Beloved Son

by Carole Cummings

  Dallin frowns, peering about before shifting his gaze back to the Mother. “I see stars. Stars inside clouds.”

  Wil frowns too. He sees the threads as he’s always done—threads and patterns, all winding into their places in the weave, color upon color and strand upon strand.

  But She’s smiling as if She’s expected it. She turns to Wil. “What does the Father’s song tell you of stars?”

  “…Fate.” Wil slides a quick glance at Dallin, but Dallin isn’t looking at him. “Handing… giving yourself to fate.”

  His voice is quieter at the end than it was at the beginning. Anger crawls through Wil’s chest, resentment that She’s trying to make Her point through him when She could just as easily have told Dallin Herself.

  Her eyebrow arches as if She knows what Wil’s thinking, because of course She does. She’s proven that more than once, hasn’t She? She seems amused more than anything else, and that annoys Wil too, but She only turns Her gaze back at Dallin, hardens it once again.

  “Can you give it?”

  Relentless. Implacable.

  Dallin won’t look at Wil, his head still down, his eyes shut again. His hands clench and unclench rhythmically behind his back as he nods slowly.

  “Yes, I can give You that, if it’s what You demand of me.” He says it in a voice that’s hollow, that same note of defeat ringing at its edges. “Though I will not thank You for it.”

  “And can you give it to the Aisling? For it is he who will need your light in the darkness.”

  Dallin’s hands and jaw both tighten. “Then this is a test wasted. Wil already has it—he never had to ask.”

  Despite Dallin’s obvious anger, She smiles. “Ah, but does the Aisling?”

  Dallin frowns, blinks, then looks at Wil as though Wil’s got some kind of answer for him, and… maybe he does. Dallin is splitting himself in two, his love of Wil in conflict with his duty to the Aisling.

  “Wil is only a name I borrowed,” he tells Dallin softly. “Aisling is what I’ve always been. If you would choose one of the two….” He shrugs helplessly. “I’m afraid only one is real.”

  Dallin stares at him for quite a while, bemused. “I choose you,” he finally says. “I always have done.”

  Wil hasn’t realized how tense he’s gone, waiting for that answer, or that his breath has been clogged tight in his chest until it whooshes out of him in a long, audible sigh.

  Dallin gives Wil a look that’s impossible to interpret. “How could you have thought else?” He doesn’t wait for Wil to answer, and good job he doesn’t, because Wil doesn’t think he can. Dallin turns his gaze back to the Mother. “I have sworn service to the Aisling, and I meant it. He holds my faith and my fate, and I hold all of what he chooses to give me.”

  She shrugs, her smile bordering on smug. “Then all is well, is it not?” Dallin’s fists clench tighter, but Her expression turns soft and as loving as it was when She held Wil inside her forever-embrace. “What is your name?”

  Dallin sighs, lifts his chin, and looks at Her straight. “I am Dallin Brayden, son of Ailen and Aldercy, Guardian to the Aisling.”

  “And where is home?”

  Wil is expecting to hear “Lind,” but Dallin steps closer and takes Wil’s hand. “Home is where the Aisling leads. I follow by his will.”

  And Wil… has absolutely nothing to say to that. He doesn’t think he could speak now if he wanted to, and he really doesn’t want to.

  “Ah, you have remembered your name,” She tells him, satisfied, and without so much as a flick of Her eye in warning, She reaches out and swipes a thumb over Dallin’s right cheek.

  He gasps—shock and pain both—and jerks back with a growling curse rumbling behind his clenched teeth. He snatches his hand from Wil’s and presses it to where She’s just touched, wincing.

  “Take up your task, Guardian,” She commands. “Lind awaits, the Father awaits, and the enemy will not. Remember who you are, remember what you believe, and where you lay your faith. You cannot fail, for so very much depends on you.”

  Right, Wil thinks bleakly, no pressure.

  She smiles at Wil. “Hand him your keys, and with them, your belief. If it is strong enough to bind, it is strong enough to free. Not all cages are prisons.”

  She reaches out, both hands extended, palms up, toward Wil. He doesn’t even have time to reach back, think about what it means, before it all hits him, a hammerblow to the soul.

  Pressure builds, like a low growl rumbling in a giant’s chest, except he can’t hear it with his ears. He feels it in his chest, in his head, pulsing against his skull. Everything he gave Her before is now shoved back at him, wound through and boosted a thousandfold with Her own power, too big for him, too huge for his small mind and body to take in. Mind-bending, soul-tearing, and unbearably crushing. Pain—blinding, overwhelming, and all at once—grinds into every inch of him, inside and out, and he doesn’t know if it’s going to mash him to pulp or make him explode. It doesn’t really matter, because it’ll all work out the same.

