Chapter 7 #2
He can picture the scene if Bassen were to walk in now. The sight of Lavellin cradled in his arms, the towel beneath them twisted, both of them still in their dirty clothes made bloodier. He reddens under her imaginary gaze.
Slowly, he extricates himself. The floorboards creak; both under him and behind him in the distance where Bassen is ascending the stairs to go to her own bedroom.
The urge to talk to her alone rises and then fades.
The Beast and King Eveling’s army will still be there in the morning when she’s had a rest. He wonders if her consequence is bothering her or if the rats were enough to sate it.
He runs his hand through the tangled mess of his hair.
“How do you feel?” he asks Lavellin, and it looks up at him blearily.
“The worst is over,” it mumbles. “Just standard pain now until I fully heal.” Then it adds, “Which will be quicker than you would heal, by the way.”
“Okay,” Torver rolls his eyes. “You can’t be feeling that bad if you can be smug about it.”
It grimaces and he suspects it may be trying to wink. A stab of pity shoots through him. He remembers how it feels to be away from all he knew. To spend his first night in the sprawling Wen.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s get you something to wear.”
He goes hesitantly to the trunk at the foot of his bed, pausing at the sight of the clothes within it.
“Any preference on clothes?” he asks. “I’ve got a few male-cut shirts and tunics here that Bassen got for me, but if you prefer, I can convince her to lend you something of hers. More feminine.”
Lavellin looks at him through a haze of pain.
“Are clothes not just clothes down here?” It regards him incredulously through its eyelashes.
Torver rolls his eyes and offers for Lavellin to come and have a root through the trunk to find something it likes, but it waves him away with a hand and a proclamation that it can’t move.
“And anyway,” it drawls. “What’s the point in putting on fresh clothes? I’m filthy.”
This is true and when Torver looks down at himself, he can see that he looks no better. All mud, blood, and debris.
Lavellin seems too tired and too delicate right now for a bath. But he can think of an alternative arrangement.
He tells Lavellin to wait there—not that it has anywhere else to go—while he disappears back downstairs.
Padding around Bassen’s large kitchen on bare feet—he’s unclear on when he lost his socks—Torver fills a large pot with water from the small well in the centre of the room. He tries to move quietly, unsure of what time it is, but inevitably, the clang of metal on metal rings out.
The house feels eerily quiet when the pots settle, and his whirring brain fills the gaps.
Rats, blood, Wast. Lavellin’s screams. Images of what war would be like if all the fae really do have multiple magics like Lavellin says.
Images, too, of what an awakened Beast might do with wings and claws and holy fire.
He gets the pot onto the top of the stove but the kindling underneath doesn’t want to catch the sparks from his flint.
Every time he has to do this, he regrets himself.
Wishes that if he can’t have magic of his own, at least he could be important enough to have an in-house firemancer like senior Officials and the Meddera do.
But that’s not for the likes of him, a man who evidently doesn’t deserve magic in the first place.
In contrast, the Meddera, harsh as they are, deserve to have what they want.
It’s their control of the Courts that has kept the Beast asleep for centuries.
The kindling catches at last and an idle thought crosses his mind.
That it would all be better if there were no Beast at all.
He shakes the blasphemy away, watches the water begin to heat.
He hopes Lavellin appreciates the effort—he usually washes with cold water.
But he supposes this is the least he can do after it put its body between him and the endless teeth of the rats.
After it risked everything to bring its warning.
As suspicious as he should be of the fae, the sounds it had made in pain were unfakeable, its fist balled up in his shirt a memory he can’t shake.
After a while, Torver lifts the pot with a cloth wrapped around each handle. He leaves the stove fire to burn out and takes his cargo back to the bedroom.
He nearly drops it when he sees Lavellin perched on the end of his bed, naked except for dark underclothing that hangs around its hips.
Torver splutters and Lavellin looks at him blankly. Its dirty clothes are folded roughly in a pile by its feet, its slate pendant with the broken leather on his night stand. It cocks its head at his reaction.
“I thought you said we were changing clothes? You went to get water?” Its bare skin is practically aglow in the candlelight. Torver looks away.
“Do you not have shame in the Rath?” he grumbles, before setting the pot of warm water on the ground.
He offers Lavellin one of the small cloths he had used to carry the thing up. Tinkling splashes of water fill the air as it dutifully begins to dip the cloth and clean away the blood and dirt.
“Why would I be ashamed?” It peers over its arm at him, voice silken in a way that can only be deliberate. “Do you find my body shameful?”
Torver huffs. But he’s glad, at least, that it has the energy to goad him. It won’t die from shock before it can help them.
