The Aisling Trilogy

by Cummings, Carole

  And Dallin should know.

  Shaw’s mouth twisted. “My religion—”

  “It was not your religious sentiments you followed when you decided to join us in Chester,” Dallin cut in. “You left your Temple because you saw what Siofra’s presence among those Commonwealth troops meant to Cynewísan, and your loyalties bit you on the arse. You knew you might prove useful.”

  “Useful.” Shaw sighed. “So, I am a tool.” He didn’t look insulted, but he also didn’t look entirely pleased. He narrowed his eyes. “I am a healer now. I left the Temple when I saw Wil collapse in the street, when I saw the power that he—”

  “Bollocks, did you. You did it because a strategist never stops strategizing.” Dallin paused, softened his voice. “And that power may well find its way into the hands of men who really shouldn’t have it, unless you do what’s necessary.”

  Shaw’s jaw tightened, struck between whatever he saw as his current duty and his former loyalty—neither of which had come so close to clashing before, Dallin guessed. And why should they?

  Dallin sighed, shook his head. Regardless of how this probably looked to Shaw, Dallin wasn’t unsympathetic. “I’m not asking you to lead a charge against Commonwealth troops—quite the contrary. I’m not even asking you to carry a weapon, though I’d much prefer it if you did. I’m merely asking you to lend your influence when Wheeler gets here. He’s a general—a career general at that—and if his ego has grown any more since my last experience with him, though granted it was a peripheral one, my paltry former captain’s rank will be seen as an insult. He may not deign to talk to me at all. In fact, it’s debatable whether he should even know that I was in the military. He might see all this as more treasonous than walking away from the Constabulary.”

  Shaw was shaking his head, but it didn’t look like refusal; more like skepticism and disquiet. “If I didn’t know Wheeler, I would say that it wasn’t possible for his ego to have grown, but I’m afraid it’s not only possible, but likely.”

  “You fear him,” Wil said quietly.

  Dallin had been getting the same impression, but he kept silent and let it come from Wil. He’d likely put it more kindly than Dallin would, and Shaw liked him better.

  “You don’t have to do it, you know,” Wil went on. “You’ve already done a lot for us. We’ve no right to ask more.”

  Wil shot a reproachful glance at Dallin, but Dallin refused to even twitch beneath it. Not at all the line of approach Dallin had been hoping for and more-or-less expecting when he’d let Wil take the reins. Dallin had even worried that Wil might see the secrecy as a betrayal, and avoid Shaw after it was exposed. Ha. Instead, it seemed Wil was sympathizing with Shaw and blaming Dallin.

  Dallin made a mental note. Lesson Six: Nothing draws empathy out of the man like witnessing someone else with his back to the wall. Maybe it was Lesson Seven. Or Lesson Six-hundred and forty-two. Who could keep track?

  “I realize it’s a difficult position,” Dallin put in, speaking to Shaw but keeping his eyes locked to Wil’s. “I’m not trying to be callous about it, and if it weren’t as important as it is, we’d drop it right here. In fact, I never would have brought it up.”

  Wil stared at him, scowling a bit, before he shrugged minute concession and looked away. Dallin turned back to Shaw. “Is he right? Do you fear him?”

  And if so, why?

  “Brother Shaw,” Calder said, his voice dipping down to tones vaguely threatening. Somehow, Dallin didn’t think the threat was directed at Shaw. “You do not have to answer. You are my guest in Lind, and if—”

  “No,” Shaw interrupted, slanting a weary smile at his friend. “No reason for secrets, and Brayden is right.” Frowning, he turned back to Dallin, shook his head. “I wouldn’t say ‘fear.’ I am… wary of him. Wheeler has always had his own agenda, one that I long suspected did not quite coincide with Cynewísan’s welfare, but he was always terribly clever and…” He shrugged, discomfited. “If I could explain it, I would have done so to the Elders in Penley and had him dismissed years ago. But he had this… charm about him, this…” He turned to Wil, frown deepening. “I was minded of him when I saw Siofra.”

