C. E. Murphy - Wayfinder

“It tends to favor its wielder,” Emyr said sourly. “Or has, since it passed from immortal hands to mortal. Where did you get it?” He put his helmet aside, and Aerin stepped forward to help him remove his shoulder-pieces and breastplate. Lara’s gaze lingered on the former, searching for a name for them. They had to have one, but her expertise lay in the fine details of sewn garments, not forged. She could see the mastery in even the padded silken shirt he wore beneath the armor, and for an instant regretted that she’d had no hand in its making. Seelie clothing had awakened that faint pang in her from the first moment she’d seen it, and reminded her again that her ambitions had been those of a tailor, not a hero.

Lara brought her attention back to Emyr with a sigh, briefly silenced by the realization she had so much story to tell it was difficult to find a place to begin. She finally said, “I found it in my world,” though she felt like she juggled truth and lies with her answers as she went on. “The Unseelie king had suggested I look for it there. Your majesty, the last I knew, Dafydd had been returned to the Barrow-lands by his brother Ioan. Has Ioan not contacted you?”

Emyr’s face turned white with anger. “Hafgan bid you search out that staff? Dafydd is captured by my traitorous son? What more ill news do you bear, Truthseeker?”

Lara groaned and sat on the floor, needing a seat more than she cared for propriety. The floor was rugs thrown over earth, somehow unmarred by their muddy feet, and she frowned at that a moment as she sorted her thoughts. “Okay. I need you to just listen for a few minutes. I’m a truthseeker, so you know I’m going to tell the truth even if sounds preposterous. Right?”

Both Aerin and Emyr nodded when she glanced up, the latter begrudgingly. Lara nodded in turn, then spread her hands. “When you fostered Ioan, made him hostage to good behavior, whatever it is you want to call it that prompted the exchange of firstborns between you and Hafgan, Ioan embraced his new family, far more than Hafgan’s son Merrick ever did in the Seelie court. Ioan even changed his physicality through magic, so he’s more broadly built and golden-skinned like the rest of the Unseelie.”

Emyr’s expression darkened further and Lara climbed to her feet again, full of nervous energy now that she was speaking. “It gets more complicated. Ioan has been ruling in Hafgan’s name, literally, for a long time. Centuries, probably. Hafgan retreated ages ago, and Ioan never admitted it to you because he thought you’d see it as weakness and try to destroy the Unseelie court.”

Aerin’s gasp was audible over Emyr’s lower growl, but Lara rushed on, as she stood and paced the width of the tent as she spoke. “Ioan believes that the Barrow-lands were once called Annwn, and were … I’m not sure. Ruled jointly, maybe, by the Seelie and Unseelie, until the Seelie called the sea to drown the Unseelie coastal lands, making them exiles in their own country. That the war between you stems back that far, so far that it’s legend even to those who lived then.” Lara could barely conceive of a lifetime so extended that lives became history and history legend, though she recognized that her own childhood memories were scattered and hardly complete. Lives lived over millennia instead of decades would almost necessarily fade into obscurity, but events of the magnitude Ioan had spoken of seemed like they should stand out in anyone’s mind.

“He thinks this staff was the weapon that broke the world, back then. He thought it was sent to my world so it couldn’t be used again. I found it there, waiting for me.”

“Waiting!” Emyr burst out. “For you?”

“For a truthseeker,” Lara said, unexpectedly steady in the face of his anger. “For someone who could see through the spell laid on it and perhaps command its power. Probably any truthseeker would do, but there aren’t that many of us.” Dafydd had searched her world for a hundred years, trying to find someone with her talent, and having found her, had ended up nearly dead and now disappeared for it. Lara’s heart clenched, hurting her chest, and it took a few seconds before she could speak again.

“The point is, none of what Ioan said rang false to me, Emy—your majesty. It didn’t exactly sound true, either, but I’ve never dealt with history turned legend before. And he was right about the staff being in my world.” She frowned at the Seelie king, whose narrow face was drawn with anger. “Which means I’ve got a lot more to try to settle here than just the question of who murdered Merrick ap Annwn.”

A laugh of frustration burbled up and she cast her gaze skyward again, as if the baubles lighting the tent might lend her strength. “Except he isn’t dead. He framed Dafydd in hopes of starting a war between your court and the Unseelie court, so he could be the last man—elf—standing, and take the spoils. So Dafydd brought me here in the first place because of fraud. Because of a lie.”

There was so much more to say, but Lara fell silent as shock created lines in Emyr’s face. Age didn’t mark the Seelie in the same way it did humans, but watching Emyr’s pale skin turn to ash and the scouring of lines around his mouth told her how Seelie might look if they did age: still beautiful, but also terrible. Vampiric, as though whatever vitality they’d had had long since drained away, and left only a walking shell. Lara felt momentarily sorry for the Seelie king, though his arrogance didn’t, as a rule, invite compassion.

“Merrick is a master of air,” she said wearily. “Of illusion, shaped from air. I’m sure Dafydd did draw and nock the arrow as everyone saw, but the Merrick he shot and killed was nothing more than a phantom. A ghost of himself. I’ve stood face-to-face with Merrick, your majesty. I promise you he’s alive.”

Color flooded back into Emyr’s face, the heat of rage warming his features in a way Lara had never seen before. He snapped around to his scrying basin, simply a pool on a tall slender pedestal, and ice crackled from his fingertips as he seized the basin’s edge. Lara said, “Wait,” and Aerin directed a warning sound at her as Emyr shot a glower her way. But he released the stoneworked pool’s edge, evidently understanding he would have a great deal to look for once he began. Better to search it all out at once, than have her interrupt him time and again.

“Merrick called a nightwing attack into my world,” Lara said. “I closed the breach between the Barrow-lands and Earth to stop them. It worked, but it also closed off Dafydd’s source of strength. I had to find the staff, so he would have something of the Barrow-lands to draw on to help him stay alive.”

Old anger turned Emyr’s expression bleak. “That staff abhors the touch of Seelie hands. It should have destroyed him, and your world with him.”

Lara stuttered, then lurched on with her story: “It tried. It threw down an earthquake in a part of my world that doesn’t normally get them. It didn’t seem to affect Dafydd adversely. I thought he might be getting better, but nightwings infested a human man and came after us. Dafydd fought them and almost died for it. I used the staff to reopen the break between the worlds, and Ioan came for Dafydd. To bring him back to the Barrow-lands, where he might have a chance to heal.”

Anger rose up, burning through worry to create heat in Lara’s chest. She had come across worlds to offer help, and had found an unexpected passion in exchange. Now that love was threatened, and she had already laid down a promise, a truthseeker’s oath, on what would come to pass if that happened. Lara lifted her chin, meeting Emyr’s eyes with a forthright glare. “I told Ioan if anything happened to Dafydd, his life was forfeit. So, your majesty, I really think we should go talk to your older son.”