Aisling 2: Dream

by Carole Cummings

  Carole Cummings

  the name of that tradition and legend.

  “I know what the Mother told me,” Dallin said carefully. “I wish for Wil to hear it in the words of the Old Ones.”

  He left it there. First lesson in interrogation: give a subject the first leading push, then sit back and wait to see if he hung himself.

  Calder merely nodded; no flare of suspicion Dallin could detect. His faded blue gaze went directly to Wil, stayed there. “You ask what you are,” he said. “It would be easier to ask what you are not. Not immortal. Not invulnerable. Our people chose the Mother for our patron for Her strength and wisdom. In our ignorance, we sat the Father lower because His wisdom was imperfect in your making. And yet we came to understand that it was wiser than simple men would guess at first to create a being with so much power and make him vulnerable. We came to understand that the Mother’s wisdom in the making of the Guardian merely complemented the Father’s. So, we have kept always the Aisling safe, as the Mother intended, treasured Her Gift from Her beloved, as She does; we have guided Her Gift to the Father—”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Wil cut in impatiently. “We know the story; we don’t need your version of history. You train Guardians to keep the Aisling on his proper leash, which doesn’t answer any of my questions.” He stood, pointed to the floor at Calder’s feet. “You stood right there this morning and tried to talk my Guardian into killing me. I want to know why.”

  The look between them was almost charged, thick and nearly tangible. Dallin kept his face impassive, hopefully unreadable, and only flicked his glance from one to the other.

  Calder shook his head. “You have broken the laws of the Father,” he answered evenly. “That alone is cause for judgment.”

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  Wil’s mouth pressed tight, and he sank back down to the cot, slowly.

  “You mean, because he did the things he did for Siofra,” Dallin put in. “Except those ‘crimes’ were the result of your failure.”

  “And so judgment would be put aside,” Calder agreed. “Which leaves us with the question of the danger the Aisling now presents to us.” His eyes went to Wil again. “Do you even know what lives inside you? Do you know what’s been given to your safekeeping? When I asked you if you thought we’d simply let you walk into Lind, unaccosted, it wasn’t merely rhetoric. Even if your intention is to prostrate yourself before the Old Ones, take up your Task and devote yourself to your Purpose…” He sighed, shook his head. “It may already be too late. We have never received the Gift so late; the damage may be too great.”

  Prostrate. Ha. Dallin thought that was likely it right there, the reason Calder’s thoughts and intentions had turned so abruptly to execution: you only had to know Wil for a few moments, see the refusal to bend or submit, to know he wouldn’t prostrate himself before anything or anyone. Was this the ‘damage’ to which Calder referred?

  He spoke of being a servant, of being at their service, but what sort of service did the Old Ones think they owed the Aisling really? Caught and caged—was that it, then? Was Lind little more than a prison for the one they purported to serve and protect? Dallin would like to know what the lives of Wil’s predecessors had been like—had they

  ‘devoted themselves to their Purpose’ willingly, or were the Old Ones no better than Siofra: snipping a child from his roots, molding him into what they deemed he should be?

  “What danger am I to you?” Wil asked softly.

  Dallin wished he hadn’t. He was close to knowing; 188

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  he wasn’t sure how, and logical explanations for the fantastic, or even the mundanely odd, had stopped being important some time ago. Dallin could almost feel the knowledge knocking at his consciousness, and it was big.

  He wanted to get it clear in his own head first, so he could break it to Wil in ways that wouldn’t hurt, but he couldn’t ask him to wait anymore. Not after Dallin had taken so long to get to him in the first place, and certainly not after failing to see what all of these capricious messages were trying to tell him in all the time after.

  Do you know what’s been given to your safekeeping?

  Dúil.

  Elemental .

  Coimeádaí.

  Keeper .

  Damn it, that one had been more-or-less lobbed right at his face, and he’d nearly missed it. Mother’s mercy, the man had made it rain.

  So, when Calder opened his mouth to answer, Dallin spoke instead: “You are a danger to all,” he said quietly, waited for a beat until Wil turned to him, frowning. “You are a danger to yourself. Coimeádaí. Dúil. ” He leaned in, tapped lightly at Wil’s breastbone. “You are the keeper of the strength of the old gods, and it’s been suppressed for too long now. It’s beating at your mind, your spirit.

