The Aisling Trilogy

by Cummings, Carole

  Wil had stopped laughing, his smile now weary and lopsided, and still twitching like he was trying to wipe it off and couldn’t, but the soft gaze still throttled screams behind it. His eyes drifted down, caught on the bloodstain spidered over one side of his shirt. He stared at it like he’d never seen it before, then dismissed it like it didn’t matter. He slid down the rough trunk of the tree, a bit of a snorting whoof puffing from him when his arse hit the ground, and he blinked and squinted as a light drizzle began to fall.

  “At my command,” he murmured, nodding like he was trying to push the sense of it through his muzzy mind. He reached out, flicked Dallin’s fringe clumsily from his brow with his dirty, blood-stained fingers, leaned in until his head was flopped once again on Dallin’s shoulder. “Don’t leave me alone,” he whispered, then: “I want… please… so tired.” Fading quickly now, and what had it been costing him to remain even this aware? Would he even remember any of what they’d just said?

  Dallin tried not to let the worry gnaw at him, told himself he was borrowing trouble. He dragged Wil in close, squeezing gently, mindful of the wound. “I’m not going anywhere,” he promised, squeezing harder, as hard as he dared, as Wil’s body crumpled against him, going limp and too bendy. Dallin let himself feel it for as long as he needed to, let himself know the warmth and contact until he was sure he would remember it, even if everything else was taken from him. Then he shook himself, dragged Wil to his feet, and slid a lanky arm across his shoulders to hold him up. “C’mon, then,” he told Wil quietly. He reached out, called to Miri and the gray, and started steering Wil, leaning heavier and drooping against him more by the second, over toward the others waiting for them in a loose ring about Calder’s body. “We’ve still got a ways to go, and now you’ve gone and made it rain.”

  “’s because ’m sad,” Wil mumbled into his shoulder.

  And somehow, that made all the sense in the world to Dallin. He bowed his head, dropped a kiss to Wil’s dirty hair. “So am I,” he whispered, allowed himself a heavy sigh, and guided Wil carefully over to the others.

  They gnawed on jerky and hardtack while they waited for the horses, Corliss and Woodrow somewhat skeptical when Dallin told them laconically that they’d all have their mounts back shortly. Andette and the others merely folded down around one of the smaller fires and broke out travel sustenance from their saddlebags to share about. All of them shot surreptitious glances at Wil, though. Out cold again, head propped on the pack Corliss had retrieved from where they’d left the horses—farther down the path where the fires wouldn’t spook them—and covered with a coat from one of the young men. Seaf, if Dallin was remembering right. Nine of them sat in the loose circle, two of them keeping watch about the temporary perimeter, one watching the horses, and all of them shifting glances at Wil that looked remarkably alike—awe and sympathy and a hard little glint beneath it all that Dallin couldn’t quite put his finger on. If he had to guess, he’d name it possessive protectiveness. Which would make Wil twitch and snarl, probably, but which made Dallin nod to himself in newfound satisfaction.

  “How many did you get back there?” he asked Woodrow, looking the entire party over for injuries. Apparently, there’d been only one: a taciturn young woman who’d guardedly introduced herself as Setenne sported a quickly bruising gouge angling up over her wide forehead. Bullet graze, it wasn’t hard to determine. Everyone else appeared relatively unscathed. Mud and sweat and the still-lingering nibble of fear and adrenaline didn’t count.

  “There were eight, by my reckoning,” Woodrow told him, shaking his head with a puzzled frown as he followed Dallin, retrieving the rifle and the crossbow from where they’d been dropped in the brush. “We got five of them, and the rest scattered.” He paused, chewed his lip; Dallin waited him out. “It was easy,” Woodrow finally went on. “Too easy. Either they were trying to get shot, or they’ve little enough training so as not to count.”

  Dallin nodded, said, “Mm,” and sat down with the others. “A little of both, I expect. They’re priests, mostly, or at least they think they are, though what they worship…” His mouth tightened, and he shook his head. “Their god poses as the Father, and they have a calling of sorts, but I think…” He pondered. “I think he can only reach those who… who already have a weakness toward him, if that makes any sense. The rest, he has to rely on those like Wheeler to charm for him, but I don’t think they would be so willing to die as the Brethren are. He seeks out those most easily used and uses them, speaks to them with the voice of a god and hands them a calling. And it doesn’t matter if they die for him, because all he has to do is find a hundred more to take their places, and he doesn’t seem to have a lot of problem with that bit of it.”

