He pasted on a pleasant smile and dipped his head.
“We won’t be taking any books with us and promise to be more than careful with any you might permit us to look at.” He didn’t think he’d achieved a look of innocence since he was five-years-old, but he tried for one anyway. “We’re looking for something in particular, something about the gods of the Four Corners. Have you got anything that might help?”
She thought about it, eyes flicking a telltale glance to the center of the far wall, before fixing again on Dallin.
“You can read?”
It was strange, being assumed a Linder after all this time. Dallin had never met anyone from Lind in the years since he’d left it. He was the only one he knew of who had traveled as far south as Putnam. There, those who knew him just knew him as Dallin, and those who didn’t knew him as Constable Brayden. Even in the Army, he’d only seen one other who looked like he’d been from Lind, and he’d been just another of the dead Dallin’s horse had to pick its way over after the last retreat had sounded.
There he’d been first that big Brayden lad then yessir, Lieutenant, sir and then finally just Cap’n. In Putnam, it had taken him years to fit in, and he’d belonged as much as someone like him could; the Army and the Constabulary were different, valuing skill over heritage. No one had looked at him like he belonged in Lind since he had. It was disconcerting.
“I can read,” he answered evenly, watched as the librarian’s gaze changed infinitesimally, ‘Exile’ now dropping like a little weight behind its reflected judgment.
Interesting. Dallin had never been on the receiving-end of bigotry before. New acquaintances in Putnam usually 96
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viewed his origins as a point of interest and then took him for who he was, whether they liked him or not. Not only did this woman apparently dislike those from Lind, but she liked those exiled from it even less. And by the way her lip curled and she avoided looking at Wil altogether, she disliked anyone who looked like they might be from Ríocht, too, though that wasn’t terribly unique. Refugees from Ríocht were few, but they existed nonetheless, and now that Wil didn’t have the dubious disguise of his hat to hide his hair color, his heritage was all too plain.
The woman sighed, shook her head, then stepped purposefully around them and toward the spot where her glance had shifted before. She pulled down two books.
Dallin felt not even a twinge of guilt when he noted with satisfaction that Manning, for all his disorganized disarray, would never have allowed books in such a state onto his shelves—the bindings were cracking, their weave fraying along the edges of the spines, and no one had bothered to gild the pages to prevent yellowing.
“Let me see your hands,” the woman demanded.
Show me those hands, now, little man.
Dallin lifted an eyebrow, held back a scowl and put his hands out.
The woman had herself a good, long look, mouth twisting tartly at his relatively clean hands, apparently unable to find an excuse not to let him touch the books.
She blew a great, longsuffering sigh and shoved them at Dallin, pointing over to a lacquered table in the midst of eight uncomfortable-looking stiff-backed chairs. And then she wheeled on her very proper heel and clipped over to her desk, slipped on her spectacles, and set to quite pointedly not-really-ignoring them.
Dallin rolled his eyes, gave Wil a sour grimace when he noted the covert snorts had never stopped, then plodded over to the table and dropped into one of the small chairs.
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Wil followed, hiding a grin in his collar.
“Are you all right?” Wil asked, smirking.
Dallin didn’t miss the inflection, the way his own apparently too-oft-voiced question was turned back on him. His mouth twisted. “Very funny.”
“It really bothers you, doesn’t it?”
“Of course it bothers me,” Dallin retorted; he just barely kept himself from snapping it. “It’s ignorant and hidebound, and I find both offensive in the extreme.”
“Is that why you got so angry with that guard?”
“I expect I got angry with the guard for the same reason you did.”
Wil’s eyebrows went up. “I was angry because he was going to take the gun.” A shrug and another smirk. “I really like that gun.”
Dallin gave him a skeptical grimace. “And what he said didn’t bother you at all?”
“Ha.” Wil snorted, dipped his head a bit, and glanced over his shoulder when the Librarian loudly cleared her throat. He couldn’t seem to lose the smirk. “Did you do all of that because you thought my virtue was insulted?”
