Aisling 2: Dream

by Carole Cummings

  Dallin blinked. He almost scooted himself back and away, but didn’t want to do anything that would close Wil up again.

  Voices? As if everything else wasn’t bad enough, and now there were bloody voices? How much more—?

  A stifled snort, and Wil shook his head. “You should see your face,” he chuckled.

  Dallin could’ve punched him right in the mouth. “Oh, funny,” he growled. Except it sort of was, and ridiculously relieved, he couldn’t keep the grudging half-grin from off his face. “That sense of humor of yours is either going to do me in or get you throttled,” he grumbled. “I’m knee-deep in the surreal, and you’re cracking wise.” He shook his head, trying not to laugh. “Seriously, how’d you find it?”

  Wil shrugged, flipped the stone in his palm then pocketed it. “Dunno,” he said easily. “Just did.” He stood. “Millard called me a crow, too.” A peculiar little smile was working at the corners of his mouth then he looked back at Dallin, curious. “What’s a chimera?”

  Dallin winced. It had been nearly cheerful between them for a moment there. “Well…” He rubbed at his brow, considered dodging the question—sometimes lies really were kinder than truths—but decided prevaricating 66

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  would be disrespectful at best, tentative trust-breaking at worst. “It’s a dream.” He made his voice even, straightforward. “Usually an unattainable dream.”

  He watched closely as Wil took this in.

  “Huh,” Wil said, thought about it for a moment.

  “Sometimes I wonder…” He trailed off, frowning off into the darkness. “Have you noticed that Aisling means Dream and not Dreamer?” His voice was soft, somewhat flat, the humor of a moment ago gone completely. He looked back at Dallin, quizzical. “Isn’t that strange?”

  “A little,” Dallin agreed. “But translations get bollixed all the time.” He stood, groaning as the bones in his spine cracked and realigned themselves. “Everyone thinks about that now and again. You’re as real as I am. Don’t borrow trouble.”

  Wil cocked his head, peered at Dallin sideways. “And what makes you so sure you’re real?” he wanted to know.

  It wasn’t one of his odd little jokes, and he wasn’t being difficult; the question was genuine. And far too big for Dallin to address before coffee.

  “Sometimes you make my brain hurt,” he told Wil tiredly. He stepped away from the bedroll, waved a hand toward it, and then went to wake the fire. “I won’t be getting back to sleep. You might as well have it for a few hours.”

  “Oh.” Wil shook his head. “I didn’t mean to disturb—”

  “You didn’t,” Dallin cut in. “I told you—dreams.

  I’d just as soon not chance any more tonight. They’re not terribly pleasant.” He threw some kindling on the smoldering bones of the fire and jerked his chin at the bedroll. “Honestly. One of us should be alert in the morning.”

  Wil peered at him thoughtfully for a moment, considering, then nodded. He looked down at the rifle and reluctantly held it out. “You, um… want this back?”

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  Dallin held back the snort, but not the twitch of a smirk. “I wouldn’t dream of coming between the two of you,” he said, shifted some bits of timber onto the coals, and went to hunt through his pack for the coffee.

  Dawn found Dallin poring over his map when Wil snorted awake and blinked over at him with a wide, lazy yawn. “This,” he slurred contentedly, “is a very comfortable bedroll.”

  Dallin didn’t look up, but smiled and took a slurp of his coffee. “Well, you’ll have to drag yourself out of it soon. I want to get started as soon as we can.” He tilted a curious look at Wil. “D’you know that your fingers are always moving when you sleep?”

  Wil paused in mid-stretch, frowned up at the sky for a moment then grimaced. “Yeah, so? You snore.” He lifted his hands, squinted at them, fingers of the left hand flexing and wavering in front of his nose. “Why the rush?” he wanted to know. “Something wrong?”

  “No, no.” Dallin turned his gaze to the map. “It’s time we started being proper fugitives and trying to hide our trail a little better. Besides a change of course, that’ll mean no more target practice or evening fires. Sorry.”

  Wil sat up and rolled his shoulders, tipped his head from side-to-side, the bones in his neck cracking so loud it made Dallin wince. “I’m already a brilliant shot,” Wil smirked. “I don’t need to practice.” He grinned when Dallin rolled his eyes, then he stood and stepped several feet away and behind a tree. “So, which way are we heading, then?”

