by C. E. Murphy
A hint of sympathy tempered the barman’s smile. “Put off a college research paper, huh? Look, you can try Old Jake. He’s usually down at the Canal Bar—you know where that is? Head west three blocks, until you get to the canal, then go north two. He’ll tell tall tales as long as you keep buying him another drink. I don’t know if any of them are true, but you’re looking for legends, not the truth, right? And if you’re looking for a place to stay, the bar’s got rooms, too. Canal Bar and Inn, you can’t miss it. New building, part of the revitalization work going on here, not one of the old mill buildings.”
Lara, grateful, said, “Thank you,” and drank her wine much too quickly, eager to make her escape. Turners Falls streets were laid out in tidy square blocks, and following the barman’s instructions was easy, even with three glasses of wine in her. The waterfront was as he’d suggested, a mix of old mill buildings and newer ones similar enough in style to retain character but unique enough to mark themselves as modern. The canal itself reflected streetlamps, and there was indeed a sense of revitalization as couples took after-dinner walks along the water, greeted by dog walkers and joggers. It had the feel of a town reinventing itself, and Lara found the Canal Bar with her own sense of purpose renewed.
A group of locals, mostly young men, sent wolf whistles and approving jeers toward her as she approached. Nerves clenched her stomach and she wished Dafydd or Kelly were with her after all. Retreating, though, wasn’t an option, and she made her hands into fists, hidden by her skirts, to urge herself forward.
An older man with military-cut gray hair and a limp stepped through the group of younger men, raising his cane to smack one of the youths on the shoulder as he passed. “Your mother’d never forgive you for harassing a woman that way, Denny. Behave like a gentleman.”
“Denny” swallowed a protest into a look of embarrassment as the older man came forward to offer Lara his hand. He was in his sixties, and wore a beaten-up black leather jacket over a blue T-shirt and jeans that had seen better days. “Sorry about that, Miss Jansen. I’m Old Jake. Been waiting for you a while now.” He glanced beyond her, eyebrows lifted, then looked back at her. “Where’re your friends? Two men and a woman. They were expected, too.”
“Expected?” Lara squeaked the word, then cleared her throat. “There are, um. Just three of us. How did you know?”
He flashed a sharp smile. “You want the hoodoo mystic answer or the practical one? You were on the news,” he announced, choosing which answer she got. “But I’ve been waiting a lot longer than that. C’mon inside, let me get you away from these hooligans.”
Bemused, Lara followed him into the bar, which was brighter and more welcoming than she expected it to be. Jake waved a waitress down, ordered himself a beer and Lara a ginger ale without asking, then gave her a sly look of curiosity.
“Ginger ale’s fine, thanks. Great, in fact. How did you—”
“Know the history of Turners Falls, Miss Jansen?” Jake leaned back and folded his hands behind his head. Lara thought he might kick his feet onto the table between them, he looked so comfortable, but instead he thumped his chair forward again as the waitress hurried back with their drinks. Lara waited for the woman to leave again before giving Jake an uncertain smile.
“Not really. Only what I read on the tourist board on the main street.”
“About the massacre. Does it mention the men were gone from the village that night? That it was mostly women and children who died?”
“God,” Lara said involuntarily. “No. That’s even more horrible, somehow.”
“No, Miss Jansen, what’s horrible is the men left knowing their wives and children would die, but they went anyway, or so that’s what the family stories say.”
The wine she’d drunk swirled up in a twist of bitter nausea. “Why would anyone do that?”
“They were given a vision, a holy duty to carry out. A woman’s voice, charging the men to save an artifact before the great falls were stopped.”
“The worldbreaking staff?” Lara whispered. Then even more softly, around a knot in her throat, she asked, “My voice?”
Gentleness slid across Jake’s expression. “Now, I wouldn’t know that, Miss Jansen. I’m Old Jake, but I’m not that old. It’s just a story handed down over a dozen generations. They say the shamans asked the spirits, and the spirits said to empty the great falls before the white men came.”
