Wayfinder by C. E. Murphy Page A

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