The Aisling Trilogy

by Cummings, Carole

“How d’you know for sure?” Brayden persisted. “You said it’s happened accidentally. And your eyes…” He shook his head. “You should’ve seen your bloody eyes.”

  Constable Brayden, Wil reflected, bleakly amused, was not the sort of man who appreciated being plunged headlong into the surreal. Wil sighed, looked Brayden in the eye. “Because I’ve thought about it, and if it was me, they would’ve been at each other’s throats. Like Palmer and Orman.” Burning gazes reflecting unhinged minds, hateful snarling and gnashing teeth… “It seems to happen when… well, when there’s no way out.” Wil shuddered a little, blinked it away, thought about expanding, if only just to appease Brayden a little, but he couldn’t make himself do it.

  “I want to get out of here,” he muttered, got to his feet slowly, paused for a moment as a wave of dizziness hit him and momentarily blackened his vision. Brayden was there again, taking his elbow so he didn’t fall over, and then leading him out of the cell and down to the office. Slightly woozy, Wil found himself plopped in Locke’s padded chair, a fresh cup of cider pressed into his hand—his around the cup and Brayden’s around his. It was like that first morning, even down to the headache. Shit, had that only been yesterday? “I’ve got it,” he mumbled.

  Brayden backed off, watched him for a moment, presumably to make sure he didn’t keel over, then slid a meaty thigh onto the desk, leaned back. He crossed his arms over his chest and eyed Wil with a keen edge. “I begin to see why you’re so in demand,” he said slowly. “Not even shamans can do what you did back there.”

  Wil snorted a little, small and bitter. “And the irony of it is, they don’t even know I can do it. I didn’t even know I could do it, not ‘til Old Bridge, and even then—” He bit his tongue, slid the cup to the desk and dropped his head into his hands. Damn it, why couldn’t he keep his bleeding mouth shut?

  The all too predictable question didn’t even take two seconds to voice itself: “What happened in Old Bridge?”

  Wil shook his head. “Look,” he began, as steadily as he could, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, all right? I’ll even tell you things you probably don’t want to know. Just…” He peered up, unashamed by whatever pleas might be showing on his face. “Right now, I’m holding onto my breakfast by sheer force of will, and my head feels like it’s going to explode if I so much as sneeze. I want to get out of here—it’s like an itch in my brain. I don’t know if it’s because of the shaman or that man, but I can feel something closing in on me and I want to be gone when it gets here. Please—can we do this after we’ve shown Dudley our backs?”

  Brayden was silent for a moment, gaze roaming to the barred window over Wil’s head. Then he sighed, ran a hand through his hair, scratched at the stubble on his chin that was steadily growing into a substantial beard. “I’ve been feeling it, too,” he said, low and quiet, like it bothered him to admit it, then he grimaced unhappily, nodded. “All right,” he told Wil. “If you think you’ll be able to travel, let’s get our arses out of here. Although…” He slid his glance sideways. “D’you know who Bráthair Coimirceoir is?”

  Wil breathed a tired snort, rolling his eyes. “Is that the name he gave you?” He rubbed at his brow. “Terrific,” he growled, peered up at Brayden with a sour grimace and pitched the bloody handkerchief to the desk in disgust. “I told you, but you had to waste time on questions I could’ve answered myself, and now you’ve got nothing.”

  “And how was I…?” Brayden looked like he couldn’t decide between indignant defense or apologetic capitulation. He settled on something in the middle: “I’m sorry, but you don’t always tell me the truth, and I had to—”

  “I haven’t lied to you!” Wil shouted. “I have never—”

  “Maybe not,” Brayden cut in, quietly sharp. “But you hardly ever give me a straight or complete answer, and you deliberately don’t answer more times than you do. I took a chance. I was wrong. I’m sorry, I had no idea…” He shrugged, waved a hand vaguely at Wil’s face. “Now, what do you mean we’ve got nothing? D’you know the name or not?”