Despite the churning in her stomach, Lara smiled a little. “Forgive me for saying so, but you look pretty white yourself, Mr …”
“Jake,” he said easily. “Just Old Jake, Miss Jansen. That’s how everybody knows me. And bloodlines mingle over the years. My sisters, they got more of the Indian blood than me, but I’m the one patient enough to sit around waiting for a myth to come walking through the door.”
“Lara. Please, just call me Lara. Jake, I’m not even sure what I’m looking for isn’t a myth itself.”
His gaze sharpened on her. “Now, that’s not the truth, is it, Miss Lara?”
Discomfort surged over her in a toneless howl. “Anyone else would think it was a myth.”
Satisfaction colored his expression, and he picked up his beer to take a long drink. “Stories say the shamans feared what would happen if the white men found the gift of the waterfalls. That it was a terrible power for the one who could use it, and that a dozen dozen men would come searching for it. That it could be kept safe, but only with the blood of the land.”
Cold crept up Lara’s spine, more insiduous than anything Emyr had cast on her. “Breaking your own world to protect it.” Dafydd was right: the staff was a thing of dangerous power, even to mortals, if ensuring its safety destroyed communities. She wondered abruptly what price Brendan had paid, nine centuries earlier, to bring it across the ocean; wondered how his own world had been shattered in the bringing, because she was suddenly certain it had been.
Jake nodded again, his satisfaction turning grim. “And so the warriors took it away, and left their families to die, because they couldn’t stay and not fight. And one of us has been waiting ever since to give the burden to the one who comes for it.”
“How do you know it’s me?”
He steepled his fingers over his beer, then noticed it again and lifted it to drink. Lara glanced at her own untouched ginger ale and left it alone, the wine in her stomach more than enough to make her feel unwell already. Jake set the half-empty beer glass down, wiped his upper lip, then flicked answers off on his fingertips: “Her companions are a giant, a wise woman, and a spirit man. She will know the truth of the stories when she hears them.” He paused, giving her a hard stare, and Lara nodded to both, though the descriptions of her friends struck her as a little funny. Kelly would never think of herself as a wise woman, but after the levelheadedness she’d displayed throughout the day, Lara could hardly think of a better descriptor.
“And,” Jake finished pragmatically, “she’ll be the only one with the knowledge to look for it. I saw you on the news, and knew you’d come here today. I expected you to be earlier.”
“We took the long way around. Did”—Lara swallowed—“did the news say anything about Detective Washington? Is he all right?”
“Not dead yet, anyway, and where there’s life, there’s hope.” The platitude had the strength of conviction behind it, unusual enough to make it sound true. Jake leaned forward, pushing his beer aside like it blocked his view of Lara. “What will you do with it? With this thing we’ve protected all these years?”
Lara shook her head, eyes closed briefly as images of the Barrow-lands, of Emyr’s shining citadel and the sprawling black opal Unseelie city, and of the people, one so bright and one so dark, and both unhealthy with it, washed over her. “The legend I’ve been told says it’s a weapon to break a world. That it’s been used already to destroy. But a scalpel can help cure as well as kill.” She opened her eyes again, meeting Jake’s gaze, and willed truth into her voice. “If you’ll grant me the burden to carry, I’ll use it to try to hea
l a world.”
Satisfaction slid over Jake’s face again. He nodded once, sharply, then hefted his cane from beside his chair, and laid it on the table between them with a resounding smack.
“I thought it would be bigger.” There was nothing extraordinary about the cane: it was a polished length of aged wood, knobs and lumps still giving it character. Lara stared at it until it swam in her vision, sending a spike of pain through her eyes. She rubbed them, then looked again at the cane, then Jake.
Smile lines made deep crevices around his mouth. “They say it used to be. They say the one it’s meant for will reveal its true form.” His eyebrows waggled with the last words, and Lara, despite herself, laughed.
“Do you believe any of this, Jake?”