  “This is that Aeledfýres you’ve been talking about,” Corliss put in.

  Dallin merely nodded, staring at Wil’s rifle in his hands. He hadn’t been talking about it, actually; he’d called to the land and everyone in it, shown them the enemy as he’d sat and meditated on a horse that he was now waiting for so he could stand at Wil’s back while he faced another monster. But Dallin supposed he couldn’t blame Corliss for trying to bend it all into practical shapes in her mind.

  She was silent for a while, staring at him; then she leaned back, looked away. “Seems a big thing to tangle with,” she remarked, trying to make it an idle observation and not quite succeeding.

  Dallin shrugged, opened a hand. “We’ll find out, I expect.”

  Corliss set her jaw, working herself up to saying something else, Dallin had no doubt, then tilted her head. “Brayden—”

  “It’s real,” he told her steadily. “I know it’s difficult to imagine me as… as anything other than how you’ve known me, but the Guardian is real and I’m it. Wil and I… we can do this. We haven’t any choice.”

  Corliss looked away again, shook her head. “’Tisn’t difficult to imagine at all,” she said quietly, shrugged and tried to smile. “I’m afraid it suits you.”

  That seemed to quash any chatter for the moment. The rain was still coming in a light drizzle, just enough to add a low hiss to the sound of the dying fires, and slick skin and hair, but not enough to seep through coats yet. Anyway, the trees blocked most of it, and they were as comfortable as they could be for this short respite with no one shooting at them.

  “You’re bleeding,” Corliss told Dallin, flicking a glance down to the stiffening stain on his coat when he frowned over at her.

  Dallin peered down at his arm, surprised when he remembered there was a bullet stuck in there somewhere and it had better come out soon. And now that his attention had been called to it—fucking ow.

  He’d never been shot before, and he sat back for a moment, pondering his luck in that respect. Eight years in the military, more of that time spent on the front lines than not. He’d been grazed twice by arrows, wrenched his ankle once leaping from the saddle in the thick of things, and had suffered a few bruised ribs when a particularly messy skirmish had ended in hand-to-hand, which quickly degenerated into hand-to-axe-handle. Almost ten years as a constable. In all that time, he’d had a gun turned on him three times, but never a shot fired, and as far as assault… well, the criminals in Putnam tended to rather stand down when they saw him coming at them. Either that or run. Never shot, not even scarred, really, but for where he’d healed too fast after the stabbing and the healing skin had more-or-less absorbed the black sutures. There was a lumpy little line of vaguely pink-blue-black on his lower back now.

  Strange. All that time spent virtually wearing a target on his back, and the two times he’d actually been hurt—really hurt, in a life-threatening sort of way—Calder had been, if not precisely aiming at him, at least not in Chester, then nonetheless present. Dallin thought about examining the oddity of it, but dismissed it instead. Too many other directions in which to focus his attention, and suspecting that the Old Ones—or someone who used to be one—had the power to hurt him didn’t exactly surprise him. The other possibility—that his
defenses, his instinct toward selfpreservation, seemed to diminish when Wil needed his Guardian—was dismissed before Dallin had even allowed it to form fully in his mind.

  He angled his arm out of his coat sleeve and tore the little hole in his shirt until he could see the wound. Still bleeding, but slow and thick now, beginning to congeal. Wash it out and bandage it for now, and worry about it later, if there was a later.

  “Have you got anything for bandages?” he asked Corliss with a wince as he poked a little too hard at the jagged edges of the wound.

  “Well,” Corliss said, dubious, “I do, but…” She let her gaze wander over to Wil, his head resting on her pack, where, presumably, the bandages were.

  Dallin just had to snort. Here she was, watching one of her oldest friends oozing blood down his arm, and she didn’t want to get a bandage out of her pack because it might disturb Wil. He rolled his eyes, tore away the already bloodied sleeve of his shirt and held it out. “Tie that about it, can you?”

