Dallin doubted, as a rule. He always had done, and the Father approved. From the moment twelve old men had tried to take Dallin’s Self from him, he’d doubted, and now he knew why. Knew why the idea of letting another into his mind so offended him. Why he’d never quite believed that any one priest or shaman or cleric knew all the answers, and if they did, that they were interpreting them correctly. Why street magicians and petty conjurers had never impressed him, because he’d seen real magic once, had wielded it himself, and all else paled beneath the power of true gods.
He will hold your keys as you hold his.
And that was pretty much that.
Wil was watching him, slumped against the tree. That soft, impractical smile curved his mouth, but his eyes were bordering on blind delirium.
“You can make me, y’know.” He chuckled and waved a hand, the fires that had been settling into smoke and smoldering ash now reawakening with a crackling little growl. A murmur of thunder and a small flash of lightning slipped through the sky. “Oops.”
Wil tucked his hands beneath his arms and squinted, his gaze trying to sharpen as it took in Andette crouching over her uncle’s body, then Corliss and the others splitting their wary stares between the darkness surrounding them and the newly bolstered flames. Wil set his muzzy gaze back on Dallin with a lopsided grin and a tilt of his head.
“Could never seem to refuse you anyway, but now I really couldn’t.”
It had the feel of confession—Wil really believed it. Dallin resisted the temptation to point out that Wil certainly could refuse him, and often did, to Dallin’s very sincere dismay, most of the time. Wil’s hazy gaze narrowed.
“He’ll be able to make me too. What shall we do about that, Guardian?”
Dallin had thought about that. Ever since Wil had made the accusation an eternity ago, Dallin had thought about it.
The leaf would make it so that Dallin could follow Wil even if Wil didn’t want him to, and according to the things Wil had said about the Guild, he’d have to listen, would have to do what Dallin told him to do, even if it was against everything Wil wanted. And if Dallin were the same person he’d been only a few hours ago, he might have thought about it more seriously. In the most objective sense, it was probably the smartest thing he could do—drag Wil down the throat of Fæðme, order him to accept what the Mother gave him, order him to stand aside while Dallin spoke his name and called Æledfýres, and then order Wil to push everything he had at him. Dallin could die knowing he’d fulfilled his calling, walked the path the Old Ones and Calder had been so sure had been set before him. And not have to put a bullet through Wil’s head if they didn’t win this thing.
Except Dallin would be doing to Wil exactly what Síofra had done—taking away choices, using strength and power over someone who was too vulnerable to fight back, and forcing Wil to places he didn’t want to go. He’d be doing what Calder had been trying to do—assuming he knew better, making Wil watch helplessly as his fate was decided for him.
He’d be doing what everyone else seemed to think the Shaman ought to be doing—putting legend and purpose higher than a man’s right to self-direction.
And yes, the stakes were extraordinarily high, and the wrong decision could mean the difference between Wil walking away from this with at least half his mind left or life as they now knew it reverting back to the savagery and slavery of a time before men had raised their gods above them and chained them to divinity. Perhaps the sacrifice of one or two souls was not so much to ask, considering.
But.
The funny thing was, Dallin was pretty sure that was exactly what the others meant when they insisted he had to think about it as the Shaman. And he was fairly certain that if he didn’t care so much, he just might’ve done. Ironically, he’d been more prepared to think and act like the Shaman the Old Ones seemed to want way back in Putnam—before he’d seen the fierce life in Wil, the simple desire to have a life and to own himself, to shatter the control under which he’d existed for so long. Before Dallin had begun to realize he cared.
Shaman or not, Guardian or not, Dallin was only one man. He was no god, he wasn’t bound to any beliefs but his own, and Wil’s fate was not his to choose. And if that meant he would have to keep his promise….
Your love weighs more profoundly than your calling.
And that was pretty much that as well.
“I could.” Dallin took the few paces over to Wil slowly, and stood in front of him. He looked at Wil straight. “But I won’t.”