  Dallin’s eyes narrowed, the beat of Lind’s heart abruptly hammering in his ears, a rising crescendo. Siofra; soldiers at the Bounds; Wheeler on his way; the Brethren prowling even now; the faceless Cleric, catching up, with every intention of inviting a nightmare to… to…

  The Cleric must commune with the Aisling. Unite his mind and soul to the Dreamer, then annex him…

  FAeðme—just sitting there, waiting…

  Something was there, some kind of fulcrum he couldn’t see yet was turning, driving everything inexorably, and all of it gaining speed, building toward that final pivot of convergence. “…everything theoretically right,” Shaw was saying, “but there was something not right about it all, and I could never lay my finger on it. His strategies were mechanically flawless, their successes predictable, the reasons for their failures beyond suspicion, but…” He shook his head, frustrated. “His victories were many, but never strategically important. His failures were few but massive, the loss of life staggering.”

  If someone wanted to get close to the opposition, have the most influence possible, without having to go through the bother of spying or the constrictions of state formalities, what profession do you think would be most convenient?

  And if someone wanted to lose a war, to what level of incompetence would he have to rise? All of the compromises Cynewísan had made toward the end of the war, all of the concessions, placing the Commonwealth in a position that was both finely balanced and potentially strategically weak, should more hostilities boil up. Stacking the hierarchy of the military with men inexperienced and unprincipled. Drawing back troops at the Borders and sending them into retirement, while Ríocht’s presence thickened like smoky shadows at every guard post and picket. All of it a slow-rolling chain of policy negotiated by Wheeler himself. And written into the formal treaties by…

  I’ve become quite… familiar with the High Seat, Channing.

  Oh, shit.

  A cold fist locked around Dallin’s chest, constricting air. Dim connection, perhaps, but now that it had been made…

  Reason? Logical deduction? Or screaming paranoia? Was Wil’s proclivity toward dreaming up conspiracies around every corner rubbing off on him, or had Wil been right all along?

  Dallin had been assuming the Brethren was a Dominion ‘brotherhood’ but there were plenty of his own countrymen who would be susceptible to the sort of mission those men followed. Payton back in Putnam had the right sort of smarminess about him; in fact, that might explain how Wheeler had known to drag Manning and Ramsford in for questioning, how he knew which of the staff to imprison and which to keep. And Payton certainly wasn’t the only one Dallin knew who might fit this particular bill. No stolen Marks, but Wheeler couldn’t possibly have them, either, so that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  How did that joke go?—Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean everyone’s not out to get me.

  “If compared to any other general’s record,” Shaw was saying, “the losses would have been glaring, but the Elders saw only the victories stacking up, I suppose considering all those young lives necessary sacrifices.” His jaw tightened. “Not a military man among them, so I don’t know why I was continually surprised by it.”

  Dallin had heard much the same, but it hadn’t had much to do with him at the time. Wheeler came in during the last year of the official declaration, assigned to the eastern Border, and Dallin’s regiment had never fallen under his command. By the time the discontent had started to reach up north, truce had been declared and Dallin had seen enough. He’d retired when his commission was up and gone home, vaguely angry and empty, and having no idea why. “But…” Hunter had been silent for quite a while—so much so that Dallin had nearly forgotten his presence. Now, he noted all of the gazes turned toward him, flushed a bit, but plowed on. “But war de
mands sacrifice,” he asserted confidently. Dallin suspected the puffing of his chest was entirely unconscious. “Surely there are some who enlist for reasons other than the honor of their country—” His lip curled a little, again unconsciously, if Dallin didn’t miss his guess. “—but to die for one’s country is to die for the glory of the Mother, surely. It is dishonor to imply that sacrifice is anything other than necessary, or that any who make it have gone as sheep to the slaughter.”

  Dallin sighed. He’d seen so many like Hunter over the years—bright-eyed and eager to die for their cause, until they realized that sacrificing oneself to one’s country or beliefs often meant slogging through hip-deep mud and blood toward a grisly, lonely end that meant no more than another finger-length on a map to the men who had sent them there. Ask ten soldiers what they were fighting for, and you’d be liable to get ten different answers, and all of them likely more noble than the goals of those men with their maps in their clean, marble-floored rooms, with their cozy fires and their hot baths and their hot meals waiting for them in the next room.

