by C. E. Murphy
“Oh, to hell with it, I’m just making this worse.” Lara let go of Aerin’s hand and dragged in the deepest breath she could, then put on a surge of speed and ran forward. Ten steps; twenty; then thirty before her lungs began to burn. An athlete would do better, she thought. Even Kelly, with her love of adventure sports, would do better. Lara staggered forward, tears in her eyes again as her heart beat a painful protest at the sudden lack of oxygen. Her eyes were still closed, letting the glamour trick her as best it could. Water dampened her skin, full-on humidity, but not the immersion of having splashed into the sea. The lie of it sang through her mind, but she shied away from admitting it, concentrating instead on one more step. One more. One more.
She lost count of how many she’d taken before instinct ripped away deliberation and her jaw gaped open to suck down air.
Water flooded her lungs, cold and deadly and relentless. Lara hacked it out and tried again, fingers clawing at her chest as if she could rip it open and find sustaining breath that way. Salt stung the welts that rose and she thrashed, trying to escape both the drowning and the itching pain. Gravity lost its hold on her, the silver path below no longer a road but simply a watery gravemarker. She rose up, kicking and coughing, drawing more water in with every panicked inhalation, but the surface was impossibly far away. The sun was a distant dot refracting through gray waves, parted waters long since closed above her head. They hadn’t been so deep when she’d crushed her eyes shut and begun her mad rush; she was sure of it. Maybe she’d run farther than she’d thought. Maybe the glamour, once acknowledged, had swept her into the ocean more quickly, its primary mission already accomplished.
Her chest hurt. It weighed so much, filled with water the way it was, and its weight wanted to pull her back to the ocean floor. That was closer by far than the receding spot of sunlight up above, and seemed vastly easier to reach. She’d stopped flailing; her arms and legs, like her chest, were absurdly heavy. Waving them seemed futile, a waste of what little energy she had left. An idle thought crossed her mind: if she could kick her way down to the sandy earth below, she could curl up there and rest a while. Perhaps the pressure in her chest would ease then, and she could swim to the surface after a few minutes of relaxing.
Swimming down was much easier than struggling upward. Within a few seconds she reached the ocean floor and listlessly curled into a ball.
Sand rose up at the pressure of her descent, tiny particles floating into her nose and mouth. Lara dropped against the earth with an unexpected soft thud, the jarring thump knocking water from her lungs. She coughed, then rolled onto her hands and knees, gagging and choking on water as it came up again, emptying from her lungs as quickly as it had filled them. Floating sand collapsed into rich loamy soil, darker brown where Lara spat up mouthful after mouthful of bitter saltwater. She gasped and wheezed, tears streaming from her eyes once more, until there was nothing more to force out of her body and she collapsed in the dirt, rolling over to stare skyward.
The sun above was clear and warm now, the ocean’s interference washed away. Lara drew a shuddering breath of clean fresh air and shivered as a breeze pinned cold wet clothes against her skin. Exhaustion held her in its grip, her body still too heavy to move, but the pain in her chest was fading. She was, by all rights, dead.
The thought ran sour in her mind, its bells tarnished by sea water and age. For a long time she couldn’t move beyond the concept, stymied by its wrongness. Finally she croaked “By all rights be-spelled?” aloud, and that had the ring of truth to it.
“That was the most foolish, and possibly the boldest, thing I have seen someone do in a long time.” Aerin came from nowhere to sit beside her, arms looped around her knees as she, too, heaved for air in the aftermath of drowning. “I lacked your courage, Truthseeker. I came one step at a time. I’m not certain yours wasn’t the wiser way. A quick drowning may be easier than a slow.”
Lara wheezed, trying to find her voice, and coughed until tears came again before she could speak clearly. “On the other hand, you can talk better. Ow, oh, ow.” She pressed a hand against her chest, then rolled over again to curl up with her forehead in the dirt. “I hope it won’t be that bad going back.”
Nonplussed, Aerin made a sound. “I don’t know. There are other things to worry about first.”
Lara groaned, “The trials,” and Aerin, cautiously, said, “Among other things. Lift your gaze, Truthseeker. See what I see.”
