C. E. Murphy - Wayfinder

“Not dead.” Ioan had moved while they spoke, rolling Merrick’s unmoving form over. Red bubbles formed at the Unseelie prince’s mouth, and once silence fell, Lara could hear his short, wet gasps as Ioan said, grimly, “He lives, if barely. Dafydd?”

Dafydd looked to Lara, whose heart thudded heavily. “Why me?”

“Truthseeker, wayfinder, worldbreaker. Arbiter of justice. You said defeat me, and he has failed in that. You didn’t say kill or be killed, and so his fate must lie in the decision you now make.”

“Kill him.” Aerin spoke hoarsely, but without remorse. She pushed herself upright against the wall, feeling cautiously at her throat even as she threw a hateful look at Merrick. “He’ll never be anything but trouble.”

Truth, almost unquestionable, swept through her accusation. Only a note or two sounded off, one instrument among many in an orchestra, but it was enough to give Lara pause.

Not Dafydd, though; untouched by music, his shoulders dropped with weary acknowledgment “I’m afraid Aerin’s right. The ambitious rarely let failure stop them. His next game might be worse still.”

“Worse than attempted regicide, homicide, fratricide?” Lara ticked the crimes off on her fingers. “Worse than throwing the Seelie and Unseelie nations into war that could still wipe out both sides? The only thing worse would be if he succeeded. Right now there’s no chance of that, not with the condition he’s in. Put him on a bier.”

The elves exchanged nonplussed glances, Aerin’s expression bitterest of all. It was she who put the obvious into words, voice flat with disbelieving anger: “What?”

Lara shook her head, determination rising in the face of Aerin’s disapproval. “If I’m going to break a world and rebuild it, I’m not starting out with blood on my hands, not if I can help it. I don’t care how wrong he’s been. Maybe it’s not any better to put someone in a stasis chamber forever than it is to kill them, but maybe this place can heal his … soul,” she finished awkwardly. It was the wrong word for a people whose immortality was physical, not spiritual, but she didn’t have a better one.

Dafydd and Ioan looked at one another again, and Ioan turned a palm up, gesturing to Merrick’s body. “You asked the truthseeker for her justice. Will you now ignore it?”

Bemused, Dafydd said, “No,” and crouched to help Ioan lift Merrick onto one of the biers.

Lara’s shoulders unknotted as he came to rest. “Maybe it can heal the broken places inside him as well as his body. If not, at least here he can’t hurt anyone.”

“A gentler prison than your world offers,” Dafydd said. “I think we have very little time to seal this room again, else he’ll die despite our noblest efforts.”

“Great.” Magic objected to sarcasm. Lara winced an apology as she went to help Aerin up and nodded toward Emyr and Hafgan. “All right. Neither of them are dying. Let’s bring them up into the garden, and then we’ll break the world.”

Oisín awaited them in the garden, his genial presence so unexpected that Lara stumbled on seeing him. Humor flashed over Oisín’s wrinkled face. “I may be nimble for a blind man, but exploring caves and earthen chambers is more daring than I’m inclined to at my age.”

Dafydd laid Emyr out on the grass with a grunt, then looked up at Oisín with good-natured suspicion. “Are you sure you’re blind, Oisín? No one said anything.”

“People say as much with their breath and their feet as they do with their lips and faces,” the old poet replied. “I’ve had a long time to learn those languages. You’ve found the sleeping king?”

Lara gave him a questioning look. “Emyr, not Arthur. Even I know that mythology.”

“And I do not. Your sleeping Arthur must be a story from after my time, Truthseeker. Perhaps one day you’ll share it with me. For now, who else do we have here?”

“My father Hafgan.” Ioan put Hafgan on the grass beside Emyr, earning a groan for his efforts: Emyr slept, but Hafgan had only been injured, not sealed away in the chamber for healing.

Lara glanced toward the pathway they’d taken below the earth, unsurprised to see it filling itself in again, grass growing back over the door leading downward. Rhiannon’s magic, Ioan had said, and if so, it was more consistent, stronger even millennia after her death, than any other magic Lara had seen worked. It left behind no broken afterimages, no headache-inducing wrongnesses. Her will was made manifest, and Lara, disconcertingly, found herself accepting that the legendary Seelie woman was a goddess indeed.

“Ah.” Oisín stood and went to the two kings, kneeling between them. “Both halves of the whole. There is a story here, Truthseeker, if you wish to seek it out.”

Lara smiled, though it made the swollen bruise on her cheek hurt. “Storytelling’s your business.”

“And truthseeking is yours. Together we might tell a tale such as man has never known, and elfkind has long since forgotten.”

“I am desperate to hear that tale,” Ioan said in a low voice. “I’ve waited for it more years than I know how to recall.”

Oisín, with the grandiosity of a conductor, gestured to Hafgan. “Take his hand, then, and Dafydd, you take Emyr’s. Aerin, will you join us?”

Aerin crawled toward them and sat hard at Dafydd’s side, losing every evidence of grace as she did so. “I would be loathe to miss it.”

“Truthseeker?”

Lara joined them, sitting cross-legged like a tailor at Hafgan and Emyr’s heads. Oisín gave her a beatific smile that faded into sorrowful caution. “Now is the time to wield that staff, Lara.”

Heart pounding, Lara loosened the staff from its bindings. Its anticipation outweighed hers, churning her stomach until she was ill, but she held it out parallel to the ground, focusing on the blind man beyond its intricate carvings. “What now?”

Oisín wrapped his ancient fists around the ivory. Recognition leapt in the weapon, a thrill of delight utterly at odds with anything else Lara had felt from it. Oisín smiled and whispered something too soft for Lara to hear, though the sense of it was a greeting, and then lifted his unseeing gaze to hers. “Place it across Emyr and Hafgan’s chests, Truthseeker, and do your calling. Seek answers from millennia past, and if you three would see and hear the story told, grasp the staff as well, when she puts it to them. Do not let go.” Urgency colored the old man’s voice. “Whatever happens, do not let go. ”

Murmurs of assent met his demand. Lara held the worldbreaking staff aloft, waiting for the subtle change in Oisín’s grip that would say he was prepared to begin. After long seconds she felt a fractional relaxation of his muscles, and brought the staff down across Hafgan and Emyr’s chests in a smooth motion. Ivory warmed with excitement as the three Seelie laid hands on it. Lara seized that enthusiasm and gave it a focus, mutating the words of the prophecies she’d heard: “Truth has sought the hardest path for measures that will mend the past. If finders know the only way, tell me how worlds came changed at end of day.”

Gold ripped across the citadel, like the worldwalking spell turned the size of the land. The Barrow-lands folded around them, inverted, and spat them out its other side.

“You are not here,” Oisín whispered in Lara’s ear, but he wasn’t there when she looked for him. She retained a reassuring grip on the staff, but she was otherwise alone under a healing sky. Gold leached away, leaving a growing streak of blue behind, as if someone wove fabric together at an impossible speed to create a picture and hide what had been there before.

There was a wrongness about the streak across the sky; a wrongness that she’d felt time and again with the worldwalking spell, only much greater. The worldwalking spell was a tiny breach, a tear that even she could put to rights if she wanted to. The magic stitching itself together above her was primeval in its strength.