Beloved Son

by Carole Cummings

No. Fate, chance, or Divine command—Wil didn’t care. There were only so many sacrifices a man could make, and Wil didn’t think anyone could argue that he hadn’t already made more than his share. He wasn’t about to sacrifice Dallin too, or let Dallin sacrifice himself. Dallin had shown Wil hope, had made him believe he could change his own fate. He could damn well change this.

  Catching up wasn’t easy—Dallin had a stride on him, and he was angry, so he’d likely be walking fast. It was dark, which didn’t help, and he’d taken a path down to the river, which didn’t help either. Too-smooth rock interleaved too-soft sweetgrass, neither of which lent much by way of traction beneath Wil’s boots on the path that didn’t look like much of a slope until he tried navigating it in the dark and in a hurry. He slid to his arse twice, only keeping himself from sliding to his arse another four or five times by sheer determination, before he reached the bottom and stopped to catch his breath.

  He’d seen Dallin standing just that way before, in just that spot, but that time the sun had been bright and the air had been sweet with spring, and Dallin’s spirit had been bared and reaching. This was it, the bend in the river where Dallin had brought Wil that first night, when he’d shown Wil he wasn’t as alone as he’d always thought he was, and then again when Wil had taken a chance he hadn’t known he was taking and kissed him, and again when he’d been lost and Dallin had waited for him here, waited and searched and poured himself out. Now the posture was the same but everything else was wrong—closed in, pulling away—and Wil couldn’t stand it. It was just wrong.

  You didn’t approach a person with an arsenal strapped all over him from behind, but Wil was still too busy not thinking to care. He stalked toward Dallin, kept coming when Dallin cocked his head to the side and then spun, kept coming when Dallin’s mouth set firm and his fists clenched tight in the thin light of stars and moon. And when Dallin started to say something, to warn Wil off, perhaps, Wil kept coming until he was planted right in front of him. Reached out, took hold of Dallin’s coat, dragged him in, and kissed him. Kept kissing him until Dallin stopped trying to pull away, stopped trying to protest, stopped resisting altogether, wrapped Wil in a death grip that made it hard to breathe, and kissed him back.

  After that it was easy. Easy to fall to the cold grass. Easy to bare skin to the chill brilliance of the stars and heat it with hands and mouth. Easy to beg and plead and demand, and easy to rock into the rhythm of soft words spoken to the distant heady beat of earthbound drums and the immortal songs of stars and river. Easy to gasp things that were real and things he meant into sweated skin and damp hair that smelled of smoke and pine and the sharp-spicy scent of dreams that didn’t hurt.

  Easy to lie there after, panting and shaking, whispering apologies and promises, listening as they were whispered back, and realize that he’d just made real, honest love for the first time in his life.

  THEY’D BEEN given the little guardhouse—the perks of privilege, Dallin had joked as they’d made their way back up the path. Wil had to admit he was rather pleased. It would be nice to have an actual bed, and this one was built for Linders and so quite big enough. Still, he made himself stay awake until well after Dallin had dropped heavily into sleep. With any luck, the dreams would leave Dallin alone tonight, and if they didn’t, Wil wouldn’t be long behind him.

  Dallin was snoring lightly, arm heavy across Wil’s chest, when the drums finally stopped and the night went quiet. Wil waited until his own eyelids were drooping dangerously, then slid carefully from out Dallin’s loose grip and stood over the bed for a few moments, holding his breath. Dallin slept so lightly, and Wil wanted to make sure this little jaunt would be private. Dallin was exhausted, so Wil wasn’t terribly surprised when he stirred just a little and then slept on. Satisfied, Wil dressed quickly, slipped the knife into his belt, snatched up his pack, slung the rifle over his shoulder, and started for the—

  Matches. It would be stupid to risk calling fire. Wil poked about on the sparse-covered shelves, found a nice bundle in a small crock on the second, and nicked several.

  He took stock, ticked down his mental list, then stole outside, shutting the door as softly as possible. Quickly he sat down on the step to put his boots on and drop the knife—can’t forget the knife—into the left, surprised when he noted no sentry at the door. Dallin had told Hunter to have Corliss and Woodrow take shifts, and it was unusual that Hunter would leave before he was relieved. Well, Wil wasn’t about to rat Hunter out, and this way there wouldn’t be the bother of arguing someone into a moment of privacy. Smirking, Wil stood, and made his way down to the river again.