“That tone suggests I’d rather not.” Lara coughed again, then raised her eyes to look over the Drowned Lands.
An army of ghosts marched on them.
They were men and women and children, and they bore no weapons. But neither did they need any: even from a remove they were cold, drawing warmth and life from the air. Lara hitched back, knowing the sea lay behind her and that ultimately she had to go forward, but reluctant to let the dead close the distance.
“Are they real?” Aerin’s hoarse whisper barely carried to Lara’s ears.
Lara, dismayed at her own conviction, said, “Oh, they’re real,” before wondering how they could be. She’d been told time and again that the elfin races had no afterlife, no soul to continue on after death, but each of the undead pacing toward them was an individual, loss and horror written on their faces. If they had once had color, it had been bleached from them, the way relentless sun might bleach bone to brittle white. Some carried farm tools and fishing materials; others led skeletal horses, skin tight over protruding ribs. They left no mark on the earth as they passed, nor made any sound, but the air grew colder, and Lara, shivering in her wet Unseelie garb, thought she might freeze before they even reached her.
Beyond them, beyond the black fields they crossed, stood the remnants of a city. Broken obsidian towers jabbed at the sky, ugly where they should have been graceful. Details were lost to the distance, but a single ragged banner flew from one of the ruined towers, a testament against oblivion. Lara abruptly liked them for that, even though defiance had never been her way.
“They draw closer, Truthseeker.” Aerin was on her feet, sword in hand. If her injured shoulder bothered her, Lara could see no sign of it. “What do we do?”
“We can’t fight. There are hundreds of them.”
“Thousands,” Aerin disagreed, truth ringing in the assessment.
Lara gritted her teeth. “So maybe you should put the sword down.”
“And let them come at us unhindered? We have two days and a little, Lara Jansen. We cannot stand here and wait on them if we wish to revive Dafydd or bring back the Unseelie king.” Aerin’s lip curled with the last words and she wove a figure with her sword, making it a threat to the oncoming ghosts.
Dafydd. Lara closed her eyes, building an image of the Seelie prince. Warm-skinned, shaggy-haired, delicately elfin even hidden behind a mortal glamour. She hadn’t forgotten him, but he had fallen from the forefront of her thoughts. There had to be a way forward, because he lay somewhere beyond the ghost-ridden fields, and it was much too early to give up.
Emboldened and feeling entirely unwise, Lara repeated, “Put the sword down,” and strode past Aerin to meet the approaching undead.
She met a woman first, and offered a hand as she would to a human. The woman gazed at Lara’s extended hand, while behind her the masses came to a slow halt. Their stillness answered any lingering doubts of whether they lived or not: no living thing could be so eerily motionless. Only the woman before her moved, looking again from her hand into Lara’s face.
“My name’s Lara Jansen. I’m a truthseeker.” Barely a month ago Lara had never heard the word, but describing herself that way, especially within the Barrow-lands, came naturally. They understood, here, what it meant, maybe more profoundly than she herself did.
And even the dead, it seemed, knew what to make of the word and its portents. A flush of color ran through the woman, enlivening her a little. Then her jaw dropped, gaping like a vampire’s, and the woman surged forward, fingers clawed and hunger in her gaze.
Lara shrieked and fell backward, hands uplifted to block the woman’s attack. But Aerin was there, unsheathed blade whispering between them. She threw Lara a look of I told you so disgust, worsened when Lara shouted, “No!” and dove under the blade to reach a second time for the undead woman.
This time their hands connected. Cold power rushed Lara, seeking sustenance. It dove inside her, pouring toward the sound of bells; toward the music that guided Lara in truth and falsehood. Lara steeled herself against the attack, the knowledge of how rising up like the tide. The skill lay in the bells: she whispered, “I’m sorry, no. The power’s not for you,” and it rang out from her core. Not the alto and soprano tones she usually heard in her own voice, but deep reverberations, baritone peals from church bells meant to be heard for miles.
The tolling notes shook apart the frantic power channeled by the undead woman. She released Lara and staggered back, her retreat echoed by the army massed behind her. Aerin finally lowered her sword, mouth agape as Lara crept toward the dead Unseelie and offered her hands a third time.