  Wil slumped, rubbed at his temple. He wasn’t even really angry with Brayden in particular—he was just angry. Furious. “It isn’t a name,” he growled. “It isn’t anything. It means ‘Brother Guardian.’ Generic and worthless. It could be anyone. It could be me, for all you know.” He almost pounded his fist on the desk, caught the blotched bandaging out the corner of his eye just in time, snarled instead. Useless, it had all been bloody useless. “In other words,” he said through his teeth, “it means absolutely nothing.”

  ***

  It took all of thirty seconds for Wil to get ready to leave. All he had to do, after all, was reclaim his pack. While he waited for Brayden, he amused himself by poking about the office, seeing the little bits of Locke in the severe, stark surroundings, touched every now and then by a spatter of personality: a small statuette of an eagle on a shelf above the stove; a heavy pewter medal tethered to a bright blue silk ribbon, but he couldn’t read the engraving, though it had a tiny little rifle etched into it, so he assumed it was for sharp-shooting; about ten little tins that he thought probably held teas, each of them with a different sort of flower or herb painted on…

  Wil avoided the far cell completely while Brayden sat at the desk and scribbled… whatever he was scribbling. When Brayden finally put away pen and paper, Wil confiscated the now vacant chair and spent the rest of the time waiting and kipping lightly with his head on the desk while Brayden rammed about the office, disassembling, sorting, checking, counting, and reassembling his kit. It was kind of funny, actually, watching Brayden fuss like an old woman, rolling up clothes in neat little balls and managing to stuff what looked like an entire clothespress into his admittedly gigantic pack. It looked nearly half as big as Wil and probably weighed as much.

  There was a small mountain of food-tins and sacks of dried something-or-others, plus a huge bag of salt, presumably for preserving whatever wild game he managed to hunt down along the way. Three small graduated pans nested neatly inside a slightly larger pot, a tin plate snapped over the top with clever little clasps to hold the kit together. Wil remembered all the times he’d huddled over a spark of a fire, roasting a scrap of squirrel on a stick, and wondered why he’d never even guessed there was such a thing as that ingenious little cook set. A small shovel and hatchet hung on either side of the pack, snugged in narrow little sleeves apparently made for the purpose. And what in the world did he think he’d need all those candles for? For pity’s sake, the man carried what seemed like the equivalent of two entire households on his back. Three extra pairs of stockings made Wil slightly jealous, though the ones that had come with the new clothes from Mistress Afton were heavy and warm and not likely to wear out soon. But still.

  Brayden’s bedroll was thick and double-lined, shiny, like it had been waterproofed—that one almost made Wil’s mouth water. He hated the cold the worst. Hunger he could take, even the constant ache and weariness of continuous travel, but the cold was sometimes enough to make him want to weep pitifully through chattering teeth. Perhaps, if they weren’t who they were, and if Wil made an offer at just the right moment and in just the right way, he could carve himself a space inside that divinely warm-looking cocoon. It wouldn’t exactly be a hardship, he reflected as he watched Brayden move purposefully about. He was a good-looking man, after all, extraordinarily fit, and he was no longer as frightening as Wil had found him before, so maybe—

  That line of thought woke him right up, and he blinked, slapped his mind away from its ludicrous wanderings. What the hell? A slight growl wended at the back of his throat, and he swallowed it, wondering, annoyed and absurdly discomfited, exactly when he’d become a sixteen-year-old girl.

  He adjusted his head on his arms, arched his back up a bit and gave his shoulders a light stretch. Two more days of a relatively soft mattress would have done him a lot better, but he was eager to get moving, so he’d make the sacrifice. He wondered bemusedly what his face looked like
. There had to be a mirror about here somewhere. Not that he really wanted to know. It was enough to know that everything still hurt.

  Brayden finished with his pack, went and retrieved the shackles from the prisoner—who was still, Wil noted with a dark, not-wholly-pleasant satisfaction, staring blankly at the wall of his cell—and moved on to a locked cupboard to the side of Locke’s desk that turned out to be a small armory. With practiced ease and something akin to fluid, economical grace, surprising in a man of his bulk, Brayden began checking, cleaning and readying his weapons. There were a lot of weapons. Wil was caught between snorting quiet derision and sighing enviously.