  It was easier going this time. It helped that he wasn’t scrambling to make up for the nearly unforgivable, wasn’t shocked clumsy by his own stupidity and callousness. He really could be an idiot sometimes.

  The grass was still tamped down in a wide swath, and he couldn’t help the ridiculous grin that stretched his mouth, the hot flush that moved from his toes all the way up to the tips of his ears. It really had been quite…. Wil sighed. There wasn’t a word for it, and if there was, he didn’t know it.

  “It was what it was,” he told himself, letting the smile curl as big and stupid as it wanted. “Just let it be what it was.”

  He swung his pack around, folded himself down, laid the gun aside, and pulled out the bowl. Setting it in the grass, he dug the charcoal and paper from his coat pocket and the knife from his boot. The moon was just bright enough, made a touch brighter by its reflection from the water. Tilting the knife slightly away, Wil could see the runes well enough to copy their shapes onto the crumpled paper.

  It took him several tries, even going slowly and carefully. It seemed colder than it had been only a short time ago, and his fingers were clumsy with the chill. He was running out of clean spots on the paper when he finally got it right, tore what he’d written in a strip from the rest, and set it in the bowl.

  Just to be certain, Wil dug into his pack, found the leaves by feel, and slid one out. Rather battered and torn, going dry and crumbly, but Dallin hadn’t said the condition of the leaves mattered. Anyway, he’d said you were supposed to burn something special to you, and the leaf was special. Three of them—perfectly shaped—had been lying on his chest the morning he’d woken in a serene little wood to a doe, framed in morning sunlight and staring down at him, soft-eyed and wildly beautiful. He’d kept the leaves because he’d wanted to remember how those dark, liquid eyes looked, and how free and at peace he’d felt in that moment before she’d bolted off, tail twitching. Perhaps not worth anything to anyone else, but special to Wil, and it would have to do. He stroked the veins of the leaf with a fingertip, whispered to it what he’d hopefully written on the paper, and placed it in the bowl as well. Just to be safe, he dug out the remains of the other leaves and dropped them in too.

  The match sparked to life immediately beneath his thumbnail, blinding him for several seconds. He touched it to both ends of the paper and then several spots on the leaves, slipped it beneath it all, and sat back to watch it burn.

  It was… anticlimactic. He’d been hoping for some sort of… something—a sudden wind out of nowhere, a slight tremor, an owl hooting.

  Nothing but the quiet and the sweet smell of burning leaves.

  Ah well. He’d taken a chance. He’d done it. He’d swallowed the last of his anger and resentment, bowed to the Mother in his own way, and asked for Her favor. Well, asked for it for Dallin, but… sometimes it was one and the same. Just to be sure, Wil waited until the last of the ash was dead and black, then blew into the bowl, scattering it on the bit of breeze.

  For what it was worth.

  Satisfied, Wil collected the bowl and the knife, stuffed them in his pack and boot respectively, and turned—

  Someone grabbed his hair. His head was yanked back so far he thought his neck might snap. His shocked yelp was drowned by a cup at his mouth and tepid brew washing over his tongue, down his throat.

  Wil gagged, choked, reflex kicking in and try
ing to spew out what was going in. But an arm was around his throat now, and a wide hand clamped over Wil’s mouth, his nose, and fuck, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t… couldn’t.

  He fought. Kicking, punching, twisting and scratching and gouging.

  The arm was like an iron band around him. The hand blocked the brew from going out and air from going in.

  White sparks hazed Wil’s vision. Reflex once again took over, his body taking the only option that was available to it—Wil swallowed.

  “You do not understand how… precarious a position you’ve put your Guardian in, young Wil.” Calder’s voice, right next to Wil’s ear, so serious, so concerned. “A link has been forged. Every weakness of yours, he uses his strength to shield. Your pain is his tenfold. I don’t think you know just how much of himself he is using up to keep you from falling beneath the weight of what bombards his defenses.”

  The hand over Wil’s nose and mouth let go. The grip around him didn’t. It shifted, though, Calder’s wide arm going around Wil’s chest, pinning his arms, squeezing so tight he couldn’t catch his breath, couldn’t scream, couldn’t move.

