C.E. Murphy - Truthseeker

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 heal 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.”