The Aisling Trilogy

by Cummings, Carole

  The look is so familiar, it nearly takes Wil’s breath again. Like in his vision, and he thinks dazedly, Is this my end, then? except he knows better. Dark eyes, boring into his, the Mark bright and burning, and he’d thought the look somewhat savage before, angry and dangerous, but now he sees it for the worry it is, and there’s anger, but it isn’t for him.

  “You know them for travesties,” She’d told him. Only days ago, he might not have been sure; now he is.

  “Reborn,” he thinks he whispers, but he can’t tell, and he doesn’t feel reborn, so maybe he’s wrong. He tries to decide if he cares, but he feels hazy and still a bit stunned, so he stops thinking altogether.

  “I’ve got it,” Dallin tells him calmly. “Do you trust me?”

  Wil sends a woozy glance about, notes they’re alone, She’s gone, and he feels a strange mix of relief and sorrow. “Yes,” he says, a little faintly, doesn’t even stop to try and think about it. “Yes, I trust you.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  And he does, and it’s so very different this time, so much less suffocating, but no less overwhelming. Dallin was right—it’s been waiting for him, and it’s insistent. It batters at his defenses, and Wil has to focus everything in him on Dallin’s voice in his mind—“It’s all right, trust me, it won’t hurt this time”—trust him like Wil had just said he did, and lower the walls, let it in. He’s buffeted inside it, like a leaf on the wind, and it gathers into his every crevice, fills him up ’til he thinks he’ll burst, and still it pours itself into him.

  He sees the Mother, only She was called Aelíf, back when Time began, and he sees the Father, who was Brionglóid when he caught sight of his Beloved for the first time. MAeting, She calls Him, because She’d dreamt of Him, and Wil almost flinches, watches as She plaits a silky strand of sable through with the spiny green stem of the delicate little white flower that had kept him captive for so very long.

  “’Tis a mark of ownership in my country,” He tells Her, grinning, so charming and beguiling, as he steals a kiss and then another. “Now I must do as you say.”

  He’s telling tales, teasing and seducing, Wil knows He is. It wasn’t true then, but He spoke it and so made it true ever after.

  “Then I say kiss me again,” She demands, and he grins again and obeys.

  The tales are wrong, all the legends, they’re all wrong. They didn’t wage war on Their kin, but gathered them to Them and joined against Aeledfýres—Soul-eater, Dearg-dur, Daeva, stealing the magic of others, and if they didn’t have magic and he was bored, sometimes he’d merely drink their blood or eat their hearts, and those were the lucky ones. Slowly, he walked across the infant land, herded the Clans, took the souls of those who had magic, and used the minds of those who didn’t, built himself an army while líf and Brionglóid fell into each other and bided for a time in newborn bliss.

  For ages, They heeded only each other and the budding lands, built Their mountains and forged Their waters with Their kin, until Célnes cried her death-song on the wind, and They knew what Aeledfýres had done. They called Their kin to them, called all men whose minds were still free, and marched on the corrupt god.

  One after another, the old gods fell to him. Eorðbúgigend first, His brother, then Diepe, Her sister, until all but Brionglóid and Aelíf were gone—He with His sword, She with Her bow and quiver—and they hunted down Aeledfýres, cut the captive souls from out his heart, took his fire from him, and imprisoned him forever within the boll of a great evergreen, spoke Their spells to keep it strong and secret, and gave to it eternal life. The souls of the captive men They set free, and the men thanked Them, named Them Mother and Father, bowed to Them, and bound Them to Their thrones.

  But with the souls of Their kin They could not part, so the Father dreamed into life a son for His Beloved, placed the souls of Their fallen kin into his heart, where their essence would live on in the one They loved best. The Father named his son Aisling, for he was a dream—a vision He sang into poem and then into life—a wish He made Their own. But the Mother gave to him his true name, breathed it into his heart with a kiss to his brow, and made of it the last lock to Aeledfýres’ prison, kept it secret, even from Her Beloved, so that the Aisling alone held all the keys to his bondage. Keeper, Coimeádaí, of all the Kin.

