The Aisling Trilogy

by Cummings, Carole

  But that second time and this morning… yes, he could stay here with this not-Dallin, this dream-Dallin who somehow still didn’t say everything Wil wanted to hear.

  Stay here and relive those moments until everything just went away, until he dissolved into the black, and then it wouldn’t matter because he wouldn’t know anymore.

  “It hurts, I know,” Dallin answered. “Everything hurts, and you’ve endured it for so long.”

  “So long…”

  “I know.” A gentle kiss to the crown of Wil’s head.

  “And I’m sorry, but you’re not done yet.”

  Wil shut his eyes, fresh tears rolling down his cheeks.

  “Please—”

  “The Father needs you,” Dallin told him, stern now. “You’ve seen what He fights. You’ve seen who.”

  Æledfýres.

  “Yes,” Dallin replied, though Wil was sure he hadn’t spoken that time. “He’s been holding it all since you were born, Wil, keeping it all back, but how much longer d’you think He can keep doing it? He’s dying.”

  “I don’t care!” Terrified. Near-rabid in the denial.

  A soft, sympathetic chuckle; a tightening of the embrace. “You do. I know you don’t want to, but you do. And I know you’re scared, but you know I won’t let you do it alone.” Not-Dallin took Wil by the arms and pushed him back gently. “He needs you. And as much as you think you want to, you won’t let yourself stand away.” A small, firm shake of his shoulders. “Find me, Wil. You know how.”

  A widening stain flowered over the weave of Dallin’s shirt where Wil had wept blooded tears on his shoulder. Wil stared at the pattern, marking how the threads knit and plaited themselves—the kink of a fiber here, the jag of a strand there…

  “Do you need me?” he whispered, kept staring at the stain, following the loops and lines.

  Because I’ve only just this second understood that I need you, and it hurts to know it, it’s bloody terrifying.

  Except knowing that you cared stopped hurting when I realized that I cared back; I think it might be all right that I need you if you need me back.

  “I’m not real,” Dallin answered gently. “I can’t answer that. Find me at the river and ask me again.”

  It would do no good to weep, to scream, to beat at that wide chest and whimper that he was too terrified to move, too broken and lost to muster the strength. He did it anyway, let those strong arms stay twined about him, hold him tight, rested his head against Dallin’s breastbone, listened to the steady ka-thump ka-thump ka-thump, and closed his eyes. Wept until he couldn’t breathe, that stain beneath his cheek widening, defining itself with each tear.

  I’m wide open. Look for me and you’ll find me.

  Wil touched the stain with shaking fingers. Found a strand where warp met weft.

  Followed it.

  It isn’t chill and frosted over this time; it’s warm, the sun is shining bright on the water, glaring into his eyes.

  The grass is cool against his bare feet, green and soft with just a touch of dew from the mist of the river. The trees are full and flowering, fragrant apple blossom and heady dogwood, soughing whispers shivering through branch and leaf on the soft breeze. The chuckle of water over stone sings with the voices of the stars, though the sun eclipses their faces.

  A wide, gold-limned figure stands on the strand, shoulders hunched, hands stuffed into trouser pockets. Hair like chaff wafts and glints red-gold-flax with every slight shift of the gentle wind. Those dark eyes are shut tight, brow twisted in concentration, jaw set hard.

  His patterns are brilliant, shifting and re-threading even now, a constant re-making. Gold to red to blue to jade—striating out from him in every direction in shards of burnished radiance, scintillating out into thin air, reaching, stretching…

  Searching.

  Seeking.

  I’m wide open… I’ve opened myself so wide I’m scared to death…

  Open… doesn’t quite cover it. Open is too small a word. Bared, exposed, raw and defenseless. Wil doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything so terrifyingly beautiful in all his life. Honor and fear, love and rage, pride and worry, virtue and sin—all of it scorching into Wil’s eyes, a resplendent aura of lambent passion.

  “You see me,” Wil had once said to him; he doesn’t think he looked half as astonishing.

  One tentative step forward from Wil, and Dallin spins, blinks. He only stares for a moment, like he’s not sure he’s actually seeing what he’s seeing. Then everything collapses, a chaos of color disintegrating, folding back into a fixed template with the relieved droop of Dallin’s shoulders, the quickfire release of tension from whatever was holding him strung together.

