He screams, tries to lurch up—he doesn’t even know where the door is, but he has to run, he
has to, except he can’t, his legs won’t hold him up, and he thinks, ‘Oh, right, the leaf,’ as he watches the floor rise up to meet him. Hands on him, pulling at him, and he screams some more, kicks and bites, and then he’s vomiting again, abstractly pleased that he gets Curly again and another he hadn’t seen yet, but he knows right away this one will be Brute, because the man lifts him up, shakes him ‘til his teeth rattle then throws him back to the floor when the vomit hits him, too.
Crawling now, trying to find a door, a way out, and he thinks he’s still screaming, but he doesn’t have a voice, just low, animal whimpers leaking from his throat, and sobs that shake right down his spine. More hands on him, and he can’t see this one, but he names him Brute II, because his hands are hard, he wants to hurt, and he does.
His wrist is gripped tight and his arm twisted, pulled up between his shoulder-blades. Cramps lock a tight fist inside his belly, and he tries to double over, but Brute II holds him arched. It’s all too much, there’s too much pain coming at him from too many different directions, he can’t hold beneath it—his eyes roll back, and merciful darkness encloses him.
He drifts, he doesn’t know for how long, snatches of conversation coming to him from out of the darkness. He hears just enough, clings to the sense of it, makes his mind turn it into shapes he can understand through the pain and the fever and the odd spasms that jerk through his body like it belongs to someone else.
They don’t know what’s wrong with him, they think he’s insane and sick, and they fret because they don’t know what to do. He lies on a hard mattress, bare and cold, damp sheets beneath him, crumpled about as though he’d been writhing, and he’s not at all surprised. He can smell his own sickness, and it makes him gag, but there’s nothing left to vomit, so he only chokes a little, before he slumps in on himself, exhausted.
It takes him a while to understand why he can’t move his left arm, why it’s gone numb and cold, but he catches the glint of steel about his wrist in a fleeting moment of clear vision, the other end clamped about the iron bedpost, and then it makes sense. He thinks he should care, but he’s occupied with the pain, with the cramping, the nausea, and every bit of him that isn’t busy trying to breathe through it is concentrating on not telling them about the leaf. He wants to, wants it more than he wants them to let him go, more than he wants the pain to stop—he just
wants—and if he tells them, they’ll give it to him, and it’ll all go away.
But he doesn’t—if he tells them, they’ll know, and they’ll get in, and they don’t just want to get in, they want to push him
out. He could feel it when Curly was prying and digging, that push, could feel the greed and want inside it, and they’ve taken everything else from him, damn it, they won’t take his Self.
He comes to awareness in the middle of an argument, Brute II shouting at Curly: “We followed you because you said you knew, you said you could do it, but all you’ve done is sent him mad, and now he’s dying!”
He thinks that should make him sad, but it doesn’t.
Curly looks angry and thwarted, shakes his head. “Perhaps you’re right,” he tells Brute II, “but I will not go back to the Cleric and tell him I’ve failed.”
He shrinks back as Curly moves toward him, blue eyes hard and intent. Fear grips him, as tight as the fingers about his head, pressing into the wounds, and he feels the itch. He screams, flails, flings his free fist up and connects with Curly’s jaw, then four sets of hands are on him, holding him down, and Curly digs down into his mind, pushes.
He knows this is it—they’ll either get in or kill him—so he gathers his desperation in a mental fist. Pushes back.
He hadn’t known he could do it, wonders if it’s new or if it’s been there all along, and he just hadn’t known it. Wonders if Siofra had somehow throttled it, or maybe the leaf did. He doesn’t even know
how he’s doing it, but he’s doing something, and it’s stopped all four of them cold in their tracks.
It’s forever inside, and he’s crawling with the want, overwhelmed with it. They’re a greedy lot, they want it badly, they’re rabid with it, and he doesn’t know what to do with it all, so he does the only thing he can—he flings it back at them.
Thunder rolls from somewhere, and the flash of lightning spatters four faces set in feral masks.
‘Huh,’ he thinks through the haze, ‘I think I made it rain.’ Somehow, it’s much less important than the fact that he is no longer helpless. He has taken action,
done something to save himself, and the wondering pride is stunning and sublime.
He doesn’t watch everything that happens next, but he hears it all. Two of them turn their guns on the others before they’re brought down; one goes down with another’s teeth in his throat. The last two standing spend their dying breaths snarling and spitting death at the other.
Silence but for the raging storm. Long silence, and bad sleep, thrashing about on stiff, cold sheets, moaning through the pain, until he fights to consciousness. The rain has stopped, he notes, but he doesn’t know why he cares or why it matters.
He stares at the blood congealing on the bodies, on the floor, on the walls… Lets his gaze drift up to his left hand. If he’d been just a little more coherent, known he could do what he’d done, he might have had the presence of mind to get one of them to unlock him before allowing them to have at each other like animals. But he hadn’t and now he’s going to die anyway—he’s going to die of dehydration or starve to death, or just die of the pain, alone in this perdition made of blood and gore and the smell of piss and vomit.
