C.E. Murphy - Truthseeker

For an instant the battle went still, Seelie and Unseelie alike looking to the sky, as though Lara’s scream had come from far above. She had cried out the night before, looking into the scrying pool, and she wondered which had arrested the soldiers: her horror then, or now.

Aerin, undisturbed by Lara’s shriek, straightened in her saddle, watching as whatever she’d said drove Dafydd into the enemy’s waiting arms.

Rage turned Lara’s vision red. She forgot the men and women around her were meant to protect her; forgot that she knew nothing of swordplay; forgot everything except evidence of her own errors in Aerin’s actions. She didn’t know how Aerin had escaped the compulsion Dafydd had laid on the courtiers to answer, nor how she had missed the lies in the white-haired woman’s voice. Maybe, if a spell could force a man against his will, another could hide falsehood from a truthseeker, especially one as infantile in her talents as Lara was.

In the moment, none of it mattered. Her horse rushed forward, Lara’s fear forgotten as she stood in her stirrups and shouted.

She should have fallen off, but the magics Aerin had placed on her were to Lara’s benefit. She couldn’t fall, and she couldn’t be expected to do as she was doing.

That, then, was the only reason she scored a blow across Aerin’s kidneys at all.

Lara had seen others take hits that looked harder, but the moonlight armor screamed and bent under the force of her strike. Aerin whipped around, pain shattering beneath shock as she recognized Lara. Lara swung again, wildly, as momentum sent her past Aerin. The Seelie woman didn’t even have to parry to avoid it, but she lifted her sword to block a third attack as Lara hauled her horse around in a tight circle.

Metal scraped metal, Aerin drawing her blade down the length of Lara’s to tangle the guards. A quick twist wrenched the sword from Lara’s hand, and Aerin grabbed the edge of Lara’s breastplate, hauling her close. “What mortal idiocy drives you now, Truthseeker?”

Lara balled her armored fist and threw the first punch of her life at Aerin’s beautiful face.

Aerin’s head snapped back satisfactorily, blood pouring from her nose and upper lip. The nosepiece of her helm had caught the brunt of the blow: it was bent, and a cut leaked red down the bridge of her nose to mingle with the rest of the mess.

Lara, still standing in her stirrups, shoved Aerin backward, snarling “Arrest her” to those nearest to them. The command broke their stillness, drawing their attention from the echoing cry that Lara had voiced both seconds and hours earlier. Within moments the sounds of battle roared around her again, chaos personified by glittering swords and splashing blood. The sun was in her eyes, blinding and somehow, gratifyingly, reducing her fear. Emboldened and not waiting to see if she’d been obeyed, Lara pulled her horse around a second time and sent it into the Unseelie battalion. Chasing Dafydd; chasing hope.

She broke through their defenses by speed and surprise, not skill, but it was enough. Surprise let her knock men aside with kicks and once with a bash of her fist, and that was all the time she needed. Time enough to see that, just beyond the Unseelie front lines, Dafydd’s silver-bridled horse stood empty-saddled and startled-looking amid surging black-clad warriors.

Dafydd was gone.

In defiance of what she saw, in defiance of what she was, a single thought hung in Lara’s mind: Dafydd could not be gone. It rang false, but it wouldn’t leave her. It wasn’t possible that he had disappeared. She’d seen no brilliant door open in the air, nothing to take him away from the Barrow-lands. But then, she’d seen very little, with the sun in her eyes, and the transition had taken hardly any time when Dafydd had brought her to his world.

There were suddenly dozens of Seelie around her, their bright armor splashing in a wave against the Unseelie dark. She remained unmoving, stuck in her saddle even as she recognized that they were protecting her. They were obeying Dafydd’s order, even though he was no longer there. She stared at the earth, half afraid she would see his slim body trampled beneath hooves and Unseelie feet, and then another thought struck her: that he’d become invisible. She redoubled her search of the ground, hoping for signs of such a thing—maybe footprints appearing in the earth—even as the larger part of her rejected the possibility. She had seen his magic. It was electricity, not the manipulation of light that might allow him to hide in plain sight. Perhaps others among the Seelie had that skill, but not, she thought, Dafydd ap Caerwyn.

Which led her back to the impossible: that he had vanished.

She was still struggling with that, searching for another answer, when an arrowhead contingent of Unseelie rushed through the surrounding Seelie army and fair-haired Ioan ap Caerwyn clobbered her alongside the head with a gauntleted fist.

Later, she thought she had not, quite, lost consciousness. Nor had she fallen from her horse: Aerin’s magic was thorough. Dazed, she’d been surrounded by Unseelie warriors, and they’d ridden through the army at an oblique angle to the fighting. The battle thinned, then suddenly turned to nothing, grasslands becoming forest as her escort picked up speed. By the time the ringing in her head—for once not born of truth or falsehood, but from simple, painful trauma—had faded, they were well beyond the battlefield, and she had lost any hope of finding her way back on her own.

Ioan was not among her captors. They were all dark-haired, their helms removed once they’d left the field behind. Three of the group were women; and a part of Lara was bemused they felt she required eight soldiers for escort. They had more faith in her than she did.

A crescendo came over her at the thought, piano chords pounding in her head. Truthseekers, she imagined, could be dangerous, if confronted at the height of their power. She had no doubt they knew what she was—why else take her at all?—but they wouldn’t necessarily know that her talents were meager.

That might be her sole advantage. Lara bit back questions, certain her armed guards wouldn’t answer them, and tried to bury fear under the strength of her magic as they rode. They left the forests behind, climbing upward, the land becoming less hospitable as they did. Lara built a vision of their destination in her mind’s eye: a granite citadel as imposing as the Seelie court’s home, cold and unfriendly as the barren mountaintops they strove for. A wall rose up in the distance, hinting that her imagination was true; impenetrable and unscalable, it drew her eye upward, searching for an impossible palace built at its farthest reaches.

There was no such thing nor, as they came closer, any hint of a path rising along its sheer face. Its foot was buried in darkness, and they were nearly upon it before Lara realized it was a chasm cutting hundreds of feet down into the rock.

She had time to scream as the horses launched themselves across the terrible divide. Above her scream, the leader of her escort shattered the air with a piercing whistle.

In the instant before they smashed into the vast mountain wall, it ruptured, rock twisting and exploding before them. A gaping mouth opened, a black maw that roared with the sound of tearing stone. Lara’s stomach rebelled, as if it had been wrenched sharply to the left, though her vision insisted she still rode straight ahead.

Hooves clattered against the cave’s broad stony tongue, which angled down at a desperate degree, as if swallowing them. The horses barely slowed, finding their pace again as what had been a diamond of riders around Lara became a long line with her in the middle.

A road stretched before them, a narrow strip of stone leading down. Rock face shot upward on their right and plummeted on their left: one misstep would see her at the bottom of the very chasm they’d just leaped across. Lara dared a brief glance over her shoulder. There was no glimpse of the ledge they’d jumped from or the cavern they’d come through, only their thin road melding seamlessly back into the rock face. To their left, across the broad divide, rose the canyon side they had leaped from.