  I know you feel it. I can see you feeling it sometimes.”

  He met Wil’s gaze with candid respect. “You’ve been holding it back, only letting a little out at a time, and that only when you need it to survive. That’s why you bleed; that’s why it’s so hard to stop pushing once you start.” He jerked his chin at Calder, but didn’t take his eyes from Wil. “He thinks you can’t control it; he thinks you’re weak. He’s afraid you’ll let it loose on the world, and the Old Ones’ failure will be complete.”

  Wil stared at him, eyes slightly narrowed, irises made of shifting verdigris. “And what do you think?” he asked, so low Dallin thought he was probably the only one who heard it.

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  He answered in kind: “I think you are many things,”

  he told Wil frankly, “but weak has never been one of them.” He cut his glance over to Calder then quickly back to Wil again. “There’s more here.” He murmured it low and to Wil alone. “I need to think about this, and I need more. Just give me some time.” He turned back to Calder. “Does Lind know what the Guild is about?”

  “We did not know what Siofra had done,” Calder replied, chin lifting the slightest bit. “We knew that they sought, but not that they had found, let alone…” A pause and his mouth tightened. “They were once our Brethren, you see.”

  Wil stiffened, but for Dallin, more pieces fell into place.

  “The Brethren—you know of them.”

  Calder’s eyes went hard. “They are not so secret as they would like.”

  “Then

  speak,” Wil said through his teeth.

  Calder’s head dipped in a deferential nod. “It was time before Time. An alliance. Before times of war for our countries, together the Old Ones and the Guild fostered the Gifts of the Mother and the Father until both were ready to take up their Tasks. And once the Aisling and the Guardian left our collective borders, we would simply wait for the next Call and begin the cycle anew.

  “We have lost count of the years. Long before the first Brayden walked Lind’s soil, the Aisling warned the Old Ones, spoke a prophecy, told us our Brethren were not brothers in truth, that they would betray us, betray the Aisling. When next the Call of the Aisling came not to the Guild, but to the Old Ones instead, the Guild claimed treachery. They cut ties with Lind, cast out their priests, executed some, and plunged our lands into perpetual war. The soldiers of our countries, even the generals and the Elders, believe they fight for petty things—border 190

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  disputes, trade routes, waterways—but always the clandestine demands are the same: Give us the Aisling.

  “After the purge of the Guild, those who were left disappeared for generations, until they re-emerged just before the first Border War as the Brethren. Since then, we have Watched them as well. Watched as they fell from Grace and degenerated into what they are today—no honor, no true Calling.”

  “No intelligence,” Dallin muttered.

  Calder’s mouth drew down, and he peered at Wil soberly. “I suspect young Wilfred found you by following them. Unhappy providence for him, but…” He sighed.r />
  “A link in the chain of fate, for it has brought us all here.”

  Providence. Fate. Dallin didn’t believe in any of it, never had. Circumstance and coincidence, and a young man who’d followed a lead that guided him toward what he sought. Poor duped Wilfred Calder had done more than it seemed anyone in this whole sorry scenario had possessed the brains to do.

  “So, since this break,” Dallin said slowly, thinking,

  “the Brethren have been a sort of… crazier version of the Guild, and you’ve managed to keep the Aisling from both of them.” He narrowed his eyes as Calder nodded. “And it never occurred to any of you to put spies on the Guild when Wil went missing?”

  “Our spies infest Ríocht,” Calder told him curtly, “and we do not cringe at acquiring information through blood.

  The Chosen had been a fraud for centuries—we did not guess that the Guild would be bold enough to present the true Aisling as the impostor. We did not guess that if they had the true Aisling, they would not have shown their hand and wiped us from the world with his glance.”

  Again, he turned to Wil, hand over his heart. “They hid you before our eyes. There is no apology that would be abject enough.”

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  Wil was just sitting there, staring. Dallin couldn’t guess what he was thinking. His face was a blank mask. Dallin leaned in, nudged Wil a bit with his elbow, and lowered his voice to a near-whisper. “All right?”