Dallin hadn’t thought of it in those specific terms; hadn’t really thought much about it at all, just reacted.
He blinked some, shrugged. “Well, I just thought… I thought—”
“You thought I’d go to pieces because some skeezy gob thought I was your catamite?” Wil rolled his eyes and whiffled another snort, this one somewhat derisive.
“Fuck’s sake, Constable, d’you think I’ve never heard its like before? I know what I look like. Or should I be blushing and covering my ears? I keep forgetting I’m supposed to be impressive. Shall I make like the driven snow so as not to disappoint you?”
“Disappoint…” Dallin gaped. “It has nothing to do with… I’m not the one…” He peered over at the pinched-98
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up Librarian and lowered his voice. “Is that the way people always talk to you?” he demanded.
It made too much sense. The comments, the assumptions—Dallin had suspected something like it, but that man at the gate had actually offered a couched proposition as though Dallin were looking to rent Wil out. And he was on duty.
Wil shook his head at Dallin, eyes wide now and sincerely amused. “It’s how you talked to me back in Putnam.”
“That isn’t fair,” Dallin defended. He was flailing, and they both knew it. Dallin was edging on deep chagrin over it all, but Wil seemed ridiculously entertained.
“I was working from the accounts of others,” Dallin furthered with a scowl, “and you wouldn’t tell me what really happened. You wouldn’t tell me anything.”
Wil opened a hand, waved it. “You’re right,” he conceded. “It was forever ago, and we were different people then.”
Dallin frowned over that. It did seem like forever ago, and Wil certainly seemed like a different person, but Dallin felt pretty much the same as ever. Except perhaps more tired.
Wil tapped at the books. He was still smiling, but his gaze was more interested than snarky now. “So, what d’you want to know about the old gods? And how come?”
A deliberate change of subject, but Dallin was more than willing to go along with it. “I want to know everything I can find out,” he answered, flipping open the first book. He rested his head in his hand, put the strange, discomfited embarrassment aside, and started scanning through the pages.
Eorðbúgigend—god of the earth. That was simple enough.
Wil waited for a quiet moment, but when Dallin didn’t 99
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go on, he slid his elbows to the table, folded his arms and laid his chin atop them. “How come?” he repeated.
Dallin sighed. “Because I keep dreaming about them.”
He waved a hand. “Well, not dreaming about them, exactly—more like dreaming about people asking me about them and me not knowing the answers.”
“Having all the answers is very important to you, isn’t it?” Wil stretched an arm out on the table and traced little invisible symbols into its slick surface.
Dallin shrugged, turned back to the book. “It’s my job,” was all he said.
“You want to tell me your dream?” Wil’s voice was quieter than it had been, fingers still tracing, his eyes following his own movements, but distant. All the humor of a moment ago was gone, but he didn’t seem anxious or distressed.
“Why would you want to hear about my dr
eams?”
Dallin flipped some more pages. This Eorðbúgigend fellow was actually a little boring, apparently spending all his time delving and avoiding everyone, including his fellow deities. “Don’t you get enough of all that on your own?” Dallin asked mildly. Ah, now this Díepe seemed a bit more promising—the goddess of water, coaxing the hapless into her depths and having her way with them then spitting them back out, sometimes alive, if they pleased her well enough.
“I can probably tell you what it means, at least.”
Dallin snapped his glance up. Wil was still tracing his little patterns, almost stretched out across the table. To another, he might look relaxed, even bored. To Dallin, he looked pensive.
“I thought you didn’t know how… well, how… things worked.”
Wil shrugged. “Well, no one actually told me, but it’s… I’ve been doing it a long time, y’know.” He turned 100
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his head, laid it to the crook of his elbow and peered at Dallin, that little smirk back again. “And I’m smarter than I look.”
