Chapter 4
The next morning, Torver wakes up hard and embarrassed.
Often, he dreams of red scales and burning yellow eyes, the Meddera’s slogans entrenched thoroughly in his subconscious.
But last night, he’d dreamt of the girl in the tavern.
Really dreamt of her. Dreamt of things the way he likes them—rough, with him at the sharp end of it.
Her hands pinning him down, the sensation of being hit.
Teeth scraping his skin, thrusts like an axe through a branch.
And he, panting and justly punished for his defects, a little more hollow than before.
He sits up and twists the string around his finger until the skin beneath it burns.
The shelves of books look down reproachfully as he attacks the glass of water on his bedside.
He drinks beyond his thirst, until his stomach expands uncomfortably.
Until he’s in a condition fit to face Bassen and the day.
A day that involves the next of Bassen’s job scrolls. A trip to the Dodwood to cull rats—rats that an unknown assailant has magically transformed into bloodlusting predators.
Hours and miles and many complaints about his sore body later, Torver is stiffly clambering from the driver’s seat of their rented wagon and tying the mares that had pulled it to a nearby tree.
Buoyed by their distance from the Wen, Torver feels free, a little giddy.
Enforcers don’t patrol the countryside the same way they do in the city or along the border.
The only risk is running into the Enforcers sent to hunt down the fugitive Rath that Wast was telling him about, and, for a moment, Torver’s spirits are dampened by sets of hoofprints the size of dinner plates on the path ahead.
He doesn’t point them out, insists to himself that they’re old—Enforcers can’t possibly be patrolling the woods. Not now that they have a Rath insurgent to hunt.
Torver needs the money for the rat cull too badly for it to be otherwise.
He pushes the thoughts away and grabs their packs from the wagon, slings them both around his body so they can venture on.
Into the forest so old and engulfing that Torver’s returning giddiness even infects Bassen.
The endless trees and bushes swallow their laughter and return a gentle rustle of leaf on leaf as they head deeper into the wood, their concentration calming them as they search for signs of the rat colony.
Moss, grass, and little flowering things soften the sound of their footsteps, and even though they have yet to find rats, the forest comes alive in other ways.
Red squirrels jump between tree branches, wood pigeons call to one another as they waddle around the forest floor, pecking at leaves.
There is a green tranquillity in the leaf-filtered light when Bassen stops Torver with a hand to his shoulder.
Lips parted in awe, she points silently to a small clearing through the trees.
Torver squints before he sees it—a white stag grazing at a patch of lush green foliage beneath a broad oak tree.
He grins, hearing a sound in the distance, like scuffling or twigs snapping underfoot. It must be the rest of the stag’s herd, but Torver is loath to turn his head to see. He’s transfixed by the creature’s majesty.
It raises its head and he swears it looks directly at him with its eyes, dark like an endless well. He wonders what it is trying to tell him.
Then the screaming starts.
The stag bolts away, every bird in the trees above them takes flight, and the scream is replaced by the sound of pounding feet.
“What’s that?” Bassen grabs Torver’s arm.
The forest is too dense, he can’t tell where the noise is coming from. No matter where he turns his head.
The sound of running feet grows louder; the frenzied rustle of undergrowth, the snapping of twigs. More frenetic cries and pattering, like sudden rain. The silence of every other creature in the wood—listening.
Then a green-clad figure bursts through a thorny bush, knocking him to the ground.
The impact forces a strangled cry from him and he realises, too late, that it wasn’t pattering rain he could hear—but the pattering of hundreds of tiny feet.
Torver can barely take in the person pressing him into the earth, because hundreds of fanged rats have descended on them both and they’re buried alive beneath a cairn of snapping rodents, their wormy tails slapping everywhere.
They bite and tear, ragging their tiny heads and Torver is surrounded, encased in the eye of a feeding frenzy on all sides, except where his body is covered by the screaming stranger.
Torver tries to rip the rats away, but with each one he detaches from his body with a squeal and a spurt of blood, two come to replace it.
He hears Bassen yelling and feels her rush to his side, pulling the creatures from him. The air is ice-cold with her rapid-fire killing, but there are too many of them. He is vaguely aware that he’s screaming too, muffled into the shoulder of the person who had knocked him down.