  And then the Mother took Her Beloved back to Lind, the first place of Her making, the birthplace of the world and Their love, peopled it with great warriors, Marked them, and chose its finest to stand guard over Her beloved Gift.

  “You have a name,” Dallin tells him, stroking his cheek with callused fingers. “You’ve held it in your hand. All you have to do is see it.”

  Wil nods, turns his face into the caress, links his fingers through his Guardian’s, and keeps watching, keeps feeling, keeps accepting, as power keeps pouring into him, as the land keeps up its songs, and every time he thinks he can’t take any more, Dallin’s grip tightens and he does, soaking it up like parched soil beneath a spring rain. He watches the earth move as new mountains are made and old ones are swallowed up; as streams turn into rivers into seas. And all of the power inside them, all of their strength, pulsates through him, drives down into his bones, and he sees their patterns, touches them and knows them.

  The land, its people, and everything they’ve ever seen or been. He sees every Aisling that has ever come before him—brothers, of a sort, he supposes—and every Guardian that has taken his place at the Aisling’s back. Sees the land as one, Clans interbreeding and wandering borders, burning their offerings to the Mother and the Father and singing their orisons with one voice.

  Until Ríocht-that-will-be, fosterer of Aislingí, betrays Lind-that-is, begetter of Guardians.

  Wars at the borders and defenders at the Bounds. The people of Lind have been warriors since the place was birthed, and its soil has taken in the blood of native and ally and enemy alike. Calders and Portwaras and Braydens—they’ve lived and died, spent themselves and left their bones beneath its skin. It’s ancient, and it holds the memories of long years, from the infancy of the world, and it doesn’t forget.

  “Are you seeing all this?” Wil asks Dallin, and he knows Dallin answers, but he doesn’t really need to, because yes, of course he is—it’s all coming through him, isn’t it? It’s hard to imagine that Dallin has been holding it back all this time, keeping it from crushing Wil beneath the onslaught for… how long now? It doesn’t matter; he can feel the release of pain and tension from Dallin as Wil accepts its weight, doled out carefully and slowly, and only as his mind can take it, adjust to it, before Dallin sends him more.

  “Her power depends on her people, lending her the strength of their belief,” someone had told him, except he can’t remember who, and it doesn’t matter—it’s so profoundly true that it’s almost strange he’d had to be told at all. Bound by belief, and he knows what it means now, knows the power of faith, because he can feel it all coursing through him, winding its way into heart and spirit, blood and bone. From them to Dallin and then to Wil, channeled through his Guardian so he doesn’t fall beneath its weight, and it keeps amazing him that it doesn’t overwhelm him, that he knows it because Dallin knows it, can grasp it and wield it because Dallin knows how, and it doesn’t occur to Wil that he might fail, because Dallin knows he won’t.

  The strength of faith, and it almost makes him laugh, bizarrely elated, because Dallin is so sure he hasn’t any.

  Oh, Dallin, he thinks, you’ll be the very last to know the things you can do. You’ll be my savior yet.

  And again, a strange, euphoric delight moves through him, because he can actually feel Dallin smile—his spirit to Wil’s—and it’s small, just a smile, but it’s almost more intimate than anything they’ve shared between them before.

  “I’ll be anything you’ll let me,” Dallin answers, and Wil has no idea if he’s doing it with his mind or his body, but he reaches out, wraps Dallin in a firm embrace, and hangs on. His mind and soul may be buffeted and battered inside something al
most too vast and wide to comprehend, but his heart is right here, wide open, and he’s never been so glad to be so exposed.

  “Nearly there,” Dallin tells him, and it’s strange, because it feels boundless, like it couldn’t possibly have an end, and then he realizes it doesn’t. Dallin isn’t merely pulling in the last of it, but securing the tether—from the land to Dallin to Wil—bolstering the connection, protecting it, propping himself beneath it all like a stanchion, sliding it into shapes that aren’t devastating but manageable, understandable, and useable. Wil can see the threads, wonders what Dallin sees in them, if he realizes he’s weaving patterns of his own, and decides not to ask. Warp and Weft, and surely this is what it all means?

