The Aisling Trilogy

by Cummings, Carole

  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 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.”

  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 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?”

  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.”

  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 p
ossible? 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 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 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 happened 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.”

  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.

  This time, he’d been back in the Army, on one of the many Border campaigns for which he’d volunteered, the one that had earned him his Captain’s rank in only his second year. I swear, that one won’t be happy ’til he hacks through the Dominion and over the ramparts of the Guild itself, Colonel Mancy had told Dallin’s commander back then. Except in the dream, Mancy kept asking Dallin the words to the songs of the old gods. And every time Dallin couldn’t answer, Mancy would turn into Manning, amiable Librarian-now-tutor to an adolescent once-Linder, sliding a book with no pictures at Dallin, telling him if he didn’t decode it his father would die. Dallin kept trying to explain that he didn’t have the key to the code, and anyway, his father was already dead, but then Manning would turn into a tiny burnt skeleton, Clan-marks glowing phosphorescent on the flesh of a cheek that wasn’t there, point a small bony finger at him like it was his fault, and tell him he’d forgotten his name.

  The other, the one he was coming to think of the Watcher Dream, had come again after, just as vivid and violent as it had been the night before. And, as it had been the night before, it left him just as angry as shaken.

  So, after he’d grumbled awake, relieved Wil from watch and made sure he was safely asleep, Dallin dug out the book Manning had loaned him, and waited for a faint tint of dawn so he could make out the words.

  He hadn’t read much past the Aisling legend, but he remembered a mention of the old gods and their fates in there somewhere, and since they seemed to be the point of the damned dreams, he likely wasn’t going to be able to set them aside until he figured out why. Even if the dreams were just nonsensical rubbish—which dreams generally were and precisely why Dallin hadn’t missed his—perhaps forcing some reason into their crevices would at least take away some of their power. And let him get some bloody sleep.<
br />
  The book didn’t have much more than a few passing references. Apparently, the old gods were still about but spellbound and trapped inside of evergreens somewhere.

  Uh-huh. Likely some kind of metaphor for something a lot less poetic, and really not helpful.

  Luckily—not only for Dallin’s mood, but he suspected for his sanity—Wil had woken in a more pleasant mood; seemed, in fact, to have made up his mind to forget his pique altogether. He was back to his semi-amiable self, though perhaps somewhat subdued this morning when Dallin told him they’d likely reach Chester in a another two or three days. Dallin occupied himself with drawing Wil out further to get his mind off the horses again, and Dallin’s own mind off of darker matters. He finally succeeded when he happened to mention the Kymberly and Sunny Ramsford in passing. Wil perked right up.

  “You know the Ramsfords?”

  Dallin had been flailing a little up ’til then, so he latched onto the common thread. “I do, and very well,” he answered as he re-packed his kit. “For years, in fact. I stood Second at their wedding.”

  “Get on,” Wil said, boggled.

  “Ramsford had some very nice things to say about you, y’know,” Dallin ventured.

  “About me?” Blinking now, with a bemused lift of black eyebrows.

  Dallin nodded, slanting a look at Wil from his crouch near the saddles. “He’s the one asked for me on the case.

  Told my chief he was worried about you and wanted me to see no harm came to you.”

  Wil’s mouth worked. Dallin waited for the sarcastic retorts about what had actually come of that first night, wondering if he should bring up Wil’s own dodging and then running in his own defense, if he found himself accused. Again. Instead, Wil whiffed a small, surprised laugh, said, “That was very kind of him.”

  Dallin’s own eyebrows rose. He nodded. “It was. But not surprising. He’s a very kind man.”