It wasn’t until Dallin had seen Shaw leaving with Wisena on the roan gelding Wil had… liberated from Chester that Dallin realized Calder must have taken Miri—Wil’s own horse, the cheeky fuck. And though the fact that Dallin’s party was traveling in a group might slow them down a bit, Miri still wasn’t terribly fast or used to climbing these hills. With the added burden of two riders….
They’d catch up. Because the alternative was unthinkable.
Without giving himself much chance to think it over more thoroughly, Dallin shifted his calves to guide his horse closer to Corliss and held out his reins. “Hold these for a moment. And keep a tight hold. He’s been aching to bolt since we started.” More like dying for it and willing to throw Dallin off if he didn’t leave him to it soon.
“Why?” Corliss looked chary, but she took the lead from Dallin’s hand. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m a Watcher.” Dallin rested his hands on the saddlebow and closed his eyes. “I’m going to Watch.”
He didn’t know what made him think he could do it—he just knew he could. He’d never tried it outside of dreams, but in those days when Wil had been wandering and Dallin had been searching for him, dream and reality had seemed to mesh more than once, one blending into the other, and actual sleep hadn’t seemed necessary to the practice—a state somewhere in between. Dallin had needed dark and quiet to achieve it then, but if he couldn’t have that….
I am the Shaman.
Three parts arrogant blustering, at the time, but now… maybe not so much. The Aisling needed the Guardian, so the Guardian Dallin would be.
He didn’t think about the how of it. He stretched himself inside the channels Lind held ready just for him, butting up against his own barriers, but he didn’t let those stop him. Too proud, perhaps, but Dallin had already known that as he cracked the locks on the floodgates and saw the might of the terrifying power straining behind them.
It was waiting for him, eager for him, so Dallin merely opened himself up and let it in.
The rush of relief nearly overwhelmed him. He hadn’t realized just how bad the pain had been until he stopped resisting the call, let the power run through him, let it show him, guide him.
He saw his mistake with Shaw right away. Dallin hadn’t needed to send Shaw to Wheeler, because Wheeler wasn’t there anymore. Dallin had suspected as much, worried over it. He’d prevented the Old Ones from announcing Wil’s location by blowing those damned welcome horns, only to have Wil announce it himself by trying to prove something he hadn’t needed to prove. Certainly Wisena had needed the confirmation, and Wil was right when he’d argued it was the only way Wisena would believe with his whole heart and help in the way Dallin needed him to. But Wil hadn’t done it for that, even if he truly thought he had. He’d been out to prove his own worth, his merit, to the people of Lind, and Dallin couldn’t lay true blame, even though he’d wanted to choke Wil. Dallin knew Wil, knew how he thought, what was important to him, and he’d make himself a liability by trying to prove he wasn’t one. Bloody apples and potatoes.
“He fought Calder hard,” he heard himself whisper, and only shook his head at Corliss’s curious murmur. “He knew what…. Treacherous bastard.”
Dallin could see it now, could feel it. The land had stood witness to it all, and it remembered, showed him. He couldn’t hear words, but he could feel everything. The incomprehension, the murky awareness, the recognition, then the shock… the fight and the terrible, nauseating dismay—
Dallin pulled away from it before he lost his concentration. Instead he stretched himself further, trying to find the now and the here, but Calder was clever and talented. He hadn’t lost all his magic when he’d lost his Marks. He might not hear the Mother’s voice, but he could still manipulate Her land, as he’d manipulated Dallin that day in Chester. And Wil… wherever he was wandering, Dallin couldn’t reach him, at least not yet. Either Wil was deliberately hiding from his Guardian, or the leaf made it impossible for him to reach out. Dallin was betting on the latter.
All right, then.
Magic untapped and unknown, Wil had told him. Dallin tapped it now. He put away every defense he’d clung to since this whole business started, let the magic in, and let it know him, let it twine itself into him with an awareness that nearly made him sick with its intimacy, its awful knowing. It was against everything Dallin had ever believed right. His mind was his own, and he’d had every intention of keeping it that way. Except now Wil was in trouble, more trouble than he’d ever been in before—which was almost incomprehensible in itself—and Dallin would knock down every barrier he’d ever held close and sacred to get Wil back out.
