Chapter 8
Torver wakes to neck pain and shuffling sounds from the hall. He blinks in the morning light, feeling blankets and a hard floor beneath him. Towering bookshelves look down disapprovingly as sleep gradually recedes.
In a flash, it all comes back to him.
The last few days—the robbery and his arrest, moving in with Bassen, the Dodwood rats, the fugitive Rath, Wast, the Beast.
He groans not just for the aching of his bones and, sitting up, he looks around for proof he didn’t dream it all. True enough, Lavellin is in his bed, scenting the room with a flowery musk and softly drooling into his pillow.
Bassen breaks his reverie, marching into the room with a folded pile of fabric in her hands. No knock or anything.
“Morning!” she declares.
Lavellin sits up, rudely awoken and even groggier than Torver. It mutters something in the old language that sounds rolling and lilting, a little guttural in places.
Bassen sits on the edge of the bed.
“I found these in my drawers.” She drops her pile of fabric into Lavellin’s lap.
“They were from my headcloth phase before I started wearing my cloak to hide my hair. I was thinking you could wear them around the house so we can open the curtains. You know, to hide your weird Rath ears if anyone walks past and looks in.”
Lavellin, evidently not an early riser, shoots her and the headcloths a withering look before it picks the first folded piece of fabric from the selection—a large navy rectangle edged in lace.
It flaps the fabric and places it inexpertly over the top of its head, attempting to tie it under its chin. The cloth hangs down past its shoulders, the points of its ears clearly visible, tenting the fabric on either side of its head. The effect is almost comical.
“Not like that,” Bassen says, rolling her dark eyes. “Here.”
She reaches over and roughly takes the thing, folding it diagonally and arranging it around the long oval of Lavellin’s face.
She leans close, tying it up at its nape.
Torver blinks, disarmed watching her so close to someone who isn’t him—people don’t tend to let her get close.
Not if they know who she is. He wonders if she feels as strange as he does when her fingers brush the skin of the fae’s neck.
“There.” She leans back to admire her work. “That will do. See how I doubled up the fabric so it holds your ears down?”
“Thank you,” Lavellin says, and Bassen almost smiles.
It shuffles towards the edge of the bed and Bassen rises so it can get up. “You’re very kind,” it adds, but this is a step too far and causes Bassen to scowl.
“Don’t be too grateful!” She crosses her arms. “I’ve been meaning to get rid of those for months. Ever since someone told me I look like an old widow wearing them.”
“No, I didn’t!” Torver scoffs. “I said you looked elegant!”
“Like an elegant old widow,” she quotes him, smirking.
After an amount of bickering, they go downstairs, cautiously opening curtains as they go.
Torver peers through each window as he frees it from its drapes, letting the light in and assessing if there is anyone at the other side of it.
Anyone who could gaze in, recognise what Lavellin is, and report them all.
“You’re healing well,” Bassen says slowly to Lavellin as the three of them enter the kitchen.
“I am,” Lavellin agrees, performing a delicate, if sarcastic, twirl.
Already, its wounds are scabbed over and its cheeks are flushed a pleasant pink. The fae looks attractive, even with its injuries. Torver permits the thought to percolate for a moment before batting it away, irritated. His hoarse voice and his nerves yearn for the soothing touch of tea.
“I always heal quickest when the pain’s on, it’s just a bit of an ordeal getting there, isn’t it?
” it laments, lowering itself into one of the seats around the wooden table next to the well.
“It’s easier not to turn it off at all, but you know how it is when you’re in the thick of it, you just want to be able to think straight… ”
It goes to run a scabby hand through its long hair, but its fingers catch on its head covering.
“Um, not really,” Bassen says. She casts a furtive glance out of the window opposite the stove.
Lavellin taps itself lightly on the side of the head. “Ah yes! One magic each down here, isn’t it? Can’t believe I forgot!” It looks genuinely apologetic. “I hope it’s not a sore spot for you.”
Bassen frowns as she draws water from the well, the nacreous tin kettle in her other hand. She passes it to Torver when it’s full and he sets it on the stove, preparing to light it.
“It’s not an anything spot,” Bassen frowns. “Don’t worry about it.”
She joins it at the table while Torver prepares cups of tea.
She takes two small apples from the bowl at the centre of the table, and sets one in front of the empty chair beside her.
Lavellin reaches towards the bowl hesitantly until it sees her nod, and it takes a green apple, biting into it with a loud crunch.
