Truthseeker

Thirteen

Elves obviously didn’t say “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”: a rumble of comprehending bemusement rolled through the court before their prince began murmured words of enchantment. As when Aerin scolded Myfanwy, the sense of his words became clear to Lara. Then recognition leapt in her: it was the same tongue Dafydd had spoken in the fight with the nightwings, and she hadn’t understood it at all, then. A few hours in the Barrow-lands had changed her, had deepened her talent already. Lara folded her arms around herself, warding off a cold that came from within. A murder investigation might take days. By the end of that time, she wasn’t sure she’d recognize herself as the same woman who’d walked through a portal torn in the air.

Though, truthfully, she had already stepped so far beyond her customary boundaries as to be unrecognizable. I contain multitudes, she thought, and wondered if the poet who had written those words had ever found himself torn between worlds and choices.

Dafydd’s incantation ended and the court gave a collective sigh, their attention turning to Lara again. She tightened her arms around her ribs, then imagined how fragile and afraid she must look, huddled like that. It was the stance of a woman who didn’t want to be noticed, but she’d come here to offer help. She straightened, taking a breath deep enough to strain her tight-woven bodice, and met the eyes of those closest to her.

Light eyes: they all had light eyes, water blue to golden hazel and clear green, but none of them even close to the brown of her own. Lara stared from face to face for a few seconds, taken aback by uniformly translucent skin, pale hair, and eyes without a hint of darkness to them. For an instant their willowy forms and high-cheekboned faces looked not ethereal but inbred. Nowhere on earth could she imagine corralling a thousand passersby from any handful of streets in that city and finding such an unbroken similarity from one face to another.

They were dying, she thought very clearly, then threw the idea off with a shudder. “Is there a way to test if the compulsion is working?”

Dafydd made a nonplussed sound. “You’ll have to trust me. Or ask everyone individually if they’re obliged to answer, in which case we may as well have not bothered.”

“Fair enough.” Lara backed up until her heels touched the first step of the throne dais, then stood on her toes. “I wish I could see you all. All right. I think I’m going to have to ask a lot of very similar questions to cover all the bases, so I’ll start with … did anyone here murder Merrick ap Annwn?”

She braced for a tide of answers similar to the thanks offered moments before, but was instead greeted with a thousand chimes, like single notes struck from distant triangles. They lifted her, played at her skin and the fine hairs at her nape, making her tremble with their music and taking her weight from her feet. “No,” she whispered back into the purity of their response. “No one here murdered him.”

A sigh of relief tempered with concern washed over the court. Lara felt a stab of sympathy. It would have been easier if one false note had played; if one person had come up untrue and therefore offered an end to their uncertainty. At the same time, the truth reverberating in their answers meant none of their friends was guilty of murder, and that was soothing, too. Lara bit her lower lip. “Is anyone here responsible, in any way, for Merrick ap Annwn’s death?”

Sour notes echoed in the court’s response. Lara pressed her fingers against the sides of her nose and bared her teeth behind the steeple of her hands. “That was an awkward question. Let me try this: Does anyone here feel guilt over his death?”

Pure tones rang out in disparate answers: hundreds upon hundreds answered no, truthfully, but a handful more said yes with as much truth. Glances were exchanged, frowns and sharp looks, and in a few places the courtiers shifted, making distrustful space around those who had answered in the affirmative.

Lara nodded, lifting a hand as though she conducted music. “Will those of you who said yes please answer this next question, and the rest remain silent: Why do you feel guilty over Merrick ap Annwn’s death?” Repeating his full name felt necessary, like anything less might allow the men and women she interrogated to squeak by with a truthful answer that didn’t address what Lara wanted to ask. Her heartbeat was sick and fast in her chest, full of worry that she might let something slip by unnoticed. She was a tailor, not a lawyer.

Answers flooded back, more than one word this time, many of them mumbled with shame. I didn’t like him, or I wished him ill; I wanted him out of our court—all true answers. Dafydd stood rigid with tension at Lara’s side, his gaze lingering on those who responded truly with an answer he didn’t like. He looked betrayed, Lara thought, as though those who hadn’t liked Merrick struck at him personally with their distaste.

Lara nodded again, more to encourage herself than the court. “The same group, please answer this: Do you believe your feelings may have created a situation that led to Merrick ap Annwn’s death?”

Some did, or were, on further questioning, afraid they might have. The spaces around them grew, their comrades distancing themselves from association with possible murder. Those who stood abandoned did so with grim pride, their eyes warning that such slights would not go unforgotten.

Lara put her teeth together, searching for the right questions to ask: Were those fears rational? Fear wasn’t, by its nature, rational, but most people could separate out a fear of heights from the conviction that the bridge they crossed was going to fall into the water below. Finally satisfied that it was, indeed, fear driving guilt and dissonant answers, Lara brought her questions back to the whole: Does anyone know who is responsible for Merrick ap Annwn’s murder? Does anyone have suspicions? Motives? That got a bitter laugh, and one clear voice out of hundreds: “He was Unseelie.”

Silence, abrupt and strained, followed the accusation. The courtiers, so willing to edge away from those who confessed to dislike, went still, as if afraid they would otherwise all look to whomever spoke, and in doing so condemn him.

But there was no condemnation to be made. Even the repugnance with which the words had been spoken wasn’t enough to mask an inherent truth. Merrick’s Unseelie heritage may have seemed, in melodramatic terms, to be reason enough to destroy him, but there was dissonance in the words: it was not, in truth, reason enough. It had not driven any of the gathered court to kill.

