Chapter 15
Torver wakes with the rising sun, trapped in a tangle of limbs and hair scented like honey. He’s warm, happy, and—he realises with a start—erect.
Mortified, he pushes a snoring Lavellin off him and flees the tent, tightening the laces of his trousers as he goes. By the side of the babbling beck, he waits for the others to wake up.
It doesn’t take long, or maybe Torver just lost himself in the hypnotic flow of the water, before Winander appears from behind the oak tree. Torver watches him through narrowed eyes, wondering at the mussed cowlicks of his hair. Suspiciously dishevelled, if you ask him.
He doesn’t like the man.
Bassen’s hair is in equal disarray when she emerges a minute later and the pair of them join Torver at the water’s edge.
“Morning!” Winander flashes a toothy smile while Bassen splashes her face in the beck. “I’m in, by the way.”
Torver blinks.
“Killing the Beast,” Winander raises his brows. “Bassen made it sound like the most noble endeavour.”
He elbows her lightly as she lifts her face from the beck, laughing.
“At this point it would be rude not to help,” she chides, before turning to Torver. “And he says he has fell ponies and a wagon we can go in—so no more walking! Having a mate is the best choice I ever didn’t make.”
Torver rolls his eyes. “So pleased for you. Though, when he said fell ponies and a wagon, are you sure he didn’t mean a shire and a suit of armour?”
Torver doesn’t expect it when Winander rolls his hazel eyes, too. “Bass said you’d say that.”
“Hm.” Torver grumbles. A low sound that he continues to make as Winander marches to his and Lavellin’s tent and shakes the pole running along the top of it.
“Wake up, princess!” Winander grins. “No time for sleeping in, we’ve got a cairn to get to!”
Lavellin emerges, blinking into the daylight like a bear roused from hibernation.
After changing into fresh clothes and washing the old ones and their bodies in the stream, they prepare to leave in a blur of tent disassembly, water boiling, and the scoffing of dry bread and Winander-supplied cheeses.
Before long, Torver is being jostled in the back of another bouncing wagon, pulled by two black ponies with manes that hang to their shoulders. He’s quiet, watches silently as the others chatter. All the better to avoid Lavellin’s opalescent gaze.
“Won’t your neighbours miss this thing?” Lavellin asks, running its hand along the smooth wood of the seat. It sits with a regal posture, as if accustomed to being thusly ferried around.
“It’s not a communal wagon—it’s all mine,” Winander shrugs, casting a glance at the chicken-blood map spread over Bassen’s lap.
“We all got to keep just a few things when we were forced to move out here. For me it was this wagon, my prize fell stallion and my favourite mares. Started breeding them to pass the time.”
One of his black geldings snorts loudly, as if in response. It’s small but strong and impossible to tell apart from the pony next to it.
“You were forced to move out here?” Torver leans forward. “I thought it was just old people that were moved from the bigger places and put into retirement villages? I assumed you’d moved to Watenlath voluntarily.”
Winander snorts, not unlike his pony.
“Don’t get me started, son,” the man grumbles, in the tone of someone far older. Torver clenches with irritation.
“Some Official made a mistake, I presume?” Bassen folds up her map and pushes it into a bag at her feet—a gift from Winander along with all the supplies that jostle in the back. “Sent out the retirement letter fifty years too early?”
“Something like that.” Winander kisses the silver crown of her head and Torver looks away. He becomes determined to admire the view.
Even though the ponies, bred for the terrain they walk on, are sure footed and don’t stumble, Torver is still glad when the land flattens from dramatic crags and tors to sloping hills clad in trees and gentle fields of waving grass.
An ancient pilgrimage route snakes through the forest ahead of them like a brown blindworm through the brush.
Soon, the sky above dims, obscured by branches.
Torver doesn’t have to wonder if Lavellin trusts their new travel companion.
For all its wisdom, he wonders if it isn’t a little naive, answering every question about its magic that Winander can think to ask.
Winander seems particularly interested in how fast the fae can heal from injury and Torver is glad when the party eventually lapses into a long, easy silence. Until Lavellin leans forwards.
Torver is jolted by some small panic before it leans past him, to tap Bassen on the shoulder. She turns around, her face pale. Her familiar pallor, the dark circles under her eyes. A surge of disappointment makes Torver tsk himself, ashamed that his first thought had been already?