  “Oh, thank fuck,” Dallin breathes, shaky and thick.

  He stalks over to Wil in five swift strides, jaw set, eyes ablaze. For a moment, Wil thinks maybe Dallin’s going to hit him, but then he’s being snatched up, nearly off his feet, hauled in and crushed to Dallin’s chest so tight it knocks the breath from him. “When I tell you to run,” Dallin wheezes through his teeth, “you bloody run , and you bloody keep running , understand?”

  There was a question Wil had wanted to ask, it had seemed so important, but now it’s gone, and he thinks he doesn’t really need to ask, because he knows. That look, this embrace—whatever the question was, this is the answer. A tearful laugh wants to wend up from Wil’s chest, but it’s cut off by the strength of the hold.

  “Keep telling me not to leave you alone, and there you went—” Dallin chokes it off, grip tightening. “And I’ve got Calder giving me I-told-you-so’s and Shaw nattering at me to ignore Calder, and you wouldn’t… wouldn’t hear me, I couldn’t find you, and damn you, don’t you ever do that to me again!”

  “Sorry, I…” No good. Wil twists a bit, trying to push gently. “I can’t breathe.”

  Dallin lets go so abruptly that Wil almost totters backward, would’ve done, if not for the fact that Dallin’s wide, strong hands are now gripping Wil’s arms like he’s afraid to let go. “Sorry,” Dallin breathes, as close to losing control as Wil has ever seen him. “Sorry, I just…”

  His face screws up, and he shrugs helplessly, tightens his grip until Wil’s sure it’ll leave bruises, shakes him lightly.

  “Don’t do that again, all right?” It’s shaky, taken from a demand to a request from one word to the next.

  Wil’s ashamed that no steady reassurance will rise to his tongue. Instead, he reaches up, sliding gentle fingers over the red-blistered burn, shiny and gruesome-looking, on Dallin’s left cheek. “How—?”

  Dallin’s hand is over Wil’s, gently pushing it away, curling around it. “Things got a little crazy in Chester. It’s how we managed to get out relatively easily.”

  Wil frowns. “Fire?”

  “Um…” Dallin looks uncomfortable now. “The rain put most of it out before it could get out of control.”

  Ah. Wil thinks he sees now. He thinks he was seeing all along.

  “Though the Constabulary is probably lost,” Wil murmurs, distant.

  Dallin’s eyes narrow. “How did you know that?”

  Wil just shakes his head, jerks his chin at the burn.

  “Did I do that?”

  A pause, then: “You weren’t yourself,” Dallin answers steadily.

  Wil puffs a bitter snort. “Ya think?” He shakes his head. “How long?”

  Dallin sighs. “It’s been almost two days now.”

  Wil scowls this time, unaccountably filled with sudden, sharp wrath. “So why isn’t it healed yet? Fuck’s sake, Dallin, you need a nursemaid to natter you into healing yourself every time you get hurt? How did you ever manage to live this long without someone behind you all the time, nagging you to make yourself better?”

  A stunned almost-laugh, but it dies before it can make itself. “I’ve been…” Dallin doesn’t finish, just shakes his head, takes a long, deep breath, closes his eyes and leans into Wil.

  I’ve been using up everythin
g I had on you, is what he didn’t say, and Wil sags, leans in, too, wraps tentative arms about Dallin’s torso, soothed when a gentler embrace is wound about him this time.

  “I know,” Wil says quietly. “I’m sorry. I can’t… I don’t know if I can do this.” He pulls back, pulls away, walks slowly over to the strand and looks down into the water. He could be blind and deaf, and still he’d know that Dallin was behind him the whole way. “The things I saw,” Wil whispers, shudders and clenches his jaw. “The things I felt— feel —it’s all just so… big , I don’t know how to put it all in order in my mind, everything keeps blurring together, slipping away then slamming back into me, and I…” The tears are rising again; he blinks them back, swallows. “Calder worried what might happen if my mind broke.” He turns slowly, peering at Dallin over his shoulder. “I think it might have done. And if that means I won’t have to do what I know I have to do…”

  His shrug is heavy as he turns back to the water. “Maybe it’s not such a bad thing.”

  “And what…?” A pause, the weight of Dallin’s hand on his shoulder, grounding. “What do you think you have to do?”