He sat back with a laconic shrug. “I believed you’d be here today. Believed you’d be looking for this. Guess that means I believe it all enough. So how does the reveal work?”
Lara glanced at the cane again, squinting against another stab of unreliable vision. Dafydd’s glamour had done that to her, once she’d known it was in place. “Oh! Oh. I can almost see through—um, would you like to take a walk with me, Jake?”
“Can almost see through?” Jake finished his beer in a few long swallows, eyed Lara’s untouched ginger ale, then gestured to his cane as he stood up. “A walk sounds terrific.”
Lara folded her hands behind her back like a child resisting temptation. “I’d like you to take it out of here. I’m not quite sure what will happen when I touch it.”
“Curiouser and curiouser.” Jake scooped the cane up and made a show of using it to herd people out of his way as he led Lara to the door. The youths outside scattered guiltily as they left, though one of them whistled and called out a congratulations to Jake as he headed down the canal street with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. Lara grinned, and Jake gave an unapologetic shrug. “Small town. Everybody gets in everyone else’s business.”
“I grew up outside of Boston, but everyone still got in everybody’s business. I think a lot of people went to church just for the weekly gossip.”
“Big Irish-Catholic community?”
Lara nodded. “My family are mostly Dutch and Norwegian, but four of my friends growing up all had the last name Murphy. Different families.”
“Makes the paperwork easy when people get married.”
Lara laughed. “Except these were all girls. The laws might allow it now, but their mothers might never recover if any of them married each other. It was a pretty conservative community that way.” She looked over her shoulder, judging the distance they’d come and the other people out walking along the canal. “Okay. I don’t think anything really showy is going to happen, but I didn’t want to risk it in the bar.”
Jake offered her the cane again, ill-disguised interest in his eyes. “Risk what?”
“Looking at that gives me a headache.” Lara took a breath to steady herself. “That might mean it has a glamour on it, a …” She trailed off, uncertain of how to explain a glamour without sounding absurd, but Jake gave the cane a little shake, obviously eager for her to take it.
“Something to make it look different from how it really is.”
“Right. And I’m a truthseeker, so it’s possible that just holding it will strip away the glamour.”
“You’re killing me here, Miss Lara.”
Lara looked up at him with a smile. “No, I’m not.” Buoyed by that simple exchange of exaggeration and truth, she took the cane in both hands.
Power sparked dissonance against her palms, a vivid shock of what she felt not matching what she saw. A headache flared and she crushed her eyes closed. The cane’s gnarly polished surface faded from her mind’s eye, her hands instead telling her the truth. Patterns were marked against her skin, the cane’s circumference much larger and more varied than what she’d seen. Relieved song swept through her, washing away the last vestiges of untuneful falsehood. She whispered “It’s all right” as if she spoke to a living thing, and squeezed the column in her hands. “Show your true form. I’m the one you’ve been waiting for.”
Jake, reverently, said, “I will be God damned,” and Lara opened her eyes to look at the ivory staff lying across her palms.
It was as it had been in Dafydd’s vision: hollow, carved with intricate Celtic patterns, and considerably longer than Lara stood tall. The ends were solid, as if they’d been capped to give them strength to stand against the wear of use. Despite its age, the ivory was still a rich gleaming white, unyellowed by time, and it tingled with power, as if pleased to be reverted to its natural form.
Oisín, Lara realized very clearly, was more exceptional than she’d known. The staff in her hands wanted to be used, like it had a will of its own that it could work upon the bearer. If he’d carried it as long as he had without turning its power to any ends of his own, then his willingness to be no more than he was was extraordinary. She looked at Jake, who still gaped at the staff, and found herself shaking her head.
“Did you never have any impulse to try to use this for anything? Did it not … tell you it could be used?”
Jake’s eyebrows furrowed and he shook his head. “Not for anything more than a cane, Miss Lara. Why, does it say something to you?”