“How are you feeling?” Lavellin’s brow is furrowed in concern. “I can hear your heartbeat. It’s getting weak. Do you need to kill something?”
Bassen smiles wryly. “I always need to kill something.”
This catches Winander’s attention. He turns his head over his shoulder, reins in one hand, just in time for the first ruby drops to fall from Bassen’s nose.
They splash down her front before she can catch them in her palm.
Torver looks around urgently, eyeing a few potential candidates that include a fat wood pigeon pecking around a nearby bush.
“Are you struggling?” Lashes blink back Winander’s concern. “You said your consequence is—death, right?”
Bassen nods, sniffing wetly. Blood gurgles at the back of her throat as Torver taps her and draws her attention to the pigeon with a pointed finger.
Winander’s frown deepens. “In that case, shouldn’t we find something really big for you to kill?”
“Doesn’t need to be too big,” Bassen says through the blood.
Torver shuffles in his seat, closer to her, while Lavellin stretches across the length of the bench. He looks away from it. Away from how Winander’s linen trousers hang on its legs, the shape of them demarcated in soft fabric, away from the line of its jaw when its mouth is relaxed.
“I think it does,” Winander counters. “Shouldn’t you practise killing big things? As training for killing the Beast?”
Torver’s leg bounces slightly at the confirmation that Bassen really has told him everything about their mission.
His eyes glaze over because if Winander’s only pretending to be Bassen’s magic-bound soulmate—if he’s able to fake it somehow—then isn’t this the perfect way for him to trap them?
Betray them? He’s even in control of their transport.
He could be driving his fell ponies right towards an Enforcer outpost for all they know—he’ll tell the knights that two seditious criminals plan to kill a Beast they already have under control for the express purpose of undermining their governance—and on top of that, they’re harbouring an insurgent Rath—and—and all they will be able to do to escape is have Bassen kill their way out—a horrible, horrible concept, that he can’t believe Bassen is even risking.
Bassen’s voice brings him to. He notices his breathing. How fast it is.
“You’re right,” Bassen tells Winander, wiping the blood from her nose with her sleeve.
Torver’s gaze is caught by Lavellin sighing languidly, bringing its lean hand from its hair to rest on its flat, muscled torso.
Its ease soothes him. Lavellin deems their situation safe and Bassen can’t be too close to death or it would be able to sense it in her heartbeat, wouldn’t it?
The thought lingers as his eyes trail its body.
A flash of a memory—how it had felt in his arms last night. He blinks, afflicted.
“How about a cow?” Winander asks.
“A cow,” Bassen repeats.
“Smell the air,” Winander instructs, and Bassen breathes deeply.
“There’s cattle somewhere around here,” she says, crinkling her nose.
“Lavellin could have told you that for free,” Torver grumbles, despite himself.
Lavellin chuckles. “I’ve known for miles,” it winks. “Keep following this trail, they’re close by.”
It takes ten minutes, but the trees begin to thin before disappearing entirely. The path spits them out of the forest and into a lawless patchwork of drystone walls.
Some fields contain crops, the golden heads of wheat swaying in the breeze. Some lie fallow, left to the wilds. Others contain animals—flocks of grey herdwicks, their lambs growing into their adult colouring. Black fell ponies. Herds of ginger cows, their heads bracketed by horns.
There’s no one in sight. No farmhouse, no sheds, no one wandering the fields—the farmer must be over the hills and away, tending to some other herd, some other crop. Perhaps a milkmaid in a distant shed.
Winander pulls his ponies to a stop next to a cowfield, their ears pricked, disquieted by the proximity of the grazing beasts. One of the cows’ heads rises in interest, watching them with large brown eyes. Several of them have fluffy calves at their sides.
Bassen pauses before slipping from her seat.
“Don’t watch.” Her head tilts back to meet Winander’s eyes, towering above her from the wagon. Her voice is strained with the tilt of her neck; a line of blood connects her nose to her chest like a ruby tether. “I don’t want you to see.”
“You don’t frighten me,” he says softly.
She doesn’t respond, but her expression says that maybe he should.
“You want me to come with you?” Torver asks.
She shakes her head. “No, just—stay there.” Her frown is still strong, still carving deep lines on her face. “I haven’t done anything as big as a cow in a long time. I just—need a minute.”
Torver obeys and Winander’s eyes stay on her, following her as she walks away, towards the wooden gate of the field in which the herd grazes. Her gait is slow, a little shaky.