  Wil blows out a heavy breath. He lifts his chin, staring at the banks of rolling green on the other side of the river. “Æledfýres.” Like a lead weight, dropping from his mouth, thudding at his feet. “He gave me to Siofra; he’s been trying to give me to the Brethren. He needs something from me, and he needs one of them to get it for him. And once he has it, he can… I’m not sure. Finish the job with Father, I think.” He looks down, turns his gaze slowly back to Dallin’s. “You know my name.”

  Dallin’s head jerks back, and he stares at Wil, brow drawing down, eyes narrowing. “How…?”

  “Because you just would—if anyone would figure it out, you would.” Wil reaches up, sliding his fingers under his hair, over the lumpy scars on his scalp. “You were trying to heal me, to find me, I think I felt you, and you found my name instead.” He shakes his head and drops his hand. “I’ve held the key to my cage all along. Fucking irony.” Dallin opens his mouth, but Wil shakes his head reluctantly. “Don’t tell me.” The words are almost a physical pain in his chest. His name, his Self—he’s wanted it for so long, it twists his heart to have it so close. “Seal it up tight, keep it safe for me. If I know it, he might find it, and then I’m really fucked.” His hand goes back to his head, fingertips toying lightly at the raised symbols.

  “Can’t read,” he mutters, resentful, “no danger of me finding out by accident.”

  Dallin steps in and takes Wil’s hand away. He grabs up the other and holds them both tight. “As long as you remember that it’s yours, that you can have it for the asking.”

  A sad smile twitches at Wil’s lips, and he nods. “I wouldn’t be doing it, else.” He leans up, lays a kiss to Dallin’s mouth—not the frantic, desperate one from when he’d been lost and trying not to know it, but soft and sweet, just a brief brush of intimacy, connection. He draws back, lays his head to Dallin’s shoulder, tells him, “I want to sleep now. Real sleep. And then I’ll… and then I’ll come back. All right?”

  Dallin squeezes his hands. Sighs, sags just a little—relief. “I’ll be Watching,” is all he says.

  He came awake by slow degrees. A vague awareness of his own existence first, broadening back into himself, getting to know the shapes of his mind again, then reaching out, stretching into his body. The aches came next, stiff pain all through him, making him heavy and reluctant to move. The scent of wood burning, then the heat radiating from it, warm and comforting. Ka-thump ka-thump ka-thump against his cheek, and he smiled, slow and drowsy.

  He knew that sound; he knew that cadence.

  Wil opened his eyes, blinked about the darkness, the undulating flicker of the fire scudding over first his own hand, lying relaxed in front of his face, splayed over the familiar weave of Dallin’s shirt, the familiar curve of Dallin’s chest. Stretched his squinted gaze a little farther, pulling the rumple of a bedroll into focus, an empty bowl on the floor, a water-skin. Let his eyes roam farther, over unbroken curved stone…

  A cave? The sound of rushing water came to him, all at once, babbling and chuckling not far away. Wil could smell it—fish and loam, river-reed and silt.

  The Flównysse. Looks like I’ll finally get to see a real river after all.

  He sighed, tried to stretch without moving too much, but the aches flared, so he only twisted his neck a little so he could get a look. He was, apparently, lying quite literally in Dallin’s lap, Dallin semi-propped against what looked like Wil’s pack and blankets, long body stretched out, with Wil sprawled half along his torso and half on the cave’s floor between his legs. A thick-furred bedroll was pulled almost over Wil’s head, Dallin’s arms locked protectively around Wil’s shoulders.

  “All right?” Dallin whispered.

  Wil smiled. “I didn’t know I’d be so sore,” he whispered back. “Some shaman you are.”

  Dallin’s lip curled up on one side, sardonic. “You’ve been lazing about for four days now, going on five. And your brain nearly exploded out your ears before that. A little soreness you can live with.”

  “Four days?”

  “You had a rough go of it,” was all Dallin said.

  “Hrmph.” Wil didn’t have an argument for it, so he didn’t bother. “And how long have you been lazing about with me?”

  Dallin shrugged, closed his eyes and stretched. “A Watcher’s job is never done.”

  “It would seem so, yeah. Sorry.”

  “Don’t.”

  Wil let it go. He stretched, too, a wide, satisfying yawn curling all the way up from his toes. “I see that burn looks better.”

  It did. Deep and almost gory before, blistered and raw. Now it was healed over with new pink skin, smooth and slightly tight.

