The Aisling Trilogy

by Cummings, Carole

  “Shut up,” he wheezes.

  “They burned me, Dallin, did he tell you that? And you would choose him?”

  Burned alive. He’s always feared it, never wondered, pushed it away, and convinced himself that her death was as clean as the runes on the notice that had listed her name among the dead, gentle as Mrs. Tanner’s voice when she’d read it to him. Burned alive, a blackened skeleton, the very first of his ghosts, kept company by but set above the children of Lind, and he supposes he knows now why those of Ríocht and Kenley have haunted him so.

  “No,” Wil warbles, weak and watery. “Not true.”

  Dallin knows that, he does, but…

  Burnt.

  The bastard isn’t just inside Dallin’s head—he’s inside nightmares Dallin had refused to know were there.

  It’s strange, now that Dallin thinks about it, now that it’s slammed him in the chest, that he’s never asked Wil how she died when Wil has confessed to being there when she breathed her last. No, not strange, not really—one more thing Dallin had buried, refused to look at, though the horror of it has been waiting inside him, a malignant seed sprung to life by a daemon wearing his mother’s face, speaking with his mother’s voice, and this… this is low. This is obscene.

  A chittering buzz leaks over his mind, spreading like the skittering legs of an army of spiders kicked from their nest and marching over his thoughts. An exploratory prod, seeking cracks, then a push that rocks him just enough to make him pay attention. He wants to slam down his defenses, clamp his barriers over everything he is, but he catches himself just in time. Instead, he throws power at it, feels it like ropes of lightning in his hands, and spears it with whatever strength and magic are his.

  A scream in his mother’s voice; the pungent stink of burning hair; the stench of charring meat. “Dallin-lad!” A pitiful shriek. “You know how he loves the burning. Would you let him murder me twice?”

  Going for the soft underbelly, because Aeledfýres is in Dallin’s head, pulling out all of the things that are Dallin’s and parading them in front of him, and all Dallin can do is look away. Driving the knife deep, because Dallin handed it over, Aeledfýres knows, and there’s nothing Dallin can do but endure it.

  “It isn’t real,” he pants, clenching his teeth and shaking his head, a light spring of clammy sweat threading his brow. “She isn’t there, it isn’t her,” then, a little bit desperate: “Wil?” And he’s there, taking Dallin’s hand, telling him, “It isn’t true, she didn’t burn,” in a wavering voice that’s just this side of panicked. “I didn’t tell them about her, Dallin, I swear, you don’t—”

  “I know,” Dallin husks, breathless, his whole body heavy, weighted down. He opens his eyes, looks first at Wil, notes the look of fear that just won’t do, not here, not now, so he repeats, “I know,” urgent, because Wil really needs to believe it; his strength is huge and limitless, but too fragile a thing. He never believes its depth, and they need it now.

  They’re on the defensive, trying to hold their own, get their bearings, when the strategy is so obvious it makes Dallin’s pride curl up in shame that he’s allowing it. His focus is scattered and too driven by reacting—damn it, he’s better at war than this. The monster is winning, quietly but steadily, burying the real danger inside this cheap, overt offensive, pushing so subtly and slyly that it’s slipping right past them both. And Dallin’s just standing here and letting him do it.

  “Push him back,” he tells Wil, low and through his teeth. “Make him bleed.”

  Wil looks over Dallin’s shoulder, shies away from whatever it is he sees, wild eyes scudding back to Dallin’s. He shakes his head. “You… she’s your—”

  “That,” Dallin snarls, “is not my mother.” Another shriek, and now the sounds are getting to him, fire crackling and hissing, and he wants more than anything to just haul himself out of this place, shut down everything, and flee. He takes hold of Wil’s arms, grates, “I need you. I can’t do this, I don’t have the right magic… this isn’t…” He squeezes his eyes shut, blinks away the stinging behind them, gives his head a sharp shake. “You have to do it.” Quiet and as composed as he can make it. “For me, Wil. Please.”

  Dallin doesn’t know how much of it is for his own benefit and how much of it is for Wil’s, but he watches it ease Wil, watches him dig down and find his concentration and calm. That telltale lift of his chin, and Wil merely hardens his gaze, nods.

