Wayfinder

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