Dallin smiled back, drawn. It was quite an offer, considering. And extraordinarily heartening that Wil would even make it. And to him. Dallin thought about it for only a mere span of seconds.
“People—people in my dreams, I mean—they keep asking me to sing them the songs of the old gods, and when I can’t…” Dallin paused. “Well, bad things happen.”
“Hm,” Wil hummed. “That’s not much to go on. Is that all you remember?”
“…No.” Dallin sighed.
He sat back, carded through the various dreams and their possible effects on Wil, and chose the one he thought least likely to disturb him. If Wil could indeed discern something in them that squeaked some sense out of it all, Dallin would have to confess the other, the one he knew would be somewhat upsetting, and he’d have to do that eventually anyway, but he was loath to do it here, with that bitter-boned librarian looking on. Strange—all of this ‘putting it off ’til a better time’ was getting to look more and more embarrassingly like stalling. And yet still, Dallin couldn’t seem to bring himself to broach it.
“I’m in the Army,” he said. “Colonel Mancy is there, the one who more-or-less arranged my promotion, and at first he’s telling my commander how he thinks I won’t be satisfied until I hack my way into the Dominion and through the Guild’s ramparts. He actually did say that, I heard it, so it’s likely just a memory or something.”
Despite the reassurance, Wil’s eyes narrowed and he tensed just a little. Dallin paused, worried Wil might take it as yet another sign that Dallin was a danger—Wil used to live inside the Guild’s walls, after all—but Wil merely sat up, rested his chin in his hand and peered at Dallin 101
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steadily. “Go on,” he said.
Dallin blew out another sigh. “Well, then he asks me the words to the songs of the old gods, and when I tell him I don’t know them, he turns into Manning—my old tutor—and he keeps shoving books at me, but they’re written in a language I don’t understand. He tells me I have to decode them, except when I tell him I don’t have the key to the code, he tells me my father’s going to die. I tell him my father’s already dead, but then he turns into one of the children from Kenley and tells me I’ve forgotten my name.” He paused, thinking, trying to eke details out of the murk. “The skeleton has Clan-marks on its cheek,”
he added after a moment. “And it’s pointing at me like I’m the one who killed it.” He shrugged, grimacing a little. Now that he’d said it, gave it ordinary words as its frame, it sounded a little bit silly.
Wil didn’t seem like he thought it was silly; he was pondering it seriously. His fingers went back to their invisible scribbling, gaze following.
“Singing generally means happiness,” he said slowly.
“But you don’t look very happy.” He flicked a look up at Dallin, penetrating, then shrugged it away. Dallin had nothing intelligent to offer, so he kept silent. “The songs are the key,” Wil went on. “The code is whatever you find inside them that will get you to whatever goal it is you’ve got you eye on. Something that will mean something to you, help you figure out where to look for the pieces of your puzzle and understand who you are.”
Dallin rolled his eyes, slumped a little. “I know who I am,” he argued, rubbing his brow. “Let’s don’t go back to this again—please, I’m begging you.”
“I’m not,” Wil told him with a slight roll of his eyes.
“I’m not saying anything like that. For pity’s sake, I sleep while you’re walking watch with a loaded gun five paces away from me; doesn’t that tell you anything?”
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It told Dallin plenty; he only wondered if the reverse told Wil as much.
“You’re a Linder who was taken from Lind when he was a boy,” Wil continued quietly. Dallin was somewhat taken aback by the soft authority in his tone. “You are what you’ve made of yourself, but there are parts of you that you can’t possibly know—you didn’t even know there was such thing as a Guardian. How much more d’you think there is to you that you don’t know?”
Dallin had to concede the point. “My father died before he could teach me the songs of my name,” he murmured.
“There you are.” Wil opened a hand. “P’raps the songs of the old gods will help you understand your own.”
“Which would be very helpful if I could find the bloody songs,” Dallin muttered tiredly, flipped open the second book, and began to scan the pages. “These only seem to be tales of the gods themselves, and there’s not much of even that. A few paragraphs for each one, mixed with a bunch of other mythology that has nothing to do with anything.”