  Dallin steadies himself on that strength, lets Wil see his belief in it, his reliance on it, before he straightens his back, sucks in a long breath, and turns.

  He was expecting something shocking and gruesome, but this… this is bad.

  Beautiful, untouched, unmarred, just as he remembers her, young and vital and stronger than the mountains. Her smile is perfection, and Dallin wonders a little dazedly how Aeledfýres had managed to mimic it so flawlessly, how he’d managed to imitate the love and comfort and the bit of steel Dallin remembers so well it’s like a cramp in his heart. And then he realizes it comes from his own mind, his most precious memories perverted and twisted to another’s purpose, and the revulsion shatters through him again. A violation of a mind, a rape of a memory, and it both sickens and infuriates him. He’s almost glad he’s nailed to the spot, because if he were to try to move, he thinks he’ll stumble.

  “Burn it,” he breathes. Aeledfýres, the god of bloody fire, and Dallin wants—oh, he wants—to see his own Gift used against him… wants the poetic irony to hurt.

  Wil only stares at Dallin for a long moment, uncertain. “There are other—”

  “Burn it!” Dallin snarls, makes himself watch as what pretends to be his mother watches him back knowingly, that soft look of love and strength twisting into a mask of mock-fear and horror. And now Dallin can truly remove himself, can wholly convince himself that this is not his mother. A daughter of Lind, born and bred, and she would never show fear so plainly, never offer her sorrow like a gift in an open hand, not even when her land is burning around her and she is heaving her only son and the hope of the Mother into the back of a cart. Dallin can watch as white flame closes around her, as her screams wrench the air and split the sky, as her skin bubbles and blisters, then burns, as her hair catches and makes a ghoulish halo of her melting face. He can watch as the remains of the mask shrink and blacken and mutate into the twisted form of a child, the Mark blazing fire on a cheek that’s not there. He can watch and not feel, which he thinks is likely the best he can hope for.

  Dallin can actually feel the push this time, the shove, the power coursing through every fiber of him, unfolding itself out to Wil, and Wil takes it in, uses it. “He’s too strong,” Wil grates, but he doesn’t give in, doesn’t allow so much as a hitch or hiccup as he reels in power, turns it into strength, then hurls it. Aeledfýres’ chuckle comes from beneath the shrieks in Dallin’s mother’s blackened throat, lurid and too deliberate. Dallin’s mind tells him none of it’s real, but a disgusted shudder still walks up his spine.

  Wil is panting, the strain all too evident, and Dallin can feel the conflict in the air as though it’s the meeting of two stormfronts, a clash of wills that dredges all of the oxygen from the air, all of the color from the shifting vista. The shrieking of the cindered slag of bone and charred flesh sounds real enough, the pain and thwarted intent inside it adding to the weight that clutches at Dallin’s chest and drags the wind from his lungs. Power runs through him, but it slides into him, then back out before he can snatch enough to let him breathe. Wil’s hand is clenched tight about Dallin’s fingers, sucking everything through him, throwing it all at Aeledfýres, pushing as hard as he can and stretching it all around himself and Dallin like a barrier, a penumbra of strength.

  Dallin has a wild, giddy moment of satisfaction—I think he might really do this, then, Ha, told ’em all—before there’s a shudder in the air, a heavy whine, and he realizes it’s not enough. Still merely holding their own, not gaining ground, and if this is all there is, it could go on fore
ver. Or until Wil wearies and can’t hold his own anymore. Before Dallin has a chance to dig down and snatch for more, there’s a thin pop and the carcass is gone—just gone—like it’s folded into itself, winked out without prelude or drama.

  Wil stumbles back, shaking and sweating, his breath blowing in and out like he’s been drowning. Dallin feels the sharp snap of recoil, like he’d felt when healing was snatched from his grasp by death at Andette’s hands. Wil peers about warily, and Dallin can tell that Wil is as aware as he is that it can’t be that simple. More is coming. Aeledfýres is merely taking their measure, seeking their boundaries, and gathering his strategy. If what’s already past is any indication, Dallin wonders a little despondently what other horrors are coming, because he has no doubt whatsoever that it’s bound to get worse.

  “Too easy,” Wil mutters, shaking his head and flicking his glance everywhere. “He’s playing with us.”

