The Aisling Trilogy

by Cummings, Carole

  Dallin’s heart slows down a little, genuinely unsure what he hopes Wheeler will answer. He wants the man dead, punished, something. ‘Go forth and do no more evil’ no longer seems possible, and he doesn’t think Wheeler’s vanity or fear of his god would permit it anyway. But to witness it happening still holds an odd allure for Dallin, even with the need for vengeance knocking heavily in his chest. Wheeler is being handed one last chance by the one he would see owned, possessed, and displaced, and there’s a strange sort of beauty in the offer that tugs at Dallin’s soul—a plain and very definitive beauty in the one who extends it in an open hand. Certainly more generous than Dallin could be; then again, he’s suspected, before he even realized he was suspecting, that Wil is a better man than he is, so he’s not terribly surprised.

  Wheeler doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t even think it over. He merely smiles, smug now, like he’s taken the very real offer of reprieve as a sign of weakness and fear. It’s interesting to watch his mind work like this, and Dallin can see now how Wheeler had managed to manipulate his way to the mortal power he holds and the immortal power he craves. Always calculating, measuring, and he does get close to his mark, but he doesn’t quite hit it. Dallin thinks it’s because Wheeler sees things only through the shadow of his own lust and greed. It hardly matters now, but it’s still interesting.

  “I do genuinely regret your fate, Aisling,” Wheeler says, “but all rewards require sacrifice. My god does not fear you, and neither do I.”

  The anger that was almost receding in Dallin rises again, and he thinks of all the young men who had marched to their deaths beneath this man’s command, believing right up ’til the last that their commander would not ask for unnecessary blood, never even suspecting that his strategies were driving toward a goal that would have surely meant mutiny, had they known. Dallin can hear their ghosts crying out to him, as clearly as he’d heard the last Guardian Call his name. The betrayal is profound, and there is not enough rage, Dallin thinks, to equal its enormity.

  “Your god doesn’t know him very well,” Dallin says, deadly soft, smiles, and it feels like a blade across his mouth, sharp and lethal. “And neither do you.” He turns his gaze to Wil. “You gave him his chance.”

  Wil nods, a little bit sadly, but his back is straight and his face impassive as he snaps his wrist, the dagger landing with a soft hiss, hilt-up, between Wheeler’s boots. Wheeler merely flicks a quick look down, but doesn’t move.

  “Call your spells,” Wil tells him, “before my Guardian abandons his control and throttles you for your betrayal of his countrymen.”

  There are so many things in the command that make Dallin’s heart heat and swell, ‘my Guardian’ among them, which has a possessive pride inside it that Dallin thinks would make him strong even in his weakest moment. But more—Wil knows, Wil understands. He has spoken the betrayal and laid it as an accusation at the usurper’s feet, and Dallin never had to explain it to him. He feels ashamed that he wouldn’t have done, even had Wil asked. He’s kept too much of himself back, kept things locked away from a man who’s offered him everything, and the dishonor is a hot, red iron in his gut.

  “Wil,” he says, pauses, and shakes his head when Wil looks back at him, eyebrows raised, expectant. “I only… if we get out of this…” Dallin sucks in a long breath, opens his hands. “I took too long and I didn’t give enough. I let the quick-mud keep too tight a hold, and I’m sorry. I mean to do better.”

  Wil smiles a little, soft and private, just for Dallin, but Wheeler chuckles, shakes his head.

  “A pretty sentiment, for what it’s worth, but I fear you will not live long enough to do anything about it.” Wheeler pauses, shrugs at Dallin, unconcerned. “There is no more use for you, boy. You are a ghost, and the true Guardian now claims his place.”

  It should drive the rage up, but Dallin only rolls his eyes.

  “Come, lad,” Wheeler tells Wil, raises his hands and reaches for him. “Let us be along with our business.”

  The intent is clear, and Wil steps back, trepidation showing on his face for the first time. His own hand rises, fingers no doubt grazing over the scars beneath his hair. “Just say it,” he growls. “I don’t want you touching me.”

  Wheeler sighs, impatient. “You killed the man who found it, don’t you remember?” His mouth pinches, mild disgust, when Wil flinches a little. “A man of great magic and a martyr to my Deartháireacha. But he made sure the knowledge would remain for the Cleric, the true Guardian.” He lifts his hands again. “Come, then, no use delaying.”

