Chapter 13 #2
“To the north,” he replies, squeezing her hand back. If he can keep her calm then it will be easier to help her mum when they find her. “We came from the—”
“Nowhere!” Bassen cuts in. “And we’re only going to the north for a visit, aren’t we, Torver?”
Torver looks over his shoulder and Bassen is now next to him, casting him the most vicious of looks.
“What are you visiting?” the girl asks. She seems, at last, distracted from the panic of whatever has happened to her mother.
Before he can respond, Bassen cuts in again, leaning down to address the girl who is now skipping.
“You’re being very brave!” Bassen croons. “Were you not scared, coming up to strangers? We could have been anybody!”
The girl throws her tangled brown hair over her shoulder. “Of course not! You look just like the girl from the stories, so I knew you and your friends would be powerful!”
That gives Torver pause. “The stories?”
The woods around them are growing thicker and there is no path ahead of them, just mossy rocks, huge ferns, wide trees.
“Yeah!” the girl says. “My mum always tells the story of the White Hair Girl—she lives in the Wen and she has to kill naughty children or her consequence eats her up! Mum always tells it when I don’t want to sweep the yard even though it’s my turn…”
Torver looks at Bassen. She appears to have stopped breathing.
“You look just like her!” The kid continues, skipping over a fallen branch. “Except you’re not scary. You and your friends are helping me, aren’t you?”
Lavellin’s footsteps behind Torver grow heavier as the fae jogs to be beside them.
Bassen seems entirely disarmed and she blinks heavily. “I’m a folktale…” she mutters. “The monster that parents frighten their kids with…”
Torver squeezes the girl’s hand again. “Well, you did a good job coming to get help.”
Lavellin looks over Torver’s shoulder, down at the little girl.
“So what exactly happened to your dad?” It asks casually. “An accident?”
“He tripped and hit his head!” The girl says. Then confusion passes over her bright face. “Wait, wasn’t it my mum?”
Lavellin stops walking, puts a hand on Torver’s shoulder so that he stops too. The fae, ears disguised by its headcloth, crouches down to the child’s level.
“There was no accident, was there?” Lavellin asks softly.
The girl blinks, her eyes filling with tears.
“Who sent you to lure us? Where are you really taking us?” Lavellin’s voice is kind but firm.
Blood drains from the kid’s face, and her eyes widen. Before Torver can stop her, her tiny hand wrestles free from his and she sprints away into the wood.
She soon disappears into the shades of green and brown and the only sign of her is a startled bird shooting into the sky some way off.
“This is the part where we run in the other direction.” Lavellin raises a brow, lifting Bassen into its arms once more.
Torver growls under his breath. He really is the stupidest man in all of the People’s Kingdom.
They turn on their heels and run.
After weaving and darting, and crossing rivers and jumping fences, Lavellin seems satisfied that they aren’t being followed and Torver is under strict instruction to ignore any other children that they meet.
He doesn’t even have the energy to feel embarrassed.
They resume their original trajectory and even without looking at the map, Bassen seems to be uncannily familiar with the route to Watenlath.
She guides their march through trees and fields, around becks and softly-flowing rivers.
Torver starts at the noise of far-off hoofbeats, but no Enforcers gallop from distant treelines.
The only thing watching them is an osprey perched in a nearby tree.
He shakes his paranoid thoughts away. Enforcers couldn’t possibly track them over this distance without being spotted. That little girl was probably employed by wandering thieves. He tells himself they’re safe, that they’ve gotten away with it.
Several hours pass and legs grow leaden, the air loses its heat.
Occasionally, Torver looks to the side, at Lavellin.
He wonders what it sees when the fae looks at him.
Does he look good? Is his hair boyishly tousled or repellently unkempt?
The wind whips through it and he has no way of knowing and shakes the strange thoughts away.
He keeps walking, keeps talking to Bassen, who seems distracted.
Eventually, a path familiar to even Torver appears, the marks of wagonwheels and mares’ hoofprints still visible in the dirt.
Although he doesn’t know what to expect when they arrive at the small retirement village, he’s relieved that they’re nearly there.
The thought of a bed, and not a hard floor makes him salivate—assuming there’s an inn or they can somehow convince some Watenlathian to lodge them for the night.
The day is growing cold and if he has to spend one more night sleeping on the hard ground, he thinks he might shed tears.
If every night to the cairn is spent on the ground… he doesn’t know what he’ll do.
Bassen seems to be having the same thoughts, because she’s grown antsy, her earlier mirth disappearing into the evening chill.
He wonders if the healer has told the other inhabitants about Bassen, her magic. Her reputation for bloodlust and cruelty, pale hair marking her out like a death-white dove. The White Hair Girl who scares children, as if the threat of the Beast wasn’t enough to make them obey.
They ascend a familiar hill, surveying the village below. Torver had forgotten how quaint the place is. The evening is early but the air is cold and none of the retired villagers wander the tarnside. The place seems almost abandoned in its stillness.
He looks to see that Bassen’s knuckles are white and her laced fingers are fiddling. The bushes around them rustle in the breeze.
“The age-old question…” Lavellin puts its angular hands to its hips. “What about Lavellin?”
“You’re right,” Torver admits, bringing the group to a halt. “We need to plan what we’re doing. Are we going to ask for shelter in a barn or just see if they’ll sell us some food, or—”
“I’ll go,” Bassen says quickly, her dark eyes darting down the hill. “You two can stay here.”
She moves to leave, but Torver catches her arm.