  He screams—he thinks he screams, he can’t tell, maybe not, because he has no breath, so how could he?—then goes to his knees. He’s never felt torment so pure and piercing, an ecstasy of agony, and he twists inside it like a worm on a hook, helpless.

  Voices resonate from the threads themselves, set them vibrating, and it only adds to the shrilling in Wil’s head. It’s like the land gathering at him, but worse, so much worse, because this isn’t only the land but the world. Every voice shouting at him, every thought pounding into his mind like it’s his or it should be, like he knows everything—all of it, and all at once—and it’s too much, he can’t take it all. He can feel it shattering into him, crushing him from the inside out, and he screams again, means to beg Her to take it away, it’s killing him—

  And then Dallin is there, taking Wil’s hands, stilling it all between one breath and the next. Stunned and shocky, dizzy and weak, as though he’s just been drowning and now suddenly isn’t anymore. Dallin’s hands lift Wil up, drag him close, keeping a firm hold and waiting patiently until Wil opens his eyes and meets Dallin’s steady gaze.

  The new Mark on Dallin’s cheek is already scarred over, but red and angry-looking. His eye is red-rimmed and watery, like the Mark hurts but not badly, just enough pain so he doesn’t forget it’s there.

  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. Before, he thought the look somewhat savage, 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, Wil might not have been sure. Now he is.

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

  “Close your eyes.”

  Wil does.

  It’s so very different this time, so much less suffocating but no less overwhelming. Dallin was right—it’s been waiting for this, and it’s insistent. It batters at Wil’s defenses, and it takes everything in him to listen to Dallin’s voice in his mind—It’s all right, trust me, it won’t hurt this time—trust him as 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 winnows 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 Ǽlíf back when time began, and he sees the Father, who was Br
ionglóid when He caught sight of His beloved for the first time. Mæting, She calls Him, because She’d dreamed of Him, and Wil almost flinches, watching as She plaits a silky strand of sable through with the spiny green stem of the delicate little white flower that had kept Wil captive for so very long.

  “’Tis a mark of ownership in my country,” He teases 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 Æledfýres.

  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 Ǽlíf 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 Æledfýres 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 Díepe, Her sister, until all but Brionglóid and Ǽlíf were gone—He with His sword, She with Her bow and quiver—and they hunted down Æledfýres. Together They cut the captive souls from out his heart, took his fire from him, and imprisoned him forever within the bole 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 and 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 Æledfýres’s prison. Kept it secret even from Her beloved so 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 strokes Wil’s 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 tightens his grip and he can, 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 the power inside them, all 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 who has ever come before him—brothers of a sort, he supposes—and every Guardian who 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. He knows Dallin answers, but he doesn’t really need to, because yes, of course he is. The very soul of the land and all its power—its history, its magic, its people—flows through the Guardian. It’s what he’s for. Gníomhaire, Wæterþéotan.

  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 Wil’s mind can take it, adjust to it, before Dallin sends him more.

  Lind’s power depends on her people lending her the strength of their belief—someone had told him that, except he can’t remember who, and it doesn’t matter. It’s so profoundly true it’s almost strange he had to be told at all. Bound by belief—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, channeling through his Guardian so he doesn’t fall beneath its weight. It keeps amazing Wil 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 Wil won’t.

  The strength of faith. 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 be,” 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. Wil’s mind and soul may be buffeted and battered inside something almost 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, as if it couldn’t possibly have an end, and then Wil 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 usable. 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. It was as though 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 halfway 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 that bloomed outward from his chest and shoulder, his head thudding sick and heavy. Everything was heavy, as if he’d been weighted down and halfway buried, his limbs laden and slow and altogether too far away from his body.

  “…the fuck?” He tried to focus but on
ly managed a blurred image of blond hair and dark eyes hovering a few inches above him.

  “Can you hear me?” Dallin’s voice was soft and concerned.

  “’Course I c’n hear you.” Wil 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 that freedom and beauty and power, and then drop without warning back into… this. He almost wanted to weep. He was slumped in Dallin’s lap again, Wil realized, his head drooping against the hard muscle of Dallin’s chest—hair wet, cheek damp against Dallin’s sopping shirt.

  “Oh.” Wil shivered. “We’re back.”

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

  Wil thought about it, then snorted, rough and weak. “Like I’ve just been trampled by a herd of Linders.” Which was coarse and oversimplified, but not too far off the mark.

  “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.”

  It had started out soft but progressed to throttled anger by the end. Wil turned it 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. He frowned, opened his eyes, and blinked Dallin into cleaner focus.

  “Bullet?” Well, that would explain a few things, at least. “I’m shot?”

  Wil tried to sit up, but Dallin tightened his grip, keeping him down, 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 Wil’s 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.