I will do whatever it takes, Dallin had told Wil, and even though he’d had no idea it would take this, still, he’d still meant it.
“This might take a bit,” he murmured to Corliss. “Stop if you have to but don’t interrupt.”
Some part of him noted the absurdity of it, hunkering down to meditate while riding horseback on tricky terrain. Another part he didn’t even know he had in him reached out with a mental hand, kept it firm on the horse’s tether, warned him and instructed him, and sat back, satisfied by the compliance.
With one last deep breath, Dallin let down the blockades of everything he was, let it all in, let it wash over him, take him, and it’s so much less jarring and sickening than he’d thought it would be, so much less intrusive. More like a greeting, a reacquainting, than a conquest or invasion, and he almost laughs at the trepidation he felt just a second ago.
Wæpenbora, it names him, and Ealdordéman, Foreládtéowes, and more names, too many, they flit by him too quickly. He snags them with mental grappling hooks, lets them tell him what he is, what he should be, the words themselves commands.
Soldier, Guide, Chief, Warrior, Doorway, Guardian….
On and on and on, it reaches down into those empty places he has inside him, and he lets it, lets it fill them up, only they’re not as empty as he’d always thought them, rife with parts of himself he hadn’t known he’d known, things tamped down and buried—
No, not buried… taken away.
“Bloody damn.” It was a whisper, almost a laugh. “And here I’d thought—”
Do you put everything away like that? Do you bury everything that hurts?
Except Dallin hadn’t put this away—it had been put away for him.
“What are you seeing?” someone asked, probably Corliss, but it was too far away, and Dallin couldn’t make out the voice.
He shook his head and reached deeper. “Myself,” he thinks he answers, but he’s not sure if the voice is inside his head or outside, and it doesn’t matter.
You knew your magic once whispers through him, and it may be Her, or it may be Lind, it may even be him. He doesn’t think it matters, because it’s almost the same, and the words are truer than any half-believed bit of sacred rite he’s ever bothered to look at from the corner of a wary eye. He’d known it, used it, and screamed and fought when they’d taken him from his bed, dragged him down into the glittering green throat of Fæðme, and stolen the memories of what he is.
“Green as the Mother’s Womb,” he muttered to… whomever, surprised by how much sense it made and how it had made none at all when he’d first read the words, scoffed at them. “That’s where he gets his eyes.”
He knows them all, all twelve. They’ve been his teachers, and he recognizes all but two now through a vertiginous sort of double vision, looking at them as they were and as they are now with eyes that are young and not so young at the same time.
Can’t cross the Bounds, they say with one voice, not before he’s Marked, not knowing what he knows. Only no one speaks, and he understands it, thinks he approves, but Ríocht comes—he’d dreamed it, and they’d dreamed it with him, and they shouldn’t be here, they should be blowing the horns, waking the countryside. Instead they surround him in the Mother’s Womb and speak in silent circles, deciding his fate for him when his fate is not theirs
to choose.
Their minds dig into his, sorting and taking, and he fights with everything he has, and it’s enough, or it will be, he’s stronger than all of them put together. But there are too many of them, a concentrated assault, and he screams to his mother, and then to the Mother—They steal my calling—and She’s there, laying Her hand to his brow, cooling the fiery touch of too many minds inside his own.
“We are all bound by those who believe in us.” She draws up Her sleeve to reveal the iron that binds Her wrists, a clink of chains he hadn’t heard before. He wants to weep, but She looks at him, reproachful, so he holds the tears back. “The magic of faith is great and strong,” She says, “and We are its creatures.” Her fingers slide beneath his chin, lift his face up until he meets Her depthless blue eyes. A wave of Her hand sweeps the Old Ones, and Dallin is surprised to note that none of them see Her, he’s the only one, and he almost tells them to stop, this isn’t what She wants, but She shakes Her head. “They do what they think they must. One day it will be yours to teach them, but today is not that day.”