  Wil peers at Dallin, mouth tight and gaze poignant. All Dallin can do is reach out, lay his hand to Wil’s shoulder, stand at his back as he is meant to do. Wil shifts ever-so-slightly into the touch; then he sighs out a loose, shaky breath, submits. Wheeler grins, hungry, as he slides his fingers into Wil’s hair, leans in closer than he needs to; Dallin has to use all his will to restrain himself from knocking Wheeler away, breaking every bone in those grasping hands, saving the fingers for last to shatter slowly and one at a time.

  “Drút Hyse,” Wheeler breathes, Beloved Son, and Dallin’s heart nearly breaks wide open when he watches Wil’s eyes close, his brow twist, and his mouth trace the words in a silent echo. His name, spoken aloud, heard for the first time, and Wil had said it would likely hurt hearing it from this man’s mouth, but Dallin hadn’t expected it to pierce him as well, just watching the mingling of relief and new pain etch itself like acid-furrows across Wil’s face.

  There is no time to ponder it, let the pain take hold, because the change is instant and undeniable. The air shifts, building pressure, and the rank smell of death and decay all at once encloses Dallin in a tight fist, cloying and heavy; he gags on it. The horizons stretch, shatter, and in the moment before they rebuild themselves, there are clots of stars bleeding through, screaming, and the shrieking blare of them makes Dallin wonder if his ears are bleeding. Everything shifts again, and then again—they’re standing on the nothing of Wil’s Threads and Dallin’s stars, then there is grass beneath their feet, the solid ground of Lind skidding out beneath them and shifting to brittle malachite then the stone floor of the Constabulary, the oily flicker of the lamps sliding behind Dallin’s eyes and into his nose, then places he’s never been, things he’s never seen. The vertigo is nauseating.

  “What the fuck?” Dallin is weak with the sensation of being thrown from one non-reality to another and then another before he can blink his stinging eyes even once. He reaches out, unthinking, and slams Wheeler’s hands away from Wil, drags Wil back and away with a frantic grip and a few stumbling steps on ground, then floor, then nothing.

  “He’s trying to take it away,” Wil hisses, eyes shut tight, and he reaches for Dallin’s hand, clutches it, panic-stricken, says, “Give it to me,” and that’s all.

  Dallin doesn’t have to ask what Wil wants; he merely lets whatever Wil needs flow from the feet that are planted firmly in FAeðme, attached to some other body, up through him and out to Wil. Intermediary, he thinks wildly, Doorway, and opens the floodgates.

  The ground stops slipping and morphing, and Dallin stops feeling like he might vomit any second, but it isn’t done yet, and he wishes the ground was the worst of it.

  Wheeler isn’t Wheeler anymore, he isn’t anyone, or even anything. A loose blot of man-shaped matter, face and form mutating in a constant flow of skin tone and hair color, contour and countenance. He screams, something wrenching and filled with pain, and Dallin can’t help the wince, the way his hand tightens on Wil’s, the horror and agony sliding through the shrieks so vividly that Dallin thinks he can taste it, bitter and rotting and coppery on his tongue. The urge to vomit climbs again, but Dallin wills it back. He wished for this, scant seconds ago, this vengeance that’s so obviously torturous, and now that he has it, he wishes it would just stop.

  Wil’s hands come up over his ears, and he stoops a little, like he’s in pain. “He’s doing it already,” he wheezes, eyes shut tight.

 
Dallin keeps the power flowing, reaches out and builds what stanchions he can; it’s enough, but it won’t be forever. This is more than Siofra’s small attempts to influence his mind, more than Wheeler’s blunt pushing. This is big, this can beat him if he’s not very careful, if he loses his hold for even a second. He pulls himself open, sends what Wil can take, and holds the rest, setting himself beneath it like a yoke across his shoulders.

  Wil straightens, breathes a little easier, glances about, and his gaze stops dead at what was Wheeler only a little while ago. Still writhing and contorting, but gathering shape to itself now, solidifying. Dallin doesn’t expect it to resolve itself into Siofra, and apparently neither does Wil, because he gasps, jerks back into Dallin, stumbling in his bare feet and shaking. Siofra just stands there for a moment, smiling that arrogant smile, blue eyes over white teeth. He tilts his head, extends his limbs, and sighs, like he’s stretching himself inside his body. Dallin supposes he is.

