Beloved Son

by Carole Cummings

  There are no words, and 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 own hand, turns it to Dallin, Dallin shows him. Shows him it’s all right, it’s not shameful, doesn’t make Wil depraved or mad or weak. Says, “Look,” and shows him that Dallin knows, that he understands, that he’s seen it before and it’s painful but not appalling.

  “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 and swipes, annoyed, at his eyes. “You told me that once before.”

  “Did I?” Dallin blinks. “Wiser than I’d thought. 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, then turns, all at once crowded by dread.

  “I fucked him, you know,” Ramsford says, 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.” Ramsford 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!” Chestnut hair that’s always been too long curls over his ears, flopping over that wide, clear brow with a familiarity that stings. “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.”

  “I know” is all Dallin says, but he can’t take his eyes away. Síofra had been strange, but this is… just wrong. “He’s got in my head.” He’s sickened by the thought and shocked by 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.” Dallin fists his hands and stares, revolted, at the glamour of his friend—handsome, kind, dependable Ramsford—as it mocks him in a voice that once skirled into Dallin’s 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 treacle, 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 tilts his head, sly sympathy. “Told me I impressed him.” His smile crimps 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. How could he love the man who killed his mother?”

  Wil gasps as though he’s been sucker punched. Dallin turns to Wil, 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 the air goes out of him, and his fragile grip on hope loosens and falls away.

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

  “Shut up,” he wheezes, hoarse and heavy.

  “They burned me, Dallin, did he tell you that? And you would choose him?”

  Burned alive—Dallin has always feared it, never wondered, pushed it away, and convinced himself her death was as clean as the runes on the notice that had listed her name among the dead, gentle as Mrs. Tanner’s voice when she’d read it to him. Burned alive, a blackened skeleton, the very first of his ghosts, kept company by but set above the children of Lind, and he supposes he knows now why those of Ríocht and Kenley have haunted him so.

  “No,” Wil warbles, weak and watery. “It’s not…. She didn’t, Dallin, I swear. She… this isn’t… it’s… I….”

  Dallin knows she didn’t burn, he does. Wil doesn’t lie, but—

  He isn’t just inside Dallin’s head—he’s inside nightmares Dallin has refused to know he had.

  It’s strange, now that Dallin thinks about it, now that it’s slammed him in the chest, that he never asked Wil how she died when Wil confessed to having been there when she breathed her last. No, not strange, not really—one more thing Dallin had buried, refused to look at, though the horror of it has been waiting inside him, a malignant seed sprung to life by a daemon wearing his mother’s face, speaking with his mother’s voice, and this… this is low. This is obscene.

  A chittering buzz leaks over his mind, spreading like the skittering legs of an army of spiders kicked from their nest and marching over his thoughts. An exploratory prod, seeking cracks, then a push that rocks him just enough to make him pay attention. He wants to slam down his defenses, clamp his barriers over everything he is, but he catches himself just in time. Instead he throws power at it, feels it like ropes of lightning in his hands, and spears it with whatever strength and magic is his.

  A scream in his mother’s voice, the pungent stink of burned hair, the stench of charring meat. “Dallin-lad!” A pitiful shriek. “You know how he loves the burning. Would you let him murder me twice?”

  Going for the soft underbelly, because he’s in Dallin’s head, pulling out all the things that are Dallin’s and parading them in front of him, and all Dallin can do is look away. Driving the knife deep because he can—Dallin handed it to him, he knows, and there’s nothing Dallin can do but endure it.

  “It isn’t real.” He clenches his teeth and shakes his head, a light spring of clammy sweat threading his brow. “She isn’t there. It isn’t her.” Then, a little desperate: “Wil?”

  And he’s there, taking Dallin’s hand, telling him, “It isn’t true, she didn’t burn,” in a wavering voice that’s just this side of panicked. “I didn’t tell them about her, Dallin, I swear. You don’t—”

  “I know.” Dallin’s whole body is heavy, weighted down, and he opens his eyes, looks first at Wil—notes the look of fear that just won’t do, not here, not now, so he repeats, “I know,” urgent, because Wil really needs to believe it. Wil’s strength is huge and limitless but too fragile a thing, and he never believes its depth, and they need it now.

  They’re on the defensive, trying to hold their own, get their bearings, when the strategy is so obvious it makes Dallin’s pride curl up in shame that he’s allowing it. His focus is scattered and too driven by reacting—damn it, he’s better at war than this. The monster is winning quietly but steadily, pushing so subtly and slyly, burying the real danger inside this cheap overt offensive, that it’s slipping right past them both—and Dallin’s just standing here and letting him do it.

  “Push him back,” he tells Wil, low and through his teeth. “Make him bleed.”