  “And what about dying for the honor of the Father?” Wil asked softly, his face unreadable as he peered at Hunter. “Are they any less honorable? You believe that the Mother grants Her favor to those who die fighting against men who believe just as strongly that they fight in the Father’s name. He is Her Beloved. They fought side by side, or so the story goes. Do you really think She looks upon war between our countries and approves?”

  Oh, well done. If it weren’t so obviously damned inappropriate, Dallin might have applauded.

  “The Dominion has abandoned the Father,” Hunter argued. “Every day, they stumble farther from His Grace, and gird themselves with the lies of the Guild. They reject the Mother and hate those who do not.”

  “So they should be punished,” Wil said in that same soft, even tone. “They should be hated in return for being tricked and lied to.”

  Dallin winced. This could go horribly, terribly wrong, and very quickly, if he didn’t stop it before it got started. He reached out, and laid a hand to Wil’s arm, the tension running beneath Dallin’s palm hard and trembling, contradicting sharply the cool calm of Wil’s expression. Dallin tried to make his voice soft and commanding at the same time. “We haven’t the time for this, and I don’t think—”

  Wil roughly shrugged him off, turned to him, his gaze cold enough to snap-freeze a raging inferno. “I’ll have an answer,” he told Dallin. He turned back to Hunter, who stared back at him, wide-eyed and clearly beyond his depth, flushed bright-red, mouth moving but nothing coming out of it. The boy wasn’t capable of answering, but that didn’t stop Wil from driving daggers into him with his eyes.

  Calder dismounted and went to stand beside his nephew, placing a hand to his knee. “You must forgive his ignorance, Aisling,” he said quietly, dipped a small bow. “He does not know, he cannot understand—”

  “Lack of knowledge should not preclude understanding,” Wil said evenly, “or at least the attempt to understand.” He tilted his head, narrow-eyed and dangerous. “Is this what Lind teaches its youth?” he asked in a voice softly poisonous. His gaze, if possible, intensified, shifted to Calder. “Will Lind accept an Aisling who has been tricked and lied to? An Aisling who has rejected the Mother and cursed Her name?”

  Hunter gasped, short and sharp; Wil ignored him, kept his eyes on Calder, tightened his jaw. “I expect it would’ve been easier for you, after all, to get Dallin to kill me, though I suppose I should be grateful you didn’t quite have the courage to do it yourself. But I wonder—what sort of excuse d’you think you’d give Her when you stood before Her at the end? That I was stupid and weak?” He watched, cold satisfaction, as Calder colored and just kept staring at him, speechless.

  Wil’s gaze slid over to Dallin, still hard but not quite as cold. “That I believed too blindly?”

  It wasn’t meant to skewer, merely to cut a little. Still, it drove into Dallin with the impact of a punch to the chest. Bloody hell, had he really been thinking only moments ago that Wil had lost his edge? Apology leapt to Dallin’s tongue, desperate and mildly unnerving for its urgency. “Wil —”

  “No.” Wil shook his head, even smiled a little, though it was somewhat frosty. “I won’t hear defense while you have secrets behind your eyes.” His eyebrows went up when Dallin twitched. “Did you think I wouldn’t know? Or were you just hoping?” He leaned in, lowered his voice. “You despise blind faith, and yet you expect it from me under the guise of trust. I told you before that I wouldn’t trust you blindly.”

  Except for when you do. You’re hardly consistent, are you? How the hell am I supposed to know when you’ll trust and when you won’t?

  Dallin’s heart was thumping, his temples throbbing with dull, heavy heat. He swallowed, said, “You also told me you’d choose yourself,” before he could stop himself.

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Every single thing he’d been thinking just moments ago, every tentative plan, was now rendered moot by that one careless, panicked statement.

  Wil’s eyes changed, the cold anger slipping down into reluctant understanding, perhaps a bit of resentment. He nodded, pursed his lips. “All right,” he said slowly, “I expect that’s fair, if looked at from a certain point of view.”