  A grim little snort puffed out of Wil, and he closed his eyes, rubbed at his brow. “Can we be done?”

  Dallin would rather not—he’d rather get it done all to the once—but apparently it was hitting Wil pretty hard, hard enough to begin the slide into withdrawal, and that would be damned inconvenient right now. Still, Wil was a lot tougher than he looked.

  “Can you stand one more?”

  Wil shrugged. “I expect that will depend upon the answer,” he muttered.

  “Right.” Dallin sighed. “Sorry.” He turned to Calder.

  “Why Lind? What’s there for him?”

  Calder’s eyebrows shot up. Dallin thought it had likely never even crossed his mind that, now they were being more-or-less welcomed, they might decide not to accept.

  “Protection,” Calder told Dallin, then shifted his glance to Wil, softened it just the smallest bit. “Rebirth.

  An awakening to your Self. Your Design.” He tempered his rough voice to a tone that was kind and likely as near to gentle as it got. “One cannot be reborn without returning to the Womb.”

  Wil jolted and wheezed out a throttled gasp. Dallin turned to him quickly, eyes narrowed. Wil was pale, wide-eyed, but his gaze was pointed toward the floor, unseeing.

  What Calder had said meant very little to Dallin, but it apparently meant an awful lot to Wil.

  “All right,” Dallin told him, reached up and laid his hand to Wil’s shoulder. “Sorry. We’re done now.” He shot a pointed glance to Calder. “Thank you. Give us the night, would you? We’ll pick it up again in the morning.”

  Calder peered at Wil with something close to worry, 192

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  then at Dallin with a slight touch of suspicion in his faded gaze. He didn’t argue, merely nodded at Dallin, then dipped a bow to Wil. “Tomorrow then,” was all he said, turned and quit the room.

  Dallin turned immediately to Wil. “What is it?” he wanted to know. “You’ve gone nearly white.”

  “Have I?” Wil leaned over, propped an elbow to his knee and dropped his head into his hand. “Just… Father says these things to me and they make no sense—and I think about them, all the time, I can’t stop thinking about them, trying to understand, but I never can. And then he just…” His free hand came up, waved toward the door.

  “He just opens his mouth and it falls out, and suddenly, it almost makes sense, I almost know what it means, but…

  but…” He looked at Dallin, clearly and unashamedly distressed. “But there’s the Cradle—caught and caged, right?—and I don’t know if I want to understand it.”

  Dallin could only shake his head. “I’m not sure I know what you’re saying.”

  “I’m saying that I’m beginning to think all of this has been a waste of time. Why did I even bother—?” His jaw clenched tight and he shook his head. “I’m beginning to think that no matter how I interpret any prophecy, no matter where it came from or who spoke it, whether they were lying or telling the truth, they all come down to the same bloody thing, and there’s no getting away from it.

  I don’t think I was entirely serious before when I said I didn’t care what was in Lind, and now I’m thinking it wouldn’t matter if I did or not, because whatever’s coming is going to come, whether I care or not.”

  Dallin frowned, pondered it.

  The interesting thing about Wil… All right, there were many interesting things about Wil, but the most interesting thing was how he believed in bloody every thing. For all Wil had lived through, for all the surface cynicism, he 193

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  talked about things Dallin had always thought of as myth and legend as though there was no question whatsoever.

  Even having seen and spoken to the Mother Herself hadn’t depleted Dallin’s healthy doubt and—he’d like to think—his reasoning. Wil had been given every reason in the world, and then some, to distrust magic, and yet here he was, accepting the words of a shaman he’d never met before and erstwhile prophecies spoken by, for all they knew, ancient lunatics. Wil was—incredibly, implausibly and against all sense and reason—an idealist. With the widest, most contrary streak of fatalism Dallin had ever witnessed. An idealistic fatalist—what the hell was Dallin supposed to do with that?

  He scratched at his chin. “I’ve no idea where this came from,” he said carefully, gave Wil’s shoulder a light squeeze, “but in my experience, the truth of a prophecy is in direct proportion to the sanity of the one who believes it. Any thing can be twisted about to mean something if you try hard enough.”

