Wayfinder

by C. E. Murphy

  Ioan reached over to pat her horse’s shoulder. It turned its head toward him agreeably, but continued forward without missing a step. Lara, though, clutched its mane when its head moved, then felt patient glances from not only Ioan and Aerin, but their horses as well. “We don’t ride horses as a matter of course in my world.”

  “Do you not travel, then?” Ioan edged his animal further forward, so they rode abreast of one another instead of with Lara at a slight point. That made more sense: he knew the path they were taking, though for the moment there was no choice in the stone-cut road they followed. It was struck through sheer stone, a pathway tall enough that its ceiling was lost to vision, though echoes suggested there was a roof. Lara glanced up as she had dozens of times already, wondering if one of the globes of light might be sent skyward to show how tall the enclosure was, but once again dismissed the idea with a shiver. She could almost imagine it reached to sunlight if she didn’t see that it closed above them.

  “We travel,” she said firmly, eager to take her thoughts away from the enclosed roadway. “Just not on horses. We use … self-propelled carriages called cars. There were several of them on the road when you came through to fight the hydra. The wheeled boxes in different colors?”

  Ioan squinted, then grunted in surprise. “Those would keep a rider dry. How do they work?”

  “With what we call an internal combustion engine. Technology, instead of magic.” Lara shook her head. “I could explain a steam engine to you, but not a combustion engine. And I wouldn’t anyway.”

  “To keep us simple?” Aerin asked archly.

  Lara risked a dirty look over her shoulder. The horse ambled along, undisturbed by her motion, and triumph lanced through her before she answered. “To keep the air clean, maybe. The fuel those engines burn smells terrible and is bad for the atmosphere. But even if I understood them well enough to explain it, they’re made of steel. Seelie couldn’t make them anyway.”

  “We could use another metal, perhaps.”

  “I think the whole point of iron and steel is that once it’s molded it can be reheated without losing its integrity. Most metal is too soft.”

  “Is this?” Aerin tapped her moonlit armor, and dismay splashed through Lara.

  “I don’t know. It’s at least as strong as the plate mail my people used to use, but it’s lighter, so maybe it’s harder, too.” Lara wrinkled her nose. “Anyway, I really can’t tell you how they work, because I honestly don’t know. Mostly in my world we have mechanics to take care of car problems. People don’t fix them themselves, if something goes wrong.”

  “You must have some idea,” Ioan said dubiously. “There’s no one here who can’t check a hoof for stones, or rub down swollen muscles if a horse comes up lame on a journey. Surely you can do the same for your ‘cars’?”

  “No, we have …” Lara put a hand over her face, suddenly embarrassed at her reliance on other people’s knowledge. “We call for help if something goes wrong. With cell phones, which are sort of like your scrying spells, except everyone can use them.”

  “No wonder Dafydd stayed so long in your world,” Aerin finally said. “It sounds very … interesting.”

  “That, and it took a hundred years to find a truthseeker,” Lara muttered. “Ioan, how long are we—Oh! Is that light?”

  Ioan, solemnly, said, “It is,” and chuckled when Lara urged her horse forward a little more quickly.

  The road bent in front of her, then abruptly opened onto daylight so bright she threw an arm up to protect her eyes. The horse, startled by her boldness, pranced a step or two to the side. Lara yelped, eyes screwed shut as she grabbed for the saddle’s edge. Ioan, still chuckling, caught her horse’s reins and waited for them both to settle before releasing them.

  Lara mumbled thanks and patted the horse’s shoulder in apology as her eyes adjusted. Water reflected in the distance, helping to explain the sudden brilliance, but it was the countryside sloping down before her that made her catch her breath.

  Jewel green swept away from the mountainside, spreading to lowlands peppered by houses that looked to have grown there. Ancient stone walls sat beneath thatched and slated roofs, and tiny figures were visible through motion as they worked fields stretching nearly to the water’s edge. Mountains curved around the bay protectively, only the beach offering easy access on either side. Even Aerin was speechless as she gazed over the valley, though she turned to Ioan, accusing if still silent.

  “We must grow our food somewhere,” he said in response. “Magics have given us many choices within our earthen hall, but we must still fish and grow seed to survive.”