  Dallin doesn’t even have time to agree. He’s shoved, his hand torn from Wil’s, pain like he’s never known rupturing through him, saw-toothed shards of himself ripping loose, bursting through his chest in breathless agony.

  “The Guardian is no more,” a deep, silky voice whispers to him, and he thinks this is the true voice of the Soul-eater, low and seductive, as he should have expected of a beguiler, and even inside the revulsion, pieces of him torn away, ripping great, gaping holes in his sanity, he hears the beauty inside the tone, the allure. “You are in my way, Mother’s mule.”

  And he’s flung, hurtling through nothing, agony chewing him up with gnashing teeth as he reaches out for his own Self, grips it in a mental fist. It only ramps up the torment, his bones liquefying inside muscles turned to broken glass, his mind bellowing in near-paralyzing shock and pain, and the harder he hangs on, the more intense the torture becomes. Every nerve-ending is lit up in bright-hot constellations. He’d never even thought to consider what it might feel like for a mind to be ripped loose from a person, and now he thinks he knows, thinks he understands what all those unfortunates had felt just before the Dearg-dur swallowed them down, thinks he knows what Wil suffered at the commands of Siofra all those times, and he wants to weep in outrage and pain and fury, but he has no eyes from which to squeeze the tears, no body with which to curl in on the pain. He is a formless mass of agony, and if he lets go of the pain, he lets go of his Self. It might almost be worth it, he thinks, screaming with a voice that isn’t there, rigid splinters of himself breaking loose inside it.

  There isn’t enough of him to catch it all, pieces of him slipping through fingers he doesn’t have, and he means to call out—to Wil, to the Mother, anyone—if for nothing else than to do one last thing that’s his before he slides into the forever-void that’s sucking him down.

  “What is your name?” skims through him, and he thinks it should be the Mother’s Voice, but it isn’t, it’s his father, speaking to him from across Time, drilling the lesson into his son, so that even when he’d forgotten everything else, he always knew this one thing.

  “Dallin Brayden,” he answers back. ‘From the Valley’ and ‘Brave’ and he’s always known what these things mean, even when he’d forgotten their purpose, but he’s never truly understood the other, not ’til now. “Pride’s people,” he wheezes through the pain in his not-voice, thinks of Lind and its lineage of warriors, its centuries of secrets and unknowing, faithful defense of the Heart of the World.

  And finally wonders what sort of power lies hidden in their belief. “If it is strong enough to bind, it is strong enough to free,” She’d told Wil. Dallin thinks he knows what that means now. He gathers himself inward, curls what he can around it, cries out in a voice that shattered all around him, a ringing bellow that bounded against the walls of the cavern. The shock of standing once again on solid ground recoiled through him, jolted up his legs and backbone.

  He blinked, cleared his eyes, saw Wil still standing there, eyes liquid and shifting and locked onto Wheeler, who stared back, somehow lax and helpless-looking, even in his thrall. Wil’s nose was trickling a steady rivulet of blood, dripping down to a small puddle on the floor of the cavern between his boots. Still there, still locked in some otherworld conflict with the monster, and Dallin had somehow left him behind, and he didn’t even know how.

  He didn’t take the time for guilt or horror, merely tightened his grip on Wil, eyes settling on the closest person available—Andette, staring at him in something between fright and cool faith as he reached out his hand to her, said “Hurry!” then, “Thorne!” and waited the barest of moments for Andette’s wide hand to lock onto his before he hurled himself back into the nothing of agony, caught in mid-scream as it all slams back into him, the rip and tear of a soul being shredded from a Self. “Thorne!” he calls again, and feels new power burning through him, setting whatever’s left of him on fire. It hardly matters—he doesn’t think anything could possibly hurt worse than this—so he pulls it all inside him, builds it like a wall around himself, a calm center of silence inside the nothing.

  His mind is his, his soul remains, and he’s standing once again beside Wil, here and whole, but with his feet planted firmly in the quick-mud of FAeðme, his hand locked to Andette’s, and hers to Thorne’s. He’d thought once that he’d have to be careful where he pointed these people, that their faith could be as dangerous as a loaded gun aimed at the world, but he’d forgotten that a loaded gun can mean salvation, too, if held in the right hand. He tightens the hand that hangs at the end of the body he left in FAeðme and reaches with the other for Wil.