For days, he lies there, lurching back and forth between waking and dreaming, in and out of sanity. The corpses speak to him sometimes, but he knows that’s only part of the madness. The knowing doesn’t help, though, and he screams his throat raw, screams ‘til he spits weak little sprays of blood, and still they whisper to him of slow death and long torture, and they laugh.
He doesn’t know when he decided to do it. One moment he was lying there, trying to accept a protracted end—it wouldn’t hurt anymore, he kept telling himself; a few days of misery and then it wouldn’t ever hurt again—and the next he was dragging himself up, lubricating the cuff about his wrist with his own blood—
She pulls Dallin back into himself with a gentle tug. He gasps, thinks he should feel a little embarrassed by the tears on his cheeks, but his horror is too acute, and he can’t make himself care.
“Why did you show me that?” he demands, breathless and nauseated.
“I would spare him the ordeal.” She turns to Dallin, Her blue gaze earnest and somber. “Take the veil from your eyes, Guardian. You have heard the Call; now you must heed it.”
She raises Her arm, points.
Dallin turns his gaze slowly, almost afraid of what She means to show him this time. He looks to where She points and he sees… Wil.
A soft brume of mist broods about him, stretching from one end of Eternity to the other, scintillating sparks of iridescence flaring through it, inside it, like millions of infinitesimal stars birthing then exploding in brilliant death. Wil’s hands whisk through it with unthinking grace, fingers flying, plucking out a rhythm Dallin can’t hear, but his whole body vibrates to the cadence, like it’s a song so fine and high that he can’t hear it, yet he could sing it if he concentrated hard enough.
“What is he doing?” he asks.
She looks at Dallin closely, so intense Dallin feels naked beneath Her regard. “Tending the Threads,” is all She says.
Dallin frowns, looks back at Wil, shakes his head. “I can’t see them. I see stars inside of clouds.”
She only chuckles lightly. “All see it differently.”
Dallin thinks about that for a moment. “Why does he weep?” he whispers.
The melancholy slant to Her smile has never left, but now it turns to anguish. She
sighs a little, looks at Wil with a poignancy that slides a slender blade of grief through Dallin’s own heart. “Betrayal is a harsh teacher,” She tells Dallin sadly, “and its lessons are steeped in deceit.”
“I don’t know what that means.” Dallin looks at Her expectantly, but She only keeps gazing at Wil with that doleful melancholy. Dallin scowls, annoyed. “Why aren’t you helping him?” he demands.
She turns to him with an elegant lift of Her perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “But I already have,” is all She says.
And then She’s gone. Dallin blinks into the darkness, rubs at his eyes, tries to wake up, but he can’t.
He walks slowly over to Wil, musing, somewhat unsettled, that his feet touch nothing—no ground, no floor, only emptiness—and yet he doesn’t fall. He wonders a little dazedly if he spread his arms wide, would he be able to fly. The thought seems so trivial as he draws closer to Wil, moving steadily, finding patterns with his fingertips, and weeping quietly, tears slipping slowly to spatter down on…
Dallin frowns now, angry, and he reaches out, gently takes up Wil’s hand in one of his own. “Your fingers are bleeding.” Wil jumps, spins. Dallin thinks Wil’s going to scream, but then he chokes it back, stares at Dallin, face twitching between misery and confusion, eyes half-lidded and pulsing out something that nearly hums with betrayed resignation—‘burning,’ Dallin thinks dazedly, doesn’t half-cover it. There is nothing so mundane as radiance coming from them, but
power, Dallin can almost see it in physical form just below his corporeal vision, green irises swirling that fluid malachite and glistening jade he’d seen the first time he’d laid eyes on Wil, and again in a cell in Dudley. Somehow, it doesn’t matter now—it’s as it should be, and it’s of less concern than those bleeding fingers. He turns Wil’s hand palm-up, touches lightly at a fingertip. “Why d’you do this to yourself?” he asks quietly.
Wil doesn’t answer the question, instead says, “You’re… here.”
Dallin shrugs a little, a small smile quirking the corner of his mouth. “I’m here,” he agrees.
“You’re always here,” Wil mutters unhappily, pulls his hand away and looks at Dallin, eyebrows coming together in consternation. “What d’you want?”
His voice is dull, weary. He looks so much like he’s expecting Dallin to say he’d like his soul, thanks, and his mind and heart while he’s at, that Dallin puffs a tired little snort.
“That’s a very big question,” he answers. “What do
you want?”
Wil doesn’t even think about it, just looks up at Dallin, drained. “I want to not be afraid anymore.”
Dallin sighs, nods slowly, reaches out and lays his hand to Wil’s shoulder. Wil doesn’t shrug it off. “Are you still afraid of me?”
A slight frown crinkles Wil’s forehead. “Not… mostly,” he answers slowly. “But I can’t tell yet. I have to know first.”
“Know what?”
Wil rolls his eyes, growls impatience. “What do you
want from me?”
“Ah.” Dallin wants to snort again, and he doesn’t think he should, but the question seems too simple to have been voiced so seriously. “I don’t want anything from you,” he says, grave and sincere. “I want to help you.” And then he does snort, runs a hand roughly through his hair and looks about the bizarre surroundings. “But most of all, I
really want to wake up.”