  “This land was drowned.”

  “Most of it. The hundreds lie beyond, in the water. See, even yet? There are shadows of the spires that once rose there, shaping the sea. That’s where we go now, not to these few leagues that survived the drowning.”

  “You thought everything was underwater?” Cold dismay sluiced through Lara, leaving her rigid on the horse. “Didn’t you wonder how any of them had survived, then?”

  “That’s been a question of debate among my people as long as I can remember.” Aerin kicked her horse forward, taking the lead into grounds where Lara thought the inhabitants might well strike first and ask questions later. Ioan, sharing the unspoken thought, cursed softly and urged his horse into a gallop after Aerin, leaving Lara behind on the mountainside.

  Pervasive mist softened the valley air, holding its own against the warm afternoon sun. The fields below were wide, bordered by hills and streams and rough stone walls. Different shades of green grew up as the fields came closer to the sea, and finally walls stood between yellowed beaches and the cultivated lands. She could see the slope of the earth all the way from her mountainside vantage to the beaches: it tilted down abruptly with the mountains, then very gently into miles of farmland. At some point in the distant past, the beaches themselves must have been farmland, too, until the sea came up to drown them.

  If there were shadows of the towns-that-had-been lying within the water, she didn’t yet have the eyes to see them. The bay was protected, but not idle and calm: sky-colored water rolled in and out again, hiding all the secrets it could.

  Secrets that she had agreed to unveil. Lara shook herself, then leaned forward to whisper “Please don’t let me get killed” into the horse’s ear before kicking him into motion after the other two.

  The downhill ride wasn’t as bad—quite—as leaping the Unseelie chasm had been. Lara held on, alternately shrieking and laughing, until their chase brought them over a cresting hill and into a scene of chaos.

  She reined up, though her horse’s impulse was clearly to join the fray as Aerin, shouting, charged a group of farmers and by proxy, Ioan, who forced himself in front of her, their horses crashing together. One of the farmers, a woman, jumped forward to brandish a scythe at Aerin. Aerin backed away, more because of Ioan’s interference than the armed farmer, though to Lara’s eye the woman had a sure hand with the instrument-turned-weapon.

  The noise, for half a dozen people and two horses, was astounding. Lara could pick no words out of the uproar, though Aerin’s soprano was unusually aggrieved. Ioan bellowed over the farmers, whose voices were raised together in war cries as one drew daggers and spun them in his hands. They were more than the peasants the idyllic pastoral setting suggested, Lara realized. They were very likely trained warriors, which, given the history of the land, seemed wise.

  Warriors who evidently didn’t recognize their king. A dagger flew, narrowly missing Ioan himself and wedging flawlessly into the armor joint at Aerin’s shoulder. She screamed as much in rage as pain, and transferred her sword to the other hand as she drove her horse forward again. Ioan rushed her a second time, drawing his legs up to launch himself bodily from his horse to tackle Aerin. They crashed to earth in a rattle of armor and supplies, both horses dancing in agitation. One of the Unseelie ran forward, carrying a spade he lifted like a piston, ready to drive it down even as Ioan balled a
fist and cracked it across Aerin’s jaw.

  She hit back and scrabbled for the blade she’d lost when he tackled her. He dropped a knee onto her forearm, shouting incomprehensibly over her yell. A flash of resolve rushed over the spade-bearing Unseelie’s face, and he changed his grip to swing it like a baseball bat at the back of Ioan’s head.

  Lara stood in her stirrups and roared, “That is your king!”

  Later, although her shout had been infused with truth, she thought it wasn’t her power that had stopped the brawl. The Unseelie farmers simply hadn’t been aware of her presence until she yelled, and then there was no chance of mistaking her as one of them. Her humanity, not her power, ended the fight.

  But not soon enough. The spade, already in motion, slammed into Ioan’s head. He fell forward, arms flung out, and dropped across Aerin, whose shouts were muffled beneath his weight.

  Too late, the farmers lowered their weapons to preparatory stages, horror spreading across the spade-bearing man’s face. Lara, swearing vehemently, rode forward and slid from her horse’s back with none of the care she had taken earlier; Aerin’s spell was indeed weaker than it had been.