  Wil looks over Dallin’s shoulder and shies away from whatever he sees, wild eyes skittering back to Dallin’s. He shakes his head. “You… she’s your—”

  “That,” Dallin snarls, “is not my mother.” Another shriek, and now the sounds are getting to him, fire crackling and hissing, and he wants more than anything to just haul himself out
of this place, shut down everything, and flee. He takes hold of Wil’s arms. “I need you. I can’t do this. I don’t have the right magic. This isn’t—” He blinks away the stinging behind his eyes. “You have to do it.” Quiet and as composed as Dallin can make it. “For me, Wil. Please.”

  He doesn’t know how much of it is for his benefit and how much of it is for Wil’s, but he watches it ease Wil, watches Wil dig down and find his concentration and calm. That telltale lift of his chin, and Wil merely hardens his gaze and nods.

  Dallin steadies himself on that strength, lets Wil see Dallin’s belief in it, his reliance on it, before he straightens his back, and turns.

  He was expecting something shocking and gruesome, but this… this is bad.

  Beautiful, untouched, unmarred, just as he remembers her, young and vital and stronger than the mountains. Her smile is perfection, and Dallin wonders dazedly how Æledfýres has managed to mimic it so flawlessly, how he’s managed to imitate the love and comfort and the bit of steel Dallin remembers so well it’s like a cramp in his heart. And then he realizes it comes from his own mind, his most precious memories perverted and twisted to another’s purpose, and the revulsion shatters through him again. A violation of the mind, the rape of a memory, and it both sickens and infuriates him. He’s almost glad he’s nailed to the spot, because if he tries to move, he thinks he’ll stumble.

  “Burn it,” he breathes. Æledfýres, the god of bloody fire, and Dallin wants—oh, he wants—to see his own gift used against him, wants the poetic irony to hurt.

  Wil only stares at him for a long moment, uncertain. “There are other—”

  “Burn it!” Dallin snarls and makes himself watch as what pretends to be his mother watches him back knowingly, that soft look of love and strength twisting into a mask of mock fear and horror. And only now can Dallin truly remove himself, wholly convince himself that this is not his mother—a daughter of Lind, born and bred, she would never show fear so plainly, never open her sorrow like a gift in an open hand, not even when her land was burning around her and she was heaving her only son and the hope of the Mother into the back of a cart. Dallin can watch as white flame closes around her, as her screams wrench the air and split the sky, as her skin bubbles and blisters and burns, as her hair catches and makes a ghoulish halo of her melting face. He can watch as the remains of the mask shrink and blacken and mutate into the twisted form of a child, the Mark blazing fire on a cheek that’s not there. He can watch and not feel, which he thinks is the best he can hope for.

  Dallin can actually feel the push this time, the shove, the power of Lind coursing through every fiber of him, unfolding itself out to Wil, and Wil takes it in, uses it.

  “He’s too strong.” Wil’s voice shakes, but he doesn’t give in, doesn’t allow so much as a hitch or hiccup as he reels in power, turns it into strength, and hurls it. Æledfýres’s chuckle comes from beneath the shrieks in a blackened throat, lurid and too deliberate, and Dallin’s mind tells him none of it’s real, but a disgusted shudder still walks up his spine.

  Wil is panting, the strain all too evident, and Dallin can feel the conflict in the air as though it’s the meeting of two storm fronts, a clash of wills that dredges all the oxygen from the air, all the color from the shifting vista. The shrieking of the cindered slag of bone and charred flesh sounds real enough, the pain and thwarted intent inside it adding to the weight that clutches at Dallin’s chest and drags the wind from his lungs. Power runs through him, but it slides into him and back out before he can snatch enough to let him breathe. Wil’s hand is clenched tight around Dallin’s fingers, sucking everything through him, throwing it all at Æledfýres, pushing as hard as he can and stretching it all around himself and Dallin like a barrier, a penumbra of strength.

  Dallin has a wild, giddy moment of satisfaction—I think he might really do this, then, ha, told ’em all—before there’s a shudder in the air, a heavy whine, and Dallin realizes it’s not enough. They’re still merely holding their own, not gaining ground, and if this is all there is, it could go on forever—or until Wil wearies and can’t hold his own anymore. Before Dallin has a chance to dig down and snatch for more, there’s a thin pop and the carcass is gone—just gone—as though it’s folded into itself, winked out without prelude or drama.

  Wil stumbles back, shaking and sweating, his breath blowing in and out like he’s been drowning. Dallin feels the sharp snap of recoil, that same wallop he’d felt when healing was snatched from his grasp by death at Andette’s hands.

  “Too easy.” Wil shakes his head and cuts his glance everywhere. “He’s playing with us.”