  “If I haven’t got us completely lost,” Dallin muttered, finger tracing over the worn lines of the map, “Chester is only just over a week’s ride southwest from here, and 68

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  not much in between, so we can avoid being seen if we’re careful. We can stop there, sell the horses and replenish our supplies. We need more ammunition and our water’s getting low. No more unnecessary washing either, I’m afraid. And then we’ll strike northwest and follow the Flównysse all the way to Lind. If the weather holds and we don’t run into any trouble or delays, we should come upon Cildtrog’s Bounds in… say ten days, maybe twelve.”

  He looked up with a lift of eyebrows. Wil was just emerging from around the tree, buttoning his trousers and frowning at the ground.

  “Sell the horses?”

  Disenchanted and trying not to show it; trying to pretend his tone was curious and not just slightly mournful.

  You know what your problem is, Brayden? Dallin chastised himself. You don’t spend enough time around people who aren’t looking at you from behind bars. If he did, he might stop to consider more how his words affected others. And here he’d been thinking only hours ago that Wil was starting to get attached to the beasts. He shouldn’t have just blurted it like that.

  “We wanted to be followed when we started out,”

  Dallin told him. “And the horses gave us a good head-start through the rougher country, but our pursuers will likely be riding harder than we’ve done. I won’t be at all surprised if they can track us through here and all the way to Chester, but once we leave there, we can’t risk it. It’s a lot easier to follow hoofprints than footprints—

  especially if they’re trying to track us from horseback.

  Unless they’ve dogs, we should be able to stay invisible, even if they’re within a few miles of us.” He held out a hand, palm-up. “Sorry. It’s for the best.”

  “They’re yours, you bought ’em.” Wil shrugged with a bit of a scowl. “Don’t care, really. Just a little surprised, is all.”

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  Dallin wasn’t the least bit fooled, but he let it go.

  “Porridge for breakfast,” he told Wil. “Might as well take advantage of our last fire. Start getting your kit together.

  Breakfast will be ready in about a half hour, and then we’ll strike camp.”

  “Mm,” was all Wil mumbled, glowered a bit, then slouched away.

  Wil didn’t speak to Dallin for nearly three days, other than noncommittal grunts now and again at casual comments, and one-word answers to actual questions. It didn’t feel like anger. Withdrawal, perhaps. The same sort of retreat he’d employed when Sheriff Locke was about: an extraction of himself from a situation he didn’t yet know how to navigate. If Dallin had been feeling unkind, he might have even called it sulking.

  Dallin gave Wil his space. He’d given in to sentiment too many times already on this journey—if it weren’t for sentiment, he’d be on his way back to Putnam with a prisoner in shackles, and not on the run with the Dominion’s Chosen—and the matter of the horses was just more of the same. The matter of the horses, in fact, was damned important, and Dallin wouldn’t even think of selling them if it wasn’t. Just because the maudlin broodiness was making him twitchy didn’t mean he was wrong, damn it.

  He held out until it was time to
start scouting for a suitable campsite on the third day of what Dallin was coming to think of as Wil’s Hissy. The silence had actually been sort of nice at first, but Dallin had got used to the occasional ingenuous questions and smart-arse commentary, and the absence of it just kept reminding him that he was taking away something from a man 70

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  who had next to nothing. It didn’t matter that Dallin had bought the horses and he could do with them as he pleased; it didn’t matter that they’d been nothing to him on this trip but another two mouths to feed and tools to get them from Point A to Point B—he hadn’t even bothered to check their papers to see if they had names when he’d bought them. What mattered was that Dallin had more-or-less handed something to Wil, forced it on him, in fact, and now he was taking it back. And causing the retreat of what he’d been amazed to realize was an intriguing personality right back inside a shell of guarded remove.

  So, he decided nearly three days was quite enough.

  “So, Wil, tell me,” he said as they rounded the feet of a range of lofty hills, strung like mossy ribs sprouting from a fallen giant’s backbone, “where’ve you been?”

