Truthseeker

Fourteen

Ice erupted in Lara’s stomach and froze her breath as surely as though Emyr had cast a spell to chill the air. Bravado had pushed her through facing his anger; bravado and the certainty that if she let herself admit to the awe she felt, she would crumble in a whimpering heap at the throne’s edge and never get up again.

Even that narrow strand of willpower deserted her, resonating pure tones in Aerin’s charge stripping what strength she had to draw on. She swung toward Dafydd, the ice in her belly spreading to her arms and legs and leaving her a clumsy marionette. Only the way the skirts crumpled in her hand promised her gown was still gossamer: its weight was such that it might have turned to stone. There was nothing to her voice, only a protest of disbelief she knew would go unanswered: “Dafydd?”

Unanswered, at least, in the way she wanted it to be. Weary regret in the lines of his body told her everything she already knew to be true: that Aerin’s accusation held merit, and that the son of the Seelie king had somehow lied to her.

“I nocked the arrow.” Dafydd’s shoulders slumped, all his slender alien beauty wiped out with such a human stance of defeat. “I drew the bowstring and loosed the arrow that ended my brother’s life.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me this?” Venom melted the cold in Lara’s chest and carried heat to her cheeks. Worse than blushes, bitter water stung her eyes. She knotted her fingers more tightly into the thin fabric of her skirts, willing herself to not draw attention to tears by dashing them away, and wondered sharply if the Seelie cried from frustration or anger. It was a human fallibility she’d be glad to give up. “What the hell did you want me here for, if you killed him?”

“He claims himself innocent of the crime.” Emyr spoke again, disdain in every word. “Our poet and seer insisted he be given the chance to clear himself, and that can only be done through a truthseeker’s talents.”

“I loosed the arrow.” Dafydd’s hands slowly turned to fists, his body taut and his face downcast. His gaze, though, remained on Lara, fiery with desperation. “But my actions weren’t my own, Lara. I remember still—I will never forget—the thickness that came over me. I can see what I did, can feel my arm bend and take the arrow from its quiver, can feel the weight of the bowstring against my fingers, and in nightmares I watch the arrow fly true while my mind screams against my actions. I was the weapon, but I am not the killer. I swear it.”

Strain released him abruptly, as though offering his explanation had been a battle of wills that, once ended, left him drained. “I’m sorry,” he added in a whisper. “I should have explained it all, but I was afraid you wouldn’t come with me, and I have no other way to prove myself innocent.”

Lara sat down gracelessly, scraping her hip painfully on the edge of the throne dais as she did. The wince that crossed her face was excuse enough to cup her hands around her forehead, shielding herself from the curious light eyes of so many strangers while she caught her breath.

Shielding herself, too, from showing confusion and relief and dismay, though she knew hiding her expression was as much a giveaway as sharing it would be. The courtiers’ silence pressed on her, unforgiving in its interest, inhuman in its patient extension.

She broke before they did, shivering under the weight of their anticipation. “He’s telling the truth. At least he believes it’s the truth. He was the weapon, not the murderer.” Aerin had named Dafydd the weapon as well, a distinction that had meant nothing to Lara a few moments earlier. She folded her fingers down, searching for Aerin’s willowy form among so many others. “Is that possible? Dafydd just laid a compulsion to answer on all of you. Can one be laid on someone to make them act against their will?”

Hesitation clouded the Seelie woman’s clear eyes. “I would have said no. That there must be a part of the one enchanted that wishes to act as the enchanter wishes him to.”

“But?” The single word echoed sharply in a hall too filled with bodies for reverberations to sound at all. Discomfort crawled over Lara’s skin, raising hairs, and the muscles in her neck creaked with the effort of holding her head still. Magic was being employed, making her voice carry. She was almost certain of it, but looking around to question Dafydd or Emyr’s hand in it felt, somehow, like losing ground.

“But I’ve known Dafydd and Merrick all their lives,” Aerin said. “I saw rivalry between them, as with any family, but I can’t believe there’s any part of Dafydd that wished Merrick harm. Either I don’t know him as well as I think, or there’s a magic that can force a man’s hand against his will.”

“Unseelie magic” came out of the gathering, accusing words spoken in more than one voice. Others nodded, muttering agreement as a spasm of uncertain concurrence shaped Aerin’s mouth. Lara released her self-imposed stillness and twisted to glance first at Dafydd, then Emyr. Her neck ached from the angle, but getting to her feet seemed risky: tremors rattled her, Dafydd’s confession still leaving marks.

“A few more questions, if you will, your majesty. Am I right in assuming you’re one of the most skilled magic users of your people?” A trill of body-weakening absurdity ran through her, making her glad she hadn’t risen. A week earlier she hadn’t believed in magic at all. Now she was interrogating a monarch on his talent for it. She felt as though a bandage had been torn off, the sting fading so long as she didn’t look too closely at the wound it had covered.

Emyr stared down at her, impassive enough to be threatening. He finally nodded, a single short action that informed Lara as to her rudeness in asking. She sighed and climbed to her feet again, feeling more able to face Emyr’s acidic gaze that way. “Then for the purposes of this trial, I’m going to consider you an expert witness. As such, would you say it’s possible to enchant someone into doing something he didn’t want to?”

“I have never tried,” Emyr said after a lengthy silence, “but I believe I could.” The faintest emphasis lay on the final “I,” making it clear that he doubted it was a skill owned by all.

“So it’s not necessarily Unseelie magic?” Lara used the word cautiously, uncomfortably certain that the Seelie court regarded it as synonymous with evil or dark.

For all his pale icy colors, Lara saw fire rise in the Seelie king. “Not,” he said with too much precision, “necessarily. But that court has made use of their magics before in ways that this court and these people had never considered and would not condone. This is such a use. I think it more likely, if my son has been used as a weapon, that the wielder is of the Unseelie court, and not this one.”

“Even though they’d be killing their own king’s son? Why would they do that?” Even as she asked Lara knew, and answered her own question: “To provoke war. To create a chance at seizing the land they want. How long did you say you’ve fought over the Barrow-lands?”

“It has been this way for—” Dafydd shrugged, spreading his hands. “Forever.”

“Forever,” Lara heard herself say in a light, disconcerting tone, “is a very long time, to immortals.” Her dress suddenly wasn’t warm enough, cold rushing over her as though she’d stepped into a northern wind. Uncertainty crossed Dafydd’s face, a sign that the strangeness in her voice wasn’t something only she had heard, but it was his father who answered her.

“It is, and yet even I would rest easy with saying it has been this way forever to a truthseeker.”

“And have there been wars over it before?” Lara folded her arms around herself as she turned back to Emyr, not caring that it made her look small and defensive.

The first hint of humor she’d seen in him ghosted across the king’s pale features. “Not in forever. Battles, yes, but never war. The Unseelie have never gathered in such force as will greet us in the morning.” Humor passed, leaving sharpness in its wake. “All of us who live in the citadel are gathered in this room, Truthseeker. If you cannot point us at a murderer tonight, then we who must fight on the morrow will retire, the better to protect our lands and people with dawn.”

“All I have right now is Dafydd,” she said bitterly. “The same as the rest of you. He believes utterly that he was the weapon but not the killer, and no one else in here has even a hint of guilt about them. You might as well go to bed.”

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.