He was already sitting up, body still vibrating from its lurch into wakefulness. His chest was heaving, hard, shallow breaths sucking in and out, like he’d just run five miles in his sleep, and his hands were shaking. He drew up his knees, lowered his face into his hands.
“Fuck,” he whispered, incensed that his voice trembled. He was being absurd.
He’d never had such a vivid dream in all his life. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he had dreamed. And the things he’d seen, felt…
He shook his head. “Don’t even think about it,” he mumbled into his hands. “It wasn’t real, you’re just spooked by all the… everything.”
Except…
No. No. Shamans weaving little spells was one thing, but… but… Well, and there had been Wil and that man in the cell…
A bit of a shudder he couldn’t suppress, and he rubbed at his face, peered about in the low, uncertain light from the dying fire, rubbed sleep-blurry eyes and blinked ‘til his vision cleared. He shot his gaze to the bed; Wil was still sleeping, thank the—
He shook his head, clenched his jaw. “You didn’t see Her. You didn’t see anything. It was a dream. You need your quick-mud, damn it. Don’t get all wonky now, for pity’s sake.”
Easier said than done. It still felt real. And the bit about Old Bridge—if it turned out that it was even close to what really happened—
No. It wasn’t. It was just Dallin’s own imagination. Filling in too many blanks because he didn’t have any facts to fill them with. It wasn’t any more real than a man controlling other people’s dreams. Just because everyone in Ríocht had gone insane with the wilder aspects of their religion, didn’t mean Dallin had to let them drag him along with them.
Still…
The lad’s got scars you en’t seen.
All he had to do was slide his fingers into Wil’s hair, feel about for scarred shapes beneath his fingertips. Their lack would prove that Dallin was just playing into everyone else’s madness; their presence would prove… He closed his eyes. Their presence would confirm—at least circumstantially—that the Aisling was real. Which would, in turn, prove that the Guardian was real.
The thought turned his stomach, ever so slightly.
He growled a little, clenched his teeth. “All right, Dreamer,” he muttered, low and quiet, “why don’t you do something useful and dream me up some coffee?”
A low snort knocked at the bottom of his throat, but it felt a little wild and crazed, so he kept it in, ran a hand through his hair. Peered up at the tiny window. It was going pinkish outside, dawn just breaking up the night. Maybe he could walk off the remnants of the dream, pick up some tea from the kitchen while he was at it. Do something nice for Wil, why not? Even if the dream hadn’t been real, Wil had obviously been through some difficult times, and Dallin would bet no one had ever brought him tea in bed before. It would be a nice gesture. Wake him up in the right mood. Make him more cooperative.
There. It was decided. He’d go get tea. For Wil. Because it would serve Dallin’s purposes. Lesson Two: Honey. He’d bring some of that, too—hahaha. Right.
He dressed quickly, throwing on clothes, strapping on his weapons with as little clanging as possible; his hands were still shaking a little, so it was hard going, but if he made too much noise, he’d wake Wil. And then he’d have to explain why he was locking him in the room by himself so that Dallin could get out somewhere he could breathe, and pump a little adrenaline through his veins to crowd out the ridiculous… whatever it was. And he didn’t think he could explain.
Securely buttoned, tied and strapped, he slipped out the door and into the narrow hallway, locking the door behind him. So, I am a prisoner wanted to echo through his head, poke guilty little pins at him, but there was already too much racing about in there, so it couldn’t get a handhold.
He sucked in a long breath, cleared his mind—or tried to—clomped down the stairs to the empty common room. It was quiet and dark, no lamps lit yet, so he followed the din of pots and a slice of dim light to the kitchen. The innkeep who’d served them supper last night—Dallin had neglected to ask his name—was already in there, baggy-eyed and sour-looking, along with two women busy with the morning baking. The innkeep looked up when Dallin reached the doorway, rolled his eyes.
“Ah, at least one person’ll be happy for the bloody-awful-in-the-morning delivery.”
Dallin blinked, lifted an eyebrow. After the night he’d had, he wasn’t surprised that nothing was making sense. “Sorry?” was all he managed.
The man waved a hand tiredly. “Eh, not you
r fault. I’m up late to close up and I’m not pleasant when I don’t sleep ‘til midday.”
One of the women snorted and smirked at the other. The innkeep flashed them both a sour grimace, turned back to Dallin. “One of our deliveries came early,” he said. “Woke me up. I was going on back up, but I figured to tell Elli here to start brewing, ‘cause I remembered you asking after coffee yesterday.”
Dallin’s stomach did a lazy little roll as the woman who must be Elli turned to pour the contents of a steaming pot into a good-sized mug. The aroma was undeniable and unmistakable. Dallin’s head felt light.
“You…” Shit, that had come out rather high and thin. He cleared his throat, shook his head. “You’ve coffee?”
The innkeep spared him a bit of a smile, gestured to the cup. “And more for you to take on the road, if you like.”
The Aisling Trilogy Page 32