It made her aware she knew too little and that Dafydd had diced his language carefully when he’d asked her to help him. That, in turn, reminded her of Aerin’s warning to be cautious, and Lara trembled with both exhaustion and nerves as she finally turned back to the throne. “I honestly don’t think anyone here is responsible in any way for your brother’s murder, Dafydd. I don’t know what that means, where we go from here, but if anyone here is guilty I can’t think of a question to ask that’ll resonate with me.”

“A truthseeker worthy of the name would have looked among us and known instantly,” the king said coolly.

There was no profit in angering powerful men. Lara’s chin dropped to her chest, weariness overcoming wisdom. “Dafydd said my talent hasn’t matured. If you’re not in any hurry, I could come back in a few years and we could try again then. I’m trying my best, though, and there is something I did notice, even if I’m not as good as I could be.”

Impatient fingertips rattled a drumbeat against the throne’s arm. “And what is that?”

Lara lifted her head, meeting the elfin king’s eyes. “Neither you nor Dafydd answered any of my questions.”

Emyr came to his feet in a silver shot, offended power blazing off him so strongly that Lara’s next breath showed on suddenly chilly air. As one, the gathered courtiers moved back, showing the respect and awe due a monarch whose temper had been ignited by insult.

Panic leapt in Lara’s stomach, driving the impulse to do as the courtiers had done: to escape the king’s reach and his wrath. She wasn’t certain it was bravery that held her in place; it could as easily have been a fundamental inability to move. But she forced her chin up, forced her gaze to be cool, and told herself that in the face of her calm the Seelie king’s response was overblown and gauche. That he made himself foolish, when all he’d had to do was respond evenly in order to retain his own dignity.

“I’m sorry,” she said mildly, and meant it, though more as an expression of surprise than apology. “Is the king above the law in the Barrow-lands?”

“The king is not expected to participate in common courtroom displays,” he said through his teeth. Ice crystals grew around his feet, marring the silver craftsmanship of his throne and creeping toward Lara like a physical threat. For a long moment her attention was drawn to their inching progress, and a shiver rose up from her core. Regardless of how much courage she drew on, she could never hope to match an anger that was literally elemental.

The leading edge of ice turned to water as it moved beyond the immediate area of the king’s effect, and a prosaic curiosity knocked fear out of her: she wondered how the silver remained unblackened, if the Seelie monarch was prone to fits of temper. There would have to be servants to mop up the melt water so it wouldn’t oxidize in hard-to-reach crevices, since Lara couldn’t imagine Dafydd’s father stooping to do such menial work himself.

Equilibrium restored by ordinary matters of pragmatism, Lara lifted her gaze back to the king and arched an eyebrow in deliberate, if moderate, challenge. “In private will be fine, then. I do most of my work behind a closed door anyway.”

“I have nothing to hide.” Dafydd’s voice surprised her, but nowhere nearly as much as it shocked his father, who flinched so hard a spray of frost cascaded from his shoulders and fell white against the throne. “I should have thought to include myself in the compulsion, or at the least, made answers to your questions. The prerogative of royalty,” Dafydd explained. “I’m afraid even a century among humans didn’t eliminate my assumption of carte blanche once I returned home.”

The king’s jaw locked, fury paling his eyes. Dafydd met the expression with an artless expression of no concern, but subtle tension changed the set of his shoulders and the way his clothes fell. He was forcing his father’s hand, Lara realized and, looking between them, had an instant’s clarity. The king wasn’t above the law: he was the law, as he would have been through much of human history. It was therefore almost impossible to suggest the law might be in any way corrupt without also implicating the crown.

She’d come to the Barrow-lands to help, not to sow the seeds of civil war. “It’s all right, Dafydd. I probably wouldn’t have thought to include myself, either. And I imagine no one would expect the queen of England to be subjected to mass questioning, either. I do think it’s necessary to put you through it, though, your majesty, if for no other reason than to allow you to face the Unseelie king with the absolute truth at your side.”

The phrase “your majesty” came more smoothly than she’d feared it might. It was deliberate mollification, as deliberate as her earlier attempt to infuriate him, but the wealthy and powerful were frequently easy to assuage by paying them the due they thought owed them. And, to be fair, the man was a king. Insufferably arrogant, perhaps, but a king.

And, just like a highly sensitive shop client, he relaxed a little, some of the cold inching back from where it had grown around him. “Hafgan would never believe me to be in any way responsible for his son’s death. To be so would be to risk my own child Ioan’s life. Even so, the assurance would not go amiss.” He took one step down from his dais, approaching Lara, though it was his court he addressed.

“I am Emyr, king of the Barrow-lands, and I tell you this now: I have had no hand in the death—the murder—of Merrick ap Annwn, child of Hafgan of the Unseelie. I neither nocked the arrow nor drew it nor released it.” His gaze went to Lara, and quietly but sharply, he added, “And those words are both literal and figurative in their truths. I am not part of the plot that designed his death. I did not shape it, nor do I have any knowledge of who did. I only wish I did, if for no other reason than to assure my oldest son’s safety.” The ice that had left it came back into his voice. “Now, Truthseeker, are you satisfied?”

Lara tilted her head, eyebrows furrowed as she considered the king. Then she took a handful of skirts and dropped a brief curtsy that felt unnatural, but which she meant with as much genuine respect as she could muster. “I am. You were very thorough, and I don’t think I have any follow-up questions.” She released her skirts and turned to Dafydd much less formally. “Which only leaves you, I guess.”

“Why bother?” Aerin stepped forward from within the courtiers. “There’s no one among us who doesn’t know Dafydd ap Caerwyn was the murder weapon himself.”