Wayfinder

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.

Eight

“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.”