The Aisling Trilogy

by Cummings, Carole

  That wasn’t entirely true. One of the first things Dallin remembered remarking about this man was that he looked young and old at the same time, the face hardly more than a lad’s, but the eyes…

  Calder only shrugged, kept his eyes on the fraying linen on his hand. “I could be a hundred, for all I know,” he muttered, diffident. “It felt like forever. Sometimes there was no time, at least nothing to mark it by, and if I could be more precise, I would, but…” He trailed off, shrugged again.

  The man was too good at lying, but Dallin was oddly certain that he at least thought he was telling the truth. Still, something about the timing tugged at Dallin’s skepticism, and he narrowed his eyes. “I thought a Guardian was born to Watch the Aisling. If I am what you think I am, why would I have come so late? What good could I have done against a grown or near-grown young man?” That tumbled a few more suspicions. “For that matter, why would I have been born on the opposite side of the Border? If all of this is ‘meant’ and planned, then why wasn’t I, say, your elder brother, or even an uncle or something?”

  “How would I know?” Calder grumbled, the fear slowly giving way to that familiar anxious anger that seemed to leak from him constantly, like some kind of tangible aura. “You ask me, like I’m supposed to know, like it was all my doing.” His shoulders hunched in, and impossibly, he curled into himself even tighter. “Believe me, if I were running things…” He paused, seemingly surprised that he was still talking, then shut his mouth tight.

  Dallin stood, deliberately stepped away before he gave Calder a chance to cringe and ramp up the strange removed rage that was driving through Dallin’s veins. He paced over to the bars, leaned into them. Took a long, deep breath.

  All right. Let’s think about this logically.

  Setting aside the question of Calder’s age, and assuming the rest of the story was at least half-true, the raid on Lind had happened when Dallin was well into his addiction and more of a tool than a person. Regardless of Dallin’s innate shock and anger at the revelation, and his real and sudden drive to exact some sort of belated vengeance, he’d known in his gut that Calder wasn’t really where those emotions should be directed. A pawn. A helpless instrument. Someone to be pitied.

  Except, Calder seemed to deflect even the smallest show of sympathy like he was wearing some kind of repelling armor. Every time Dallin found himself feeling some small bit of compassion, every time he looked for reasons to forgive the constant biting and scratching, or even admire it a little, Calder would look at him with that expectant fear in his eyes, and Dallin’s blood would boil.

  He’d stood on the other side of these bars only a few hours ago, looking over Calder’s shirtless form, eyes dubiously roving the piebald chest, belly, back, sides, face… marking every bruise and wondering which of them had come from his own hand. Watching blurry eyes trying to blink into focus, and feeling about two inches tall for those knocks to the head he himself had administered. Telling himself yet again that he’d been doing his job, that any force he’d used had been entirely necessary and completely unavoidable.

  And then Calder had looked at him in fuzzy confusion. Why are you being so nice to me?

  I wasn’t aware I was being ‘nice.’ This is nice to you?

  It had been all Dallin could do not to start stomping about and snarling, proving himself the animal Calder kept expecting him to be.

  Why was he being nice to him?

  Because I’m a decent man, and I don’t go about hurting people just because I can; I’ve never had to prove that so many times to the same person in my entire life, and if I have to do it one more time, I might snap.

  Because I don’t believe in beating confessions out of people, but every time I ask you even the simplest question, you keep making me wonder if a simple thrashing might not be kinder.

  Because I have never in my life met someone who could make me want to put my hands around his throat and just keep squeezing, at the same time as I want to let him lay his head on my shoulder and tell him to weep until it all goes away.

  He’d bloody apologized to Dallin for blacking his eye, when it was very likely Dallin’s rough treatment that had resulted in his near-blindness—thank the Mother it only seemed temporary. And that apology… Dallin wished he knew why it made his teeth clench. Nearly as much as Calder’s confused, half-hearted defense of Dallin to the healer. I didn’t do this, Dallin had told her, and he hadn’t, really, at least not the worst of it, but Calder’s odd vindication had hit him right in the conscience.

  “I’m tired,” Calder murmured from across the small cell. “I want to…” He swallowed, head still ducked down, and shoulders still hunched. He looked like a bloody weevil, trying to hide up his own arse. “May I sleep?”

  For the love of the Mother, I’m not your bloody keeper! Dallin wanted to shout—except, he was. What was he, if not the man’s jailer? Protector? Guardian? Ha. He’d put at least several of those bruises on Calder, and he was standing here thinking about how good it would feel to wrap his hands about that throat and start squeezing.

  He sucked back a growl, beat back the fury that wanted to wrench at his chest, inexplicably rising because the simple request for some sleep had been exactly that—a request and not a statement, not a demand. Damn it, he didn’t want to break the man. He only wanted…

  Well. He didn’t really know. The truth. A truth he could believe and could do something about. A definition of what his job was going to be when he found it. A surety that he would be able to do what was right if it turned out that ‘right’ conflicted with his duty to Jagger and to the Constabulary and to bloody Cynewísan, for all that. Because it was looking more and more like what the laws of his country required him to do was going to be in direct contrast to what his instincts were telling him.