  What little medical knowledge Lara had said the bludgeoned king shouldn’t be moved. Aerin had no such knowledge or compunction, and shoved Ioan away. He flopped to the side, head lolling and blood beginning to pour from the back of his skull. Lara cried out with dismay and knelt, trying to cradle his head so the wound wouldn’t sustain further damage. “Get a healer.”

  “Who—what—are you?” The woman with the scythe looked torn between obedience and curiosity. Lara curled a lip and the man with the spade dropped it and ran for the distance.

  “My name is Lara Jansen. I’m a truthseeker, and this is your king you just brained. He’s still breathing.” She bent close, making certain that was true. Willing it to be true, though she didn’t think a truthseeker’s power stretched that far. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “We saw—” The woman faltered, eyebrows drawn down. “We saw the Seelie woman, saw the man come after her—”

  “And decided to hit the one tackling her, too?” Blood filled the lines of Lara’s palms and dripped from the sides of her hands to stain her borrowed leggings. Someone would never want them back, after this.

  “The light,” the woman said uncertainly. “I thought he was fair as well. Now I see more clearly, and see our king.”

  Lara cursed again, this time barely more than a gurgle of frustration. She wasn’t in the habit of swearing, and under pressure, felt her vocabulary lacking. “At least the shovel wasn’t edge on. He’d have taken the top of his head off entirely. Do you have any talent at all for healing others?”

  The woman, stricken, shook her head. “Healing another is one of the great gifts. Like truthseeking. You’re mortal.”

  “So’s Ioan going to prove to be if a healer doesn’t get here fast.” Lara bent her head over Ioan’s, holding her breath so she could hear his. She was a literal world away from her deity, but she whispered a prayer anyway, trying to infuse it with strength and song to help the Unseelie king survive.

  Aerin sat up, wrapped a hand around the dagger, and yanked it free with a sick shout. Her chin fell to her chest while she gulped for air. Then she looked up with a mixture of guilt and fury. “They attacked me!”

  “Of course they attacked you!” Lara looked up with tears of anger suddenly hot on her cheeks. “You’re a Seelie warrior, charging full speed into the single protected land they have left! You’re lucky you’re not dead, but I swear if you were I wouldn’t shed a tear! Thank you,” she added in a snarl to the farmer woman. “For not killing her.”

  “Thank her armor, not us,” the scythe woman said flatly. “It was no decision of our own to spare her life. I am Braith,” she added with the air of someone making a reminder, not an introduction. “What is a truthseeker doing here with our king?”

  “I came to learn the truth about how the lands here were drowned. If I can, I’ll try to raise them again.” Lara placed a hand behind her, reminded of the staff strapped across her back. It had tremendous power, though whether it could be used to heal a badly injured man, she didn’t know. Dafydd had drawn strength from it, but that had been magical weariness, not physical damage, and even then it had wrought a cost in the landscape. “But it’s not going to matter unless a healer gets here soon. How long will it take for one to arrive?”

  Silence greeted her, and she looked up to find three sets of Unseelie eyes hungry on her. Belatedly, it struck her that speaking the raw truth—that she would try to raise the Drowned Lands—might not have been the wisest thing she could have done.

  For the first time in her life, meeting those desperate gazes, Lara thought no pressure, and heard amusement, not censure, in the untruth’s music.

  “You should come to the village,” Braith said very softly. “The healer will wish to bring Hafgan there, and your presence and explanations will be desired. Almost none of us have met a mortal, and none at all have seen a truthseeker in years beyond counting. We would like to speak with you.”

  From the undercurrents in Braith’s speech, Lara thought they would like to swallow her whole, as if she were a vessel of hope that could be drained to sustain them. And when she was emptied, the staff would be theirs for the taking, a more cynical part of her psyche added. She glanced at Ioan’s barely breathing form, then exhaled softly. “I would be honored.” That was true, and gave her a moment to think before shaking her head. “But we only have three days from this morning to complete our … quest. There’ll be time to visit when we’re done, though.”

  “Are you mad?” Aerin’s voice broke on the question. “The quest is over. We cannot go on without him!”