  “Someone came over all auntie at me and insulted my shiny-new healing skills,” Dallin retorted. “What else could I do?”

  Wil stared at the burn, noting how close it had been to Dallin’s eye. Wil’s mouth tightened. “How did it happen?”

  One sandy eyebrow went up. “You’ve just woken. Don’t you want—?”

  “How did it happen?”

  Dallin sighed, resting his head back to stare at the curve of the cave’s ceiling. “At the gate.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, careful of the burn. “You were out cold, I could barely feel your heartbeat; I’d never seen so much blood coming from one person. And then the sky just… opened up. And then the fires started, but the rain took care of most of them pretty quickly.” He puffed out a heavy breath, Wil’s body lifting as Dallin’s chest rose and fell. “It was bloody pandemonium, Wil, you should’ve seen—” He cut himself off. “The ground started to sort of… roll, and everyone broke for cover. I thought that would be a good time to get ourselves out of there, so we made for the horses.” A pause and a crooked smirk. “Well done you, by the way.”

  Wil returned the smirk, a little weakly. “Told you we’d need ’em.” Trying for smug and not quite making it.

  Dallin snorted. “Right, well…” His hand came back down, pulling the bedroll up over Wil’s shoulders then sliding beneath it, thumb dawdling absently along Wil’s backbone. “We were trying to barrel our way through the gate, and they were giving us a pretty good fight, more than I’d expected, considering. I thought Calder was a goner for a few minutes there. But then these…” His hand waved about. “Just… fire, it came out of nowhere, great gobs of it, like a ghost was throwing balls of it, and the Guard decided we weren’t worth the trouble.” A shrug. “One of them caught me, is all.”

  “Sorry,” Wil offered, a little too tentative and quiet.

  “Ha.” Dallin shook his head. “I’m not. Might not’ve got out of there, else. Anyway, at least the fire didn’t follow us. The rain did, though. Great torrents of it, for bloody days. The Planting should be damned prosperous in the spring, with all that ground water storing up. It finally let up two days ago.”

  Two days ago. W
hen Wil had finally found his way to the river and at least a semblance of sanity. And then fell into a sleep so deep that for the first time in his life, he didn’t think he’d dreamt at all. Or at least if he had, he didn’t remember it.

  He turned slowly, trying not to grunt or groan, folded his hands over Dallin’s breastbone and rested his chin atop them. “Maybe Calder was right,” he muttered.

  Another snort. “I doubt it, but what about?”

  Wil shrugged and stared cross-eyed at his fingers.

  “Maybe it’s all too big for me.” He frowned, chewed his lip. “Maybe I’m not strong enough for all this. Maybe it really did drive me mad, and… I don’t know… maybe it would be better if…”

  He trailed off, brooding. He could feel Dallin’s eyes on him, and he lifted his own to meet the stare. Found the dark gaze tilted, the mouth curved wry and just edging on throttled mirth.

  Wil twitched, snapped, “What?”

  “Nothing.” Dallin set a soft pat to Wil’s shoulder, almost condescending but not quite. “I’m just waiting for the badger to chew its way out and negate everything you just said.”

  A light flush flared at Wil’s cheeks, and he looked away, tried to growl and couldn’t. “Shut up,” was the best retort he could muster.

  Dallin had the decency not to snort out loud, but Wil could feel it rumbling in his chest. His hand settled on the back of Wil’s head. “It’s the middle of the night,” he said, a reassuring smile in his voice. “Save it all for daylight, yeah? We’ll have plenty of things to worry about in the morning.”

  Wil’s eyes closed again. Lethargy had never left, but now it sank in deeper, curled down as if it meant to stay.

  He frowned. With a huff, he reached up and flicked his fingers at Dallin’s hand. “Are you putting me to sleep, Shaman?” he mumbled into Dallin’s chest.

  “Neat trick, innit?” Dallin retorted, not a smile in his voice this time, but a grin. “I promise not to use it on you just to get you to shut up when you’re in a particularly bothersome mood.”

  Wil dragged open his eyes. Huh. Maybe that was why he’d been sleeping so deeply for so long. It occurred to him that perhaps he should be vaguely pissed, Dallin making free with it like that, but it didn’t feel like making free—he’d paused, waiting to see if Wil would object, waiting for permission.