  “All right,” Dallin finally said, pointedly looked down at his boots and not at Calder. “A few more questions and then we’ll let it go for a bit.” Calder sagged a little, but didn’t protest, just sat there, waiting. “You said you found me.” Dallin went back to his chair, lowered himself into it. “How? Can you… whatever it is you do—go inside my head?”

  Calder shook his head, frowned, like the question troubled him. “No,” he said in a voice that was quiet but steady. “I found…” He paused, took a wobbly breath, and with obvious effort, lifted his chin and looked Dallin in the eye. He looked like he’d rather swallow broken glass than finish the sentence. “I found your mother.”

  Dallin refused to let it hit like a sucker-punch, refused to even feel. He nodded calmly, trained his voice steady. “So, you’ve tried to look inside my head, and couldn’t?” Calder paled a little, but willfully kept his gaze locked to Dallin’s. Nodded. Dallin sighed a little. Even though he wasn’t sure he even believed any of this story yet, that admission relieved him. “And that’s why you were so surprised when you saw me in Putnam? You thought I was dead?”

  Calder opened his mouth at that, then closed it, broke the stare and looked down. Something was there, something he didn’t want to say. Dallin wasn’t so sure he wanted to know it, considering, but after all, how much worse could it possibly be?

  “What?” he asked sharply.

  Calder jumped, flashed him a quick, uneasy glance, shook his head. “I knew.” It was so quiet that Dallin wasn’t even sure he heard it.

  “Knew what?” he demanded.

  There was a pause, heavy and filled with so much tension it was like a static charge in the air. Calder nearly crackled with it.

  Dallin resisted the driving need to launch himself at Calder and shake the answer out of him. “Knew. What?” he snarled.

  The tears came again, sliding fat and slow down pale, bruised cheeks. Dallin watched them, knew he could stop them easily, knew how to take an overwhelmed suspect and gently pry the confession that wanted to come. He couldn’t make himself do it, half-sick with the low rumble of satisfaction that purred in his heart at the sight of those miserable tears.

  Then, fi
nally: “I knew they hadn’t got you,” Calder whispered. “I knew you got away.” He looked up at Dallin, those damnable tears dripping slow from swollen, bloodshot eyes. “Siofra didn’t bother… he ordered them to kill all of the boys, all of the young men, and they told him they did, no one saw you escape, he only asked me if the Guardian was gone, and… well, you were. He didn’t ask me if you were dead, and you were gone from Lind, so I said… I told him yes, that you were gone, and he only told me to keep watching Lind for… well, for…”

  The next Guardian, he didn’t say. Dallin took this in with keen interest. “And you found…?”

  Calder cringed, flinched like Dallin had just hit him. “She didn’t…” He swallowed, heavily, like he had a boulder in his throat. Dallin had never had a telepathic encounter in his life, but he knew somehow who the ‘she’ was to whom Calder referred. “She loved you very—”

  “Don’t—” Dallin’s teeth were clenched so tight he thought they might shatter. He was closer than he’d ever been to reaching out and snapping the man’s neck. “Do not presume to tell me anything about my mother,” he said slowly, allowing every bit of anger and threat to show plainly in his face, his voice. “I want nothing from you but an answer to my question.”

  Calder resisted cringing with a very conscious and obvious effort. “I knew you were alive,” he answered faintly.

  “And why didn’t you tell?”

  A look of real bewilderment and anger crossed Calder’s face, and for the first time since this latest confession, he looked away, shook his head.

  Dallin’s hands curled into fists again, and he leaned forward in his chair, crowding in and making Calder instinctively press his back farther into the wall. “Why,” he said through his teeth, “didn’t you tell?”

  “I don’t know,” Calder whispered, drawing his arms across his middle and his knees closer to his chest.

  “Not good enough,” Dallin growled. “I’ll have an answer, damn it. I want to know why you didn’t—”

  “Because he never asked!” Calder shouted. “Because my whole bloody life was have to and I didn’t have to! Because it was a little bit of mutiny that was mine. Because if you lived, it meant you might one day hunt me down and put me out of my misery. Because—” He choked, closed his eyes, as close to actual broken whimpering as Dallin had ever seen him. “Because I told her I wouldn’t.”

  The tone was heavy with decimated remorse and ruin, but the words were sharp enough to drive into Dallin’s chest like knives. All of the air went out of him, and he sat there, staring and shaking his head slowly back and forth, trying to deny the faltering confession, but somehow unable to dismiss it like he wanted to.

  “I’d never been there when… when someone died before,” Calder went on, halting, like he wanted to stop but couldn’t. “It was so real and solid, I was actually standing in grass, right in front of her, it was like I was free, and she… she smiled at me, touched my cheek.” A small sob warbled its way from his throat. “She said… she said you were a good boy, that you’d be a good man, that you’d come, told me I mustn’t tell, mustn’t let them know—she asked me, looked right at me and asked me, and…” He seemed to collapse into himself, head sinking down to his knees. “How could I say no,” he asked, toneless now and quiet enough to be almost without sound, “when I didn’t even really want to?”

  Dallin… stared. He couldn’t do anything else. Mind caroming back and forth between he was only six and but… my mother.

