skin.
“Okay, fine, three thousand, whatever, but my point was aren’t the Catskills haunted? Like Rip Van Winkle plays ninepins up there and stuff. If there’s anywhere on the East Coast that’s got any kind of connection to David’s world, doesn’t it seem like it might be them? So we get the staff, we head for the Catskills, and you two figure out how to power it up and get David home by sunset.” She made her lips thin, scowling down the two-lane highway they were on. “Well, if we could take the interstates, anyway. It’ll take longer on the back roads, especially since I have to find one that’ll get us pointed west. I was kind of going to Canada.”
“So we could be arrested at the border?” Lara wondered. Kelly turned an injured look on her and she shook her head apologetically. “No, you’re right, it was a good idea. There must be some little roads you can cross over without border patrol noticing. Or at least we could abandon the car and walk across through the woods.”
“Perhaps as a second choice,” Dafydd murmured.
Kelly flashed him a tense smile in the rearview mirror. “Second choice, not last resort?”
“As you say. Let us hold making our way to Wales as the last resort, and for our first choice, explore the Catskills.” His voice wavered and he closed his eyes, suddenly more fragile than he’d been. “Though, Lara, even if we should find the staff, my magic—”
“You have royal blood, and I have the ability to find a truthseeker’s path,” Lara said fiercely. “We’ll make a world-road if we have to.”
Deep bells rang through the words, carrying, for the first time, the weight of prophecy.
“Okay, where are we?” Kelly wolfed down a cheese-covered hot dog and slurped at a soda as Lara unfolded the map Kelly’d bought along with the food at a local grocery store. Lara’s own meal was cooling, but she’d argued that she could eat it while Kelly drove, whereas eating and driving invariably turned messy. Dafydd, still in the backseat, ate a green salad straight from the bag, alternating with long draughts of bottled water.
“Here’s Peabody. We’re …” Lara tapped her finger just below a green spot on the map. “We’re about here, because I just saw a sign for this forest.” She drew a line westward across the map. “If you head due west, the only reference to a waterfall I can find is Turners Falls.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s dammed up, Lara. I don’t know if there are any major falls on the Connecticut River that aren’t.”
“No, it’s this one.” Confidence jangled over Lara’s skin, its music imbuing her with hope. “If it’s dammed up, there must be a way to get beneath or behind or inside it. Something,” she said with less certainty.
“You’re the navigator. Okay, let me see that.” Kelly shoved the rest of her hot dog into her mouth and took the map, studying the thin road lines. “The thing is, we know they’re looking for us in Boston,” she said around her mouthful. “We don’t know if they’ll have spread out. Still, I don’t want to take the direct route. If we drive north a little ways farther we can get onto one of the smaller roads and come around and head south. Nobody’d be looking for us from that direction.”
“Your friend has the makings of a criminal mastermind, Lara.” Dafydd’s color and humor were both improved, though Lara thought it would take escaping the vehicle’s metal frame to really see a difference in his health. “Did you know this about her?”
“I had no idea.”
“C’mon,” Kelly muttered. “It’s the kind of adventure everybody dreams about, right? You think of all the ways you’d prepare. You just don’t expect a cop to end up dead and your fiancé to dump you along the way.”
“Oh, God, Kelly.” Lara reached for Kelly’s shoulder and was shaken off, though not rudely.
“No, forget I said that. It doesn’t make it any easier.”
“We don’t know Detective Washington’s dead,” Lara offered in a small
voice. “The news hasn’t said so.”
“Yeah, well, Dickon didn’t technically dump me, either, but I’m kind of thinking we should consider this a worst-case scenario situation. Anyway,” Kelly said ferociously, “I thought everybody made up melodramatic plans about how they were going to survive the plane crash or how they would disappear after stealing a hundred million dollars from Wall Street or whatever. Don’t they?” She looked up and Lara gave her an uncertain smile.
“I never did, but you’re the one who was always telling me I never took any risks.”
