Chapter 9 #2
“What we know in Rheged is that the Beast, as you call it, could fly on its wings and its breath was a holy fire,” Lavellin recounts. “Its red scales were like plates of armour—impenetrable to human weapons.”
Torver almost misses it, but his brow furrows at Lavellin’s assertion that the Beast really is red. It’s not undisturbing that his mind had somehow guessed the right colour for his nightmares.
He latches onto the first distraction from that fact, and it comes in the form of Bassen grumbling.
“How do you know all this, Lavellin? We don’t even know all this.”
Lavellin closes its fingers over its palm and looks at her.
“What did you suppose this land was called before it was the People’s Kingdom?”
The question hangs in the air and roots Torver in position when he realises that he doesn’t know.
“Rheged,” Lavellin says grimly. “Once, all of this—”
It gestures with a waft of its wrist. Melodramatic.
“—was Rheged.”
Torver feels inexplicably angry, and the twin feeling is wrought plainly on Bassen’s face.
“That’s not true. That’s not—you’re not saying that King Dunmail was the king of Rheged?” she splutters at its sacrilege.
Lavellin chuckles. “Of course not,” it says. “There was a long intermediary period after this land ceded from Rheged, when its human people became their own nation. But—to King Eveling, at least—all of this was Rheged. Still is, if you believe its advisers…”
A dark look passes over Lavellin’s face when speaking of its homeland, and it seems suddenly so…foreign, so unfamiliar, that Torver is reminded of what it is. He wonders for the millionth time if they can really trust it.
“If only your ancestors had been more pious,” Lavellin says sadly. “Then the gods wouldn’t have punished you all with that foul monster… You wouldn’t have your censoring Meddera, and you would know all of this.”
Torver is about to quietly agree before the meaning behind the words really hits him. Is Lavellin—religious?
His head tilts when Lavellin’s gaze turns upward, where the sky rests beyond the roof of Bassen’s house. It brings its slate pendant from its pocket and presses the thing to its chest, its heart.
Torver’s mouth opens, wordless.
“So, we’ve learned nothing useful, then,” Bassen concludes, standing suddenly and dropping onto the settee between them.
“I suppose not,” Torver concedes.
She leans her head against his shoulder and exhales into a stretching silence. Then—
“What if I can’t even kill it?” Bassen mutters. “What if we get there, I try my hardest, and all I do is give it a headache? What if it’s too big?”
Torver’s eyebrow quirks. “Does that mean you’re willing to try?”
“I never said that.” She rearranges herself against him. “It’s just—I don’t understand my own magic as well as I could. I’ve never tested its limits, seen what it can do. Because I hate it. I hate the nature of it.”
Torver nods, resting his cheek against the top of her head. “I know.”
She continues. “I look and feel like shit because I let it nearly kill me all the time. It wants more than I give it, but I…” She motions uselessly with a pale hand.
“Sometimes I wonder how big it could go. The biggest thing I’ve killed was that Enforcer’s shire with the broken leg, do you remember? ”
She doesn’t wait for him to reply, seems now to be talking for and to herself. Torver and Lavellin listen silently.
“It scared me how easy it felt,” she mumbles. “And it scared me how good I felt, too. I know my consequence manifests kind of randomly, but I didn’t get a nosebleed for weeks after that. But—but, does that mean I could kill the Beast?”
Torver considers this, uncomfortable in the knowledge that they have no way of knowing.
“You know, there’s no deathmancy guidebook,” she shrugs. “I’m the only one there’s ever been as far as I can tell, and I just—wish I had an innocuous magic, you know? Like those flying girls that circle the cider slums in the evening.”
Torver makes a small, inquisitive noise.
“Two of them. My bedroom window faces the right direction. I watch them.” Her voice lowers.
“Every night. They know exactly what they’re doing.
Because when they’ve flown enough to sate their magic, when they’ve avoided their consequence for another day…
They just carry on. And on. And on… Until they can’t go on any longer. ”
She shrugs again. “They know themselves.”
Her voice is so mournful that when Lavellin turns to her, its face is edged with concern.
“Perhaps killing this dragon will help you to know yourself,” it proffers.
She gathers a small breath as if to begin speaking, but then stops. She exhales a stilted sound instead.
“Perhaps,” she says.
They talk quietly amongst themselves for a while. About the Beast, about war, about magic. The hour grows late and Torver suggests bed.
“We can decide in the morning if we even want to do this,” he says, rising from the settee with a definitive slap of his knees.
He looks down at Bassen, wonders if she’s feeling weak again when she doesn’t rise after him. He holds out his hand, and she looks at it, at the angry red skin of his finger where he’d dragged his string back and forth across it all afternoon.
“We have to do it,” she says hollowly, to his hand.
Torver blinks; it takes him a second.
“You—You’re sure?”