  Wil slanted him a sideways glance, eyebrows drawn. “I mean, what places have you been to since you’ve been…

  um…” How to put this tactfully? “…since you’ve been out on your own?”

  “Lots of places,” was the wary reply.

  “So I assumed,” Dallin told him. “You’ve been wandering about for, from what you’ve said, three years or more, and I don’t imagine you’ve been holed up in a cave all this time.” He kept his tone light and conversational.

  “It’s almost a straight line southeast from Old Bridge to Putnam—did you just sort of…” He waved a hand about.

  “…pick a direction and keep going?”

  “I didn’t…” Wil’s eyebrows twisted. “Straight…?”

  He stared, surprise sliding into that maddening apprehensive antipathy that Dallin hadn’t missed in the least. What the hell was wrong with him now, damn it?

  “No,” Wil finally grudged. His posture was closing in on itself again. “I started out…” An uncomfortable shrug, and an annoyed huff. “Do you really need to know?”

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  Dallin blinked, eyebrows rising. Thought back to the stunted conversation, tried to find a reason for the flare of resentment, and couldn’t. The exchange had been fairly innocuous, even by what Dallin was coming to know as Wil’s perpetually suspicious standards.

  “Is there a reason you don’t want to tell me?” Dallin countered.

  “You mean other than the fact that it’s none of your damned business?”

  Dallin’s own suspicions piqued, despite the good intentions he’d had just a moment ago. His eyes narrowed.

  “Did you cut a swath of crime from the Border on down?”

  he asked mildly, trying to push some levity into the tone of the question.

  Wil rolled his eyes, exasperated impatience. “Maybe I just don’t want to talk about it for some of the same reasons you don’t want to talk about your time in the army,” he snapped.

  That one made Dallin sit back a little in his saddle.

  “What the hell does that—?”

  “You did things you can’t talk about because they’d seem wrong to anyone who wasn’t there, right? You’ve tried once or twice, but the looks on the faces of others made you understand that people would just as soon you kept it all where they couldn’t see it. You did things you’re maybe not proud of, things you try not to look at now because they make you wonder what kind of person could be capable of them, and then you remember oh, right, that was you, and then you understand those looks on the faces of others, but you can’t feel the same way they do because you know it was necessary, no matter how low it makes you feel to have done them.” He pulled rein and turned to glare at Dallin as he did the same.

  “I’m not astounding, and there’s no reason for you to be impressed—I did what I had to do, and I won’t apologize for surviving.”

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  Dallin stared for a long time, meeting the throttled fury in the green eyes with calm consideration. This had nothing whatever to do with any speculations about Dallin’s own proposed encounters; this was entirely abject bitterness accumulated before Dallin’s existence had even come within Wil’s purview of experience. Just how long, Dallin wondered dubiously, did it take for someone whose entire life had consisted of pain and thwarted rage to stop being enraged? Was it possible? Could someone who’d been taught over and over again that every word hid some sort of betrayal ever learn to trust? Should they?

  More to the point, did Dallin have the patience to deal with it while he figured it out?

  He thought again about telling Wil about the dream, about how at least two men had died trying to find him, help him… thought about Wil’s reaction when Dallin had informed him about the other and decided he needed to deal with this latest flare-up first.

  Dallin propped a hand to the saddlebow, leaned into it, and cocked his head to the side. “I’m getting a little tired,” he said slowly, “of feeling compelled to defend myself over things I haven’t done. I wasn’t trying to interrogate you; I was trying to get your mind off the horses. I was trying to get to know you—as a person and not as the Guild’s tool or the Brethren’s prey, since those histories are the only ones you’ve thus far seen fit to give me. Very grudgingly, I might add, and not without fighting me bitterly tooth-and-nail first. Quite literally.”

  Wil opened his mouth, but Dallin shook his head, held up a hand.

  “But since you’ve brought it up,” he continued, just as evenly, “I wouldn’t be half as impressed with you if you did apologize for surviving.” He paused for a quick moment to let that one sink in. “I don’t say things I don’t mean, and it’s very rare indeed that I misjudge someone 73

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  badly enough that my considered assessment of them comes back to bite me on the arse. In fact, it’s never happened, so if I’m impressed with you, it means you’ve done things to impress me; live with it.