  “Dallin!” Wil cries, voice raw and weak, and he stumbles a little, sweat seeping through his tunic where Dallin grips his arm. Wil is shaking, and not from fear but debility, his strength flowing out of him, Dallin can feel it, how Wil had been reaching out while Dallin had been busy being ripped apart. And all the while, Wil was keeping up the fight and trying to keep Dallin whole. It makes Dallin want to scream in frustration, these chances that Wil takes, and they’re always for the right reasons, but Wil’s going to end up paying for it, if he isn’t already.

  “Take it,” he tells Wil, only now noticing that Wil bleeds here, too, a hard knot of fear grinding in Dallin’s gut as he watches the small stream leak scarlet-bright onto the clean white of Wil’s tunic.

  “The Vessel is too weak,” says a voice that’s too familiar, and only now does Dallin turn to see Calder. Eyes with that same righteous exaltation, shoulder lumped and out of true, Wil’s bolt still lodged in his broken wrist and the blooded white fletching of his niece’s arrow jutting from his throat. It bobs obscenely as he speaks. He raises his broken arm, bone grinding and crunching in the shoulder, and points at Wil. “I serve the Aisling, even in this,” he rasps. “The Heart of the World sits too heavily on your soul. The Mother seeks to break you beneath it, take it to Herself. She weakens the Father.”

  “Liar,” Wil grinds out, already standing taller, accepting everything flowing through Dallin and steadying himself on it. “You take truths and twist them into lies. You wear faces not your own.”

  Calder holds out a cup, and he smirks. “You want it,” he tells Wil. “You will always want it. Do you think it will ever stop? I can give it to you, lad. Take you to where it never has to hurt again, give you—”

  Wil shoves again, Dallin can feel it buffeting through him, and is heartened that not-Calder seems to stagger just a little.

  “Show me your own face, fraud,” Wil snarls, his tone deeper now, more powerful than only a moment ago. “You hide behind masks and then accuse deception. You steal from others and claim it your right.”

  Calder’s form ripples, glimpses of other faces melting into then out of the scarred countenance, some faces Dallin knows and many more he doesn’t. The echoes of souls consumed, then cut free, he thinks, and shudders a little.

  “It is my right,” Calder hisses, the voice now raw and croaking, thick with the obstruction of the arrow. “Do you think yourself so far above me, boy? You’ve had the taste of it, ha
ve you not? You’ve taken the magic of another, fed on it, and grown stronger with the taking. Do you think your right more righteous than my own?”

  The man in Dudley, Dallin thinks, and he kept trying not to know it, but it’s truth, it has to be. Wil’s magic before that had been weak and sporadic, by his own testimony, and after that… After that, he’d called storms, tamed fire. And Dallin had explained it to both of them in ways that made sense, still make sense, but he wonders now if he’d known what it all meant and just hadn’t dared the knowing.

  “Your Guardian knows it,” not-Calder chuckles and, jerks his chin at Dallin, the arrow’s fletching bobbling gruesomely. “Look at him,” he croons to Wil, “he can’t help the disgust, can’t help the revulsion at knowing that he’s been the accomplice of Daeva. And the Mother and the Father do not suffer Dearg-dur to live. She uses you, and when She’s used you up, Her mack will cut your throat.” A slippery little laugh, and Dallin is both shocked and repelled that the face that mocks so casually is now his own. “The things that happened, Wil… they offend me. I don’t know how to say it any better. They offend me to my core.”

  It’s Dallin’s own voice, coming from Dallin’s own mouth, like looking into some kind of noisome mirror. He reaches instinctively for the gun at his hip, wraps his fingers about its grip. Would it do any good here? Can bullets still kill if their real shapes exist in another reality?

  “I didn’t know,” he watches himself say. A sad shake of the head, and a hand that’s his but not reaches out toward Wil. “I’m sorry, but you can’t think I could countenance this.” Wil’s frowning, and he glances helplessly between the two Guardians, as though he’s unsure which is the truth.

  Dallin had been expecting monsters, gruesome freaks of not-nature, lumbering beasts with slavering maws, chasing him down and maybe even catching him, gnawing his bones. This is so much worse.