C.E. Murphy - Truthseeker

Courtiers scattered away from Lara, from their disgraced prince, and most of all from their bleak-eyed king. Lara watched them break into groups, gossip rising up in whispers before they’d escaped earshot. Even Aerin slipped into the heart of a small gathering, ducking her head to catch the murmurs and speculation of those around her. It was easier to watch them, to wonder at what they said, than to look at Dafydd again, knowing he had betrayed her trust with full and deliberate intention.

Oh, he hadn’t lied, and Lara perversely admired that, but it did nothing to ease the cut of betrayal she felt. He hadn’t lied, but neither had he told her anything like the whole truth, nor laid out the clues that might have led her to asking questions he couldn’t refuse to answer.

Kelly would call him a piece of work for that particular success. Lara cast one hard glare at the floor, then made herself lift her gaze to find Dafydd’s, to see what she could read in his expression.

Humility, even self-disgust, marred his handsome, alien features, and his glance skittered away guiltily before he brought it back to her, seeking forgiveness he in no way deserved. She met that plea coolly, feeling the same well-controlled condemnation in her gaze as she’d laid on him the first time they’d met, in the moment he’d given her a false name.

She ought to have been wiser from that moment on. Subtle complexities of truth were so rare as to be intriguing and exciting to pursue, but at the heart of it he had lied to her from the moment they’d met. When she had been so uncomfortable over his name, she should have known better than to trust that he had been wholly honest with the story that had convinced her to join him in the Barrow-lands.

“Don’t tell me you had no other choice.” Her voice was as clipped as Emyr’s had ever been, and she wondered if she could be as arrogant as the Seelie king. “You could have said you’d been framed. I’d have heard the truth in it.”

“But would you have come with me, knowing I’d murdered a man? You just said I believed what I told you was the truth. That’s not exoneration, Lara. It’s only enough to hang the jury.”

It was a curiously human expression from the Seelie prince, and had her anger been a little less, she might have smiled. Instead she snapped, “Do you even have juries here?”

“No.” Emyr stepped down from the throne dais, regal presence needing no other clarification: he was the beginning and end of the law, uninterested in troubling with juries or trials. “Take your truthseeker away, Dafydd. I have magics to work, and I would have them removed from her influence.”

“And her mortal taint?” Lara asked under her breath. Emyr’s shoulders pinched and he turned a sharp look on her. Lara scowled back, sullen in her defiance and not particularly caring. Nor did she expect an answer, and a touch of her outrage was mollified by the fact that he bothered.

“Yes. Your nearness pulls at the warp and weft of Seelie magic. Oisín was not cursed with immortality without youth; that he ages was the unintended price of magics worked on a man of mortal birth. Now go, as far away as my son can take you without leaving these lands.”

“Who’s Oisín?” For the second time, Lara forwent Emyr’s answer, turning to walk away, arms folded under her breasts. Dafydd scrambled after her, offering an answer she wasn’t certain she wanted, given that it offered him an excuse to talk to her at all.

“Oisín is our seer, the one who sent me to your world to look for you. There are stories about him, legends.”

“I don’t like fairy tales.”

Dafydd, ill-advisedly, breathed, “And yet here you are, participating in one.”

“You son of a bitch.” Shrieking discordance rushed through Lara, infuriating talent picking apart impossibilities and untruths. Furious, frustrated, she spun and rushed away from him, strides just short enough to not be called a run. A moment later she pushed through the audience chamber’s great doors, the violent slap of her palms against them shocking through her elbows. They were obviously meant to open with a mere touch: under her thrust they flew back, startling everyone but her with their bang.

Wind, as if affronted by the assault, snatched at her gown and hair, making her feel like she’d been transformed into a wild thing in the space of an instant, and then fell away again as abruptly as it had risen, leaving Lara with the impression that the air itself was shocked by her mere mortality and how easy it was to rumple her.

“Lara …” Dafydd’s placating voice came after her.

She turned back to him in such a snap of skirts it seemed the wind hadn’t left her at all. “Don’t try to charm me right now, your highness . You’re right, maybe I wouldn’t have come here if you’d told me you’d killed Merrick yourself. But you should have given me the choice. Or did you just think you were being clever, hiding things from the naïve human truthseeker?” Her lips peeled away from her teeth, her expression feral enough that it drove Dafydd half a step backward.

Lara’s snarl turned to a sneer, belittling his cowardice in the face of her wrath. “I’ll help,” she said. “I’ll help because I said I would, but I’m going home the second this is over. In the meantime, stay out of my way.” She whipped around again and stalked away, leaving Dafydd to stand alone on the citadel’s steps like Cinderella’s prince.

Within minutes, embarrassment outweighed Lara’s anger. Running away was a child’s trick, and like a child, she’d failed to pay any attention to her path. The citadel’s vast ghostly shape above the trees wasn’t enough to guide her back on the path she’d taken, though she might be able to work her way back by heading toward its graceful spires. Might: the idea of briar rose patches and moats, things of fairy tales, presented themselves to her as likely deterrents surrounding the heart of the Seelie court. The forest seemed improbably thick so close to the palace, wild and grown-over rather than the widespread oak trees and soft undergrowth she’d seen surrounding ancient castles in photographs.

But those were images captured in a different world. Magic bent the rules here; there was hardly any reason to suppose things like forests or landscaping would follow the same patterns they did at home.

The thought felt too big, too unwieldy to be accepted. Lara, overwhelmed, sank into a huddle of moss and branches that softened to make a comfortable seat for her weight. For long minutes she sat with her head in her hands, eyes dry as she stared at the forest floor.

She had no way home except through Dafydd’s goodwill. Scorning him, despite his treachery, had been a mistake, though even as she admitted that, irritation washed through her. He ought to have followed her, for all that she’d told him not to. The contradiction pulled a reluctant smile to her lips: men, whether human or fae, were right to be confounded by women.

“And so we are,” came a voice from the forest. Lara jolted in her mossy chair, too entangled to come to her feet. “Forgive me,” the voice added. “I forget how silent the forest is until the silence is broken. I am Oisín.”

He came out of the trees as he spoke, a bent and ancient man with a heavy staff and filmed-over white eyes, though his step was more certain than Lara’s had been as she’d run from the palace. Like everyone she’d seen, he was dressed beautifully, but there was nothing ethereal or inhuman about the soft robes he wore. The collar was high, the shoulders winged, the colored wraps around his middle of the finest material: each piece was as richly made as anything that graced the Seelie, and yet the whole was somehow imbued with a solidity that made the old man as human as Lara herself was.