C.E. Murphy - Truthseeker

“You’re killing me here, Miss Lara.”

Lara looked up at him with a smile. “No, I’m not.” Buoyed by that simple exchange of exaggeration and truth, she took the cane in both hands.

Power sparked dissonance against her palms, a vivid shock of what she felt not matching what she saw. A headache flared and she crushed her eyes closed. The cane’s gnarly polished surface faded from her mind’s eye, her hands instead telling her the truth. Patterns were marked against her skin, the cane’s circumference much larger and more varied than what she’d seen. Relieved song swept through her, washing away the last vestiges of untuneful falsehood. She whispered “It’s all right” as if she spoke to a living thing, and squeezed the column in her hands. “Show your true form. I’m the one you’ve been waiting for.”

Jake, reverently, said, “I will be God damned,” and Lara opened her eyes to look at the ivory staff lying across her palms.

It was as it had been in Dafydd’s vision: hollow, carved with intricate Celtic patterns, and considerably longer than Lara stood tall. The ends were solid, as if they’d been capped to give them strength to stand against the wear of use. Despite its age, the ivory was still a rich gleaming white, unyellowed by time, and it tingled with power, as if pleased to be reverted to its natural form.

Oisín, Lara realized very clearly, was more exceptional than she’d known. The staff in her hands wanted to be used, like it had a will of its own that it could work upon the bearer. If he’d carried it as long as he had without turning its power to any ends of his own, then his willingness to be no more than he was was extraordinary. She looked at Jake, who still gaped at the staff, and found herself shaking her head.

“Did you never have any impulse to try to use this for anything? Did it not … tell you it could be used?”

Jake’s eyebrows furrowed and he shook his head. “Not for anything more than a cane, Miss Lara. Why, does it say something to you?”

Maybe it responded to inherent magics. Lara tightened her fingers around the staff, hope surging through her. If her mortal magic could make the staff sing, then Dafydd’s Seelie talent might awaken it far enough to heal him. “It almost makes promises,” she whispered. “Like it’s alive. What it says …” She breathed a laugh, and gave Jake a lopsided smile. “What it says is, I’m going to have to be very careful with it. Thank you, Jake. Thank you for bringing this, and for trusting me.”

“The world needs healing, Miss Lara. Good luck to you, if you’re the one to do it.”

“That didn’t take long.” Kelly eyed Lara’s staff as Dafydd, looking a little refreshed, came from the largest copse of trees available in the park. He studied the staff even more avidly than Kelly, and Lara handed it to him wordlessly.

Color flooded back into his face within seconds. He sagged, but with an air of relief rather than the exhaustion that had dogged him. “It feels like home,” he whispered. “I can hardly believe an artifact of such power has been here for so long and I never sensed it.”

“It was in disguise,” Lara said carefully. “I’m not sure you’d have sensed it even if you’d known to look for it. Someone was waiting for me,” she added to Kelly. “I think they sort of had been for four hundred years. So it didn’t take long.”

Kelly looked faintly disapproving. “I thought finding mystical artifacts was supposed to take great trials. Or at least, I don’t know, Nazis chasing after you.”

“Only, I think, if you’re Indiana Jones.” Dafydd smiled at Kelly, then wrapped his arms around the staff, putting as much flesh against it as he could. “With this and a wild place, I would be well restored in a matter of days.”

“I don’t think we should wait days, but we can at least stop for the night in one of the state forests,” Lara offered. “We should be able to get five or six hours’ rest, even if we want to try to get to the Catskills by morning.”

“But perhaps we should just push through to the mountains,” Dafydd murmured.

Lara shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s already after ten and we’ve had a long day. I could use the rest.”

“A long day,” Kelly echoed. “Is that what you call it? I was thinking more like a horrible, terrible, no-good awful day, and I want a nap. Dafydd, is that thing going to make riding in the car easier for you? Because Lara’s right, we should get away from town sooner rather than later. We can head northeast and get a little farther away from where anybody might expect us and then sack out for the night.”

“The staff will make it much more comfortable, I think. All right.” Dafydd curled a hand around it protectively, then drew in a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. To Lara’s astonishment, his glamour slipped back into place, changing the staff to a cane and taking the elfin edge off his looks. His visage still fluctuated and twisted to her eyes, but to other people, he would look normal again.

Kelly muttered, “That’s flipping freaky, man,” and more clearly said, “Can you make yourself, I don’t know, short, forty, and balding? Because that would be a much better disguise for tromping back to the car in.”

“I’m sorry.” Rue flashed across Dafydd’s face. “It would take several hours to build a new glamour, and weeks of practice to be certain it would hold under even mild scrutiny.”

“Guess we’ll just have to make a run for it.”

“All the way to the sidewalk?” Lara wondered. “Didn’t you move the car down here to the park?”

Kelly opened her mouth and shut it again. “No. That would have been smart. I left it back up on the main drag where we parked earlier.”

“Oh.” Lara twitched a smile, and offered Dafydd her arm as they left the park. He leaned on it more heavily than she might have hoped, the staff clearly not having helped as much as it could. “That’s a relief, really. You’ve been so competent and levelheaded all day, but if you didn’t think of that maybe you’re not a criminal mastermind in the making.”

“It’s my first attempt,” Kelly said with a sniff. “Give me time.”

“Time,” Dafydd murmured, “is one thing we do not seem to have in abundance.”

Reminded and chastened, they hurried back to the car.

The Corolla bumped down a rutted road, all three passengers gritting their teeth so they didn’t bite their tongues. Cicadas squealed loudly enough to be heard over the engine, announcing their lovelorn state to the world. Dafydd, apparently undisturbed, all but fell from the vehicle before it had come to a full stop in front of a reed-ridden pond, and took several long strides away as Kelly killed the engine. Both women got out of the car as Dafydd turned back with a joyous smile.

“This will do,” he said. “This will do wonderfully. Thank you, Kelly. Thank you for everything. I owe you my life.”

“You actually mean that, don’t you.”

“I do. It’s not a phrase I would use lightly.” He took a breath and closed his teeth on it, like he was actually eating the fresh air. “Resting under the risen moon will do me good. Thank you again,” he said, then took a few steps and disappeared.

Lara startled and Kelly made a noise of disbelief. “Where’d he go?”

“He’s …” Lara blinked hard. “I can kind of see him.” There was no double vision of glamour, but the trees seemed to accept and camouflage the Seelie prince in a way they would never do with humans. “I guess he was right. The forest likes him.”

“I guess so.” Kelly watched the trees in silence a few moments, then spoke in a low voice. “I always thought it would be cool to have somebody say ‘you saved my life’ and mean it. I thought, you know, that it’d be happenstance, just being in the right place at the right time to be a hero. I didn’t know it would really be this kind of blind panic, running to try to do the right thing while everything else got fucked up.”