“Tell me who you are. I’ll carry your story beyond here, back to Annwn, so you won’t be forgotten. I swear it on my—” Oath as a Truthseeker leapt to mind, though she’d taken no oath. Lara swallowed a breath and changed the phrase, not wanting to foreswear herself even with the best of intentions. “On my blood as a Truthseeker.”
The woman whispered “Truthseeker,” then seized Lara’s hands in a cold grip, and told her story.
She was Glenna, a farmer, with dirt still beneath her nails. She knelt in the soil, a trowel in one hand, a sack of root vegetables rich and warm-smelling at her side. Birds, mostly raucous crows, called and shouted while she worked, the boldest ones winging toward the bag of sun-warm tubers. But suddenly they were silent, and in their place came a sound of thunder from a clear sky. Glenna looked up in time to see a wall of water crashing toward her, high and silver and full of fury. She was on her feet, running, then. A dozen steps, no more, before the ocean took her. She could swim, but not in this. Familiar panic rose in her breast, the same sensations of drowning Lara had just encountered. Only there was no sea god to promise her a chance to survive the drowning, and when the waves rolled smooth again, Glenna floated dead on their surface.
Caddoc, behind Glenna, whispered his tale, too. A warrior, fighting under hot sun: practicing bladework with other soldiers, beneath the obsidian spires of the distant city. Water surged in around the castle, coming from every direction at once; he and others like him drowned in the weight of their armor, clawing for the disappearing sky.
Smiths, weavers, scholars, artists: their stories came over Lara like the water itself, relentless waves pounding into her. Flashes of vision ran so close together they became a mosaic, a collage of a thousand lives in the moments they ended. Parents snatched up children as if they could hold them higher than the waters; students clutched manuscripts the same way. A boy ran for the highest of the towers, chased by rising water, and when it caught him in the castle’s apex, he threw himself from the windows and struck out in a defiant swim. Some few turned to the inescapable tide and greeted it with elegance and grace. But they died as the others did, so quickly, leaving only drowned lands behind. Their lives poured into Lara until she had always been there, a forever monument to what had been lost.
The shock of release was as great as the power of listening. The tide of immortal lives lost pulled back, leaving her gasping on hands and knees, as shocked to have survived this as she’d been to live through the drowning. The staff, safe across her back, pulsed with power, and for a moment she wanted to draw it out to help her stand. But it had tried to split the earth back on the shores of the Drowned Lands. What it would do within their actual borders wasn’t something she was eager to discover. Instead she sat back on her heels, uncertain of when she’d fallen. Aerin grabbed her elbow and pulled her to her feet, less elegant than the staff’s support might have been, but equally effective.
Glenna stood before them, paler than before. Wan, fading, with a different desperation in her eyes. Lara croaked, “Rest,” and put a hand over her throat; she sounded as if she hadn’t spoken in weeks. Exhaustion swept over her, limbs trembling and thirst coming on her hard. She spoke slowly, making sure the words made sense: “Rest. I understand now, and I won’t forget. You won’t be forgotten.”
Aerin hissed, “What are you speaking of?” but Lara shook her head as Glenna stepped back and began to fade.
They weren’t ghosts. They were the memory of the land. Someone—Llyr, perhaps, if he was god of the sea and the things in it—had invested, or lost, so much in the drowned countryside that it survived in the water itself; in the inundated earth, and in the shards of homes and buildings and bones now hidden beneath the water.
“Oisín will help me write it down,” Lara whispered to the changing land. The black earth was emptier now, not just of the visible ghosts, but even a sense of sorrow was lessened. “All your stories. All your names. You’ve waited long enough. Rest now. Go with …”
“Rhiannon,” Aerin said in a very low voice.
Lara looked at her, then at the darkening land and finally nodded. “With Rhiannon. With Llyr. Go into history, but not legend. You won’t be forgotten. I promise.”