  Not really a concession, and certainly not forgiveness. Dallin’s throat was tight. He shouldn’t want either concession or forgiveness, and the fact that he wanted both only drove the words of the Old Ones further home:

  Your Guardian owns the priorities of a lover… you must think about it as the Shaman now…

  Dallin’s teeth set tight to hold back whatever anxious denials might be lurking behind them. “I’m sorry,” he said, completely uncaring that the others might hear. “I can’t think about this as the Shaman, I can’t… can’t make myself not care, and it’s mucking up everything. I can’t—”

  “You can do anything you truly want to do,” Wil cut in. “I’ve seen you.”

  That seemed like an awful lot of unnerving faith, considering the current conversation, though Dallin didn’t miss the implication of the remark. His mouth twisted. “Somehow I don’t think that’s quite the vote of confidence it sounded like.”

  Wil opened his mouth, but Dallin shook his head. “We don’t have time for this. Later, you have my word. Right now, our first priority is to get to the Bounds and put Lind on alert. We’ll pick this up when we’ve more privacy.”

  “And what good will that do me,” Wil asked slowly, eyes hard, “if you’ve already made up your mind what’s best?”

  It stung. And the cool, calm delivery of it made it burn.

  Dallin clenched his jaw. “How the hell would I know what’s best?” he wanted to know, surprised at the acidic sincerity of the question. He glanced about at the others. “We’re wasting time we don’t have. Let’s go.”

  It was growing dark enough that, by the time they neared the Bounds, Dallin had begun to wish he’d thought to commandeer a lamp from somewhere. He’d chosen the path along the river because he’d thought it would please Wil, and because there had been little reason at the time for speed. That had changed a little more than halfway through the trip, and the sometimes treacherous sloping terrain—alternately mud-slick with the recent rains, and moss-slick as a general rule—quickly became a serious impediment beneath the horses’ hoofs. Had the mild urgency never arisen, it would have been nothing more than a slight annoyance and reason for caution. Now, with the drive to give warning gnawing at him, it was maddening.

  The sun was low behind the trees, its orange-gold haze thick above them, but here, beneath the cover of overhanging pines that lined the river’s edge, it might as well have been nightfall already. Still, by the time Dallin’s ears had started to pick up the telltale voices and sporadic animal sounds alerting him that they were nearing a campsite, it was still light enough to spot the silhouettes. He couldn’t mistake the nine tall figures—alternately straight and somewhat hunched, thin and wide—standing on
the path ahead of them as anything but what they were. Relief took him and he turned to Wil, riding just behind him and to his right.

  “The Old Ones have come to welcome you.” He nodded up the path. “I can hear nothing alarming coming from the Weardas at the Bounds, and the Old Ones wouldn’t be here if anything had happened. Or at least they wouldn’t be standing there and calmly waiting for you. We’re all right for now.”

  He couldn’t see Wil’s expression in the gloom, but he made out a nod of the dark head. “Thank you,” Wil said softly. “That’s good to know.”

  They’d hardly spoken since the bit of a palaver farther upriver, but for a brief exchange where Wil had led his mare a little too close to the river’s edge and onto a stretch of slippery-smooth granite. He’d seen fish leaping, he’d said, and wanted to have a closer look, but Dallin had warned him off. As politely and kindly as he could, and in direct contrast to the surge of alarm that had washed through him as he’d watched Miri’s hoofs slip-slide briefly before she reasserted her balance. Wil had accepted the caution with nothing more than a short nod and a conciliatory, “Sorry. You’re right, of course,” as he’d patted the mare’s neck and led her back onto surer ground.

  Now, Wil jogged the horse a few steps until he caught even with Dallin, snatched at Dallin’s sleeve and halted, waiting for Dallin to do the same. Dallin reined in, waited for the others to pass them by, then turned his horse, bringing her up close to Wil’s so he could see Wil’s face in the gathering dusk. He waited.

  Wil watched the others until they were out of hearing, then he turned to Dallin, looked at him straight. “I don’t want to be angry,” he said quietly. “I don’t want you to be angry.”

  Dallin shook his head. “I’m not—”