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“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

Carole Cummings

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.

“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

Carole Cummings

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

The Aisling Book Two Dream

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

Carole Cummings

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

The Aisling Book Two Dream

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

Carole Cummings

it. I’m not asking you for anything you’re not bound to give.”

The warble of his voice, the grayness of his face—it should have made Dallin stop, calm himself, think it through, but he was too caught up in his own indignant outrage. “How many times,” he snarled, “do I have to prove I’m no danger to you? It was lies,
all
of it. Those things Calder said—don’t you know what it means? Siofra knew about Lind, he knew about me. And what d’you want to bet me he started out as one of the Brethren? He never needed you to find me, he had you do it because he wanted to see if you could, because he knew it would make you afraid of me. There is no reason—”

“That isn’t what—!” Wil stopped, bent himself over his knees, took several long breaths. Slowly, like the entire world had just been set on his shoulders, he got to his feet, approaching Dallin slowly.

“I’m not accusing you of murder,” he said quietly, eyes bleakly despairing. “I’m asking you for a mercy.”

He stooped down, pulled the knife from his boot. “Here.

Take it. If there is no other way, you’ll put it through my heart and twist, or even put your hands ’round my throat, if it comes to it, snap my neck—”

“
Stop
!”

Dallin’s arm shot out, knocked away Wil’s hand. The knife went clattering and skidding across the stone floor.

Dallin just watched it for a moment, marking the flash of golden lamplight on honed steel as it fetched up against a corner of the doorframe. It was too far away, the lettering much too small, but he could swear he could read the blessing etched on its blade as though it were written in fire. He looked away, and tried to slow his breathing. He hadn’t realized his back was to the wall, hadn’t realized he’d retreated as Wil had advanced. There were very few things to which Dallin had ever given ground in fear, but 197

The Aisling Book Two Dream

this
… this was actually making him recoil and almost cower.

Wil meant it—every word. He was, in all sincerity, asking Dallin to be his suicide—

No. Not asking. He just said he’d seen it, knew it would happen anyway. He wasn’t asking for something he was sure was already coming—he was absolving Dallin before it came.

It should have been darkly touching; it was, after all, probably the most profound show of trust and regard possible, and from someone who almost never showed either. It was, instead, enraging.