  With painstaking precision, Brayden laid out a long, fierce-looking rifle, then checked it thoroughly, rubbed it with an oily cloth and loaded it with large, lethal-looking shells. Wil watched attentively as Brayden flipped a mysterious little metal catch behind the trigger from one position to another and checked it twice before the gun was laid aside—had to be the safety. Wil filed the information away in case he needed it later. A sheathed short sword came next, quickly unsheathed and swiped with the cloth then re-sheathed before being belted at an angle about Brayden’s hips. Wil’s interest perked even more when a crossbow made an appearance. He was pretty good with a longbow, and he’d never actually shot a crossbow, but he’d seen others use them and had thought he’d like to have one. Depending on the archer, they were more accurate and covered more distance, in his admittedly spare observation. A bolt from one of those would likely drive through three men and have some punch leftover.

  The weapons on Brayden’s person came next, each one removed from a holster—or in the case of the long, malignant dagger, a boot—then emptied, cleaned, checked, reloaded and re-holstered. When Brayden finally finished, Wil was very nearly writhing with envy and resentment. The man carried a bloody arsenal, for pity’s sake, and Wil didn’t even have his rusty little dirk anymore. It wasn’t fair. The ammunition alone took up its own good-sized carryall.

  He was drifting in and out of a light, hazy doze, pleasantly warm inside his coat, half-watching/half-ignoring Brayden’s labors, when his own pack was snatched up from the floor beside the desk then dropped onto it, mere feet away from Wil’s nose. He sat up, blinking and rubbing carefully at his still bruised eyes, frowned. Without even a glance at Wil, Brayden upended the pack, apples and potatoes rolling out first, then everything else following in an unruly heap.

  “Hey!” Wil yelped, caught two apples before they rolled to the floor, and made a grab for the pack. Brayden merely scowled at the messy mound on the desk that was, to Wil’s very sincere indignation, everything he owned in the world. “That’s mine,” he barked, completely awake now, and already seething. “You must have already searched it, I haven’t got any weapons, give it back.”

  He was on his feet now, trying to gather his meager belongings into some semblance of order, but Brayden was ignoring him. His long fingers were poking through everything, damn it, and rearranging it all into nonsensical piles. Wil stalked around the desk, tried to roughly shoulder Brayden out of the way, but he might as well have been trying to move a boulder.

  “Leave off,” Wil snarled. “These are my things, you’ve no right, I didn’t go through your things, get off!”

  But Brayden just shook his head and kept on. “You can’t carry all this rubbish,” he said, his tone one of a parent chastising a child—and how dare the man? “I mean, what the fuck, with the potatoes? How long have you been carrying—?”

  “It’s called food,” Will growled. “And I intend to carry it until I’ve eaten every last bit of it.”

  “You can’t carry this much weight,” Brayden insisted. “Did you pick this up in Kenley? No wonder your tracks were so easy to follow—they were nearly half an inch deeper than they’d been before.”

  “I have carried this much weight, and never you mind where I—” The fury dimmed a bit as that last comment sank in. “Wait, what?”

  “Your trail was a little difficult to find after the fens,” Brayden told him patiently. “I was cursing your light step for days, until I picked up the tracks of those men. And they’d trampled your trail under theirs so badly that for a while I had to follow their tracks and hope I’d find one or two of yours along the way to confirm I wasn’t following the wrong ones. After Kenley, though, it was easier to spot yours because you weighed more. I assumed you’d resupplied there, but potatoes and apples?” He shook his head, waved a hand over the mess on the desk. “Who taught you how to—?” He paused as though struck, nodded with a rueful little shrug. “Right, no one taught you, my mistake.”

  “Don’t,” Wil seethed quietly, “patronize me. I’ve been doing all right, y’know, I’m not slow, and I’m not completely uneducated. I’ve managed to figure out quite a lot on my own.”