Somewhere in that sharp mind, right now being dismantled piece by piece and subsumed beneath a cottony haze of euphoria, sense tried to work its way through the sticky clouds of leaf, tried to bare itself on the razor-edge inside the murky gaze, and couldn’t quite make it.
“He’ll be there to try to take from you,” Dallin said evenly. “I’ll be there to help you keep it. You tell me what you want, and I’ll make sure you do it. I can, you know—I’m stronger than Wheeler, at least. He won’t get past me.”
Wil snorted. “You’ll order me to follow my own orders?”
“I am servant to the Aisling.” Dallin held out his hands, open and offering. “I always have been.” Slowly, making sure Wil watched him all the way, he went down to one knee. He kept his hands out before him and bowed his head. “I am at your command.”
He could feel the eyes of the others on him and nodded to himself with satisfaction. Andette and nine others from Lind watching their Shaman bend his neck and knee before their Aisling, and Dallin had no doubt word would spread once this was over. If he didn’t live through it, and Wil did, Wil would need the support of people who’d been set their example by the one figure they placed above all mortals, even above the Old Ones. Perhaps Dallin had never felt entirely comfortable with the deference the people of Lind showed him, but in this case it was useful and so therefore usable.
Wil had stopped laughing, his smile now weary and lopsided and still twitching as if he were trying to wipe it off and couldn’t. But his soft gaze throttled screams behind it. His eyes drifted down, caught on the bloodstain purled over one side of his shirt, and he stared at it like he’d never seen it before, then dismissed it like it didn’t matter. He slid all the way down the rough trunk of the tree, a bit of a chuckling whoof puffing from him when his arse hit the ground, and he blinked and squinted as a light drizzle began to fall.
“At my command.” He nodded, like he was trying to push the sense of it through the wooziness. Clumsy, he flicked Dallin’s fringe from his brow with dirty, blood-stained fingers, then leaned in until his head was flopped once again on Dallin’s shoulder. “Don’t leave me alone. I want… please… so tired.” Fading quickly now, and what had it been costing him to remain even this aware? And would he even remember any of what they’d just said?
Dallin tried not to let the worry gnaw at him, telling himself he was borrowing trouble. He dragged Wil in close, mindful of the wound on Wil’s chest.
“I’m not going anywhere.” He squeezed as hard as he dared as Wil’s body crumpled against him, going limp and too bendy. Dallin let himself feel it for as long as he needed to, let himself know the warmth and contact until he was sure he would remember it even if everything else was taken from him. Then he shook himself, dragged Wil to his feet, and slid one of Wil’s lanky arms across his own shoulders to hold him up.
“C’mon, then.” He reached out, sent a mental call to Miri and the gray, and started steering Wil, leaning heavier and drooping more by the second, toward the others waiting for them in a loose ring around Calder’s body. “We’ve still got a ways to go, and now you’ve gone and made it rain.”
“’S ’cause ’m sad,” Wil mumbled into his shoulder.
And somehow that made all the sense in the world to Dallin. He dipped in and dropped a kiss to Wil’s dirty hair.
“So am I.”
THEY GNAWED on jerky and hardtack while they waited for the horses, Corliss and Woodrow somewhat skeptical when Dallin told
them laconically that they’d show up shortly. Andette and the others merely folded down around one of the smaller fires and broke out travel sustenance from their saddlebags to share about. All of them shot surreptitious glances at Wil, though—out cold again, head propped on the pack Corliss had retrieved from where they’d left their horses farther down the path where the fires wouldn’t spook them, and covered with a coat from one of the young men. Seaf, if Dallin was remembering right.
Nine of them were sat in the loose circle, two keeping watch around the temporary perimeter, one watching the horses. And all of them shifting glances at Wil that looked remarkably alike—awe and sympathy and a hard little glint beneath it all that Dallin couldn’t quite put his finger on, but if he had to guess, he’d name it possessive protectiveness. Which would make Wil twitch and snarl, probably, but which made Dallin nod to himself in newfound satisfaction.