Beneath, his body bucks between arms that bracket him, the bloodwet hair dancing on his neck. He tries to wriggle away, but the person grunts in dissent, and he realises with a sharp shock that they’re deliberately shielding him with their body.
“Hang on—” Bassen’s voice is high and panicked.“I can’t do them all at once in case I get you too—stay still, I—”
She seems immune from their attacks, killing every rat she touches and more besides. She kills in pairs and threes, in groups of ten, a swathe of them over here, a single one there. Squeaks and grunts and screams fill the air. Until, eventually, everything fades into a quietness.
Until, eventually, Bassen has killed them all.
It’s over.
Bassen’s legs buckle beneath her as the person above Torver dismounts in an inelegant collapse. The three of them lie on the rat-covered ground. Panting, bleeding, haloed by fur.
“Fucking hell,” Bassen breathes out, reaching out to squeeze Torver’s pink hand, before sitting up on her haunches.
He looks at her as if through fog, his body alive in the worst way. The air feels too still. An unrealness permeates.
“Thank you,” he murmurs, squeezing her hand back and tasting blood in his mouth. “Thank you thank you thank you.”
A small groan next to him reminds him that they are not alone.
His darting eyes widen at the gored mess of the stranger beside him. Flashes of raw skin, dripping gouges, long hair wet with blood plastered to a face he can’t see from the angle he’s at.
He slowly sits up when he hears Bassen’s inhale.
“Torv…” Bassen’s fingers lace around his wrist. “Torv, we should go.”
He bats her away, nudges the delirious body next to him again. His numerous wounds are starting to burn like fire.
He stiffens as Bassen’s grip tightens. When he sees what she is seeing.
Poking out through the coppery hair, the tips of the stranger’s ears stretch into points. Their skin almost seems to glow. And nestled amongst the tattered green robes, is a pendant made of slate.
Torver recoils as if burnt.
“A Rath,” he whispers, as if the word itself is forbidden.
He’s never seen one before, only knows the tales—that they’re a strange and terrible people, held back only by the border wall and the Enforcers’ patrols. Cruel tricksters, rumoured to take what isn’t theirs.
And now he’s face to face with one.
“We have to go,” Bassen repeats, standing and pulling Torver up after her. “If we’re caught with it, then we’re dead. How could it even have gotten here?”
His instinct is to agree but when he moves, his injuries scream. He looks at the Rath beside him, how much worse their wounds are because they’d shielded him. Hadn’t his mother taught him to be grateful? The rats are still warm beneath him.
“Shouldn’t we do something?” He asks. “I—”
Bassen cuts him off.
“Torv,” she inhales sharply. “Can you hear that?”
Torver slows his breath, and he hears it. The distant hoofbeats, the voices softened by the trees between. The metallic clanking. He wants to kick himself, wants to kill himself.
Patrolling Enforcers are approaching at speed.
They must have heard the screaming, too.
It won’t be long until they’re surrounded, and he doubts that Enforcers posted to the countryside will know Bassen by sight like the residents of the Wen do.
They’ll soon be shackled in whatever element the Enforcers can mance, swords at their throats for good measure.
An unconscious enemy at their feet, surrounded by heaps of dead rats—this doesn’t look good.
Bassen would either have to let them both be arrested or kill their way out and he won’t—can’t—ask her to do that and—
All the while, the hoofbeats get closer and—can he leave this stranger here to die? Laws and good sense dictate that he must, but—but—
He does the first thing he can think of.
“Torver—put that Rath down!” Bassen hisses.
In a mangled panic, his injuries roaring a blind fury, Torver hobbles into the underbrush, laden like a pack mule.
He ignores Bassen’s repeated pleas to drop the unconscious stranger.
His arms burn under the weight and his legs buckle with each step, until, with a roll of her eyes, Bassen helps, taking hold of their legs.
The sound of hooves and clattering armour grows only louder.
Torver’s racing heart feels like it’s about to give out.
The trees become denser, their green canopy blocking the blue sky above, and after a frenzied eternity, Bassen whispers, “There!”
She jerks her head in the direction of an ancient oak, its massive trunk hollowed out by time and fungi.
A large crack in the trunk reveals a space inside large enough for the three of them and Torver manoeuvres inside, setting their quarry on the ground.
Bassen rushes back out to rip leafy branches from nearby trees to conceal the entrance.