  “He loves too well and too deeply,” Calder said gently. “It is not meant, what you have between you. It can do no good—to you, to him, or to Lind.”

  “What…?” Wil couldn’t pull in enough breath to make his voice come out above a wheeze. “What did you do? What—”

  The taste on his tongue was flowery. Familiar.

  Wil’s mind stumbled, a slight haze covering his perceptions, making everything thick and sticky. The chain of his thoughts broke apart, the links flying out in every direction.

  The arms around Wil let him go. He was on his knees a second later, propping himself up on his hands in the wet grass.

  A tiny snort leaked from his mouth.

  What had he been saying? What had he been doing?

  “Bowl. I was… the burning bowl, and it….”

  Slurred and syrupy, as though his tongue had just outgrown his mouth. He goggled at the ground, at Calder’s boots, at the divot in the grass he’d clawed up earlier when Dallin had sunk his teeth into Wil’s shoulder and made him beg, and then at the dirt still crusted lightly under his fingernails… at the cup smudging out of focus on the ground….

  He knew this feeling. If his mind were working, it would be screaming.

  “I am sorry, Aisling,” Calder said gravely. “But even in this, I serve you.”

  “Serve…?” As though his hand belonged to someone else, Wil picked up the cup, and lifted it toward Calder. “What… what have you…?”

  Calder knelt, and gently took the cup from Wil. Mouth pressed, eyes sad, Calder stroked Wil’s cheek with a broad, callused hand.

  “Someone has to be the Guardian, lad. I do the Mother’s will, as I always have done.”

  Oh fuck. Somebody… help.

  Clumsy and slow, his limbs too far away from his body, Wil groped blindly for the rifle, only to watch it slide across the grass at the end of Calder’s hand then sail into the darkness as he pitched it aside. Out of reach. Gone.

  Purge, Wil thought, sense and thought too slippery, but he latched on to that one—puke it up—and he raised his hand to his mouth—

  Calder’s wide hands closed over Wil’s wrists. The grip was like iron.

  Shackled.

  Caught.

  An oily little cackle warbled out from Wil’s throat, and he shut his mouth tight. He snorted anyway, except nothing was funny.

  “Sonuvabitch.” Wil giggled, sloppy and garbled, snagging at one thought and one thought only, concentrating with everything in him until he shoved it out his mouth.

  “Fuckin’ hatechoo.” It came out a hooting snort.

  His mind was full of cotton, and he couldn’t stop laughing about it. Euphoria closed him in a gentle hand, lifted him up, and he was floating, flying, and it was really fucking funny, except his brain wouldn’t stop shrieking at him—Run! Get up and bloody run! Scream, do something!—except he couldn’t, and that was pretty fucking funny too.

  “Fæðme,” Calder was telling him. “The Vessel is too weak, and your Guardian cannot know the risks he takes.”

  The Vessel is too weak.

  Wil had heard that somewhere before.

  “And I….” Calder’s voice dipped down into something like wistfulness. “I would hear Her voice again.”

  You’re mad, Wil wanted to say, but whatever came out was mangled and shoved out between sobbing little chuckles. Even Wil couldn’t really understand it.

  He was… so, so fucked.

  Sense was slipping away, all but the keening knowledge that this was wrong, very very wrong, which couldn’t be right, because whooping giggles were leaking from Wil like steam from a kettle. The peace was gentling him, so familiar, sliding its sinuous tethers around his mind, calling to him, and he knew it, wanted it, needed it, the need almost eating him up, and he didn’t care, and oh, he’d missed it.

  Boneless, Wil fell forward, careening into Calder’s chest. It was nice, wide and hard, except not as hard as Dallin’s, where Wil had rested his head forever ago and listened to Dallin’s heartbeat—ka-thump ka-thump ka-thump—and Wil had slid his hand over a light sheen of sweat in the moonlight and kept it there so he could feel the muscles flex and slide beneath his palm.

  Calder’s arms were around Wil, lifting him up, and it shouldn’t be Calder, it should be Síofra, crooning to him and carrying him to the chamber to slide dream into nightmare and nightmare into pain and—

  No. No. Gone, dead, a soul crushed in his fist—Síofra was gone, and it should be Dallin here with Wil, because it should always be Dallin, because it always was. Dallin’s arms around him, Dallin’s voice in his ear, Dallin’s heartbeat against his cheek—DallinDallinDallinDallin….