She leans down, and sets a kiss to his brow. Soft comfort moves through him, an immediate quelling of the minds inside his own, a lessening of the clamor. And then She’s taking up the empty spaces where the Old Ones have just been, seeking, and Dallin doesn’t fight Her as he had them—he merely closes his eyes, allows Her in, though he doesn’t think he could stop Her even if he wanted to.
“They can take nothing you don’t give them.” She shows him the bars and locks, shows him how to use them. “Keep it safe. He will hold your keys as you hold his. How you each choose to use them….” She sighs and lifts Her shoulder in a graceful shrug, the chains at Her wrists chinking lightly, and the bone-deep outrage of it, the wrongness, makes him want to cry, but again he holds it back.
“You want me to hide,” he whispers, offended and wounded and crushed right down to his soul.
“He needs you to live” is all She says. She kisses him again, slides Her fingertips across his unMarked cheek, and commands, “Lock it down where they cannot see it, and hold it close until you find him. I will come to you when he is ready.”
And then She’s gone, but he still feels Her watching him as he does what She’d commanded—buries what he is beneath what he will need to be in this place of Her making, with its walls of malachite that stagger and shift with the flicker of lamplight. They sigh, their weathered faces full of worry and sorrow as they lead him, weeping and confused, from Her embrace, and it’s only when he is taken from them by his mother and hauled, resisting mindlessly, through the fires and the screams and the clash of bone and metal, shoved into the back of the cart, that the horns blow. He grasps at what it should all mean, but he can’t remember.
It doesn’t matter anymore. He is a different man now, he is what he’s made of himself, and those things he was before are the building blocks he’s used as foundations even when he didn’t know it. He is the Shaman, he does have magic, and he almost thinks he feels Her smile in his mind as he reaches for it, takes it in his hand, directs it.
Like an old friend, it fits back into his grasp, and he knows it, and it knows him. He’d had true faith before, and he has it now again, and it’s all he really needs.
He calls Shaw back first, calls Wisena and every man and woman in Lind who carries a weapon, shows them where the enemy hides, and shows them the enemy that waits. He calls to the land, warns it, and it whispers back to him, tells him of bootsteps beneath its skin and fires that burn hotter than suns and scrape moaning cries from deep in its heart.
Dallin opened his eyes and snatched the reins back from Corliss.
“He’s waking up.”
He kicked his heels into the horse’s ribs and let him bolt, let him set the pace, only a short tug on the reins every now and then to keep him on surer footing. Dallin leaned down into the gather and release of thick muscle, winding his fingers through the rough gray mane, and dug in with his knees. His lips curled back, teeth bared and clenched together in a grin that felt hard and cruel but ripe with anticipatory satisfaction.
“You really can fly,” he whispered to the gray and sank himself into the veil of fleeing night, guiding the horse’s lurching strides by nothing more than Dallin’s own forgotten bond with the land and the surety that the tie wouldn’t fail him.
He understood now; he understood it all. Before, it might have angered him, might have paralyzed him with rage, but there wasn’t time now for anything but the beat of hoofs to ground, the shortening of distance between him and what he knew to be happening farther up the trail. The physical was the only thing important right now—the rhythm of the uphill gallop, the silent urging for more and faster, and the horse’s willing acquiescence to both, its mindless glee at opening its stride, pouring every bit of itself into the stretch and bunch of its thumping gait, hot blood racing through its veins and opening its heart, pumping air through its frothing mouth.
Dallin could be a part of it if he wanted to, could sink himself deep and watch it all from the inside, could feel the instinctive necessity to run and go with no knowledge of years of tricks and betrayals to complicate the pure power of speed. Not quite tempting enough, not now. The thin scent of smoke was wafting toward him, and he’d already lost too much time watching the past—the present was happening right now.
Miles stretched beneath them, then a league and more, the gray planting his hoofs on rock and paths still mud-slick from the rain three days ago, trusting the Guardian to guide him true. Dallin Watched and guided and trusted the horse in turn to carry them both on the wings of muscled flanks and pure, uncomplicated heart.
