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or more, and I don’t imagine you’ve been holed up in a cave all this time.” He kept his tone light and conversational.
    “It’s almost a straight line southeast from Old Bridge to Putnam—did you just sort of…” He waved a hand about.
    “…pick a direction and keep going?”
    “I didn’t…” Wil’s eyebrows twisted. “Straight…?”
    He stared, surprise sliding into that maddening apprehensive antipathy that Dallin hadn’t missed in the least. What the hell was wrong with him now , damn it?
    “No,” Wil finally grudged. His posture was closing in on itself again. “I started out…” An uncomfortable shrug, and an annoyed huff. “Do you really need to know?”
    71

    The Aisling Book Two Dream
    Dallin blinked, eyebrows rising. Thought back to the stunted conversation, tried to find a reason for the flare of resentment, and couldn’t. The exchange had been fairly innocuous, even by what Dallin was coming to know as Wil’s perpetually suspicious standards.
    “Is there a reason you don’t want to tell me?” Dallin countered.
    “You mean other than the fact that it’s none of your damned business?”
    Dallin’s own suspicions piqued, despite the good intentions he’d had just a moment ago. His eyes narrowed.
    “Did you cut a swath of crime from the Border on down?”
    he asked mildly, trying to push some levity into the tone of the question.
    Wil rolled his eyes, exasperated impatience. “Maybe I just don’t want to talk about it for some of the same reasons you don’t want to talk about your time in the army,” he snapped.
    That one made Dallin sit back a little in his saddle.
    “What the hell does that—?”
    “You did things you can’t talk about because they’d seem wrong to anyone who wasn’t there, right? You’ve tried once or twice, but the looks on the faces of others made you understand that people would just as soon you kept it all where they couldn’t see it. You did things you’re maybe not proud of, things you try not to look at now because they make you wonder what kind of person could be capable of them, and then you remember oh, right, that was you, and then you understand those looks on the faces of others, but you can’t feel the same way they do because you know it was necessary, no matter how low it makes you feel to have done them.” He pulled rein and turned to glare at Dallin as he did the same.
    “I’m not astounding, and there’s no reason for you to be impressed—I did what I had to do, and I won’t apologize for surviving.”
    72

    Carole Cummings
    Dallin stared for a long time, meeting the throttled fury in the green eyes with calm consideration. This had nothing whatever to do with any speculations about Dallin’s own proposed encounters; this was entirely abject bitterness accumulated before Dallin’s existence had even come within Wil’s purview of experience. Just how long, Dallin wondered dubiously, did it take for someone whose entire life had consisted of pain and thwarted rage to stop being enraged? Was it possible? Could someone who’d been taught over and over again that every word hid some sort of betrayal ever learn to trust? Should they?
    More to the point, did Dallin have the patience to deal with it while he figured it out?
    He thought again about telling Wil about the dream, about how at least two men had died trying to find him, help him… thought about Wil’s reaction when Dallin had informed him about the other and decided he needed to deal with this latest flare-up first.
    Dallin propped a hand to the saddlebow, leaned into it, and cocked his head to the side. “I’m getting a little tired,” he said slowly, “of feeling compelled to defend myself over things I haven’t done. I wasn’t trying to interrogate you; I was trying to get your mind off the horses. I was trying to get to know you—as a person and not as the Guild’s tool or the Brethren’s prey, since those histories are the only ones you’ve thus far