  Dallin doesn’t even have time to agree. He’s shoved, his hand torn from Wil’s, pain like he’s never known rupturing through him. Saw-toothed shards of himself rip loose and burst through his chest in breathless agony.

  “The Guardian is no more,” a deep silky voice whispers to him, and he thinks this is the true voice of the soul-eater, low and seductive as Dallin should have expected of a beguiler. Even inside the revulsion, as pieces of him are torn away, ripping great, gaping holes in his sanity, he hears the beauty inside the tone, the allure. “You are in my way, Mother’s mule.”

  And he’s flung, hurtling through nothing, agony chewing him up with gnashing teeth as he reaches out for his own Self, grips it in a mental fist. It only ramps up the torment, his bones liquefying inside muscles turned to broken glass, his mind bellowing in near paralyzing shock and pain, and the harder he hangs on, the more intense the torture becomes. Every nerve ending is lit up in glitter-sharp constellations. He’s never even thought to consider what it might feel like for a mind to be ripped loose from a person. He thinks he knows now, thinks he understands what all those unfortunates felt just before the dearg-dur swallowed them down, thinks he knows what Wil suffered at the commands of Síofra all those times. Dallin wants to weep in outrage and pain and fury, but he has no eyes from which to squeeze the tears, no body with which to curl in on the pain. He is a formless mass of agony, and if he lets go of the pain, he lets go of his Self. It might almost be worth it, he thinks, screaming with a voice that isn’t there, rigid splinters of himself breaking loose inside it.

  There isn’t enough of him to catch it all, pieces of him slipping through fingers he doesn’t have, and he means to call out—to Wil, to the Mother, to anyone—if for nothing else than to do one last thing that’s his before he slides into the forever-void that’s sucking him down.

  “What is your name?” curls through him, and he thinks it should be the Mother’s voice, but it isn’t. It’s his father speaking to him from across time, drilling the lesson into his son so that even when he’d forgotten everything else, he always knew this one thing.

  “Dallin Brayden,” he answers back. “From the Valley,” and “Brave,” and he’s always known what these things mean, even when he’d forgotten their purpose, but he’s never truly understood the other, not ’til now. “Pride’s people,” he wheezes through the pain in his not-voice, thinks of Lind and its lineage of warriors, its centuries of secrets and unknowing, faithful defense of the Heart of the World.

  And finally wonders what sort of power lies hidden in their belief. “If it is strong enough to bind, it is strong enough to free,” She’d told Wil. Dallin thinks he knows what that means now.

  He gathers himself inward, curls what he can around it, and cries out—

  —in a voice that shattered all around him, a ringing bellow that bounded against the walls of the cavern as the shock of standing once again on solid ground recoiled through him, jolting up his legs and backbone. He blinked to clear his vision and found Wil still standing there, eyes liquid and shifting and locked on to Wheeler, who stared back, somehow lax and helpless-looking even in his thrall. Wil’s nose was trickling a steady rivulet of blood, dripping down to a small puddle on the floor of the cavern between his boots.

  Still there, still locked in some otherworld conflict with the monster. Dallin had somehow left Wil
behind, and he didn’t even know how.

  He didn’t take the time for guilt or horror, merely tightened his grip on Wil, eyes settling on the closest one available—Andette, staring at Dallin in something between fright and cool faith as Dallin reached out his hand to her, said “Hurry!” then “Thorne!” and waited the barest of moments for Andette’s wide hand to lock on to his before he hurled himself—

  —back into the nothing of agony, caught in midscream as it all slams back into him, the rip and tear of a soul being shredded from a Self. “Thorne!” he calls again and feels new power burning through him, setting whatever’s left of him on fire. It hardly matters—he doesn’t think anything could possibly hurt worse than this—so he pulls it all inside him, builds it like a wall around himself, a calm center of silence inside the nothing.

  His mind is his, his soul remains, and he’s standing once again beside Wil, here and whole, but with his feet planted firmly in the quickmud of Fæðme, his hand locked to Andette’s and hers to Thorne’s. He thought once that he’d have to be careful where he pointed these people, that their faith could be as dangerous as a loaded gun aimed at the world. He’d forgotten that a loaded gun can mean salvation too, if held in the right hand. He tightens the hand that hangs at the end of the body he left in Fæðme and reaches with the other for Wil.

  “Dallin!” Wil cries, voice raw and weak, and he stumbles, sweat seeping through his shirt where Dallin grips his arm. Wil is shaking, not from fear but debility, his strength flowing out of him, and Dallin all at once knows why. It’s not surprising to realize that the whole time he’s been busy getting ripped apart, Wil has been reaching out for him, trying to keep him whole. Not surprising, no, but it makes Dallin want to scream in frustration, these chances Wil takes. They’re always for the right reasons, but he’s going to end up paying for it, if he isn’t already.