Bassen nods. “It’s not just about fighting off Rheged, is it?” she says. “It’s about what we’re protecting. I…” She trails off, pulling herself up using his hand.
“Yeah?” He searches her pallid face. The concern etched in lines and knitted eyebrows.
“I saw that Enforcer—Conise. I think I saw her in the library.” She shifts uncomfortably. “I mean—it could have been someone that looks like her. I didn’t get a proper look at her face, but… What if we’re being surveilled? Because obedience keeps the Beast asleep?”
From outside, a crashing sound makes Torver flinch—a cat knocking over a water pail. Clattering tin on cobble, a mournful yowl. He shakes the feeling away.
“They wouldn’t,” Torver frowns. “Not you—never you. They’re too scared of you…aren’t they?”
Bassen shrugs.
“Maybe I’m paranoid. Or maybe we’re on some kind of Meddera watchlist.”
“Either way,” Lavellin adds, “what other choice is there?”
Bassen grits her teeth and Torver watches the thumbprint of muscle in her jaw tick. None of them say anything until—
“Let’s sleep on it,” Bassen sighs. She stands up, heading to the stairs, and Torver and Lavellin hesitantly follow.
Torver brushes her wrist with his hand, making her pause on the upstairs landing. He doesn’t know what to say, so he suggests, voice low, that Lavellin should get its own bedroom to sleep in.
“There’s one more spare bedroom,” he points out. “The one that shares a wall with yours.”
Her eyes flare at the suggestion, but before she can protest, Lavellin interjects.
“I liked sharing with Torver,” it says. “I don’t like to be alone. I’d like to stay in that room, if I can.”
“Perfect!” Bassen proclaims, before Torver can counter. She scurries off to her room at the end of the corridor, bidding them both goodnight over her quickly retreating shoulder.
“But there’s only one bed…” Torver protests weakly.
Her door closes with a clunk.
Lavellin shrugs. “We share beds in Rheged.”
Torver huffs, arranges his face into some kind of look. He pushes his door open with what he hopes is the requisite level of sullenness.
“I’m sure you do all kinds of things in Rheged,” he says bitterly. “But you’re not in Rheged any more.”
It follows him into the room quite happily, unaffected by his display. It hops jauntily onto his bed and assumes a comfortable position for holding him unwaveringly in its pale gaze. Torver sighs, resigned to his fate.
Releasing the knot of held breath in his throat, he supposes they’ve already been all over each other twice.
Once in the Dodwood being eaten alive by rats, and once when Lavellin had used him as a human stress toy as it rode out its pain.
He can handle sharing a room. Its mere presence won’t be as oppressive as the memory of its hands on him.
And anyway, he should be keeping an eye on it.
It takes the scarf from its head and shakes out its glimmering sunstone hair, looks over its shoulder at him as he crouches on the ground to rearrange his paltry blanket pile. Its expression is caught between pity and derision.
“Are you really going to keep sleeping on the floor?” it asks. One of its eyebrows curves in an arch.
And he remembers how his neck had ached that morning, how the floorboards had seeped pain into his bones like water into hessian.
He remembers that and says, “Yes.”
Pretty and frowning, it looks down at him. Its eyes bore holes and he prickles like kindling. He grits his teeth.
“It’s bad enough sharing a room with you,” he declares. “I know you saved me from those rats, but who knows what a fae might do to me? Won’t you spirit me away and make me a changeling?”
Lavellin’s smirk falters, it looks away from him at last.
“That is a horrible myth,” it says, the tightness of its voice so subtle that Torver almost fails to notice.
“I mean it, Lavellin!” he insists, rather enjoying the reaction. “You better not try anything, or I’ll scream.”
At that, the fae recovers. It chuckles darkly, its voice once again like soft velvet brushed against Torver’s cheek. But the laughter doesn’t reach its eyes and its voice is quietly serious when it purrs its words.
“I don’t doubt I could make you scream,” it says, and for a second, in the low light, Torver swears he sees its eyes physically darken. “I’ve given the matter some thought.”
Torver’s taunts die in his mouth. “I bet you have,” he manages, wings clipped. “I would too, if I had to share a room with myself.”
It only chuckles again. Torver swallows, watching as Lavellin crawls between his sheets, seemingly satisfied. It pushes its head delicately into the folds of his pillow, inhaling Torver’s scent at length and looking at him smugly.
But he won’t be goaded by the enemy in his bed, he won’t bite.
He just rolls his eyes and juts out his jaw as he turns away, shuffling into a position he might sleep in.
But even his irritation doesn’t distract from the weight on his shoulders, from the thought of what an ancient red dragon might do when awakened from his nightmares and released into his world.
Beyond his closed curtain, the moon hangs in the black sky.
Its cycle of waxing and waning won’t stop for him, no matter how he wishes, and somewhere, somehow, unknowable armies are readying.