Chapter 12
Torver is hurrying back to the river, a heavy bag thumping against his spine and a live chicken under his arm. The town he’s fleeing is called Eskam and it’s the only civilization they’ve seen all day.
He’d regretted going alone to get supplies almost immediately—passing Enforcers had set up a document checkpoint on the main street and he’d had to cut through a grubby pigpen to avoid it. If only Bassen hadn’t looked so shaky, then he would have made her come with him.
He doesn’t know what he expects to see when the boat comes back into view.
Bassen and Lavellin have never been alone before.
Bassen is still prickly about its warning upending their life, and Lavellin itself is infuriatingly peculiar.
He half expects to see them scrapping in the dust, hands at each other’s necks.
That or them sat on either ends of the boat in stony silence.
Instead, when he crests the small hill leading to the river, what he sees nearly makes him drop his chicken.
In the pale wood of the vessel, Bassen is bent slightly forward with a look of pure bliss on her face despite the trail of blood dripping out of one eye. And Lavellin sits behind her—massaging her shoulders.
“Interrupting, am I?” Torver mumbles, his steps muffled by the grass underfoot. The hen nestled in his armpit squirms unhappily as he thrusts it into Bassen’s hands.
Her cheeks flush pink. One of Lavellin’s hands leaves her shoulder to wave at him, but returns a moment later to thumbing circles over her shoulder blades.
“Bass was telling me about how she’s often in pain,” Lavellin explains in its lilting accent. “Her magic is like a disease in a lot of ways. I’m surprised you don’t do this for her, considering how much she does for you.”
Torver’s outrage is instinctive. Like the kick of a tapped knee. He points an accusing finger at the fae.
“First of all, who said you could call her Bass—”
“I did,” Bassen interjects.
“—and second of all, how are you being so judgemental when I’m the one who’s just gone into that town on my own to get us all supplies? I got us food, soap, a map, and a chicken! Even though there were Enforcers in there! So, what do we say?”
Bassen rolls her eyes, readjusting the unhappily clucking hen in her arms. “We say thank you, Torver.”
“That’s what I thought.” Torver wobbles his way into the boat and throws his bag to the planks with a decisive thunk. He huffs, wants to shake off like a hound. Stupid Enforcers. Stupid Lavellin. Stupid, stupid boy.
But, at least he made it back safely.
The sun is high in the sky and Lavellin squints at him under its light, taps its long, taloned fingers on the handles of the oars. It looks at him with an expression that Torver can’t parse.
“Shall I?” it asks softly, adjusting one of the oars in its mount.
Torver forces a sly smile. “Only because I know you love it,” he says.
What he doesn’t say is that his arms are stiff from the time he’d spent rowing the previous day. That’s why Lavellin needs to row, not because he wants to be distracted by the sound of its rhythmic breathing.
Each oar-thrust pulls them from Eskam and Torver twists the string on his finger as they go.
He’s almost grateful to hear the wet sound of chicken flesh as Bassen kills it, his head turned away, towards the blinding light of the unclouded sun.
She throws the mulch of it to the river, and it lands with a small splash.
A while later, Lavellin propels the boat with one final push, then allows the craft to float along on the momentum.
They commence with a modest lunch, but Lavellin doesn’t eat much, just holds various pieces of food in its hand, occasionally nibbling on them.
Torver raises a questioning brow when it picks up a pear, only to hold it in its palm.
“I fear the worry is affecting my appetite,” Lavellin says finally, brushing a strand of amber hair behind its ear. “We’re heading towards the dragon of the gods…I can’t stop thinking about it. How are you both so—I don’t know, fine with it?”
Torver crunches his apple with a jolt of irritation. Obviously he isn’t fine with it. But he’d rather bite his finger clean off than let his feelings overtake him.
“I just don’t think you should treat this endeavour frivolously,” Lavellin continues. “We’re going to go and kill a dragon.”
Torver scoffs loudly.
Perhaps the thought of the Beast doesn’t fill him with the pants-wetting terror it should; perhaps his propensity for self-punishment helps him stay numb.
But this strange, foreign fae doesn’t get to shame him for that.
If it could see inside his head, it would know how scared he is, but he’s not about to bare his proverbial throat to it.
He swallows his chewed chunk of apple before pointing the crescent moon of what remains at Lavellin.
“We’re well aware this is life and death.” His voice grows tight. “We haven’t come from living in a castle, among all the royalty—if your story’s to be believed. We live in the real world, Lav. We’re accustomed to a little more peril than you are.”
But instead of submitting to his superior reasoning, Lavellin scoffs right back at him.
“So a deathmancer and a soothsayer living together in your Kingdom’s capital, your house just a short walk from the gallows—you both saw fit to behave like outlaws, and that’s why this, now, isn’t troubling you?”
Torver’s irritation flares inside him. Both at the assertion that this isn’t troubling him and in confusion at being called a soothsayer. Then the memory of the bothy slaps him like a small, wet fish.
Bassen lets out a small laugh, tearing a strip of dried beef with her teeth.