  Wil latched on to the name, sang it in a loop in his head, and with his last shard of sanity, gathered it into a fist in his mind—screamed it.

  4

  DALLIN WAS already in his trousers, shoving an arm into his shirt, when he snapped awake, a heavy sense of urgent dread clogging in his chest and the echo of a phantom scream drumming in his head. He didn’t take the time to strap on his guns, merely snatched them up by their holsters and slung them over his shoulder as he slammed across the little room and out the door.

  “Hunter! Go and get—Fuck!”

  No Hunter, which wasn’t surprising—no Wil, no Hunter. It almost would have made Dallin feel better, knowing Hunter was likely wherever Wil was, if Dallin’s gut weren’t twisting and his mind weren’t racing through all the possible tragedies that might be taking place right this second. Because that scream….

  It wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t anything but Wil very definitely in trouble, and what the fuck was he doing out in the first place, and how the fuck did Dallin not hear him leave, and what the fuck had Wil been thinking, and why the fuck was Dallin wasting time wondering, when he could just as easily be dreaming up all the creative ways he was going to kill Wil when he found him, and then Hunter for not stopping him?

  Dallin boiled around the north side of the guardhouse, meaning to rouse… somebody—Corliss, Woodrow, the whole bloody camp if necessary. The quick-fire thumping of his heart just made it lurch more painfully and land in a sick lump in his throat when he spotted a limp figure, limned in moonlight, half sitting and half sprawling against the outer wall of the guardhouse. It was the boots—buckskin, fringed at the tops, trousers tucked loosely inside them.

  “Hunter,” Dallin breathed, “you’d better be dead.”

  Because if he wasn’t, and someone had managed to take Wil right out from under him….

  Not dead, Dallin saw as he crouched down, but… not all right, just the same. No marks, no lumps to the skull, no blood, but too limp and unresponsive to be asleep. Not drunk—Hunter didn’t smell of liquor or even beer, and so far as Dallin had seen tonight, Hunter hadn’t touched anything but a cup of very mild mead, eschewing the heavy beer Wisena and his men had indulged
in while they all talked strategy.

  Hunter didn’t even flutter his eyelids when Dallin slapped his cheeks hard enough to bruise, and if he’d drunk enough for that kind of nonreaction, he would be dead, or at least on his way. So. Not drunk. Drugged, perhaps, but how? Hunter might be naïve, but he wasn’t stupid. If someone from the Brethren had managed to prowl through the perimeter—and after Wil’s stunt with the lightning more or less blaring his location to any who happened to look up, that wasn’t entirely out of the question—Dallin couldn’t imagine Hunter giving anyone the opportunity to slip him something. It would’ve had to have been someone here, someone from camp, someone he knew, someone who—

  “Son of a bitch.” Snarled through teeth clenched tight.

  Dallin stood, rubbed roughly at his mouth, and stared down at the crumpled figure. His mind was running around in circles, shrieking incoherently. His body was already on its way toward the chill composure of combat—heart slowing its rhythm, low tremors calming and stilling, stomach unclenching—and he waited while his mind caught up. Composed thought was necessary here. It wouldn’t do Wil any good if Dallin allowed panic. Or rage. Or murderous bloody fury.

  Dallin took a long, slow breath… pushed it back out of his chest.

  All right.

  Calder was probably better than the Brethren. Probably. He was almost as fanatical in his way, but—

  Dallin shook his head with a low growl.

  But nothing. Calder wasn’t “almost” anything. He was just as fanatical in his beliefs as any one of those wild-eyed madmen, maybe more, and though he didn’t have a little copper capsule tucked away in his cheek, his willingness to die for his cause—whatever it might be—was no less fervent. Calder had to know Dallin would happily kill him for even laying a finger on Wil—quickly if Wil wasn’t harmed; slowly and painfully and with the proper amount of screaming if he was. So whatever Calder was up to, he believed he was following his calling, whatever that might mean to him now, since he’d foresworn it and followed after his dead son. He couldn’t expect to live through this, whatever it was. In point of fact, he might be looking forward to being martyred—he had the right kind of suicidal insanity behind his eyes.