  “Something you should have thought of before riding roughshod into hostile territory,” Lara snapped. “We have to go on without him. Just because no Seelie goes into the healing waters doesn’t mean it’s impossible. And I’m not one of you at all. Different rules might apply.”

  “But if they do not.” Braith’s gaze fastened on Lara. “If you do not, we may forever lose our chance to regain a homeland. The Unseelie people are already weary, Truthseeker. We can’t afford such a blow.”

  “Then don’t tell them all what I’m doing, and we’ll do our best to survive. Aerin, can you ride?”

  “The wound heals,” Aerin replied shortly. “I can.”

  Anger expanded in Lara’s chest. “Let me rephrase that. Will you ride, or will I leave you here with—Hafgan—and these Unseelie while I go ahead?”

  Aerin bared her teeth, but climbed to her feet. “I will manage.”

  “Then we’re going.” Lara spoke decisively, though uncertainty made a pit of discomfort in her stomach. She didn’t like abandoning Ioan, and liked the prospect of riding through Unseelie lands unescorted even less. But reluctant or not, she saw no other option. It would take days in her own world for a wound like Ioan’s to heal. Even if magic accelerated the process, there was no telling how quickly he might recover. The delay could be more than they could afford.

  Resolved, she waved Braith over, changing places with her. “Hold him, keep the dirt out of the wound if you can. Keep pressure on it, and keep it higher so it doesn’t bleed as much. I don’t know if it’ll help, but it won’t hurt. And if you have any way to send messages, please warn everyone that we’re riding to the coast and shouldn’t be bothered. I don’t want another incident.”

  The last was directed more at Aerin than Braith, but Aerin ignored her, remounting awkwardly and maintaining stony indifference as Lara fetched her own horse and climbed up. Not until they were well on the path again, leaving a protesting Braith behind, did Aerin bark, “What manner of people are these, who attack a lone traveler in farmlands, and then all but slaughter their own king? No wonder the sea rose to drown them. It must have been Rhiannon’s way of keeping down numbers, the way one might drown rats.”

  “Aerin,” Lara said half under her breath, “this would b
e a good time to shut up.”

  It was hardly possible the Seelie woman heard her, but Aerin gave her a sharp look and went quiet. Her point, though, was a good one, and Lara thought about it as they cantered over low hills with only the triple beat of their horses’ hooves as their sound track. Braith had seen two fair-haired warriors, she’d said. That might have reflected Ioan as he’d once been, but no more, and not for a long time. It wasn’t impossible that the four Unseelie fighters had seen Lara in the distance, but she’d been far enough behind to not constitute a threat, and Ioan had been in the midst of the fight.

  Lara drew up suddenly, sick certainty lodging in her gut. “Merrick is here.”

  “What?” Aerin’s face was white with pain as she brought her horse around. “No. These fields and mountains are within the Barrow-lands. Emyr would have scried him, if he was here.”

  Lara pointed toward the still-distant sea. “Not if he was taking refuge in the water. He’s Unseelie, right? So they should embrace him, at least in theory. And probably block Emyr’s scrying while they were at it. No, I’m right, Aerin. I mean, could you ever mistake Ioan for fair-haired?”

  Reluctance shifted Aerin’s features and she shook her head. Lara nodded sharply in turn. “Someone made them see him as a Seelie warrior, not Unseelie. It could have been a glamour he cast himself, but why would he do that? It’d be asking for trouble. But Merrick casts illusions, and that shovel might have removed one more obstacle between himself and ruling Annwn.”

  “The Barrow-lands,” Aerin muttered.

  “They both sound true as names. Furthermore.” Lara pounded a fist into her palm. “Furthermore, if without Ioan we really can’t get to the Drowned Lands, then Merrick’s down three rivals for the throne and all that’s left is Emyr.”

  That, finally, drew Aerin’s concern. “We should go back.”

  “No. We have to go on. Emyr’s got an army surrounding him right now, but Merrick’s Unseelie. He might be able to enter the Drowned Lands himself and murder Dafydd and Hafgan, who are defenseless, both. Besides,” Lara added hopefully, “maybe the waters will heal your shoulder instantly.”