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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.”
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    The Aisling Book Two Dream
    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 70

    Carole Cummings
    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