Glenna lingered the longest, and when she was gone, so was the sun. Stars in a multitude of colors thickened the sky. Lara, staring upward, entertained the idea that the drowned Unseelie had just passed into starlight, and from Aerin’s discomfited expression, thought the Seelie woman imagined the same. Song wrapped around the fancy, exploring it without finding absolute truth or falsehood in it. Lara smiled and sat down in the dirt, weary but satisfied.
Aerin’s acerbic voice took her good humor away: “We’ve stood here on this farmstead half a day and you’re smiling?”
“Half …” The stars slipped into place in a more meaningful manner. Lara gaped at them, then at Aerin. “I was out half a day?”
The Seelie woman gestured impatiently at the horizon, which didn’t so much as hint at sunset. “Emyr scried me these long hours ago, while you shivered and cried out and whispered stories of the dead. He was none too pleased, Truthseeker.”
“You didn’t tell him Ioan was injured, did you?”
Shiftiness crossed Aerin’s face. Lara groaned, then leveled a finger at the other woman. “If we get back and Emyr’s obliterated the Unseelie city, I’m holding you responsible.”
Alarm replaced Aerin’s evasiveness and Lara bit back rue. There had been some truth in her threat, enough to not sour it in her mind, but she had briefly forgotten the power her gift offered. She wouldn’t want to be told a truthseeker held her responsible for anything … but nor was she inclined to reassure Aerin on the topic. Everything she knew about the Seelie woman suggested she was loyal to her people, commendable enough. Lara’s loyalty, though, lay with Dafydd and to the truth. She would have preferred a companion whose motivations aligned more snugly with her own.
Then again, Aerin had every reason to want Dafydd back, if nothing else. Want him back not just for the Barrow-lands, but perhaps for Aerin herself. From her perspective, it had been only a few days—months, now—since he’d left the Seelie court to find a truthseeker. She knew it had been decades for Dafydd—Lara had been there when he’d told her—but what she likely saw was her lover returning after a mere handful of days with a new, mortal interest on his arm.
Lara muttered, “Relationships are hard enough without time travel.”
Aerin said, “What?” sharply, and Lara shook her head.
“Nothing. Nothing important, Aerin. Sorry. Look, I know we only have two days left and three trials to find and survive, but I’m so tired I’m shivering. I don’t think we’re going to be bothered again right here. Could we sleep until sunrise?”
“You may,” Aerin said grudgingly. “I’ll stand watch.”
“Try not to kill anybody, okay?” Lara crawled to their packs and unrolled a blanket, folding it ben
eath herself to gain more protection from the cool earth before tugging a second one over her. From beneath the sudden warmth, she mumbled “Thank you,” and in moments sleep brought dreams of elfin faces and names and stories that would never leave her.
“Do you have a plan?” Aerin’s question, only slightly less welcome than the encroaching sunrise, shook off any hope Lara had of stealing another few minutes’ sleep. The most she could do was refuse to move, buried in her blankets, while she struggled to turn half-sleeping thoughts into coherent words.
“We’ll go into the ruined city,” she finally answered. “So many people died there. Seems like a good place to hold rites of passage. I wonder if we both have to pass. Should’ve asked Ioan.”
“The quest is yours, Truthseeker. It’s the hero, not his companions, who has to prove himself.”
Lara pushed up on an elbow, throwing blankets back so she could glower blearily at Aerin. “Are the Seelie completely unfamiliar with the concept of reassurance?”
“No, but you would hear the falsehood in my voice.”
Lara groaned. “I never thought I’d miss the little white lies people tell each other. All right.” She climbed out of bed, shaking dirt from the blankets and rolling them up again as tightly as she could. Aerin watched with professional disinterest, only nodding when Lara’s attempts to repack met her approval. A brief glow of delight warmed Lara. She wasn’t an outdoorsy camping type like Kelly, so successfully packing gear was an accomplishment worth taking pride in. It was the little things, Kelly often said, and Lara found herself in agreement.
Aerin tossed her a chunk of dried meat, followed by a piece of even drier bread, then swung her own pack up onto her shoulders with well-practiced ease. Lara watched, eyebrows furrowed as Aerin checked the pack’s hang and shifted a canteen of water to her hip for easy access. “The city’s half a day’s walk if we’re quick.”