“How many did you get back there?” Dallin directed the question at Woodrow while looking the entire party over for injuries, but apparently, besides a quickly bruising gouge—bullet graze, it wasn’t hard to determine—angling up over the wide forehead of a taciturn young woman who’d guardedly introduced herself as Setenne when Dallin had a look at it, everyone appeared relatively unscathed. Mud and sweat and the lingering nibble of fear and adrenaline didn’t count.
“There were eight, by my reckoning.” Woodrow shook his head with a puzzled frown, following as Dallin retrieved the rifle and the crossbow from where they’d been dropped in the brush. “We got five of them, and the rest scattered.” Woodrow chewed his lip. “It was easy. Too easy. Either they were trying to get shot, or they’ve little enough training so as not to count.”
Dallin nodded, said, “Mm,” and sat down with the others. “A little of both, I expect. They’re priests, mostly, or at least they think they are, though what they worship—” His mouth tightened, and he shook his head. “Their god poses as the Father, and they have a calling of sorts, but I think….” He paused, pondered. “I think he can only reach those who… who already have a weakness toward him, if that makes any sense. The rest, he has to rely on those like Wheeler to charm for him, but I don’t think they would be so willing to die as the Brethren are. He seeks out those most easily used and uses them, speaks to them with the voice of a god, and hands them a calling. And it doesn’t matter if they die for him, because all he has to do is find a hundred more to take their places, and he doesn’t seem to have a lot of problem with that bit of it.”
“This is that Æledfýres you’ve been talking about,” Corliss put in.
Dallin merely nodded, staring at Wil’s rifle in his hands. He hadn’t been talking about it, in point of fact. He’d called to the land and everyone in it, showed them the enemy as he’d sat and meditated on a horse that he was now sitting here waiting for so he could stand at Wil’s back while they faced another monster. But Dallin supposed he couldn’t blame Corliss for trying to bend it all into practical shapes in her mind.
She was silent for a while, staring at him, then looked away. “Seems a big thing to tangle with.” She was trying to make it an idle observation but not quite succeeding.
Dallin shrugged. “We’ll find out, I expect.”
Corliss wasn’t done, working herself up to saying something else, Dallin had no doubt. He waited her out until she tilted her head, frowning. “Brayden—”
“It’s real.” Dallin made it sharp and steady, because he really wasn’t in the mood to argue with Corliss’s stubborn pragmatism. “I know it’s difficult to imagine me as… as anything other than how you’ve known me, but the Guardian is real, and I’m it. Wil and I… we can do this. We haven’t any choice.”
Corliss looked away again. “’Tisn’t difficult to imagine at all.” She looked like she was trying to smile. “I’m afraid it suits you.”
That seemed to quash any chatter for the moment.
The rain was still coming in a light drizzle, just enough to add a low hiss to the sound of the dying fires and slick skin and hair, but not enough to seep through coats yet. Anyway, the trees blocked most of it, and they were as comfortable as they could be for this short respite with no one shooting at them.
“You’re bleeding.” Corliss was scowling at the stiffening stain on Dallin’s coat.
Dallin peered down at his arm, surprised when he remembered there was a bullet stuck in there somewhere and it had better come out soon. And now that his attention had been called to it—fucking ow.
He’d never been shot before, and he sat back for a moment, pondering his luck in that respect. Eight years in the military, more of that time spent on the front lines than not, and he’d been grazed twice by arrows, wrenched his ankle once leaping from the saddle in the thick of things, and had suffered a few bruised ribs when a particularly messy skirmish had ended in hand-to-hand that had quickly degenerated into hand-to-axe-handle. Almost ten years as a constable—in all that time, he’d had a gun turned on him three times but never a shot fired, and as far as assault… well, the criminals in Putnam tended to rather stand down when they saw Dallin coming at them. Either that or run.
Never shot, not even scarred, really, but for where he’d healed too fast after the stabbing in Chester, and the healing skin had more or less absorbed the black sutures. Now it was only a lumpy little line of vaguely pink-blue-black on his lower back.