And despite himself, he can’t help but rake his eyes over the fae’s epicene form.
Lean and lithely muscled, its chest is broad and flat, its waist and hips curving like an hourglass.
It might look good if it wasn’t so repellently injured.
Bites, scrapes and gashes, fang-holes and small chunks of flesh that hang unsheathed from skin.
Torver’s brain crawls in his skull; the viscera, the uncanny prickle of looking at neither a man nor a woman.
They clean themselves and Torver’s grateful that he no longer has open wounds that would slow the job down. He’s soon in the hall, changing into a fresh cotton shirt and shorts.
But when he re-enters the bedroom, he feels hot and inadequate at the sight that greets him.
He doesn’t want to admit that he’s mortified at the ease with which Lavellin is unclothed in front of him, drowsily scrubbing away at the patches of ruined flesh.
He doesn’t recall ever seeing so much skin outside the safe confines of guilt-soaked sex.
“Can you do my back?” Lavellin turns, presenting itself to him; all of it pocked with bites and wounds, streaked with red.
Torver grits his teeth, swallowing his horror and his embarrassment, the warmth in the depths of his core. His lip curls as he scrubs.
“That should do.”
He throws the cloth back into the pot of water and retreats to the other end of the room. Where his trunk sits, he hides behind it, pulling out a grey tunic and some loose linen trousers.
“Here.” He throws them in the fae’s direction and he makes sure to turn his back while it changes, standing as if gazing out of the window at the mountains. In reality, he’s unable to do anything but admire the woven patterns of the curtains that hang there.
He hears it get into his bed, and when he looks, it smiles at him from between his sheets, the movement stretching the vertical scars either side of its chin.
After delivering the bloodied pot back to the kitchen, Torver creates a nest of clothes and blankets on his rug. Lavellin asks him to share the bed with it, but Torver declines the offer quickly. He blows out the candles and curls into his pile on the floor.
In the dark, there is silence.
He knows it’ll be a long time before sleep finds him; his mind won’t quiet.
He’s sleeping on the floor and there is a fae in his bed.
War is coming, the Beast will be awoken, and a fae is in his bed, wearing his clothes.
He looks up at the dim outline of it and thinks again about the idea he had in the kitchen.
“Lavellin?” he asks after a long while.
“Yes, my sweet?” it replies. He can almost see the slope of its smirking mouth in the dark.
“Why did you come here?” he asks, wondering if fae can lie.
“I told you,” Lavellin replies steadily. “Once I learned what was coming, I had to do something. It’s not a just war, it’s expansion, it’s…conquering.” It swallows hard. “If I can’t stop needless deaths, then I can at least warn you. We’re not all—I’m not evil.”
Torver doesn’t know how much of that he should believe and he suspects there’s something that Lavellin isn’t telling him.
But he supposes he hasn’t told the whole story about himself either.
Lavellin has probably assumed he has magic just like everyone else.
Why would it think otherwise? Torver is an anomaly. But in a bad way.
“Why do you think that saving the People’s Kingdom is worth the risk?” he asks.
“I didn’t have time to think, I just—”
He hears the shuffling of fabric on fabric as Lavellin turns from its back to its side, facing him where he lays on the ground. Its hand rises, its fingers coming to rest on its chin, the white scars there.
“I ran. There was…” It trails off, as if changing its mind. “I just ran.”
Torver frowns.
“If you think you’ll be saving lives by stopping the Rath taking us over, I don’t think you are,” he says.
He thinks again of Wast’s procession, of the Enforcer who had arrested him outside his own home, of his mother who sent him away because of the risk he carries.
The endless hangings, the insidious control that the papers and documents and registrations hold.
Control magic, control the Beast—no gods, no kings.
Could it be that living under the control of the Rath would be better? Surely anything is better.
But Lavellin just chuckles through the dark.
“You don’t know King Eveling,” it glowers.
“So it’s a lose-lose situation,” Torver breathes. “As long as the Beast lives.”
An owl hoots outside, hunting for mice amongst the ginnels and the ferns.
“Why? Do you think you could take on a dragon?” Lavellin asks. There is a rustling noise as it shifts. “We have that creature in our legends too, you know. In the old language.”
Torver rises to rest on his bony elbows. “You speak the old language?”
“Natively,” Lavellin replies.
Torver nods, considering this before laying back down, stifling a yawn. He shrugs into his blankets, an exhaustion settling over him, into the bones of him.
He decides not to pursue the conversation further, wants to push it all from his tiny mind. But when he falls into a fitful sleep, he dreams of blood-red wings beating him into the earth.