“Start smaller next time,” Kelly suggested, and twisted to pop her back. “If we go the long way around we’re probably not going to get to Turners Falls until after dark, but that might be to our advantage. It’s easier to sneak at night. And then whether we find this staff or not …” She looked in the rearview mirror. “The car makes you worse, doesn’t it, David. Can you handle us taking the long way?”
His silence was more telling than the answer he gave: “I’ll manage.”
Kelly shot a look at Lara. “Is he telling the truth?”
Lara shivered, listening to the resolute notes lingering in Dafydd’s answer. “He’ll manage, but you don’t need my power to know it won’t be good for him.”
“Yeah.” Kelly blew a raspberry and gave Lara the map, then put the car back in gear. “Hang on till we get there, David. Then you can get out and go lie down in a forest or something while Lara and I do the heavy lifting.”
“I would be grateful.” Dafydd spoke quietly. “I don’t need shelter, but I think even a few hours under the moonlight, in a green and growing place, would restore me greatly.”
“Okay.” Kelly pulled back onto the road decisively. “Lara, you navigate. Keep us off the blue roads, even, if you can, and push us west.”
The dam blocking the river at Turners Falls was massive enough to make Lara laugh. Despairing humor, she thought, but humor regardless. Three enormous walls—levies, blockades; she didn’t know what to call them—pooled the river behind them into a glittering black lake. The grounds around the lake, at least where Kelly had found parking, were well-kept lightly forested greenlands. Dafydd had gratefully stumbled from the car to sit beneath a tree while the women got out to study the dam in dismay.
“There’s no way you’re getting behind or under that thing, Lara. There can’t possibly be any artifacts left under it anyway. They’d have been pulverized when it was built.”
“But it’s here.” Lara turned in a loose circle, wishing her conviction would offer more information. “Someone must have taken it before they built the dam,” she said slowly, testing the idea for veracity. It rang true, though uncertainty caught her for a moment. With the way her power was changing, it seemed possible that if she wanted it to be true badly enough, she might convince herself of the lie.
Or she might force a true thing back to before the dam’s construction, changing the time line that had led to this moment. That idea was vastly more appalling. Lara groaned, dropping her face into her hands, then let out an explosive breath as she looked up. “Okay. I’m going into town and see if I can find out when the dam was built. If it was recently enough, maybe there was some kind of preservation work done first.”
“You’re deluding yourself, Lar.” Kelly’s dry response sounded unfortunately accurate, but Lara spread her hands in semi-defeat.
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Not really. David, can you handle the car again?”
He pushed to his feet, using the tree for support. “Reluctantly.”
“Then we’ll drive in. C’mon.” Kelly headed for the car, Lara stepping up to Dafydd’s side to help him back. His weight was negligible, as though he might blow away in a strong wind, and she frowned at him.
“If we can’t find a clue or a hint somewhere fast, I want Kelly to take you back into one of the forests we just drove through, okay? You need the rest more than I need the help searching.”
“Lara, if the staff is what you say it is, it’s not meant for mortal hands. It could be very dangerous to you.”
“Oisín carried it for years,” Lara argued. “It might be less dangerous in mortal hands than in Seelie. And this isn’t up for debate. You’re—” She broke off, unwilling to finish the sentence. Unwilling to voice the truth that the Seelie prince was dying, as if letting it go unsaid might let him eke out a few more hours.
He hesitated beside the car, looking down at her before his shoulders slumped and he nodded. “Very well. I would prefer we find it rather than split up, but I … am not strong. I don’t want to burden you in your search.”
“You’re not a burden, Dafydd. I just have no intention of explaining to your father how I got his son and heir killed on a world not even his own.”
“You’re very sweet,” Kelly said from inside the car. “Now stop mooning over each other and get in. The longer this takes the more wasted David’s going to be.”
Dafydd murmured, “Again to the heart of the matter,” and accepted Lara’s help getting in the car. He shied away from metal, even forgoing the seat belt, and Lara kept a nervous eye out the window for patrolling police who might notice the minor transgression.