Strange. All that time spent more or less wearing a target on his back, and the two times Dallin had actually been hurt—really hurt, in a life-threatening sort of way—Calder had been, if not precisely aiming at him, at least not in Chester, then at least present. Dallin thought about examining the oddity of it but dismissed it instead. Too many other directions in which to focus his attention, and suspecting the Old Ones, or someone who used to be one, had the power to hurt him didn’t exactly surprise him. The other possibility—that his defenses, his instinct toward self-preservation, diminished when Wil needed his Guardian—was dismissed before Dallin had even allowed it to form fully in his mind.
He angled his arm out of his coat sleeve and tore the little hole in his shirt until he could see the wound. Still bleeding, but slow and thick now, beginning to congeal. Wash it out and bandage it for now, and worry about it later, if there was a later.
“Have you got anything for bandages?” he asked Corliss, poking at the jagged edges of the wound and wincing absently.
“Well, I do, but….” She let her gaze wander over to Wil, his head resting on her pack—where, presumably, the bandages were.
Dallin just had to laugh. Here Corliss was, watching one of her oldest friends oozing blood down his arm, and she didn’t want to get a bandage out of her pack because it might disturb Wil.
Smirking, Dallin tore away the already bloodied sleeve of his shirt and held it out. “Tie that about it, can you?”
Corliss’s eyebrow went up. “I thought you could—” She waved her hand. “You know.”
“I… could. But it takes a bit of strength, and I think I’m going to need all of it soon.” Dallin ignored the way Corliss’s mouth tightened in worry. He nodded toward Wil. “He’s got one in him too.” Again, Dallin had to laugh when Corliss voiced a startled little noise of alarm. “I’ve taken care of it as much as necessary,” he assured her. “Should probably tend to it more thoroughly before I get him up on a horse, but we’ll get him fixed up when this business is through.” He smirked at Corliss, deliberately cheerful. “Think you can be moved to dig up a bandage for him?”
Corliss scowled, snatched the sleeve out of Dallin’s hand, and began tearing it in long strips, setting aside the bits that were soaked through and draping the cleaner ones over her bent knee. “You always were a smartarse.”
“What do you mean to do?” Andette asked quietly.
Dallin had been wondering how he was going to address what happened with her, or if he even should, and he thought perhaps addressing it, making sure she was all right, was his responsibility somehow. Still, he was glad when he was saved fro
m further conversation with her by a low whistle from the direction of the man watching the horses.
Miri was back.
Dallin got to his feet, made a vague apology to Andette, and took himself over in time to greet the mare and then grin at the young man who held her bridle when they heard another set of hoofbeats in the distance.
“Corliss! Un-squirrel those bandages, yeah? We’re leaving in five minutes.”
IT TOOK more like twenty. Wil’s dead weight was floppier and harder to manage than Dallin had thought. It took concentration for Dallin to maneuver Wil semi-upright and hold him in place while Corliss focused on winding the bandage around Wil’s shoulder and chest. The dressing was sloppy and temporary, but better than nothing. Dallin had managed to stop the bleeding altogether before, but he hadn’t dared to begin the actual healing process until the bullet could be removed. Hopefully, between his and Corliss’s efforts, the provisional fix would hold until….
Well. Until.
Dawn was trying to bully its way through the gathered cloud cover by the time they’d wrangled Wil back into his coat and up into the saddle with Dallin, but so far all it had managed to do was turn the black to a grudging gray. The thunder had subsided, but the rain seemed to be digging in to stay, and considering what Wil had said, Dallin wasn’t much surprised. Depressingly fitting, in a way. It would make the last stretch of uphill travel more difficult, though. Dallin hadn’t realized it while they’d been beneath the shelter of the trees, and what with the fires still sputtering and all, but once they got back out on the trail and in the relative open, the drizzle had already resolved into sharp little spicules of sleet. Not ideal for hoofs. Especially not hoofs belonging to a poxy gray stallion who thought walking was beneath him.
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