  “That isn’t Siofra,” Dallin whispers to Wil.

  Wil only shakes his head, trembling, rasps, “No,” and keeps staring.

  Aeledfýres broadens himself in Siofra’s body like it’s a mask that doesn’t altogether fit. The smile remains, clever and charming, but with something rotten and vile beneath it. “Ah, my lad.” The voice is too much like Siofra’s. He holds out his arms as if he expects Wil to run right into them. “At last, here we are, you and I. Where we belong.”

  Wil’s still shaking his head, eyes a little too wide and wild. “No,” is all he says, and Dallin doesn’t know if it’s an answer to the statement or complete denial.

  “Come to me, lad,” not-Siofra says. “You loved me once, you love me still, you can’t help yourself. Come to me. I can love you now, like you’ve always wanted, and you don’t have to be ashamed anymore for wanting it.”

  Wil shoots a quick, anxious look at Dallin, his face paling to wax. He wrenches his gaze away, shuts his eyes. “Don’t,” he breathes, raspy and small, and he jerks away from Dallin, snatching his hand back. Not tall and strong now, but drawing himself in, reflexively making himself smaller. “I don’t love you. I never did, I never could, and I don’t—”

  “Locks and chains, cages and shackles.”

  Not-Siofra flicks his fingers and a sound like screeching metal whines into Dallin’s ears. Dallin doesn’t know what it is at first until Wil gasps again and lifts his hand. A rusted chain hangs from the shackle at his mangled wrist, the skin raw and scraped in a bloody flap that hangs down over the back of his hand. Dallin makes a grab for him—to calm, to comfort, to tear it off—but Wil flinches away.

  “Come now, Aisling, did you think I never knew your most secret wish? The shame that chokes you because you can’t help wishing for it?” The thing pretending to be Siofra tsks, blue eyes sad and somber. “I was as a father to you. I can be that father now.”

  “Stop it.” Wil’s eyes are locked to the iron at his wrist, and Dallin can tell it’s taking everything in him not to try to pull his hand free like he’d done when the shackle was real.

  Dallin steps closer, tries again to soothe. “Wil,” he says quietly. He reaches out, takes Wil’s arm in his hand, and lifts it up between them. Blood runs down Wil’s forearm, over Dallin’s fingers, and stains Wil’s white shirt. “It isn’t real.”

  “I didn’t love him,” Wil snarls.

  “And d’you think it would be so terrible if you did?” Dallin takes another small step closer, dips his head, but Wil won’t look at him, his gaze nailed helplessly to the bloody metal.

  It’s the same tangled web of love mixed with hate Dallin has seen in any number of children whose fathers have a bit too much liking for a switch or a belt or even fists; mothers whose eyes can go from soft and maternal to wrathful and hard between one breath and the next. Tears wept bitterly, not for the physical pain, but for the small, trusting heart beneath it that breaks every time the pain comes, the cheated confusion, the inner-cry at the perfidy of the one who is supposed to love and protect and instead turns on them, hurting them, and the constant litany of ‘whywhywhy?‘ burning at the spirit. Loving them still, because there is love inside and it has nowhere else to go; wanting love back, because being alone and unloved is any child’s constant nightmare.

  Does Wil think Dallin has never seen it before? He hasn’t lived it, but he’s certainly seen it enough. Children with blackened eyes and swollen mouths eagerly grinning through split lips, eyes shining, as the hand that hurt them just the night before now lays itself tenderly to a shoulder; the unabashed basking in the tiniest show of love, the most miniscule validation. Does Wil really think Dallin so naïve? Or does he simply not understand that it was all part of the steady erosion of a child’s spirit, and that Wil had stopped the slide himself, with no help from anyone at all? No stern constable arriving when he heard the screaming, hauling those fists away, clamping them in shackles so they couldn’t hurt anymore. That Wil chose his aloneness and his pain over the self-betrayal of handing over his soul, and never gave the man who called himself Father the one thing with which he could have broken Wil for good?