  “I don’t think you’re slow,” Brayden told him, just as quietly, and with a steady, sober gaze. “And I’m amazed at what you’ve been able to do, and especially seeing as how you’ve been running for your life the whole while you’ve been doing it.”

  The little hairs on Wil’s nape were smoothing, despite himself. Brayden looked like he really meant it. And the strangest thing about it was that Wil actually believed him.

  “I don’t mean to belittle what you’ve done,” Brayden went on, “and I’m sorry if it came out that way, but…” He picked up Wil’s now empty pack. “Haven’t you even got a bedroll?” he wanted to know.

  Wil looked down, found an apple in his hand and rubbed his thumb over a bruise on the skin. “I used to,” he said with a slow shrug. “It got stolen.”

  “How have you been keeping warm when you slept? I only found the bones of one fire.”

  That made Wil shift uncomfortably, and the hackles came back to half-attention. He didn’t like Brayden going on about tracking him, examining the remains of paltry little campsites and finding his footprints amongst the muddle of the Brethren’s. He didn’t like knowing that everything he did had left some kind of shadow behind for Brayden to follow, some little piece of himself that had betrayed him. It gave Wil a prickle between his shoulder-blades, like someone was watching him even now, and he had to really try to suppress a shiver.

  “I wasn’t keeping warm while I slept,” he answered, resentment bristling anew. “I was freezing my arse off, and I was starving nearly to death until I bought those potatoes and apples—with my own money that I’d earned—so that’s ‘what the fuck,’ and I don’t have a pack the size of a small cart or enough food to feed an entire regiment to fill it—or anything to hunt food with, now that I think about it—so I’d appreciate it if you’d get your great paws off of what I do have.”

  He snatched the pack from out Brayden’s hands, feeling a flush to his cheeks that bloody infuriated him, and began chucking everything back into it, not caring how what went where. A small clutch of flat colored-glass Tables stones had bounced about and scattered. He didn’t have a board, and he’d never actually played the game, and he’d lost several of the pieces through a hole in a previous discarded pack, but the stones were nice to look at, especially when he held them up to the sun, and they didn’t take up much room. And why the hell why was he justifying it, even to himself? He reached for the stones, started to count them to make sure none had bounced off the desk and onto the floor, when Brayden’s hand reached, too, closing over his. Wil jerked his hand away, stones scattering everywhere, and backed up a few steps with a ready snarl. Damn it, why did the man have to touch all the time?

  Brayden held up his hand, his expression calm and… sympathetic. The snarl curling at Wil’s mouth stretched wider, indignant now, and profoundly offended.

  “Just leave off, will you? You don’t need to—”

  “Listen,” Brayden cut in, voice even but pointed, “I’m not trying to take what’s yours. I’m trying to tell you that what you’ve got here…” He ran a hand through his hair, like he was having a hard time finding the right words. “It’s just not going to work, all right? I
can—”

  “It’s been working just fine,” Wil retorted. “D’you think I’ve been living in some squire’s country estate all this time? D’you think I’ve never done this before? What I’ve got here is all I’ve got—I’ve bought or found everything here, I’ve stolen none of it—and you’re not taking any of it.”

  “I’m not trying to take it!” Brayden snapped. “I’m trying to get you to pitch it!” He winced a little as Wil’s mouth dropped open, and he held up his hands to forestall the imminent wrath. “That didn’t come out right,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean it like… like however you think I meant it. I only…” His hands waved about then he turned to the desk, snatched up half of a broken marble carving of a rose. “What the bloody hell d’you need this for?”

  Wil scowled, looked away. “I like it,” he muttered crossly.

  “All right, very pretty, or at least I’m sure it used to be, but… honestly, when I picked up that pack the other day, I thought it was loaded with explosives or something, it was so heavy. And you haven’t even got a change of clothes! You’ve been carrying around stones, for pity’s sake, and, and, and leaves, and scraps of tin—you’ve even got… well, I’m not sure what this is, but it looks like a bit of carpet.”