  “Now, I have been nothing but straight with you and thought we’d progressed to a point where you felt more comfortable being straight with me. If we haven’t, you should tell me now so I’ll know not to bother you again with the respect of asking you questions straight-out, instead of hammering answers out of you like I could be doing.”

  Wil was trying to glare, but couldn’t seem to find the anger necessary. The muscles in his jaw twitched, teeth clamping and un-clamping, words forming and just as quickly being choked back. He looked down, stared at his hand, fingers working about the worn leather of the reins.

  “Do you not want to tell me because it’s private?”

  Dallin asked quietly, his tone less harsh than a moment ago. “Or do you just not know?”

  Perhaps it was as simple as that. Dallin hadn’t missed how Wil had more-or-less clipped out the words when he’d admitted he couldn’t read, and if he couldn’t read at all, he wouldn’t even know which way to look at a map.

  Perhaps it was as clear-cut as pointless embarrassment.

  He watched closely as Wil struggled to decide what he wanted to say, too-obviously choosing then discarding words before finally electing to speak.

  “It would appear,” Wil said slowly, “that I more-orless walked a straight line down the country from Old Bridge to Putnam, with several zigs and zags along the way.” He shrugged, scanned the hills. “I didn’t know it until you said it, and I didn’t do it on purpose. It just happened that way.”

  Dallin waited for more, but Wil just kept flicking his 74

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  glance about the terrain, shifting now and then in the saddle, and looking everywhere but at Dallin. Something was there, more than discomfiture, something that bothered Wil—either about his journey itself or things that had happen
ed along it—but whatever it was, he’d rather eat fire than tell Dallin about it.

  Dallin held back a sigh and shook his head. “C’mon, we’re losing light. Why don’t we give the horses a run while we’ve clear—?”

  “I went where my feet took me,” Wil cut in, voice low with a peculiar note of challenge beneath it. “Most of the time, I had no idea where I was heading, nor did I usually know the name of the town I was in. And neither did I care. Putnam is the only place I ever went to intentionally.”

  He slid his gaze sideways, that same rebellion Dallin had seen for the first time in the cellars of the Constabulary settling in Wil’s eyes, the clench of his jaw. “Does that seem strange to you?”

  Whatever he was getting at, or expecting Dallin to grasp from the cryptic information, it was flitting right past him. Does that seem strange to you? Yes. Yes, it did. Almost every damned thing Wil said when he was in this sort of mood was strange, and for someone who took what others said annoyingly literally, he could be the most enigmatic pain in the arse when he wanted to be. With more effort than should probably have been necessary, Dallin kept his breathing normal and his mien bland. It had been bloody small talk, for pity’s sake.

  “The horses need a run,” he repeated, nudging his heels into the chestnut’s barrel. “Come on, it’s getting dark.”

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  Camp was quiet and routine. Dallin took second watch again, snatching at restless sleep, as it seemed restful sleep was a thing of the past. They camped atop a butte, looking down over a valley that, according to the map and if Dallin had his bearings right, was known as Green Basin. Dallin had rolled his eyes a little—whatever the Ancients may have had going for them, creativity in the naming of their environs wasn’t one of them.

  He’d chosen the spot mostly because it afforded him an almost complete view of the surrounding landscape but for a small stretch to the north where a swath of conifers still occluded the line of sight. Since anyone following would likely be coming from the south or east, Dallin didn’t spare it much worry. Their perch gave him a clear view of the thin distant ribbon of road that would eventually lead into Chester. Vague blurry figures resolved themselves into the shapes of stray riders in ones and twos, interspersed with the occasional lone wagon tramping at travelers’ paces, from what Dallin could make out. Once the sun fell and night closed around them, he spent several hours scanning the surrounding area, looking for the telltale spark of a campfire, listening for the neigh of a horse, the shout of a man, the report of a gun. He saw and heard nothing but the quiet sounds of the sleeping countryside. Another three days to cross the valley, perhaps, and then they’d be closing on Chester’s city limits. Satisfied for the moment, Dallin dubiously climbed into his bedroll, leaving instructions with Wil to wake him in three hours. It was unnecessary, of course: he woke well before, just barely managing to keep the swearing behind his teeth.