Into the Dreaming (20 page)

He’d failed. And now Drustan would never be reunited with his wife in the twenty-first century. Gwen would never see her husband again. Would she wait and grieve and die a little inside each day? he brooded. Should he send her a message down through the centuries?
We tried, but I failed and he died
.

Nay, Dageus knew what action he must take. It was his fault that Drustan had died. He’d not been home the night the fire had taken Drustan’s life. If he had, he would have stopped the fire before it had gutted the tower in which his brother lay slumbering.

But he’d not been there because he’d been in the bed of a lass whose name he couldn’t even recall, sick to death of watching Silvan and Nell, so in love and busy with their new babes. Sick to death of imagining Gwen and Drustan’s joy when at long last they reunited. Sick to death of being alone. Of having his twin brother who’d been his best friend since the moment they’d drawn breath, sleeping in the next room, where he would sleep until long after Dageus had died.

Seeking the bed of a lass so he could pretend for a time that he had a place and a woman of his own.

Drustan had always known exactly who he was and where he fit. When he chose a course, he never faltered. But Dageus faltered. He’d faltered when he’d wanted to marry his fair Brea, and he was faltering now.

’Tis an old custom
, he’d promised Gwen.
I shall always protect you and yours … I owe you my life
.

By Amergin, the least he could do was keep his word! He had mere minutes to sketch the final symbols. He could go
back in time to the day of the fire and prevent it from happening. Keep Drustan from dying. Ascertain that he and his wife were reunited. Eyes narrowed, he studied the night sky. Two minutes.

But the legend …

He shook his head, rejecting the notion. ’Twas but a fae tale told to strike fear into the hearts of those who kept the coveted secret of the stones. There were no evil druids trapped in some in-between place, waiting to claim a Keltar who broke his oath. Nor was there any record of a MacKeltar having so much as glimpsed a Tuatha Dé Danann for millennia. The ancient tomes that mentioned them referred in vague terms to a vaguer race. Who knew if they still existed, if indeed they had?

Likely as not, he told himself, the legend was naught more than a myth told and retold—and getting taller in the telling—to prevent a Keltar from using the stones indiscriminately.

He had no intention of using them indiscriminately.

He’d thought his decision through long and hard. He wasn’t using the stones for personal motive. Love had to be singularly the most selfless motive in the world. Beyond all Druid powers, beyond the mysterious and fascinating heavens, beyond death, was not love the purest and most precious thing?

Mayhap he was destined never to know the kind of love Drustan shared with Gwen, but it
was
in his power to ascertain that his brother shared a long life of loving with his wife.

He must have etched the final symbols while lost in thought, for he had little memory of it, dreaming or waking. But the white bridge opened, and then it was too late for regret.

Dageus’s mind shattered as dimensions altered. Time unfurled
into a thing of strange symmetry and exhilarating beauty, stretching, bending, and curving. He felt free and as immense as the universe. Understanding crashed over him, an understanding of the laws of nature that had always danced just beyond his reach. He was awed. He was humbled. He was filled with an incredible feeling of connectedness, a flawless perception of his place in the world …

Until everything went terribly wrong.

Screeching and howling like a pack of banshees, they fell on him.

A storm ripped open the night, lightning stabbed at the earth, and hail rained down in bruising torrents. But the storm without his body was naught compared to the storm within: They surrounded him, they clawed at him. They
became
him.

He howled mindlessly as, shrieking their ancient names and ancient demands, they filled his head with a deafening cacophony.

Then there was darkness so complete he doubted he would ever find his way out again.

Dageus woke with a violent start. He’d had the dream again, and by Amergin, he’d relived that choice a thousand times, yet had only to see Gwen and Drustan together to know that he’d made the right one. But sometimes, in the wee hours of the morn when his cottage in the vale was cloaked in utter silence and he felt like the only man alive, he lay awake and wondered what his life might have been otherwise.

What it still
can
be
 … the eldest of the thirteen, Droghda reminded.
You speak as if life is o’er when yours has but begun.
Let us teach you our ways. We have power, power you’ve ne’er dreamed of. Let us make you invincible …

Then twelve other voices joined in, making threats and promises. Insisting that the Tuatha Dé Danann had lied to the Keltar, had cheated them of their full powers. The noise inside his head swiftly grew deafening.

Cursing, he pushed himself up from the tangled bed linens, but collapsed to the floor. He clamped his hands to his ears in a wholly instinctive and wholly futile gesture. The attack had come quickly this time, and it took him several long moments before he managed to force himself up from the floor. He collapsed again, but slowly managed to turn the battle into push-ups. He pumped up and down, again and again, until his body ran with sweat. Until his heart hammered, until he could hear naught but the blood pounding in his veins. Then he started on stomach crunches.

When at last the voices faded and his mind was calm again, Dageus fell back on the floor, sweating and breathing hard. He smiled bitterly. It was ironic that he’d be at his strongest, in peak physical condition, when he died.

Thus far, he’d discovered three ways to control the voices inside his head: tupping, his personal favorite; performing Druid magic, large or small, as all things Druid pleased his tormentors; and prolonged, strenuous physical exertion.

It was the former and the latter that were of great use. He’d discovered that tupping helped while he’d passed a bewildering month in twenty-first-century Edinburgh waiting for Drustan to awaken. There, he’d also discovered that women had much greater freedom to take lovers than had lasses in the sixteenth century, where a missing maidenhead might topple the succession of a clan.

The second method of silencing the thirteen, performing Druid magic, was dangerous. When he’d first come through the stones, confounded by the new century, he’d used the Druid voice of power to procure food and shelter until he’d bartered gold coins and two of his blades for modern currency. Aye, magic stilled the thirteen, yet the few times he’d used it, they’d been stronger when they’d surfaced again. Louder, clearer of mind. How he was loath to use even the tiniest spell.