  “Have we got it?” Dallin asks. It takes a moment for Wil to realize he’s heard it with his ears. He nods, dares to open his eyes—

  —and the murky residue of the leaf hit him all at once, like he’d been flying all alone through a vast, wide-open sky, serenaded by sun and stars, and suddenly he was caught in a sticky web, nearly blind and half-deaf, his own body sucking him down ’til he almost couldn’t breathe. Cold, he hated the cold, and wet and fucking-ow-sore, every bone in his body radiating a throbbing pain blooming outward from his chest and shoulder, his head thudding sick and heavy. Everything was heavy, like he’d been weighted down and half-buried, his limbs laden and slow and altogether too far away from his body.

  “…the fuck?” he muttered, tried to focus, and only managed a blurred image of blond hair and dark eyes hovering a few inches above him.

  “Can you hear me?” Dallin asked, his voice soft and a little bit concerned.

  “’Course I c’n hear you,” Wil mumbled, blinked, and squinted, but still couldn’t quite focus. “’m not deaf.” A bit more snappish than was probably warranted, but to go from all of that freedom and beauty and power, and then drop without warning back into… this. He thought he might weep. Half-sitting almost in Dallin’s lap again, head drooping against the hard muscle of Dallin’s chest, hair wet, cheek damp against Dallin’s sopping shirt. Wil shivered, rasped, “Oh. We’re back.”

  Dallin’s fingers ran through Wil’s tangled hair, slicking it back from off his brow. “I’m afraid so,” he answered. “How d’you feel?”

  Wil thought about it, snorted, rough and weak. “Like I’ve just been trampled by a herd of Linders.” Which was a little coarse and over-simplified, but still not too far off the mark. “Sorry,” Dallin offered. “I can’t do anything about the bullet until we can get it out, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to give you anything for the pain right now.”

  Dallin’s tone had started out soft, but had progressed to throttled anger by the end. Wil turned the statement over in his head a few times, trying not to chuckle as he pressed his face into Dallin’s soggy shirt, where it was wet and uncomfortable, but still warm, before the words tripped into sense. Wil frowned, opened his eyes, blinked Dallin into cleaner focus.

  “Bullet?” Well, that would explain a few things, at least. “I’m shot?” He tried to sit up, but Dallin tightened his grip, kept him still, and anyway, it hadn’t been such a good idea in the first place— everything but just sitting still and breathing seemed to shoot daggers through his chest, and breathing wasn’t all that great, either. Which wasn’t funny at all, but Wil couldn’t help snickering, which was even less funny, now that he thought about it. “Bloody hurts,” he told Dallin.

  Which meant the leaf was wearing off. And Wil didn’t quite know how to feel about that. He was already shaking, and though that was likely all in his mind, or maybe it was just that he was wet and cold, each twitch and shiver brought back a remembrance he didn’t want. Too many horrible memories of his time at the Guild, and prominent among them, himself, broken and begging, and offering anything, everything.

  “I want to go back,” he heard himself whisper, and was appalled that he wasn’t quite sure if he meant back to the Mother, where some things still hurt, but in a different way, or to the Guild, where they’d give him what he loathed and needed.

  “I don’t need it,” he said through his teeth, clenched tight to keep them from chattering, and he hated this part the worst, how everything in his head just spilled out his mouth, and fuck, he didn’t want Dallin to see him like this, but Dallin wouldn’t look away, it wasn’t the sort of person Dallin was, and that just made it… rather awful, really. “I don’t need it,” he repeated, trying to convince himself, and Dallin would know that, no point in trying to make it sound better, because it wouldn’t disguise the fact that Wil wanted it. Before, forever ago, when Calder had shoved a second dose down his throat, he’d fought it, mindlessly defiant; now, all he wanted was more. He clutched tight to the damp wad of linen in his fist. “Dallin—”

  “I know,” Dallin told him calmly.

  “No, I don’t think you do.”

  Dallin didn’t answer that one. “I can’t touch the leaf,” he said instead, “I already tried, but maybe—?”

  “Yes,” Wil grated. It didn’t even matter what Dallin might be offering; it had to be better than this. He tried to stay still as a shudder wracked him up-and-down, but pain exploded through his chest and shoulder again, and he couldn’t help the flinch, which only made things worse. “Fuck, yes, anything, just… now.”