Maybe it responded to inherent magics. Lara tightened her fingers around the staff, hope surging through her. If her mortal magic could make the staff sing, then Dafydd’s Seelie talent might awaken it far enough to heal him. “It almost makes promises,” she whispered. “Like it’s alive. What it says …” She breathed a laugh, and gave Jake a lopsided smile. “What it says is, I’m going to have to be very careful with it. Thank you, Jake. Thank you for bringing this, and for trusting me.”
“The world needs healing, Miss Lara. Good luck to you, if you’re the one to do it.”
Twenty-Nine
“That didn’t take long.” Kelly eyed Lara’s staff as Dafydd, looking a little refreshed, came from the largest copse of trees available in the park. He studied the staff even more avidly than Kelly, and Lara handed it to him wordlessly.
Color flooded back into his face within seconds. He sagged, but with an air of relief rather than the exhaustion that had dogged him. “It feels like home,” he whispered. “I can hardly believe an artifact of such power has been here for so long and I never sensed it.”
“It was in disguise,” Lara said carefully. “I’m not sure you’d have sensed it even if you’d known to look for it. Someone was waiting for me,” she added to Kelly. “I think they sort of had been for four hundred years. So it didn’t take long.”
Kelly looked faintly disapproving. “I thought finding mystical artifacts was supposed to take great trials. Or at least, I don’t know, Nazis chasing after you.”
“Only, I think, if you’re Indiana Jones.” Dafydd smiled at Kelly, then wrapped his arms around the staff, putting as much flesh against it as he could. “With this and a wild place, I would be well restored in a matter of days.”
“I don’t think we should wait days, but we can at least stop for the night in one of the state forests,” Lara offered. “We should be able to get five or six hours’ rest, even if we want to try to get to the Catskills by morning.”
“But perhaps we should just push through to the mountains,” Dafydd murmured.
Lara shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s already after ten and we’ve had a long day. I could use the rest.”
“A long day,” Kelly echoed. “Is that what you call it? I was thinking more like a horrible, terrible, no-good awful day, and I want a nap. Dafydd, is that thing going to make riding in the car easier for you? Because Lara’s right, we should get away from town sooner rather than later. We can head northeast and get a little farther away from where anybody might expect us and then sack out for the night.”
“The staff will make it much more comfortable, I think. All right.” Dafydd curled a hand around it protectively, then drew in a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. To Lara�
�s astonishment, his glamour slipped back into place, changing the staff to a cane and taking the elfin edge off his looks. His visage still fluctuated and twisted to her eyes, but to other people, he would look normal again.
Kelly muttered, “That’s flipping freaky, man,” and more clearly said, “Can you make yourself, I don’t know, short, forty, and balding? Because that would be a much better disguise for tromping back to the car in.”
“I’m sorry.” Rue flashed across Dafydd’s face. “It would take several hours to build a new glamour, and weeks of practice to be certain it would hold under even mild scrutiny.”
“Guess we’ll just have to make a run for it.”
“All the way to the sidewalk?” Lara wondered. “Didn’t you move the car down here to the park?”
Kelly opened her mouth and shut it again. “No. That would have been smart. I left it back up on the main drag where we parked earlier.”
“Oh.” Lara twitched a smile, and offered Dafydd her arm as they left the park. He leaned on it more heavily than she might have hoped, the staff clearly not having helped as much as it could. “That’s a relief, really. You’ve been so competent and levelheaded all day, but if you didn’t think of that maybe you’re not a criminal mastermind in the making.”
“It’s my first attempt,” Kelly said with a sniff. “Give me time.”
“Time,” Dafydd murmured, “is one thing we do not seem to have in abundance.”
Reminded and chastened, they hurried back to the car.
The Corolla bumped down a rutted road, all three passengers gritting their teeth so they didn’t bite their tongues. Cicadas squealed loudly enough to be heard over the engine, announcing their lovelorn state to the world. Dafydd, apparently undisturbed, all but fell from the vehicle before it had come to a full stop in front of a reed-ridden pond, and took several long strides away as Kelly killed the engine. Both women got out of the car as Dafydd turned back with a joyous smile.