Exercise and tupping silenced them completely, and sometimes the blessed silence lasted as long as a day. It was Gwen who’d suggested exercise. Gwen believed that mayhap tupping and exercise released a chemical combination in his body that had a sedating effect on the ancient beings.

Tupping was no longer an option, since he was trapped in the valley, and naught but bleating sheep ever trundled by, so exercise had become his salvation. Dageus didn’t pretend to understand the how or why of it, he merely knew that for now it worked.

He also knew that the thirteen learned swiftly, adapted at an alarming rate. He fully expected they would, in time, find a way to overcome his methods of silencing them. Dageus hoped he didn’t live to see that day.

Of late, he wearied of living to see
any
day. On the rare occasions he managed to sleep through the night, the morn brought only the sure knowledge that the blackness within him had grown whilst he slumbered.

And, och, but the blackness was becoming seductive, offering an end to the guilt and despair and self-recrimination. He wondered what it might be like to plunge headlong into it. To exult in the power and freedom they offered.

And he knew that meant time was running out. When the thirteen had first entered him, they’d been crazed from thousands of years of imprisonment. They’d been unfocused, seeming unaware that they’d regained a measure of freedom, and uncertain what to do with it.

But that uncertainty hadn’t lasted long. The night Drustan had brought him back to MacKeltar land, the Ban Drochaid stones had called out to him, singing with an energy that hummed throughout his body. Places of power and magic beckoned him as never before. He’d tried to walk past the stones, into the castle, but had been unable to take a single step, for he’d known if he had, he would have walked straight into the center of the circle and grown drunk on power.

That very night Christopher and Drustan had trapped him in the cottage. In his vale he was far enough from the stones that they were but a soft fire in his blood, not a consuming blaze.

Day by day the thirteen grew stronger, urging him to go back to their time, back further than he could fathom. Back to the time of the legendary Tuatha Dé Danann, and to a fateful battle hinted at only vaguely in Keltar myth. Although the thirteen were inside him, he was not privy to their thoughts—unless they chose to communicate them—any more than they were to his. Yet, of late, in dreams, the boundaries between he and the thirteen were blurring, and he feared that he might one day awaken and be unable to subdue them. That he might awaken irrevocably changed. He’d confided this fear to Drustan, but Drustan had refused to hear it, refused to admit even the possibility of it.

It was the bitter thought that he might disappoint his brother again that gave him strength to fight each day. He
need only hold them at bay long enough that Drustan and Christopher could find a way to end his life without releasing the dark Druids into the world, or worse, into someone else. The problem was they didn’t know what laws governed the non-corporeal beings and, to date, had found naught of use in the ancient tomes.

And it wasn’t as if he could ask the thirteen. They’d not participate willingly in their own destruction. Nay, they’d fight to the bitter end. He’d learned that lesson all too well the night he’d tried to end his own life. The instant he’d pressed the blade to his breast, the thirteen had exploded in a cacophony of voices, urging him to do it because then, they told him, they would be released into the world. The ancient Druid art of transmigration, they’d howled, would allow them to take anyone’s body.
So kill yourself
, they’d shrieked.
Set us free
.

He had no way of knowing whether it was true. If indeed they could transmigrate. He’d begun to suspect that the Tuatha Dé Danann’s Druids were a vastly different breed than the Keltar Druids, possessing far greater powers. And far fewer misgivings about using it.

He dare not risk it. The thirteen could not be permitted to claim an innocent life. No other man, woman, or child would be made to pay for his mistakes.

He’d dropped the blade and wept then, for the first and final time.

And now he lived to accomplish but one thing.

To die with that precious commodity he’d so utterly failed to live with: honor.

E
LISABETH GOT UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, DETERMINED
to slip out without disturbing the Jamesons, so they wouldn’t feel obligated to take time away from their chores. She wasn’t about to be a burden to the elderly couple. Nor was she about to waste a week waiting for Gwen and Drustan to return. Happiest when working, she was eager to begin her first official assignment. And eager to prove to herself that the man didn’t really look like the picture he’d painted. She would introduce herself (informally, for today, so they might grow comfortable with each other), identify his “problem,” and devise a plan of treatment.

Elisabeth showered quickly and dressed for the wintry clime in jeans, hiking boots, a thick woolen sweater, parka, ski cap, and mittens, then went downstairs.

She hurried to the front door and was about to open it when she heard Nigel shouting out by the road, followed by
loud, defiant bleating. Surmising that the sheep must be on another of their peculiar rampages, she pivoted and hurried down the nearest corridor until she realized she was subconsciously following the smell of coffee. From the sound of pots and pans banging about, Maeve was already up and in the kitchen. That wouldn’t do. Both of them clearly had their hands full.

Striking back in the opposite direction, she poked her head into room after room, until she finally discovered the French doors in the study that opened off the rear of the castle.

Hoping Maeve had a good sense of direction, Elisabeth used the sun to orient herself and struck off on a northerly route, telling herself she didn’t really need a cup of coffee. The frigid walk across the snowy hills and valleys would wake her up just fine.

And it did. The beauty alone, if not the frigid breath-stealing wind, would have shocked her into full consciousness. She could see for miles in every direction. The sun streaked the morning sky with red and gold. Off in the distance, atop a far mountain, sprawled another castle strikingly similar to the MacKeltars’. Squinting, she could make out the silhouettes of standing stones against the rosy morning sky. She eyed them, wondering if that castle might be where her patient had done his self-portrait.