  Corliss raised an eyebrow. “I thought you could…” She shrugged, waved her hand about. “…you know.”

  “I can,” Dallin told her. “But it takes a bit of strength, and I think I’m going to need all of it in just a bit.” He ignored the way her mouth tightened in worry, and nodded toward Wil. “He’s got one in him, too.” Again he snorted, shook his head, when Corliss voiced a startled noise of alarm. “I’ve taken care of it as much as necessary,” Dallin assured her. “Should probably tend to it a little more thoroughly before I get him up on a horse, but we’ll get him fixed up when this business is through.” My, my, Brayden, aren’t you the optimistic Guardian? He smirked at Corliss, deliberately cheerful. “Think you can be moved to dig up a bandage for him?

  Corliss scowled, snatched the sleeve out Dallin’s hand, and began tearing it in long strips, setting aside the bits that were soaked through and draping the cleaner ones over her bent knee. “You always were a smart-arse,” she muttered.

  “What do you mean to do?” Andette asked quietly.

  Dallin had been wondering how he was going to address what happened with her, if he even should, and he thought perhaps addressing it, making sure she was all right, was his responsibility somehow. Still, he was glad when he was saved from further conversation with her by a low whistle from the direction of the man watching the horses. Miri was back. Dallin got to his feet, made a vague apology to Andette, and took himself over in time to greet the mare. He grinned at the young man who held her bridle, when they heard a single set of hoofbeats in the distance.

  “Corliss!” he called. “Un-squirrel those bandages, yeah? We’re leaving in five minutes.”

  It took more like twenty. Wil’s dead-weight was floppier and harder to manage than Dallin had thought. Dallin concentrated on maneuvering him about, then holding him in place, while Corliss focused on winding the bandage over shoulder and chest to get the wound covered by a temporary dressing. Dallin had managed to stop the bleeding altogether before, but he hadn’t dared to begin the actual healing process until the bullet could be removed. Hopefully, the temporary fix would hold until…

  Until.

  Dawn was trying to bully its way through the gathered cloud-cover when they wrangled Wil back into his coat and up into the saddle with Dallin, but so far all it had managed to do was turn the black to a grudging gray. The thunder had subsided, but the rain seemed to be digging in to stay, and considering what Wil had said, Dallin didn’t suppose he was much surprised. Depressingly fitting, in a way. It would make the last stretch of uphill travel a bit more difficult, though. He hadn’t realized it while they’d been beneath the shelter of the trees and what with the fires still sputtering and all, but once they got back out on the trail and in the relative open, the drizzle had already resolved itself into sharp little spicules of sleet. Not ideal for hoofs. Especially not hoofs belonging to a poxy gray stallion who thought walking was beneath him.

  “You carry the Aisling,” Dallin told the gray—stern, but still under his breath, since he saw no reason to share his bit of vagary with the others. “Watch your step, or I’ll have your hide for gloves.” He was suddenly sorry that he hadn’t asked the horse’s master for a name so he could use a more direct address; it always seemed to work for Wil, after all.

  The warning was unnecessary, as it turned out: Miri, trailing on her lead behind Woodrow, seemed determined to keep the gray in line with the occasional cross snort and nip to his neck. Dallin had no illusions that she was doing it as a personal favor to him, of course. In fact, it was more likely that she was merely pissed off and jealous that her own saddle was empty. If she were a woman, she’d be making cow-eyes at Wil.

  There were three more skirmishes, rather rote exchanges of gunfire, in which no one was truly threatened, and the hollow sounds of misses and ricochets were more annoying than worrying. Dallin felt their pursuers coming each time, drew the small party into a tighter knot about him and Wil, just in case, but knowing what they thought they were doing made it so his heart didn’t even bother skipping beats, except in irritation. It was tempting to call out to the land, see if he could try Wil’s trick of making the ground move and swallow them up, but that would give away his own intent. Dallin’s party wouldn’t exactly have the element of surprise on their side when they reached FAeðme, but it still might be at least a small surprise to Wheeler that they were actually aiming for it and knew what to do once they got there.