Wil sat back in his chair with a brooding frown. “You’re a very interesting, very confusing man,” he told Dallin softly, peered up from beneath his lashes, measuring.
“You’re forever asking questions, seeking answers, but you sometimes miss the most obvious questions, and sometimes the answers are right in front of you and you can’t see them.” A small smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “You only take one foot at a time from out your quick-mud.”
“That’s…” Dallin frowned, tilted his head. “That’s an odd thing to say.” He closed the book, hands resting loosely atop it. “You think I’m missing something obvious, then.” He didn’t phrase it as a question; it was all too apparent that Wil was attempting to wend his way 103
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around to something, and perhaps didn’t know how to just come out with it. In Dallin’s observations thus far, Wil hardly ever ‘just came out’ with anything, unless he was fairly pissed off at the time, so patience now would probably be advisable. If they were talking about a crime scene or witness statement, Dallin likely would have taken sincere offence at the contention that he was stumbling blind. Since they were actually talking about dreams and were therefore in Wil’s element, so to speak, the allegation wasn’t too far off the mark. “You say the answers are right in front of me.” Dallin turned his hands over, palms-up on the table. “Will you tell me?”
Wil’s smile spread just a touch wider, but it twitched ever so slightly, dipped wry. “Ah, see, there’s the obvious question.” He looked down at his lap again, shrugged a little, fiddling with the slight fray of linen on the wrappings about his hand. “I can do better than tell you,”
he furthered quietly, peered up to gauge Dallin’s reaction.
“I can teach you.”
Dallin had already been itching to get back on the road as soon as possible. Between their ‘greeting’ at the gates and the figure that might or might not have been his imagination across the street from the Library, the urge to take care of the rest of their business and be gone had worked at his nerves like an itch he couldn’t reach between his shoulder-blades. Now, he was on fire with it.
He’d almost wanted to insist Wil teach him those songs right then and there, but didn�
��t like the idea of doing it while that pinch-mouthed biddy was looking on.
“All right,” he said to Wil as they stepped back out onto the Library’s steps, eyes sweeping habitually, but pausing to linger on the spot where he’d seen— thought 104
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he’d seen—the man earlier. Nothing there to see now. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed. “We’ve got to get back toward the square for the auction. Once that’s done, we can head back out.” A quick look at the position of the sun told him they still had plenty of time yet; they hadn’t been nearly as long in the Library as he’d thought they might. He started down the steps. “We should have smooth walking, at least today and tomorrow morning.
Things’ll get a little more—” He stopped, narrowed his eyes, shot his arm out to keep Wil from loping down the steps behind him. “Hold on a moment.” Unease buzzed all over him, like a ghost was chiseling right into his backbone, and he had to work really hard to suppress the shudders.
Wil halted without protest, but peered a question up at Dallin. Something in Dallin’s eyes must have been a bit too obvious. Wil’s expression changed instantly, eyes flicking from one end of the street to the other. The hardness was back, gaze wary and narrow, and his shoulders were just beginning their defensive inward stoop. Whatever Wil had seen in Dallin’s expression that had triggered the change, Dallin couldn’t have hidden it had he tried. He’d never felt anything like it: urgent foreboding, a feeling of something impending, something unpleasant. It was crawling all over him.
“What?” Wil asked—nearly whispered it.
Dallin shook his head, his own gaze never resting, scanning the people milling about on the street, looking for anything suspicious, anything at all. A lingering look or even a deliberate not-look, a telltale bulge of a weapon, a hulking shape that looked too much like him…
“Nothing, I guess.” Dallin’s voice was quiet, and his tone probably not at all convincing. “I thought…”
He shook his head, eyes still moving, troubled. “I don’t know— some thing.” He turned to Wil. “Don’t you feel it?”
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