There were none on the short drive into Turners Falls, nor any readily visible as they reached the town center. Village center, Lara read on a tourist information sign minutes later. The township was Montague, made up of five smaller villages, of which Turners Falls was the largest.
“Oh, great,” Kelly said from the other side of the sign. “Welcome to beautiful Turners Falls, named after Captain William Turner, who slaughtered a village full of sleeping Indians in this location three hundred and forty years ago. I bet anybody who knew where your staff was has been dead since then.”
Lara came around the sign with a laugh, and chagrin crossed Kelly’s face. “I mean, okay, yes, obviously, they’d be dead by now anyway. You know what I meant.”
“The dam was built in the eighteen sixties,” Dafydd read from where Lara had left him, a note of discouragement in his voice. “Certainly there was no hope of preservation work having been done so long ago.”
“No, but there were survivors of the massacre.” Lara picked up the history where Kelly had left off, tracing the words with a fingertip. “Maybe there are still a few descendants who might know something about a legendary staff.”
“And how are you going to find them?” Kelly asked with curious exasperation. “Go around knocking on doors? ‘Excuse me, were your ancestors murdered in their beds by an army captain? They were? Great! Do you know anything about Saint Brendan’s visit a thousand years ago, or about a staff he brought here?’”
Lara glanced down the street at storefronts already closed for the evening and restaurants doing late-dinner business. “If we have to, but there must be some bars off the main street here that are less trendy and more local. We could start by talking to people at them, instead of knocking on doors.”
“And if any of them watched the news and recognize us?”
“Recognize me,” Lara said decisively. “Dafydd’s glamour won’t hold, so he can’t go anywhere people might get a good look at him, and I’d rather not leave him alone. So if you guys want to hole up in—” She turned back to the tourist poster and tapped a green square a block and a half away from where they were. “In Peskeomskut Park here, then I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”
“Lara …” Worry creased a line between Kelly’s eyebrows. “You’re not very good at sweet-talking people. Maybe I should—”
“Much as I would like to retreat to a wooded place with Lara and allow you the search,” Dafydd murmured as he joined them on their side of the sign, “I suspect that if Lara should find anyone who knows of Brendan or the staff, her truthseeking talents might be critical in establishing herself. You’ve been extraordinarily helpful, Kelly, but I fear in this you and I may be relegated to the sidelines.”
Kelly’s frown increased, then slid away in a rueful smile at
Lara. “How does he make that sound so reasonable?”
“Because it is reasonable,” Lara said, but Dafydd put his hand over his heart and bowed elegantly, if more shallowly than full-blown theatrics might call for.
“Centuries, even aeons, of practice, my dear Miss Richards. Now, if you would be so good as to escort me to this mouthful of a park, I would be grateful for rest among some greenery.”
Kelly severely said “You be careful,” to Lara, and “‘Peskeomskut’ isn’t that hard to say,” to Dafydd as they headed for the park, leaving Lara behind.
Twenty-Eight
Bars and dance clubs were not Lara’s natural or comfortable habitat. In the one or two trendy clubs, she was at least the right age; in the more local bars, she stood out as both too young and too touristy.
And, she decided, probably too determined to broach a particular topic of conversation. Films always showed locals closing ranks when a stranger came in to talk, and that representation felt dismayingly accurate. Still, she nerved herself beyond the front door in more than one bar, ordering a glass of wine and putting on a shy smile for the bartender. By the third bar she wished she’d ordered soda all along, though it did seem to be getting easier to broach her awkward topic. Amused at the realization, she leaned forward to explain herself for the third time.
“I’m doing research on Native American legends. I—”
“You’ll probably want the Discovery Center, then,” the bartender said. So had the previous two, and Lara nodded with familiarity.
“Probably, but I got into town after it closed. I thought I’d see if there were any locals willing to share stories, especially about the falls.” Unrelated statements, both true, meant to sound like together they meant something. If someone else had done that, it would make hairs stand up on Lara’s arms, but her truthseeking sense allowed it to slip past, this once at least. “I’m on a tight deadline, so I hope I can skip going through the Discovery Center.”
