Truthseeker

Twenty-Nine

“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.”

“Kelly, I’m sorry.”

Kelly wiped a hand under her eyes before speaking snappishly in an attempt to keep further tears at bay. “It’s not your fault. If those—things—hadn’t attacked everything would be okay. Reg wouldn’t be hurt and Dickon wouldn’t have flipped out, but they did, so we’re just going to have to deal with that.”

“You shouldn’t have to.” Lara folded her arms around herself, then thought better of it and edged closer to Kelly, putting an arm around her shoulders. “At the most it should be Dafydd and me dealing with it.”

“Yeah.” Kelly sniffled. “Because you live in a vacuum, or something. We were all there when Reg got hurt. There wasn’t going to be any parceling out of whose fault it was. We all looked bad and there was no way to explain it.”

“Maybe I could’ve made them believe us.”

Kelly, red-eyed and puffy-nosed, gave her an incredulous stare. Lara ducked her head. “Okay, I might’ve convinced them we believed we were telling the truth.”

“And then they would’ve carted three of us off to the funny farm and the fourth to a government lab. There wasn’t much choice. I just didn’t know an adventure would feel like this.”

Lara sighed, images of Emyr and Ioan and of black-clad warriors meeting a silver-armored tide of enemies flashing through her mind. “Yeah. Neither did I.” She put her mouth against Kelly’s hair. “Maybe Dickon will—”

“Get over it? Adapt? Calm down? I donno, Lar.” Kelly’s voice thickened up again and she twisted to wipe her nose on her shoulder. “I actually think he’d have handled David being an elf if Reg hadn’t gotten hurt. I mean, he’s a big guy, he likes to ride his Yamaha, he does a little of the rebel without a clue thing, but he’s pretty squishy inside. Law-abiding. And I just went and …” She trailed off into a shudder that was more exhaustion than sobs.

“And proved yourself devious beyond any of our expectations.” Lara hugged Kelly harder, a mix of guilt and gratitude tangling inside her. “You really did save his life. Thank you.”

“He’s an elf, Lara. He’s got pointy ears. Did I just throw my whole life away for an elf?” She put her face in her hands, dragging a deep breath through her palms. “We should have kept going. I wouldn’t have to think so much if I was still driving.”

“Look.” Lara nudged her toward the car door. “Crawl into the backseat and sleep for a few hours, okay? I’ll stay awake, and maybe things will seem better when you wake up.”

Kelly sniffled again, then nodded as she climbed into the car. “Aren’t you going to tell me it’ll be okay, that Dickon loves me and that if he doesn’t forgive me he doesn’t deserve me? The rest of my friends would.”

“Yeah,” Lara said softly, and closed the door as gently as she could before whispering, “But you and I both know the truth’s more complicated than that.”

The silence of the upstate forest was nothing like the silence in the enchanted forest surrounding the Seelie citadel. There, the silence was absolute; here, if she listened hard enough, Lara could hear mechanical things. Distant airplanes, the thrum of car engines or horns; even voices raised where no one had seemed to be. But Dafydd had gone into the woods like a child seeking solace, and the quiet was a gift even for Lara.

The common phrase would be “there had been no time to think.” But there had been, long hours on the road in enforced silence, neither Lara nor Kelly eager to speak and disturb what rest Dafydd could get. The staff had eased the last hour of the journey, but traveling in the car was clearly bad for him when his glamour was released, and he’d made no effort to continue holding it once they reached the vehicle’s relative safety. So the silence had reigned, leaving her to her own thoughts.

She crouched at the pond’s edge, dragging her fingertips through it and watching ripples rebound against the incoming laps of water. Magic seemed like that to her, bouncing in unexpected ways. The staff Dafydd clung to had perhaps changed his world once already. Even with her best intentions, using it there could have unforeseen consequences.

“Changes that will break the world.” She sighed, then pushed to her feet and went into the forest more deliberately than she had the last time she’d entered a wood. Then she’d been hurt and angry and trying to escape. This time, if anything, she was searching for something.

