Chapter 9
After much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, they reluctantly decide to leave Lavellin alone in the house—Bassen’s consequence is paining her and Torver won’t let her go off alone. She has a habit of deteriorating quickly.
The fae is ordered not to open the curtains or answer the door. To sit in Torver’s room and do nothing. at. all. Under threat of Bassen’s magical retribution. But that isn’t enough to soothe Torver’s nerves as they walk towards the Citadel, where the library is housed in its Court of Learning.
Neither do the screams of a woman several streets away.
They’re forced to hide in the shadows of a nearby ginnel as two thick-necked, bronze-clad Enforcers pull the woman by her hair. Ignoring her hysteric screams of apology, they shout over her.
“By the Beast below, this fraudster will hang! No gods, no kings!”
A few onlookers cheer and return the call of “No gods, no kings!” but most people look to the ground, to their feet.
Torver tries to push it from his mind when they reemerge onto the street a minute later. A Meddera banner flutters above, the four men’s stern and interchangeable faces looking down on him. He looks away before reading about obedience keeping the Beast asleep, feels a little sick.
“You know, I didn’t know the Wen had a library,” he tells Bassen a little too loudly, stepping over an overflowing gutter.
Bassen makes a sympathetic sound. “I could fill a book with what you don’t know, Torv.”
“Maybe then you could start your own library.”
He hops to the side to avoid colliding with a passing vegetable cart.
Though, it’s true. There’s a lot that Torver doesn’t know. His mother pulled him from the schoolhouse only a few years after he’d entered it—the age when magic begins to manifest, when his curse became apparent. He relies on Bassen for a lot of the common knowledge that the schoolhouses teach.
According to her, the library of the People’s Kingdom houses the ancient writings of King Dunmail himself, transcriptions of the legendary bard Aneirin’s songs, and tomes detailing the history of Hen Ogledd, the landmass of which their Kingdom is part.
She tells him how it exists to protect the original copies of the sanctioned texts in case the Officials need to examine them while arbitrating the work of the courts.
Up in the Mere, on the shores of its lake, Torver had had a different education.
He’d been taught the husbandry of wheat and herdwicks by neighbours.
To this day, the sight of grey wool fills him with an ache; the gap inside him where his childhood used to be, before the ways in which he’s broken became clear.
“So they let people just walk in and borrow books?” he says as they cross a bridge over a narrow section of the river. Boats pass underneath, bringing crops into the city from distant farmland.
“Of course not,” she shrugs. “But the second I take my hood down and glare at them like some hungry wolf, people generally let me do what I want, don’t they?”
“Don’t I know it,” Torver rolls his eyes. He owes his life to that fact.
With Bassen concealed beneath her cloak, the streets are alive as they walk—the hum of people, the splashing of the river, horses’ hooves clacking loudly as they pull rumbling carts in and out of the Wen’s crowded centre.
Bassen seems affronted by the noise, flinching under her hood as if accosted by flies.
“You should kill something,” Torver suggests, brows knitting together. “If you faint inside that library, I can’t go in and fish you out.”
She wafts him away with her hand.
“I’ll be fine,” she insists, eyes darting away.
As grim as it is, Torver wishes she didn’t get so guilty about the lives she takes.
It would be a lot more convenient if she didn’t exist teetering on the brink of death, hesitating to kill more than is absolutely necessary.
If that was the case, he wouldn’t be somewhat sidetracked, wondering where he should buy her an animal to kill on their way home.
They get as close to the Citadel as Torver dares to go and settle that this should be their meeting point in an hour’s time. Bassen walks unsteadily away, towards the grand stone castle that looms above them all.
While he waits for the hour to pass, Torver goes to his favourite market, the one in the small square by the grain stores.
He admires the stalls—smells the fragrant breads of firemancing bakers, watches the airmancing glassblowers and their elaborate vases.
When he comes across the stall of a seamstress, he’s taken aback by a woollen cloak—in herdwick grey.
He justifies the purchase to himself quite easily.
Conise the Enforcer knows his face, so he needs his own cloak to hide it under.
A lifetime ago, he might have thought twice about such a purchase.
This is three tan and a tethera that could have gone into his savings pouch. For his new papers, his new life.
But as he recalls those thoughts, they feel like the thoughts of a distant Torver, a Torver from another world.
