Chapter 6 #2
“Come along, sister,” he says loudly. Loud enough for the creep to hear. “Father and all our seven boxing uncles are waiting for us at home! They might come looking for us if we’re late!”
That is enough for the man’s face to redden. He turns and walks away into the warren of grey buildings.
Torver, satisfied with his cunning, tugs Bassen forward. She shudders and they resume their ascent of the hill, returning to their wagon and its fugitive within.
They’re half way to the Wen when Lavellin calls through its blanket.
“Can I come out yet?”
Torver looks to Bassen and she shrugs stiffly.
Torver twists around in his seat and leans down, carefully pulling the blanket aside so that Lavellin’s face meets the open air.
“No chance of me being healed in that village then?” the Rath asks.
Bassen looks over her shoulder and responds gruffly. “It was a retirement village—where the Citadel sends people when they’re neither use nor ornament. The healer was too jumpy. He’s not used to treating anything out of the ordinary.”
Lavellin frowns, catching its bottom lip on its teeth as it moves to a seated position.
“You can come back to the Wen with us,” Torver says before Bassen can suggest otherwise.
He’s been giving it some thought. He’s sure that it’s their only option—they need to figure out what to do with Lavellin’s warning. Better to be at home for that.
Bassen gives him an expression like daggers, her white hair ruffled by the breeze and giving her the air of a startled cat.
“Sorry,” Torver adds, trying to avoid her eyes and turning to the ethereal foreigner instead. “The healer freaked when he realised who Bassen was. We couldn’t risk it.”
It nods thoughtfully. “Why would he be freaked out by Bassen?”
“Didn’t you notice that my magic kills things?” Bassen snaps.
A clotted bite on Lavellin’s temple reopens slightly and glistens, wet, when it frowns. “Is that not normal?”
Bassen lets out a noisy breath.
“No,” she says stiffly. “It isn’t. People don’t like it. People don’t like me.”
“I like you,” Lavellin offers.
Bassen casts a hard look over her shoulder, which she turns on Torver after a few seconds.
“Go and entertain your friend,” she orders. “I don’t want it bothering me.”
Not wanting to invite Bassen’s ire—he remembers her hitting him only half-jokingly after he got arrested—Torver vaults the planks of wood behind the driving seat that separates it from the main wagon.
Lavellin seems troubled by neither Bassen’s irritation, nor Torver’s sudden proximity. It leans back against the side of the wagon and gazes languidly at the view.
No longer loopy with pain, Torver takes a moment to study it.
All its wounds throb red, except for the white lines of two facial scars, one either side of its chin. It looks…foreign. Its hair is longer than is usual for even a woman, its lean muscles are draped in strange cuts of green cloth, and its magical numbness keeps it from feeling its injuries.
What could an army of such beings achieve? The mares clop onward while Torver’s mind swirls with the horrifying possibilities.
“You’re looking at me.”
Torver’s head snaps up. He didn’t realise his gaze had been pointed square at Lavellin’s chest. He shuffles in his seat.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“It’s natural to mistrust me,” it chuckles. “I would be surprised if you didn’t—you’ve been told my kind are your enemy for centuries.”
Torver leans back, runs a hand through his tangled hair and finds a twig in it.
“Aren’t you my enemy?” he asks, throwing the twig behind them. “I’m from the border region. Children go missing there—have done for years.”
Lavellin looks away.
“Children wander off,” it says, eyes fixed out the back of the wagon. “Happens every day.”
Torver inhales steadily, unclenching his jaw..
“True,” he growls without meaning to. “But the border children come back. And when they do, they’re…changed.”
Lavellin swallows. It holds out its hand as they pass close to a row of bushes, and plucks a large, green leaf which it folds carefully in its fingers. The sight makes Torver’s teeth grind.
“A tragedy that I am sorry for,” it tells the leaf before throwing it back to the earth. “But not one for which I claim culpability,”
Torver opens his mouth to argue back bitterly—but he doesn’t get chance.
“Being lost in the fells is traumatising for a child,” Lavellin continues. “ Wouldn’t you be changed? Making such a journey by yourself?”
Torver silently chokes. He looks away.
Because with that, Lavellin has happened upon the one thing that could disarm him. Changelings forgotten, the worst weeks of his life play out behind Torver’s eyelids.
He was young.
Not too young, like the changelings. But a child nonetheless.
Enforcers had come through the Mere on their way to patrol the border.
They demanded food, accommodation, and stabling for their mighty shires whose legs they washed in the lake there.
The first time he’d ever heard their clattering hooves on cobbles.
Torver will never forget the terror in his mother’s eyes as she pushed him out their back door, how she shoved a bag she’d seemingly already had packed into his hands.
She’d told him that if she was caught with an unregistered child, she would be killed alongside him.
She didn’t even have time to kiss him goodbye.
He’d walked after that. For weeks, months. Starving. Crying. Drinking from streams, stripping bushes of their berries. Running from lynxes and howling into his sleeves.
He was no longer a child by the time he found his way to the outskirts of the Wen.
A movement of Lavellin’s hand brings him back. Torver clears his throat.
“Anyway,” it says. “If your children go missing, surely it’s the fault of your rulers. Or do they blame the fae for everything?”
“We have no rulers,” he says shortly.
If Lavellin notices Torver’s shift in mood, it doesn’t react.
“Well, yes,” it drawls, accent barely parsable in places. “I know there’s no kings here and you long ago abandoned the gods. But you said that there are Enforcers and that they’re already after me. They must be your rulers—or at least, sent by them.”
“We have no rulers,” Torver repeats firmly. “No gods, no kings.”
“What a silly turn of phrase.” Lavellin rolls its eyes and looks away, admiring the green undulations of the land, the smudge of the Wen on the horizon.
