Dream

by Carole Cummings

  He gave his head a quick shake and pulled a sedate expression to his face. “Thought I saw something, but if it was there, it’s gone now.” He jerked his chin. “C’mon, we’re already running later than we wanted.”

  Wil stared up at him for a moment, skimmed his glance back out into the street, then only twitched a small nod, pulled the door open, and went inside. Dallin gave the street one last sweep before he followed.

  The scents of a library, like its overall appearance—regardless of architecture—were universal and therefore soothingly familiar. Dust and parchment were more palliative to Dallin’s senses than a stiff drink would’ve been. He stood by the door for a moment, just breathing in the scent of beeswax and ink, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light filtering in through the high windows paned in painted leaded glass. It wasn’t as big as Putnam’s, nor was it as comfortably shabby. The shelves didn’t overflow with a mishmash of titles of which only Manning knew the order, but were lined neatly, each volume tucked in its own slot. No squat little stove piled with teapots and saucepans heating the librarian’s lunch tucked in the corner, but a central hearth burned with a sensibly sized fire that put off just enough heat for comfort.

  Dallin knew just by the neatness of the setting not to expect someone like Manning to greet them, but Chester’s librarian still startled him. A spare little woman, gray and just going slightly wizened, who looked as if she was perpetually chewing on the sour-bitter rinds of a lemon. She regarded them suspiciously, mouth pursed as her critical glance roved over their obvious travel wear and Dallin’s weapons, pinching impossibly tight when her bright gaze rested on Dallin’s head. Dallin started, took off his hat, and nudged Wil to do the same.

  “Good afternoon,” he began politely. “I was wonder—”

  “Ye can’t take books ’less you live in Chester.” Amazing how the woman managed to bark it so quietly.

  Dallin blinked, then shot a quick glare over when Wil snorted. Dallin shook his head. “I wasn’t—”

  “If ye want a book, ye’ll have to show papers and leave five billets deposit.”

  Dallin frowned this time and pinched at the bridge of his nose. His first impulse was to puff up and cut the woman down to an even smaller size with verbal chastisement and high-handed posturing. His second impulse was to do exactly the opposite of his first impulse. His first impulse, after all, had worked decidedly against them at the gates.

  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 brushing 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’d appeared to be from Lind, and he’d been just another of the dead over whom Dallin’s horse had to pick its way after the last retreat sounded. There, Dallin had first been that big Brayden lad, then yessir, Lieutenant sir, and 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 as though he belonged in Lind since he actually had. It was disconcerting.

  “I can read,” Dallin answered evenly, watching 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 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 disapprove of those from Lind, but she approved of those exiled from it even less. And by the way her lip curled and she avoided looking at Wil altogether, she disapproved of 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.”

  Show me those hands, now, little man.

  Dallin managed to hold back a scowl as he put his hands out.

  The librarian had herself a good, long look, her mouth twisting tartly at Dallin’s relatively clean hands, apparently unable to find an excuse not to let him touch the books. She blew a great, long-suffering sigh as she shoved them at Dallin, pointing over to a lacquered table in the midst of eight uncomfortable-looking, stiff-backed chairs. Prim and abrupt, she wheeled on her very proper heel and clipped over to her very proper desk, slipped on her very proper spectacles, and sat very properly in her chair.

  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. Wil followed, hiding a grin in his collar.

  “Are you all right?” Wil asked through a smirk he didn’t even try to hide.

  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 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.”

  “I was angry because he was going to take the gun. I really like that gun.”

  Dallin gave him a skeptical grimace. “And what he said didn’t bother you at all?”

  “Ha.” Wil 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. “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. “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 as 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-up librarian and lowered his voice. “Is that the way people always talk to you?”

  “It’s how you talked to me back in Putnam.”

  “That isn’t fair.” Dallin was flailing, and they both knew it. “I was working from the accounts of others, and you wouldn’t tell me what really happened. You wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  Wil seemed absurdly entertained by Dallin’s discomfort, but he only waved it away. “You’re right. It was forever ago, and we were different people the
n.”

  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 flipped open the first book, trying to put the strange, unsettled 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 go on, Wil slid his elbows to the table, folded his arms, and laid his chin atop them. “How come?”

  Dallin sighed. “Because I keep dreaming about them.” He paused. “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 his arm out on the table and traced little invisible symbols into its slick surface.

  Dallin turned back to the book. “It’s my job.”

  “You want to tell me your dream?” Wil’s voice was quieter than it had been, fingers still tracing, his gaze 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 dreams?” Dallin flipped some more pages. This Eorðbúgigend fellow was 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?” 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 laid his head on the crook of his elbow and peered at Dallin, that little smirk back again. “And I’m not slow.”

  Dallin smiled back, drawn. It was quite an offer, considering. And extraordinarily heartening that Wil would even make it. 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….” He hesitated. “Well, bad things happen.”

  “That’s not much to go on. Is that all you remember?”

  “…No.”

  Dallin sat back, carding through the various dreams and their possible effects on Wil, and chose the one he thought least likely to disturb either of them. 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. He’d have to do that eventually anyway, but he was loath to do it here with that bitter-boned librarian looking on.

  “I’m in the army. 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 really did say that, I heard it, so it’s likely just a memory or something.”

  Despite the reassurance, Wil tensed just a little. Dallin paused, worried he might take it as yet another sign that Dallin was a danger—he 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 steadily.

  “Go on.”

  Dallin blew out a 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, and 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, only it’s just a burnt-up skeleton and it tells me I’ve forgotten my name.” He paused, thinking, trying to eke out details from 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 grimaced. Now that he’d said it, given it ordinary words as its frame, it sounded a bit silly.

  Wil was staring at him, eyes narrowed. He didn’t seem to think it was silly. He was pondering it seriously. His fingers went back to their invisible scribbling, gaze following.

  “The songs are the key,” he said slowly. “The code is whatever you find inside them. 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 rubbed at his brow. “I know who I am. Let’s don’t go back to this again—please, I’m begging you.”

  “I’m not.” Wil gave him 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?”

  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.” Dallin was somewhat taken aback by the soft authority in Wil’s 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.”

  “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 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 looked down into his lap with a brooding frown. “You’re a very interesting, very confusing man.” He 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 quickmud.”

  “That’s….” Dallin frowned. “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 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 take sincere offense at the contention that he was stumbling blind. Since they were in point of fact 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, palm up on the table. “Will you tell me?”

  Wil’s smile spread just a touch wider, but it twitched ever so slightly, dipping wry. “Ah, see, there’s the obvious question.” He looked down at his lap again, fiddling with the slight fray of the linen wrappings around his han
d. “I can do better than tell you.” He glanced up to gauge his 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 he 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 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. 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, and shot his arm out to keep Wil from loping down the steps behind him. “Hold on a moment.” Unease was abruptly buzzing all over him, as if a ghost were chiseling right into his backbone, and he had to work 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, gaze shooting from one end of the street to the other. The hardness was back, and his shoulders were just beginning their defensive inward stoop. Dallin couldn’t have kept whatever was on his face that had triggered the change off 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 nearly whispered it.