For someone, truth be told, and for Lara, it always was.

It took longer to find him than she expected, as if he’d been wholly embraced by wilderness and it chose to deliberately hide him from her. It was absurd, but she was given no less to the fancy when she came on him sitting in a pool of moonlight, his shirt abandoned.

He looked like what he was, half-clothed and silver-skinned under the stars: an alien being, ethereal and beautiful and so terribly inhuman. A handful of half-interested bugs darted around him, even landed on his naked skin, but left again without tasting him, as if they knew his blood was wrong.

Moonlight was his friend in a way sunshine was not. He looked carved of it, looked like he was brother to it, and looked, Lara thought, as though he was drinking it in through his skin, vitality restoring as she watched. The staff lay across his lap, his palms resting on it, and even it glowed in the moon’s light, making it more ethereal and inhuman than before.

She stood where she was a long time, watching him in silence as the shadows changed and made leaf tattoos on his skin. There was peace in simply standing there, wrapped in calm, but eventually she whispered, “Does it help at all?”

He didn’t startle, didn’t so much as change the steady slow draw of breath, but after a little while he spoke. The words were music, incomprehensible at first, but as the moments went by, their meaning became clear. Seelie language and truthseeker magic wound together, making a story of sorrow and pain.

“A little,” Dafydd breathed. “The moonlight here is cooler. At home it would burn a path to my heart, strengthening me.”

“What will happen to you if you stay here?” Lara had an answer for that, one she didn’t want to consider, and Dafydd’s sigh said her fears were well founded.

“I don’t know. With the staff, I think I would survive. Without it … your world can only give me a fraction of what I need.” Dafydd put his hand to his chest, a spasm of pain tightening his features as he did so. “There is a wound here, Lara. An empty place where I once was connected to the Barrow-lands. I’d never noticed its presence until its absence told its tale. The pale magics of your world might flood it, but they will never fill it. I reach for things here, for the sounds of nature, the taste of the wind, the cool light from the sky, and they fall away from me.” His hand rose again, this time to capture one of the insects in his palm. “Like these biting creatures, your world simply does not recognize me well enough to give me sustenance. I might become a wraith if I stayed here. Like the nightwings became, before they took that man.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

He smiled suddenly, brilliant in the moonlight. “No. I don’t think you would, at that.” Finally he opened his eyes, then put out a graceful hand, inviting Lara to join him. She knelt by his side, then leaned in to kiss him.

“Good,” she whispered. “You’re still real. There are so many things I need to ask you, Dafydd.”

He nodded, gaze solemn. “So many things to talk about.” Then he smiled again and drew her closer. “What was it you said? ‘Shut up and kiss me’?”

Lara laughed. “I only said shut up.”

“That,” Dafydd said, eyes bright, “I can do.” Then, for all the honesty in his voice and promise in his words, he added, “You came for me. Thank you, Lara. You might not have.”

Lara put her forehead against his, lost for a moment in simply wanting to touch him. His skin was cool, almost cold, and she took his hands to warm them as she sat back on her heels. “There was never any chance I wouldn’t.”

“Unless you’d been lost to the Barrow-lands forever. How did you come back? How did you open the door?”

“Me! What about you? You disappeared in the middle of a war! How did that happen?”

“I’ve had months to wonder about that.” Dafydd shook his head. “The Barrow-lands will only permit someone of royal blood to cast that spell, and it certainly wasn’t me.”

“Well, it certainly doesn’t seem very likely that it was Emyr, and I’m sure it wasn’t Ioan.”

“Hafgan, perhaps. The Barrow-lands will heed Unseelie royal blood as well as Seelie.”

“No, it wasn’t Hafgan. Ioan’s been ruling in his name for centuries, maybe longer.”

“Ioan has what?” Dafydd gasped and Lara dropped her gaze to their entwined fingers, gathering herself before answering.

“Hafgan abdicated and Ioan took his name. For consistency, maybe. Your brother is king of the Unseelie, Dafydd.”