Torver doesn’t enjoy the view.
Instead, he eyes the strange creature across from him, oscillating between distrust and a quiet fascination, until, hours later, the Wen greets them nose-first; the smell of the slums, the river. Its buildings pepper the land, growing in density as the outskirts thicken.
Bassen leans back and searches his healed face. She lowers her voice. “Are you really sure about this? I can still turn around.”
A part of Torver wishes that Lavellin had never barrelled into him.
If that were true, he and Bassen would be trotting into the Wen, going into that Citadel.
Into the Court of Works to collect payment for the rat cull, buying bread and eating it with soup, laughing at nothing and everything.
He’d put his spare coins in a pouch to save them.
A thousand yan, so he could happily face down any Enforcer who stopped him.
But Lavellin sits so close to him that he can feel its heat. He meets its pale eyes.
If what it says is true, there won’t be a Mere to dream of returning to. There won’t be papers for him to save up for. There’ll never be soup or bread or laughing with Bassen ever again.
“We’ve made it this far.” His words come out almost a whisper.
Bassen inhales deeply and pulls her cloak tight around her, covering her hair.
Torver gets Lavellin back on the floor of the wagon, pushing it under a seating bench and covering it with the blanket.
Just in time for them to enter the city proper.
The amber cobbling that marks the Wen, the stench of river water and poverty, overlaid with cider.
But smell is all the city is giving them. The crowds, the sounds, the sights—they’re all missing.
“Where is everyone?” Bassen mutters as the mares’ small, black hooves echo in the empty streets. Too empty.
Torver instantly runs through all the ways that the Enforcers could have them outflanked. Could they have been followed without realising it? Could the streets have been blockaded from their residents in time for the arrival of their wagon?
The hairs on Torver’s arms stand, prickling against the fabric of his bloodstained shirt. He leans down to readjust Lavellin’s blankets and whispers a reminder to remain absolutely silent.
Then he hears it.
The soft hum of a distant crowd, the clanging echo of armour, of horseshoes on Rhodfa stone. The peaked turrets of the Citadel look down on them, over the roofs of the city. The source of the sound that increases in volume with every step of approach.
They have no choice but to follow its siren call. The only road to Bassen’s house wide enough to fit the wagon bisects the Rhodfa. Torver joins Bassen at the front of the wagon.
The people around go from none, to few, to many in the blink of an eye.
A crowd, at least half the Wen, fills the streets.
They part unwillingly to allow the wagon through, the air thick with the smell of unwashed bodies.
They shout, jeer, scuffle, a frenetic energy in the air that makes the black mares skitter, pressed on all sides by citizens clamouring for a view of the Wen’s main road.
Bassen stops the wagon at the edge of the Rhodfa’s wide expanse; the street is in use and can’t be crossed yet. Her house on the other side of it is so close, and yet, so far.
Torver doesn’t need to lean over the edge of their vehicle, tap someone on the shoulder, and ask what is going on.
He knows exactly what this is.
Someone is being paraded down the Rhodfa. And they are going to be taken to the square, and executed.
An iron cage on large wheels, pulled by shire horses draped in purple, is about to pass them.
Torver’s heart hammers viciously. More so when he notices the same Enforcer from his arrest in the procession.
Conise, who is shouting and goading the crowd.
He sinks low into his seat and tugs up his collar.
But Torver’s stomach really drops when he sees who is her prisoner.
Wast.
Chained and beaten. Black eye shining. Burns oozing.
On his way to the gallows.
The air grows thick. It catches in Torver’s mouth. The light of the slowly setting sun glints from the bars of Wast’s horse-drawn prison.
The Enforcers gesticulate, riling up the crowd who chant, “No gods! No kings!” Wast stands silently, a hand wrapped around one of the iron bars.
When the cage rolls past, Torver’s heart races, his limbs shaky with adrenaline, like he’s being attacked by rats all over again.
He dares to tap the shoulder of a middle-aged man roped with muscle, asks him what the prisoner did to deserve a public execution.
The man spits.
“Scroll fraud.” His voice is venom. “He was a conjuror—just not powerful enough to get the Official job scroll. So he’s been impersonating an Official that died.
Some cousin from his home village came visiting and reported him—the fucker thought fraud was easier than being obedient like the rest of us! ”
Torver clenches his jaw. No wonder he was crooked, did illegal side-jobs for extortionate amounts—he had to buy what he couldn’t conjure. It makes sense now.
“Filth!” The man’s dark eyes narrow. “Living in luxury while I break my back pulling carts for twelve yan a month!”
The man picks up a loose cobblestone and flings it over the crowd.
He has strength magic, the stone bending the iron bar of Wast’s cage with an almighty clang.
The horses pulling it flinch at the sound and the Enforcers glare in their direction.
The man growls and pushes his way through the crowd, fleeing repercussion.
Torver can’t take his eyes from Wast. And as the procession passes them, for one long, aching second, Wast looks back.
Their eyes meet for the last time and Torver winces at a stab of guilt. Realising that all he can think is—
Who will help him get his papers now?
The crowd seems to close in on him, the buildings too.
The sky. Everything is crushing him and he is small under the knowledge that others would turn him in too, if they knew.
If they knew he was unregistered, worked scrolless.
If they knew he was a godscursed freak. How soon will it be before he’s in an iron cage, paraded down the Rhodfa to his doom? How long before—how long—
He doesn’t know when the wagon had started moving.
All he knows is his haggard breaths, eyes shut, head between his knees.
When Bassen touches him, he nearly screams. He jolts upright. Looks around to see they’re at home, the horses tied to the metal fence in front. The streets around are seemingly empty.
But he, shivering, swears he can feel someone watching from the shadows.