  “And what if I gave you a prophecy?” Wil asked dully.

  “Would you believe it?”

  Dallin paused. Yes, he probably would, in fact, but now was not the time for such an admission. He shook his head. “Is this about what that man said in Dudley?

  Caught and caged? Did something Calder said remind you?” Wil didn’t answer. “All right, think about it, then—

  hasn’t that one already come to pass? I did throw you in a cell, after all. But let’s don’t forget I let you out. So, that one’s over and done, yeah?”

  It made perfect sense to Dallin—so much, in fact, that he was rather proud of himself for thinking of it so quickly, but Wil’s eyes squeezed shut, and he rubbed at his forehead.

  “You’re to be my end, you know.”

  It was said so calmly, so matter-of-fact, that for a 194

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  moment, Dallin had to repeat it to himself a few times before it would make sense. And then he couldn’t help the flare of old rage. He shoved it back, let his hand slip from Wil’s shoulder, and made himself respond with unruffled patience.

  “We’ve been through this,” he said slowly. “I refuse to be what—”

  “I’ve seen it,” Wil cut in, just as calmly. “Did you think you scared me close to pissing my pants back in Putnam merely because of your size?” He shook his head, mouth turning down into a bitter grimace. “I recognized you.

  And I don’t just mean that you looked like a Watcher should look—I recognized you.” Dallin opened his mouth to object, but Wil cut him off. “You know it’s true—you know it, because I saw you recognize me, too.

  And then I saw you bury it. I saw you willfully disbelieve it, and you’ve been willfully disbelieving it ever since.” A slow shrug. “I thought I could use it, use you until you finally let yourself see it. And I reckoned you would see it eventually, because… well, because that’s how prophecies go. I thought I’d use you to get
away from those men, and then I’d get away from you.”

  Dallin thought about that at some length, didn’t even bother trying to deny it—not even to himself. He had recognized Wil, the moment he’d seen him. He hadn’t known what to make of it then, so he’d brushed it off, attributed it to salacious tricks, to Wil’s eyes, to Dallin’s own strange fascination…

  “None of it matters now,” Wil muttered tiredly.

  Dallin thought about that, too, thought about making calm arguments, offering objective logic. But what came out was a low growl between his teeth: “The fuck it doesn’t!”

  Absurdly, Wil chuckled—something dark and dry, and utterly devoid of humor. “I’m sorry,” he said, scrubbed 195

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  both hands roughly over his face, then blinked over at Dallin. “I know how all of this sounds, and I’m only making it worse. But when I say it doesn’t matter… It doesn’t matter in the same way anymore.” He paused, frowning sharply. “I meant it when I said I trust you. And I know that when you give your word, you keep it. So I’ll ask for it in this last thing: Don’t leave me alive inside a cage.”

  Again, Dallin had to think about the words, analyze them, fit them into shapes in his mind that made sense. It only took a second this time before the anger snapped all through him, swiffed across a network of nerves like the crack of a whip.

  He stood slowly, just as slowly paced the width of the small room, and stared at the wall for a moment, trying to breathe evenly. His fist came up, slammed at the stone before he even realized he was moving, then he wheeled about, turned on Wil.

  “You son of a bitch,” he grated.

  “I’ve no one else to ask!” Wil cried. “What if it’s all some trick? What if the Cradle is the trap Siofra always said it was? According to Calder, a whole bloody lot of what he said was true. For that matter, what if we never even get there at all? What if Siofra or the Brethren catch us first? Is that how you’d see me live?”

  “What the hell is this?” Dallin wanted to know. “How did we get from nonsense prophecies to… here?—and in the space of thirty bloody seconds!”

  “Thirty seconds for you,” Wil told him. “C’mon, Constable, you’re the detective, you’re the one with your feet locked in your quick-mud—look at me and tell me you’re as shocked as all that. D’you think this is a new thought for me? Except before, I had no one I could trust enough to ask, no one who… who cared. I’ve been looking at you over my shoulder all my life, waiting for 196