Brothers

Aisling would have preferred not knowing that the Princess was thinking about him. Leaving Adair to his duties, Aisling resumed his walk around the mound. Life was returning to the mound, and for that he was grateful, but it all seemed so distant from him. He was in a nightmare and there seemed to be no end in sight. Unlike Hawthorne and Adair, he placed no value in wishful thinking. Nearing the outter doors of the great hall, he saw a familar figure stooping over the new fountain running her hands in the water.

"Dunnla," he greeted, momentarily startling the woman.

"Angus!" she greeted, the only one in the mounds who refused to address him by the name he now carried for several hundred years. Dunnla had been a wolf goddess in Ireland, and sometimes she forgot what century she was in, much less what place.

"Aisling," he corrected her with a gentle smile. Dunnla was one of the few sidhe who could look upon his face and not be impressed. "What are yah doing?"

"The water. Look at the water," she told him, her mostly green eyes sparkling. "And it's sweet like back home. Do yah think the Princess pulled it right through the earth and brought it here?"

"I don't think so," Aisling replied and crouched by the spring. Running his hands through the water, he collected some of it in the palm of his hand and raised it to his mouth. It was good. Like back home. When he glanced up at Dunnla, she was smiling affectionately at him. Forget the fact they were both several thousand years old, and she was only a dozen or so years older than he, she always acted like the 'big sister' towards him. "And?" he continued.

"Yah need yore hair rebraided."

"My hair is fine," he said and absently reached behind him to feel the tight braid. "Besides we're too close to the doors. Someone will see for certain."

"Then sit and chat with me. I've been lonesome of late."

Aisling sat beside her on the stone bench, but Dunnla always ended up crying when they chatted. America was such a strange place to an old goddess who still lived in her mind at a time when wolves still lived in Ireland. One of the few sidhe who actually ventured into the world of men for any great lengths of time, she often found it confusing and scarey. But she still went looking for her 'wolves'. A woman who lived by her own thoughts and rules, she had been driven out of the Seelie court for being his friend, along with Adair and Crystall. It was not good being his friend.

"I've been thinkin' of Midir of late. Ah miss'im..like he wuz, yah know."

A brother long dead. Midir had raised Aisling, but a woman had turned them into enemies, and too late Aisling had realized his brother's folly, the one that had gotten him beheaded. But the murderer of Midir had paid with his life as well. Dunnla had seen Elcmar's head in the corner by the great hearth. It was one of those things you sort of remembered, but nothing to keep a reputation alive on.

"I fear a war is cumin' Angus, a bad'in. Ah see it in the eyes of the Ravens an' the queen herself. Yah can see her thinkin' it."

"Ah'll keep yah safe," Aisling assured the sidhe woman.

She met his eyes and smiled. "Ah know yah will. Yah always were good, takin' me in when nun else would." She glanced away and a fog of sad memory settled over her slender frame. "Ah never thought they'd kill all mah children."

Bad memories now. "Don't yah start cryin' on me," he teased her.

She smiled at him through her tears. "Let's go home, Angus."

"This is home now, Dunnla. It has been for hundreds of years."

"Let's go back to the Brugh. We were happy there."

Aisling had nothing to say to that. But he knew if he kept talking to Dunnla, she would drive him into suicidal melancholy. "I need to make my rounds, love. I'll see you later."

"Ah've heard whispers Angus...whispers about you an' the princess."

"Just rumours, love. Just rumours."