“Do all Rath—sorry, fae—heal as quickly as you?” she asks carefully, watching it chew. “You were a state yesterday. They really tried to eat you alive.”
Lavellin’s eyebrow rises.
“What can I say?” the fae asks, equally carefully. “I’m delicious.”
Torver turns his back to them to prepare mint leaves, and there are gaps in their stilted conversation while he tends the heating water; silences where thoughts of war, thoughts of the Beast hang in the air.
Bassen’s hands squirm in her lap like trapped mice.
She inhales as if readying herself for an undertaking.
But she is interrupted before she can begin.
Someone knocks at the front door—loud, hard, and sudden.
Bassen turns rigid, her eyes locking with Torver’s. He flinches when the knock comes again. Even harder this time, more insistent. Everything is painfully still.
A voice comes through the stone of the house; a shout from the street.
“Miss Bassen—open up!”
That voice.
Conise.
The Enforcer who had arrested Torver on suspicion of scroll fraud, who thinks that the deathmancer extrajudicially executed him. She’s at Bassen’s door and is thumping it with her silver-plated fist.
Torver dives beneath the table and pulls Lavellin down after him. Its apple core is launched across the tiled floor.
“Bass! Get rid of her!” he whispers.
Momentarily panicked, Bassen turns in place, her hands flapping.
“Right! Okay!” She turns and leaves the room.
Out of sight, Torver hears the clunking of the brass locks, the opening of the door around the corner and down the hall from where they hide. Lavellin starts to ask a question but he shushes it with a raised hand, his ears straining to hear what is happening at the front door.
His mind races, wondering if she saw him yesterday at the procession—decidedly and illegally alive. Wondering if she somehow knows about Lavellin.
But, with a flood of relief that makes his knees weak, it seems that Conise is only there to return Bassen’s registration papers—she apparently dropped them near the Rhodfa. Though the idea gives Torver pause. How could her papers have come loose? She keeps them in an inner pocket of her dress.
Conise’s clipped Wen accent traverses the walls of the house as she re-introduces herself to Bassen. Evidently she has had the time to mentally prepare for this interaction with the deathmancer, because she’s lost her stammer. Torver only wishes he could make out Bassen’s quiet replies.
“It’s vitally important, Miss, that you are more careful with these papers. Yes, there’s an address on them, but it’s so very important that you keep tight hold of them. There are consequences—yes.”
Then the pitched buzz of Bassens’s reply, words he can’t make out.
“Well, yes, perhaps not for you, Miss. But it’s good to set an example, isn’t it?” Conise pauses. “Speaking of which, what happened with that borderland fraudster you took on the other day?”
There’s a silence in which Torver’s heart thuds.
He needs to get closer to the door, to hear how Bassen replies, how she manages this.
He creeps out from underneath the table as stealthily as he can, motioning for Lavellin to stay where it is. All the while, he’s thinking he should have hidden under the blanket with their fugitive as soon as he saw that there were Enforcers around. He had let himself be distracted by Wast.
Stupid, stupid boy.
He presses his pounding head to the wood in time to hear Bassen’s dulcet tones.
“Oh, him?” Bassen says. “You don’t want to know what I did to him.”
She purrs the words, and Torver almost hears the feline look on her face, the one she uses to engineer discomfort. He’s close enough now, the sounds amplified by the wood pressed against his ear, that he can hear Conise swallow. He hates this. He hates her.
“The People’s Kingdom thanks you for your service,” Concise declares.
With a final reminder to be more careful with her documents, the Enforcer bids Bassen farewell. The repeated “no gods, no kings” sends a chill down Torver’s spine and he hates this all so much.
The clunking of the closing door is like the hand around Torver’s throat letting go. He can breathe again—almost. Just in time for Bassen to come clattering back into the kitchen, flinging the kitchen door open right into Torver’s crouched body, and sending him flying across the floor.
After the requisite scuffling, apologies, and the reclosing of curtains, Bassen places her registration papers in a spread across the table, and the three of them regard each other with the wide expressions of snared rabbits.
“I didn’t like that,” Torver grits out.
He hungrily eyes Bassen’s papers: two sheets of thick, cream-coloured parchment worn from years of handling.
“I don’t think any of us did,” Bassen agrees. He pulls his gaze away from the treasures spread on the table.
“Indeed,” he double-agrees hollowly.