  There are no words, or if there are, they are too many to speak now. Dallin grips Wil’s fingers, slippery with blood, says, “Look,” and when Wil slowly lifts his gaze from his hand, turns it to Dallin, Dallin shows him. Shows him it’s all right, it’s not shameful, it doesn’t make him depraved or mad or weak. Says, “Look,” and shows him that he knows, that he understands, that he’s seen it before and it’s painful but not appalling, breathes a little easier when it slides from his hand and into Wil’s, and Wil accepts it, looks, though his eyes close and thin tears leak out from the corners.

  “I did,” Wil admits, shaky and still a bit feeble. “I wanted…”

  “We all do,” Dallin tells him. “It doesn’t make you weak, it makes you normal.” Wil nods, sniffs, and swipes, annoyed, at his eyes. “You told me that once before.”

  “Did I?” Dallin blinks, then tilts his head and smiles a little. “Wiser than I thought,” he murmurs. “You should listen to me more often.”

  There is no sudden pop or clank of metal—the shackle is merely gone, the gruesome, ragged wound and blood with it, the familiar pink puckered scar back as it’s always been since Dallin spotted it in the ill-lit cellar room of the Constabulary. Wil’s shirt isn’t even stained anymore. Dallin drops a kiss to Wil’s hair, sighs relief—the first battle, and they’ve won it, and all it took was the truth. It gives him hope.

  There’s laughter now, easy and amused. Dallin knows it, has known it for years, and he pushes Wil away slowly, turns just as slowly.

  “I fucked him, you know,” Ramsford tells him, that laconic grin that used to make Dallin’s stomach do tiny flips dropping amiably over his mouth. “He was better than you—at least he knows how to pretend he loves a man. But then, I expect you’d know.” He winks, all sly conspiracy. “All he cost me was clean sheets and an extra blanket. I tossed in the sausages for free. The lad was so skinny!” He shakes his head, chestnut wisps of curls wavering too-long over his ears, flopping so familiarly over that wide, clear brow. “Damn good, he was, but I didn’t know until too late that he was eating my soul all the while.”

  Wil has gone stiff and tense. “I didn’t,” he denies, low and tentative.

  “I know,” is all Dallin says, but he still can’t take his eyes away. Siofra had been strange, but this is… this is just wrong. “He’s got in my head,” Dallin murmurs, sickened at the thought and shocked at the fact that he hadn’t felt it, but the proof is in front of him, undeniable. “I can’t block him, not when I’m open like this.” He fists his hands, stares, revolted, at the glamour of his friend—handsome, kind, dependable Ramsford—as it mocks him in a voice that once skirled into his ear in heated whispers in the dark. “Fucking hell.”

  Ramsford chuckles, the scornful tone of it grating against the affable mien of his friendly face. “Is he better than me?” he croons to Dallin, all silk and saccharine, then slants
a crafty glance at Wil. “He doesn’t know how to love, boy, though he’ll fool you with his pretty talk. Strung me for three years, did ‘honest’ Constable Brayden.” He cocks his head, sly sympathy. “Told me I impressed him.” His smile tilts into a malicious imitation of rueful when Wil hisses a sharp breath in through his teeth. “I was just a green boy, easily flattered—how could I resist?”

  It’s lies, strung through with just enough truth to make it ache. Dallin wants to deny it all nonetheless, but he keeps his mouth clamped tight.

  “He’ll leave you when he’s through with you, too, boy. What could he ever see in such a pathetic leaf-freak?” A pause and another low chuckle. “How could he love the man who killed his mother?”

  Wil gasps like he’s been sucker-punched. Dallin reaches for him, means to deny it, but a woman’s voice stops him cold.

  “Dallin-love,” it murmurs, soft and perplexed, “what have you done?”

  All of the air goes out of Dallin. His fragile grip on hope loosens and falls away. Ah, well. He’s always known sentiment would get him in the end.

  “Mum,” drags from his mouth before he can stop it, and Wil actually moans this time. Dallin shuts his eyes, refuses to turn, reaches out blind for Wil, but no hand meets his, no long, slender fingers wrap comfort about his own.

  “Tell me it isn’t true,” his mother’s voice demands, just enough confused query in it to make it almost believable. “He told them where I was, Dallin, pointed the way, and they came with their swords and their torches.”