Thunder rumbled above at the same moment they rounded a slight bend and saw the first of the fires. Gnawing only at the tops of the trees for now, smoldering bits of leaf and branch fluttering down onto the path, the crackle and hiss only dimly reaching Dallin beneath the cacophony of wind in his ears and hoofs on rock. Dallin half-expected the horse to rear and shy, but he didn’t, merely put his head down and barreled through the smoking rain of debris, eyes a bit wild and nostrils flaring but never losing speed.
“Almost there.” Dallin dropped a reassuring pat to the thick neck as the booming report of splitting wood roiled from farther uphill, followed by the dull whoosh of new flame. The hard grin reasserted itself on Dallin’s face, stretching and tugging at the new skin of the still-healing burn on his cheek. “Thought you knew better, did you, Calder?” He leaned to the side, guiding the gray around a tangle of burning brush and on up the path. “Thought you could control him, eh? Serves you right, you spineless fuck.”
Dallin turned his head, spat in the dirt, and urged the horse on with a tightening of his calves and a shift in the saddle.
He could hear voices now, raised in anger and fear, a growling curse and an incongruous shriek of laughter before thunder boiled again and a streak of lightning split the sky, turning the heavy drape of darkness into bright daylight for the span of four of Dallin’s thumping heartbeats. Two shapes seared themselves into his vision, locked in stumbling combat. He made out the wider shape of Calder holding Wil’s smaller, struggling form against him with one arm. Wil’s head was pulled back by a fistful of black hair. Calder held a flask to Wil’s lips, trying to force whatever was in it down Wil’s throat while Wil sputtered and snorted and twisted in a grip that was simply too strong and steady for someone who was already impaired and in the tight, grasping hold of a drug designed to make one helpless.
Fire leaped up again all around them, trees going up like giant candles and great, oozing gobs of it flying out in every direction, dripping flame like melting wax as it had been when they’d tried to crash the gates of Chester.
Dallin’s horse reared this time, bawled a frightened protest, and tried to veer away. Dallin crouched down over its neck, wrenched the reins, and felt the tremor in the horse’s hindquarters as it fought its own instincts and obeyed Dallin’s command, gathering itself beneath Dallin and leaping to a driving run
. It only shivered a small, frantic cry as they broached the barrier of flame and arrowed to its center, head-on to the men locked in lopsided skirmish.
Calder’s arm was secured around Wil’s throat now—Dallin saw it by the light of the fires. The shimmer of liquid flowed down Wil’s chin as Calder poured the brew into Wil’s mouth, letting up just long enough for Wil to get a gasping breath and choke, using that breath to try to spit the drug out. Calder knew Dallin was there, knew he was coming, and still, he kept trying to force the stuff down Wil’s throat, Wil gasping and kicking, face going from red to blue to red again and pulled into an unsettling mixture of pain and rage and laughter as he fought with everything he had to keep the stuff from sliding down his throat.
The gray didn’t balk or back down but kept driving on as Dallin fired a shot at Calder’s head, missed and hit his shoulder instead. The force knocked Calder back, and he loosed his hold. The gray kept driving still as Dallin leaned in the saddle, reached out, and snatched firm hold of Wil’s coat by the collar. Dallin clenched his teeth at the way his muscles wrenched, and his shoulder nearly slipped its socket as he threw Wil up and around, tried to sling him over the horse’s rump—
They were going too fast, and Wil’s reflexes weren’t worth much of anything at the moment. He yelped and scrabbled momentarily at Dallin’s back, trying to latch on to the strap of the rifle and failing. Desperately, Wil’s hand found the crossbow wedged into the saddle’s straps and took hold, but Dallin hadn’t tied it down. Wil slithered out of Dallin’s hold, hands still wrapped around the bow’s tiller, and thumped to the ground, bow and all, before Dallin could rein in.
Three shots whizzed over Dallin’s head, rapid-fire. He ducked and jerked the gray around for another pass at Wil, thankfully not trampled and not looking too terribly worse for the fall. Another shot, this one right past the gray’s nose, and it reared again, a thick, heavy scream rolling up from its barrel as two more shots rang out. One was close enough to flick at the hair over Dallin’s left ear. The other thumped into his right bicep.
Beloved Son Page 16