Now, his money's gone, his forger’s dead, and a fae fugitive is waiting on his bed, veiled and concealed behind curtains. Now, he’s making plans to cross the nation, back the way he came, and end an immortal life.
He spends his coins.
And when he meets Bassen back at their allotted corner, his new cloak hangs around his shoulders like a herdwick hug. He takes the heavy stack of books from her trembling arms and insists they walk home through the market.
Their fight about it is short, lost when Bassen’s nose and eyes begin bleeding. She blinks back blood and guilty tears while Torver buys her a quacking duck.
“I can see why the Meddera haven’t made you their personal assassin,” he tries to joke, offering her a clean handkerchief from his pocket.
“Yet,” she sniffs darkly, taking the innocent duck into her cold hands.
When Torver pushes open the front door, he holds it wide for Bassen. Turning to bolt the door behind them, his thoughts are lost in the tickly sensation of sweat dripping down his back. His thick wool cloak was certainly a choice in the late summer heat. Potentially why it was so cheap.
When he turns around he can’t help but flinch. Lavellin. Its approach must have been too quiet for him to hear and a small laugh escapes him, the mild shock making his heart palpitate. It stands too close to him, fills his nose with the scent of flowers, as it greets him.
Its long hair hangs from underneath its headcloth, half of it in front of its lean chest like a breastplate, the rest swaying between its shoulder blades.
It turns from him at last, including Bassen in the greeting of its wide smile.
White teeth attract his gaze, sharp canines that are too long—wolf-like and tipped in gold.
He wonders if fae wear tooth jewellery, or if their magical teeth just grow that way.
Bassen’s clicking fingers bring him to.
“Torver, hello?” she says. “Lost you there for a second.”
He reddens, the stack of books suddenly far too heavy in his arms. He sets them on the sideboard under the row of brass coat hooks, curving his spine down to undo the laces of his boots.
Meanwhile, Lavellin approaches the books and runs its long fingers over them.
“Amazing,” it smiles, the movement making small, round apples of its cheeks. “That you have such access to books here. The libraries of the Rath are private—for royal use only. The rest of us make do with parchment pamphlets and scrolls. Convenient, but not as…durable.”
It slaps its hand softly on the cover of the book, the noise like flesh on flesh. A leatherbound edition of The Sanctioned History of the People’s Kingdom. Torver’s fingers catch on his boot laces.
After refreshment—cool well water and plentiful biscuits—they distribute the books among themselves, sprawling over the settees and soft rugs of the living room.
But the casual comfort of their lounging quickly begins to feel inappropriate.
It’s not long before Torver is ragging at his ring of old string with a ferocity that visibly catches Lavellin’s eye.
Between sobering descriptions of the Beast’s ferocity and the necessity of the Meddera’s control are censored paragraphs blotted out with ink, or pages that have been ripped out entirely. Hours pass in tense quiet and the precious scraps of useful information are few and far between.
“This is hopeless,” Torver laments. “Any time I get to a paragraph that seems like it’s setting up some useful information on the Beast’s abilities or attributes, the next one is redacted.”
He sighs and presses his thumb between his eyes, massaging the skin there.
Lavellin closes its own tome and comes to sit at Torver’s side, examining the blotted pages in his lap. It’s hot beside him, the heat of its leg radiating into his. A feeling he can’t become unaware of once he’s noticed it.
“These books are not helpful,” it says ruefully. “ They’re all so…censored. And everything they tell me, I know anyway from the lore of Rheged and the old language. Like, in this book—”
It holds up the battered book bound in cloth that it ‘d been reading.
“There’s a brief paragraph in this that begins by saying there are ways to reduce the effects of magic, then the whole paragraph is blotted out. Whereas I,” it taps the book’s cover knowingly, “know that the answer is the rowan tree.”
“Oh, spare us,” Bassen laments. “Even children know that rowan sedation is a myth. They teach us that in school.”
“Well, fae lore says otherwise.”
“I didn’t think your people had lore,” Bassen says, leaning forward. “I assumed it was a cultural wasteland up there.”
“At least our lore isn’t so brazenly censored.”
Bassen rolls her eyes. “I’ll be sure to tell the Meddera. The four of them will get right on it.”
Lavellin moves away from Torver at last, reclining on the other end of the settee. It admires one of its long, talon-like nails while it speaks.