“A soothsayer? Pfft,” she says. “That was for Lowick’s benefit. Torver’s not really a soothsayer, he’s—”
“A dreamwalker!” Torver interrupts Bassen, casting her a vicious look. “I can enter people’s dreams and poke around. I have to do it in my sleep every night or my consequence is that I’ll get trapped in my own dreams and never wake up. It’s a bit deep for a chat in a bothy. Hence my lies.”
“Yes,” Bassen says, a little stiffly. “Hence your lies.”
Torver’s forehead furrows. Lavellin can’t know his terrible secret. Despite himself, he wants it to think more of him.
There’s a long silence, threads of tension weaving and dissipating in the air.
“I just wish I had your confidence,” Lavellin says eventually, tearing a small chunk from a loaf of bread and chewing it slowly. “My life at home—before. It was different to this. The adjustment is—” It looks at Torver with a strained expression. “Strange.”
Unsure what else to do, he reaches forward and pats it on the shoulder.
“Everything about this is strange,” he reassures it. “My life at home with my mother was different too.” He shrugs. “Things change.”
Torver regrets mentioning his mother. Lavellin lets out a breath and just in case it plans to question him, he pulls the map from his bag.
“Shall we figure out where we’re going?” It’s a question, but he doesn’t say it like one.
Bassen doesn’t need telling twice and they start to examine the inked parchment. Getting the message, Lavellin picks up the oars again and begins to row them leisurely down the centre of the river.
“We shouldn’t use these,” Bassen says, running her finger along the Official roads inked in purple. “They’ll be crawling with Enforcers as we get closer to the border.”
Torver’s eyes trail over the map, finding the black spot ringed in purple that sits beneath the centre of the border. Dunmail Raise—the cairn housing the lair of the Beast and Dunmail’s tomb. A pulse goes through him and he ignores it, swallowing hard.
“There are roads other than the Official ones,” he says, pointing to marks snaking across the parchment. “Look at these thin lines, they must be the merchant paths and the old pilgrimage routes.”
Lavellin catches Torver’s eye.
“Pilgrimage routes?” it says, its arms rhythmically flexing with the push and pull of its rowing. “What happened to no gods, no kings?”
“There used to be gods,” Torver shrugs. “It’s all been illegal for so long that no one believes anymore. I don’t think we know what their names were, do we, Bassen?”
Bassen shakes her head and Lavellin’s brows knit together. It flicks a glance skyward.
“But the pilgrimage routes survive,” Torver continues, eyeing it. “People spent hundreds, maybe thousands of years, walking the same paths to go to holy places or—religious festivals, I assume. The ground hasn’t forgotten.”
“I’m sure the ground isn’t the only thing that remembers,” Lavellin adds bitterly.
“Okay, so we can use those. Let’s see—” Bassen rummages around in the pockets of her trousers before climbing over Lavellin to retrieve one of the chicken feathers strewn around the prow, dipping its end in the congealed puddle of blood there.
Rocking the boat and palming Lavellin’s broad chest for balance, she gets back into the aft end. Torver’s gaze lingers on her hand on its taut body. Bassen, unaware, uses her makeshift quill and ink to chart them a course.
“If we leave the boat soon and follow this valley—it should spit us out near Watenlath,” Bassen says, circling the retirement village between the Wen and the Dodwood.
Torver shakes his head. “Why would we go back there? That healer knows who you are, he won’t appreciate us showing up. We’re trying not to draw attention to ourselves.”
Bassen’s white hair conceals her face as she looks down, studying the map. “I just…” She trails off, chewing her lip. “I have a feeling.”
“But—”
“It needs to be Watenlath.”
Torver looks at her. The flushing of her cheeks makes him question himself.
“Watenlath it is, I guess…”
“Good.” Her shoulders drop a fraction.
“If you’re sure about it, Bass.”
“I am,” she says, following a path from Watenlath up with her feather.
Torver leans back with his elbows on the stern of the boat as Bassen makes further marks on the map.
Lavellin continues to row, slowly and thoughtfully, its inhuman eyes glazed, as if in deep thought.
The thrust and pull of its arms on the oars is hypnotic and Torver is slightly startled when, several minutes later, Bassen sits upright triumphantly.
“All done!”
Torver inspects the lines and circles of blood that skirt around the map, leading them north to Dunmail Raise. He’s relieved to see that she’s plotted around the Mere, rather than through it.
His home is south-east of Dunmail Raise and although all he wants is to return there, he knows he can’t go back yet. He needs his papers first, physical reassurance for his mother that he won’t bring the wrath of the Enforcers down on all their heads.
“Looks good,” he says. “But why the detour here?” He points at a section where the proposed route appears to veer west for miles, only to turn back on itself.
Bassen points out the massive mountain that the route circumvents.
“Unless you’d rather walk over Cole Ridge? The highest peak in the kingdom? I mean I know it’s not enormous, but it’s still a fair trek. By all means, Torv. I had no idea you were such a keen rambler.”
“All right, no need to be smug.” He rolls his eyes. “You’re beginning to sound like Lavellin,” he grumbles.