Astonishment kept Dafydd still, though his gaze went through Lara as if he saw something distant. “Not for consistency, but because Emyr would take abdication as a folly. He might have seized the opportunity to attack the Unseelie court, to push an old enemy out of sight when they were at their weakest. Hafgan can’t be dead, can he?” He refocused on Lara, leaving her with the alarming impression that she should have many answers she lacked.

“I don’t think so, but Ioan said it was so long ago that the Unseelie have all but forgotten someone else used to be king. How long would that take?”

“Too long for it to have any meaning, Lara, or even any number I might name for you. Oisín keeps some mark of the years, but our nature doesn’t incline us to. I don’t see how the Unseelie court could forget their king was once a different man. Our memories fade until even our own lives are nothing more than stories and legends, but Ioan’s Seelie coloring would forever remind them.”

“Ah.” Lara puffed her cheeks. “I wouldn’t have known he was Seelie if he hadn’t told me. He says the Unseelie used to be pale, too, but living underground for so long has changed them, so he chose to change, too. He’s dark-haired now.”

“They? He thinks of himself as one of them?”

“Didn’t Merrick think of himself as Seelie?”

“Not so much that he let our magic work subtle changes to his coloring. I didn’t even know that could be done.” Dafydd fixed his gaze on the black pond. “So my blood brother truly is of another people, while the brother of my heart lies dead and I am, perhaps, trapped in a world not my own. I suppose it could be worse,” he said eventually. “It could be raining.”

Lara shot a look toward the sky, then shouldered him. “Even I know better than to say things like that.”

Dafydd flashed a brief smile at the stars. “I’m a weatherman. It permits me a certain leeway. Am I forgiven my follies, then? I should have told you about Merrick,” he said more quietly. “I am sorry, Lara.”

“I know. And yes, you’re forgiven. A year in jail is more than enough penance. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“You didn’t cause it to happen. I spent a great deal of time worrying about you, Lara. It seems impossible it was only a day.”

Lara shook her head. “I know. I spent hours reading news archives on Kelly’s computer. It was like reading a past history of a world that never was. But it could have been much worse. You were gone from the Barrow-lands for ten days, and a century passed here. I could’ve been missing for a decade.”

“Some aspect of the spell I used to hold time in tandem must have clung to you. Either that or a truthseeker’s will can find its way through time as well as the space between worlds.”

“In that case I need to work on my timing.”

“Well,” Dafydd said in a wonderfully mollifying tone, “it was your first time.”

Lara laughed aloud. “Practice makes perfect, is that it?”

Dafydd took the question for invitation, brushing his mouth against hers and murmuring, “That’s the human expression, yes.”

“I’d just as soon not have to practice that, though. I can think of better things that might need perfecting.”

“Really. Like what?”

Lara sat back, trying to look serious. “Well, the cut of your shirt. It’s all right when the glamour is working, but right now it looks like you borrowed your big brother’s clothes. And—”

She shouted laughter as Dafydd tackled her, knocking her back into moss and soft earth. “My dress! You’re going to destroy it! I made this, Dafydd!”

“My deepest apologies.” The phrase was teasing, not sincere, and Lara pursed her lips uninvitingly as he tried for another kiss. “Ah, is a man not allowed to offer perhaps slightly insincere apologies to salve his lady’s heart?”

“Not with me. It grates on my skin.” Delight flooded Lara, though, turning her sour expression to another smile. “His lady?”

Dafydd looked discomfited. “It’s absurd, I know, Lara. We’ve spent barely a day in each other’s company—”

“And you still haven’t learned when you’re talking too much.” Lara touched her fingers to his lips. “Shh. We can give it some time before we start putting the absurd into words. Right now—”

“Right now nothing.” Kelly’s voice came out of the shadows, and after a moment she appeared to lean against a tree. “If I had a bowl of popcorn I’d probably just sit down and watch, but since I don’t, we should probably hit the road.”