  “Perhaps some valerian, Brayden?” another voice asked softly.

  Wil jolted—a very bad idea—but he managed to tilt his head back, turn it… “Oh, fucking hell.” He hadn’t realized he had an audience. At least a score of people stood in a loose picket above them—two in the blue and brown, which meant Corliss was here, witnessing, looking—all of them staring, some shifting nervously, and it wasn’t at all difficult to imagine what they were seeing, what they were thinking. At least everything was still blurry, so he didn’t have to see their expressions. Slowly, Wil turned away, didn’t care what it looked like this time, just shoved his face into Dallin’s shirt. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re here,” Dallin told him, quietly and just for Wil, “in FAeðme, and you…” He paused, dipped his mouth to Wil’s ear. “You are the Heart of the World.”

  It should have been humbling, heavy. All Wil could do was snort tiredly, sag a bit more against Dallin’s chest. “Then why do I feel like the arse-end of it?”

  Dallin didn’t answer, rapping out orders to… someone else: “Get me a water skin, and if anyone’s got a dry coat or something he can use to keep warm, hand it over, please. He’s freezing.” A pause as Dallin shifted and, by the feel of it, looked over his shoulder. “Not valerian, it’s too strong and he doesn’t like to lose his wits.”

  Do I have any of those left to lose? Wil wondered bleakly.

  “There are other ways to overcome such things,” another voice said; it sounded like Thorne. Which probably meant that at least half of those standing over Wil, watching him shudder and twitch, were the Old Ones. Brilliant.

  If I’ve been ‘reborn’ as the Heart of the World, why does it still take only a dose or two of leaf to turn me into nothing more than a pathetic addict all over again?

  Her with Her links and Her cages—surely this cage was all too real, and no help at all in what She wanted from him. More tests, perhaps, but he couldn’t quite believe that, not when so much was on the line. Healing his soul, soothing his conscience, reconciling him to his own nature, so why hadn’t She healed this?

  “It can’t be withdrawal,” Dallin was saying. “It’s not been long enough for that, and he’s not been dependent for years.”

  Oh, and Wil wanted to believe that more than anything.

  “There is more to addiction than the body’s needs,” someone else put in, though Wil didn’t recognize this voice right off. “The mind can do many—”

  “And assumptions can do many more,” Dallin cut in. “He’s fevered and shaking, which I expect has more to do with the fact that he’s been outside since last night and exposed to freezing rain all morning. It’s more likely a simple case of the ague. The man�
��s been shot and thrown from a horse, for pity’s sake—let’s take care of the things we know are real before we start worrying about things that may not be.”

  Huh. Wil frowned. He’d been assuming right along with them, but now that he really examined the aches and injuries… maybe Dallin was right. He wanted more leaf, he couldn’t deny it—always with him, that want, singing in a low hum he usually managed to keep buried in some little pocket of his subconscious he never let himself look at—and stronger now, he couldn’t deny that either. If one of these people handed him a cup like Calder had done, Wil would very likely take it and thank them for it. But the need wasn’t burning at him, wasn’t gnawing away his sanity, wasn’t making him twist and beg and offer his soul for one more sip. No uncontrollable giggling, and his thoughts weren’t spilling out his head like messy confessions. His guts weren’t cramping, and his mind, though fuzzy and somewhat sluggish at the moment, was his own.

  And more—Dallin believed it. If She was bound by Wil’s beliefs… was he bound by Dallin’s? Tethered by the faith of one who believed everything good about him. He could do a lot worse.

  “He makes a good point.” That one had to be Marden; the thick baritone was unmistakable. “Perhaps Singréne would do best here.”

  “Mm,” Dallin grunted. “I can very well—”

  “If it’s what you think it is, Singréne’s songs of healing are best,” Thorne said, soft but with a tinge of severity that almost made Wil snort. “Shaman,” quieter now, asking, “your magic is great, but your skills are rough, unpracticed. We all want what’s best, and the best for this is Singréne. Lend him your magic and let him guide you.”