  The boys didn’t occur to him, all those boys who hadn’t been smuggled out in the back of a tinker’s cart, not until he realized he was holding back a jagged little moan. He’d known of the deaths, the destruction. He’d deliberately lived the scenes in his head, time and again, until he could look at it without vomiting; but he hadn’t even speculated it might have been because of him.

  It wasn’t—he’s lying or insane; you can’t rearrange every conviction you’ve ever had because of some wild tale told by a delusional maniac.

  It made so much sense. So, why couldn’t he make himself stop considering the possibilities?

  He didn’t know how long he sat there, staring, scenes long put away playing once again behind his eyes, voices he hadn’t heard in over twenty years now clear and vivid in his head. It was like he was that child all over again, that twelve-year-old boy who wasn’t allowed to feel the things he felt out loud and in the open, so he felt them down deep, where no one could see them, scrutinize them, judge him weak because he did feel them, and felt them hard. He was no boy now. Now, no tears came to threaten at the corners of Constable Brayden’s eyes, no cries of loss weltered at the bottom of Constable Brayden’s throat.

  Constable Brayden merely stood slowly, picked up the chair and left the cell, closing and locking the door behind him. And then Constable Brayden let himself out of the Office, tipping a calm nod and half a counterfeit smile to the man standing post, directed his gaze straight ahead and started walking.

  ***

  He walked steadily south, with no real purpose to his course except that it was the opposite direction of the Dominion. And that it would take him away from Calder.

  Except he no longer felt comfortable calling him that. It seemed… improper. It wasn’t his name, it was stolen, and perhaps it was silly, but Dallin had a problem with a stolen surname. A given name was just that—given—with only a small history attached, if it was inherited, and in more cases than not, no history at all except for the fact that someone’s mother and father had liked the sound of it in conjunction with the surname. But a surname was history, inherited by son after son after son, all the way back to the Clans, and using one that didn’t belong to you just seemed wrong.

  He was the twelfth Brayden, and considering his preferences, likely the last. His father had died when he was only eight, before he’d had the chance to teach Dallin everything the name meant, hand down the songs of Lind’s history with that name inside them, but he’d instilled in his son the respect of lineage.

  He couldn’t imagine the Calders had done less.

  He’d have to get used to calling him ‘Wil,’ he supposed, though it seemed… familiar. Which made him uncomfortable. But less uncomfortable than the alternative.

  All right. Wil it is. One problem down. Now, let’s think about the important ones you’re busy not letting yourself think about.

  He pressed his mouth into a hard line, took a long breath of chill autumn air.

  All right, start with the most obvious: he didn’t kill her.

  True.

  He was a pawn, used since birth, weaned on betrayal and cruelty.

  If what the tale he’d told could be believed, also true.

  He thinks I’m some mythical creature, born solely to make sure he behaves himself, and apparently, since he hasn’t, I’m to take him out.

  Oddly true.

  My village was raided when I was a boy, a third of its population decimated, most of them boys and young men, and among them… my mother.

  Very sadly true.

  He told them.

  Dallin looked down, watched his boots eat the ground, frowned.

  …True?

  It had the feel of it. He’d learnt to trust his gut, heed his instincts, and they were telling him that he’d seen the truth of that raid even as it happened. He’d seen young men, boys, dragged out from their homes and shot, hacked, fathers only being put to sword if they got in the way. The Dominion hadn’t been out to annex a tiny border freehold that meant nothing in the greater map of geographic strategy; they’d been out to wipe out an entire generation of males. It had clicked into place like some long-lost puzzle piece the moment it stuttered from Cald— Wil’s mouth, like Dallin had known it all along and had simply never thought about it with his head before.

  It felt like truth…

  Except, if he believed that, he had to more-or-less believe everything else.

  His country’s traditional enemy was trying to hunt down a man who supposedly
invaded the dreams of others to gain the advantage in combat—all right, if he took that as fact, what was he supposed to do about it? There were no laws for this, no rules, not even a vague guideline, and whatever he did would likely end up going against some law or rule or guideline.

  He shook his head, flung his glance about the leaf-strewn lane on which he found himself, tried to pay attention to the scenery and couldn’t.

  He was going about this all wrong. He needed to approach it from different angles, weigh the evidence of each, and then formulate his theories.

  So, what if everything the man had said was the truth?

  All right, that would mean that we’re talking about a man who can alter the course of a war just by falling asleep. He didn’t just muck about in other people’s heads when he was ordered to—he went against orders to do it, and he had to have been pretty damned motivated, because he talked about it like it was some kind of soul-flaying ordeal. So, this is a man who can spy inside people’s heads, and the only reason he has not to do it is the pain, which, according to him, he has already withstood for the ‘greater purpose’ of getting even with Siofra.

  There was also the matter of what Jagger had told Dallin about Siofra and Orman. Someone who could drive another man mad with a single look sounded like someone who would be capable of just about anything. That kind of man with any power was bad enough, but that kind of man with the power to direct the course of others’ lives through dreams? And what better way to do it? Men were at their most vulnerable, most open and unguarded in dreams.