“Bass, wait—shouldn’t we strategise?”
But she doesn’t seem to hear him, her gaze fixed on the buildings below. The empty market square that had been so busy on their previous visit.
“What are you going to do? Just start knocking on doors? You can’t go alone,” he insists.
“What if the healer comes out and sees you? He knows you from the Wen—he might panic and try to hurt you. He might have told the others. They could be down there in their houses armed with pitchforks for all we know!”
Bassen shakes him off. “It’s fine—I’ve just got to—”
She scurries urgently down the hill, but Torver is only a step or two behind. Lavellin waits at the top and conceals itself among the ferns and bushes.
“Bassen, what are you—”
She shrugs him off again. “Torv, you should really wait up there, you know. I’ll just be a minute, I—”
“Bassen.” He hooks her by the elbow and turns her to face him. “What are you not telling me?”
Bassen is still, her breath held.
“I can’t explain it,” she says timidly.
Torver doesn’t understand. He tries to meet her eyes, black in the fading light.
“I mean,” she sighs, looking at him at last. “I literally can’t explain it. The last time I was here, I felt—this pull. I don’t know why.”
Her hands disappear into her sleeves. Torver waits for her to speak, but she hesitates. He can see the apprehension in every line of her tired face. What could possibly be the matter? Should he be scared?
“That guy,” Bassen says eventually. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “The blond one.”
“Oh,” Torver blinks.
The blond man…the creep who had been staring at her? The only young man in the whole retirement village other than the healer? Torver nearly laughs.
“Not my type, personally,” he says. “But I guess he was sort of hot. I like a strong nose. Bit mad to bring us all the way back here to flirt, though.”
Her eyes roll to the side.
“It’s not like that, Torv,” she says with a vehemence that makes the veins under the thin skin of her neck pulse.
“It was like my magic was, I don’t know, pulling me towards him.
But not to kill him. And there wasn’t a consequence when I didn’t.
Just—when I was looking at him and he was looking at me, it felt—ovewhelming.
I just wanted to come back and see what it was… Sorry.”
She looks to the floor sheepishly and Torver’s irritation dissolves.
“You should have said.” He squeezes her arm.
She looks up at him, her expression small.
“Let’s go get your man,” he grins, setting back off towards the village.
“He is not my man!”
Torver grins wickedly until they reach the bottom of the hill, the silver tarn standing between them and the haphazard collection of buildings, all made out of the same shade of grey stone.
Bassen’s eyes feather shut.
“He’s here,” she breathes, like she can scent him on the air. “I can feel him.”
Torver feels disquieted. He wants to ask if she’s sure about this. If it’s safe. But before he can open his mouth, the door of a small, grey house creaks open.
As if summoned.
The blond man, his strong nose, his ropey arms. The swinging door reveals him, hair tousled.
The door is caught by the breeze and clatters noisily on the stones of the wall behind it.
“You came back.” His voice reverberates through the silent village. He steps from his house in a frowning daze, as if he can’t believe his eyes.
“I…felt you,” Bassen murmurs the words.
When the man replies, his voice is warm, mellified. Sweet like the honey of his hair.
“I felt you too.” His hazel eyes shine. “An invisible, physical pull. And you came back.”
The corners of Bassen’s mouth rise softly.
“Is it like magic for you, too?” Her head tilts with her whisper. “My magic is tingling inside me and it’s like it—wants you. Not to use itself on you. It just—I just—it wants you.”
For a second that lasts for eternity, they stand, gazing into the pools of each other.
Torver can barely breathe. He feels tense and privy to something he shouldn’t be. Something intimate, something that is making him sweat. Something he can never hope to have for himself.
And he is stood limply to the side, unable to do anything but witness it unfold.
The man takes a few more hesitant steps forward.
Bassen closes the gap, her thin hand rising in the air until it is matched by the man’s calloused one. The tips of their fingers brush. Torver hears Bassen’s breath stutter.
“What is this?” Bassen looks at their connected fingers.
“I wish I knew.” The man’s voice is so quiet that Torver can barely hear it.
Torver clears his throat.
“So, like, are you guys going to fuck now? Should I leave, or—”
He’s cut off by Bassen’s withering look.
“Okay, well, what’s his name?” Torver frowns. “How do we know we can trust him?”
The man peels his fervid gaze from Bassen.
“Winander,” he says, raising his thumb to rub it over the knuckles of Bassen’s hand. “And you can trust me with your lives because Beast below, I’ve never felt like this in my life. What’s your name?”
“Bassen,” she responds, bringing the back of his hand to her mouth and planting a soft kiss there.
They look at each other and Torver feels compelled to click his fingers to get Bassen’s attention, just how she likes to do to him.
Instead, he’s yet further appalled when Winander takes Bassen’s small hand in his—the disrelish at seeing his best-friend-sister be touched and held in a gaze so ardent. He shudders.
“We should go back up the hill,” Bassen murmurs, her eyes fixed on the blond stranger with his grubby fingers laced in hers. “The healer here knows…too much about me.”
Winander’s mouth twitches. “Carlyle would have to kill me with his hands to get to you, Bassen.”
Torver inhales. “Okay, well, let’s not get too carried away.”
Resigned and suppressing his huffs, he guides them away from the village, mind roiling with the insanity of what he’s witnessing.
They can’t stop looking at each other, trying to drink each other in with their eyes. Their fingers brush in silent electricity while Torver can do nothing but watch them, ruminating.
Who is this man?