Chapter 8 #2
“We need to be more careful.” Bassen lowers her voice. “When we do—whatever it is we decide to do. We need to think ahead. She could have seen you yesterday, we’re just stupidly lucky that she didn’t. I don’t even know how my papers fell out of my pocket…”
Lavellin nods slowly, though Torver can see that its eyes are slightly glazed with incomprehension. As his pulse begins to return to normal, he wonders if it is regretting having come here. If he were the lithe creature sat in front of him, perhaps he would have kept running.
It taps its long fingers on the table and for the first time, Torver notices the length of its nails. Long and sharp like talons.
“What are we going to do?” it asks. “About—everything?”
“I don’t know.” Bassen picks up her half-eaten apple from where she left it on the table.
“I have no idea what we can do. We can’t take the warning to the Citadel—we’ll be arrested for sedition and cross-border contact.
And what can they do anyway? More patrols?
It would take every Enforcer in the Kingdom to fight them off…
Though, they’d probably think it was a plot to get the Enforcers out of the Wen to—” she shrugs. “Assassinate the Meddera or something.”
The table rattles, her leg bouncing beneath it. When Torver looks down, he notices that he’s doing it too.
His gaze again finds the papers spread across the table’s surface. The simple sheets of parchment that control their lives. Bassen rests her head in her hands, the whiteness of her shoulder-length hair making her knuckles stand out in their redness.
“I had an…idea,” Torver starts, still staring at Bassen’s papers. “The other day.”
“Oh yeah?” Bassen regards him with one eye through splayed fingers.
Torver inhales. Perhaps he shouldn’t suggest this. It was only a passing thought he’d had at the end of a very long, very challenging day.
“You won’t like it,” he warns.
Bassen releases her face from the cage of her hands. “Try me,” she says.
Torver is embarrassed he’s giving air to the idea and he carefully tugs the ring of string on his finger. The skin beneath it is already a raw welt again after being healed in Watenlath and he holds in his wince.
“It’s bad,” he begins. “No matter what happens.”
Bassen’s mouth compresses to a thin line, and when he looks at Lavellin, he sees a similar line of consternation where its lips usually reside. Torver takes his gaze from both of them. Orates to the closed curtains.
“If we do nothing and the Rath breach the border in three months—if they make it to the cairn and use their magic to wake the Beast, we’re done for, aren’t we? How many would die in the Beast’s rampage? What untold miseries would the Rath inflict on us once we’re under their power?”
“King Eveling is a cruel, cruel creature.” Lavellin nods from the corner of his eye.
“But if we do find some way to prevent that—if we can find a way to warn the Meddera without getting ourselves executed—if they send up extra patrols, every person with strength, or firemancy, or any magic fit for fighting…it’s still bad.”
He hears Bassen exhale softly, waiting.
“Because the People’s Kingdom is a cruel, cruel place too,” he says, twists the string again. “The Meddera have this place under their thumb. The registrations, the control, the executions…”
Crinkling catches Torver’s attention and his head turns in time to see Bassen folding away her papers.
“It has to be that way, though,” she says. “The Beast. The Meddera have to know who has what magic and dictate how it’s used. Controlled magic is the cost of the Beast’s slumber. Obedience keeps it asleep, remember?”
Torver’s hands ball into fists, the expansion of his fingers cutting into his ring. The red dragon of his restless nights flexes its claws. Ready to swoop down and kill him for what he’s about to say.
“So what if there wasn’t a Beast anymore?”
Neither Bassen nor Lavellin respond. They only look at him. And he looks at each of them in turn.
“You heard me.” His eyes widen. “What if there was no Beast? Not for the Rath to wake up, not for the Meddera to keep asleep?”
The room is quiet. So quiet that Torver can hear the distant tumult of the Wen through the walls. Cries of joy and of fear, squealing children and clopping hooves.
“Why not?” he insists, looking between them in quick succession, trying to rouse their enthusiasm.