  Wheeler would’ve looked into Dallin’s history back in Putnam and would have deduced that Dallin had spent more than twenty years ignorant of what he was, untrained and unpracticed. Wheeler was doing everything he could now to keep it that way. He couldn’t possibly know that it wasn’t entirely true anymore, and pretending their drive to FAeðme was flight instead of direction was the best way to perpetuate the error.

  So Dallin allowed the Brethren to keep pace, allowed them to ‘drive’ their course. If what Wil had said was correct—and Dallin had no doubt it was—Wheeler would have had to detour into the tunnels all the way back at Éaspring, and he’d have to be on foot. Even if the tunnels ran in straight lines, and were clear of cave-ins or debris, it was at least twelve leagues from there to the Temple.

  Dallin closed his eyes, slipped a light reach outward; Wheeler was only just now under the river, and the way ahead was all uphill and not exactly uncomplicated. Time was ticking steadily and relentlessly, but it hadn’t run out yet.

  It was getting easier to see, gray day finally winning over grayer dawn, by the time they broke through the heavier foliage and out onto a slim corridor of mud and wintergrass that formed the final leg of the trail to the Temple. Dallin could see the white curves of the dome and pediments nudging through the evergreens, behind which it thrust its peak at the sky. “Almost there,” he whispered to Wil, who’d been slumped against Dallin’s chest, unresponsive, since they’d left Calder’s body behind.

  White and gray striated marble, Dallin remembered now, with moss- and ivy-covered pillars presenting before somewhat redundant pilasters. Quarters for the Old Ones were niched into a long, narrow corridor that ran the length of the Temple’s west-facing side behind the altar, which —as in all temples—faced the east, so as to stand witness when the Mother awoke each morning and brought the sun as She smiled a greeting to Her Beloved. And beneath the altar, where supplicants whispered their orisons and laid offerings, and initiates humbly and silently accepted them in the Mother’s and Father’s names, a single, incongruous slab of granite, cut from the Stairs before time was Time, barred the entry to FAeðme—the Mother’s Womb, from which all life sprang—from all but the Old Ones and those they deemed worthy. Dallin remembered the scrape and grate of the stone as a young boy, weeping and demanding the call of the horns, watched it levered aside, his anger and resentment temporarily forgotten beneath the new apprehension of being compelled down the dark earthen throat of Lind.

  Now, all these years later, he wasn’t at all surprised to see the twelve figures standing
in the cold rain before the steps, watching the path, waiting for them as they negotiated through the last of the trees that rung the clearing in which the Temple stood. Dallin halted, the rest of the party following his lead without comment, and nodded to Woodrow and Setenne to take Wil.

  Dallin waited until they had Wil’s limp form propped safely between them, upright and with his feet on the ground, but not exactly standing, his arms across their shoulders. When he was sure they held Wil securely, Dallin dismounted, taking the time to stretch his spine, readjust to having his feet on the ground. He paused, looked from the Old Ones—pristine in their formal robes, standing tall and waiting patiently—and back again to his own party, disheveled and dirty and exhausted, but gazes bright and alert, more sanguine than he might have given them credit for a few days ago. Then, he might have been surprised that the expressions on the faces of Corliss and Woodrow matched those on the Linders; now, it seemed a logical consequence of the chain of events that had brought them all here.

  He thought about taking Wil himself, carrying him up the Temple steps and presenting him to the Mother formally, before they made the descent into FAeðme. In the end, he decided it would seem too much like laying a prize from a hunt across the altar, a helpless offering, so he let Woodrow and Setenne keep Wil between them instead.

  Sucking in a long breath, Dallin gave them all a nod, gesturing for them to follow as he turned and started across the pale, sleet-coated grass and toward the picket of priests that waited. He eyed every one of them as he approached, stared evenly into one set of eyes before moving on to the next. Giving away nothing in his gaze or mien, Dallin fetched up in front of Thorne. Thorne merely looked back at him, wearing the same kind half-smile he always wore, his iron-blond hair plastered to his skull and slicked with ice, robes heavy and frozen-wet. They must have been waiting here for hours, probably making their way up last night after they’d disappeared from camp.