“What is it exactly that you propose we do, Torv?” Bassen frowns, crossing her arms.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Say it.”
The blasphemy of it makes his muscles tense.
He inhales. “I propose we kill it.”
Torver pulls his sleeves over his hands. Bassen shakes her head in slow disbelief. Disbelief—but not rejection.
“And if the Beast is dead…” Torver continues. “When the Rath get there, there’s nothing for them to wake up and the Enforcers might stand a chance of fighting off the fae. What do you think, Lavellin?”
He looks to their fae insurgent. It catches its lower lip between sharp teeth.
“Well, that’s why they need the Beast,” Lavellin says.
“The fae are far more powerful than humans. Aside from physical prowess, our magic is stronger and we’re not limited to just one—but we are vastly outnumbered.
A human army might beat Rheged on numbers alone, if they had no dragon to wield.
Our army is—” it swallows hard. “Small.”
Bassen’s expression is pensive, but Lavellin’s estimations only spur Torver on.
“And when the Meddera next go to the cairn to sight the Beast and make sure it’s still asleep—they’ll see it’s dead!
” His voice rises to a low shout. “If they find it dead, won’t they have to start treating the people better?
They’ll know that the threat is no longer real, that they’re like any other kingdom where an uprising could see them on the gallows. ”
And it’s a stretch but…with the Beast dead, would it be easier for him to get papers?
His mind whirrs with the possibilities.
The Enforcers would surely be less strict…
so wouldn’t forgers be less wary of being caught?
Wouldn’t more conjurors be willing to forge?
Wouldn’t prices lower? He could go wherever he wanted without fear of document checks.
He could even get job scrolls and try his best to complete them without magic—earning his own yan, rather than Bassen’s!
But Bassen shakes her head. “That sounds all well and good, Torv, but we can’t do that.”
Torver rakes his hands through his hair, catching Lavellin’s large eyes. His heart thumps inside him but for the first time in a long while, it is with excitement, not fear.
“We can! We are the only people who can do that, Bassen. Can’t you see?” Torver stands, unable to contain himself. “You’re the only person ever known to have death magic. You can kill it.”
“I can kill it?” she splutters.
Torver nods, looking to Lavellin for back-up as he paces the room like a caged animal.
“We’ll leave the Wen—we just need to avoid Enforcer checkpoints since we don’t have a job scroll permitting travel—then we head north.
I know you’ve never travelled that far before, but you’ll have us there to make sure you’re safe.
Then, we get to the cairn at Dunmail Raise, find the Beast’s lair, and you… do your thing!”
“Torver, you’ve gone insane.”
Lavellin stretches its scabbed hand onto the table, tapping its fingers, long nails clacking against the wood. “I hate to say it,” Lavellin inhales. “But he’s right.”
The line of its jaw is sharp, the muscles clenched.
“But…” Bassen says weakly.
Torver and Lavellin are poised like pointer hounds, both fixed on her; her crossed arms, her chapped lips. The dark rings beneath her eyes that look like bruises.
“I should have never let you pick that fucking job scroll,” she glowers, casting Lavellin a dirty look.
“So that means yes?” Torver feels his eyebrow rise, daring to hope.
“How do we know that it’s even possible?” She shakes her head. “If it could be killed, don’t you think King Dunmail would have done that?”
“King Dunmail wasn’t a deathmancer, was he? Your magic, your soul, needs death like you need air. If anyone can do it, it’s you.”
Bassen frowns, a look in her dark eyes that he can’t decipher.
“Perhaps. Maybe. I don’t know.” Her head moves like she’s suppressed the urge to look over her shoulder. “But first, we’ll need to do some research. We can’t just go in blind. We have to consider if this…idea is even remotely possible.”
“What does that mean?” Lavellin asks, looking at her so its profile is limned in dim, curtained light. Those curtains flutter on an under-door draught as Bassen stands unsteadily and peels them slowly back.
The morning light seeps into the room through the slit, the distant Citadel in view.
“I’m afraid it means a trip to the library.”