Chapter 15 #2
She’d killed a shire horse once on the order of its Enforcer.
He’d been there when it happened. The thing had escaped its stable and galloped about the Wen, spooking at startled streetgoers.
It’d slipped on a pavement, falling over itself and shattering the bones of its foreleg.
The Enforcer had cried as Bassen did it, like a horse could be worth more than the people he had taken to the gallows, dragging them to their deaths, from its saddle.
He thinks of that shire as he looks away. Just in time to feel the familiar drop in temperature, to be startled by the cow’s lowing cry.
Torver’s gaze is fixed on a distant hill when he feels the wagon shift. Bassen rights herself, taking her place next to Winander and turns to the side so she can look at Lavellin and Torver too.
“All done,” she tells them, hollow.
The crescents under her eyes have lightened from their usual sallow purple to something more like the colour of her cheeks. Cheeks which now have a rosy flush beneath her sparkling eyes. She wipes wet blood from her face with her sleeve.
“Like night and day,” Winander breathes. “You look incredible.”
“I feel it too,” she says, then frowns. “Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
Bassen shrugs. “The guilt is a little crushing.”
Torver debates reaching out and touching her on the knee. He doesn’t, just listens to her explain to Winander what he has known for years.
“My magic is—greedy. It wants and wants.” She flexes her hands, making and unmaking tight fists.
“But it’s a horrible thing. I don’t like it, having to kill something.
To end a life every time my magic demands.
So I generally do the bare minimum to stay alive—to avoid the worst of my consequence. Hence…this.”
She waves a hand around her face, the premature lines, the white hair, the general air of fatigue and illness. “If I did more, if I did as much as it wanted, as often as it wanted, I’d probably look as good as you.”
She says it in a tone implying jest, but Winander doesn’t laugh, just looks at her, concerned. His jaw pulses.
“So yeah,” she says. “I feel physically good right now. That cow was big. But I feel guilty.”
Winander pauses before carefully asking, “Was it difficult?”
Bassen releases her lip from between her teeth.
“I don’t look in their eyes. That makes it easier,” she says.
Winander shakes his head. “I mean…for your magic? Was it a great effort?”
Bassen shrugs slowly, more like a clench of her shoulders. “I suppose not.”
“Then shouldn’t you do more?” Winander asks. “To…see if you can?”
Torver doesn’t like Winander’s pragmatism.
He’s been wondering the same, about the ceiling of Bassen’s power, if her magic values size or volume of lives ended, eaten away.
She’d killed a great number of rats in the Dodwood, but they had only been small.
How had she felt after that? He’s wondered these things, but would never ask her, at least not like this. So openly.
Bassen turns her head to look at the field behind her, where the remaining herd have bolted to the far wall, the whites of their eyes shining. She stops the movement half way, her head poised in silhouette.
“If you’re going to kill the Beast, shouldn’t you know if you have a size limit before you try?” Winander asks.
“There’s nothing here the size of a dragon,” Torver frowns.
“I assume a dragon will be larger than a cow,” Lavellin adds.
“Well,” Winander looks to the field. “What about a herd of cows? All at once?”
Horror takes Torver by the scuff. “You can’t do that! That’s awful.”
“It seems like as good a trial as any, son,” Winander says evenly.
“Don’t fucking call me that,” Torver spits.
His insides feel hot. Bassen makes an outraged sound and hisses his name. Lavellin inhales audibly and Torver’s mind travels over the mountains, to the Mere.
“What about the farmers?” he asks weakly.
He thinks of the herds his neighbours tend, how their forebears had done the same with the ancestors of the same sheep. The interconnectedness of it all.
“He’s right, Win,” Bassen mutters. “If I kill their animals, how will the farmers survive? Rural communities don’t get proper job scrolls. We met a guy in a bothy that told us so. They depend on their animals.”
There is a brief silence before Bassen’s face lights up.
“What if you revive them?” she asks excitedly. “After I kill them—you just bring them back again!”
Lavellin leans forward. “That sounds perfect!” .
But Winander grimaces. The breeze ruffles his hair and he tucks a loose lock of it behind his ear.
“I…I can’t,” he says softly.
“But you can!” Bassen says, enthusiasm lighting her dark eyes. “You’re just like anyone, you need to use your magic every day to avoid its consequence—so why not use it for this? What even is your consequence?”
Bassen is practically bouncing in her seat.
Winander looks at her mournfully. His hazel eyes flicker over Torver and Lavellin too.
He runs a hand through his thick, golden hair, and the tension in his jaw makes a stubbled facial muscle twitch.
He takes a deep breath, his strong shoulders slumping forward in some measure of defeat.
Torver doesn’t know what he’s expecting Winander’s revelation to be, but it certainly isn’t what follows.
“Ninety-seven,” Winander says.
Bassen blinks.
“What does that—”
“I’m ninety-seven.” Winander’s voice is suddenly small, his eyes darting.
Torver is sure he has misheard him. Even Lavellin cocks its head.
“Ninety-seven…years old?” Bassen asks slowly.
Winander nods and all eyes are on him. The colour in his hair, the smoothness of his skin, the clarity of his eyes.
“But you’re not though,” Torver frowns.
“My consequence,” Winander’s voice dips low and smooth. “If I don’t use my magic to repair the effects of death—then it repairs me instead.”
“So you don’t age?” Bassen says after a moment.
Winander throws his hands up. “Bassen, I’m not even sure I can die. As long as I just don’t use my magic.”
One of the ponies behind them stamps its hoof. The only sound in the stunned silence.
“So if I use it now, then I’ll stop being continually healed by my consequence and my body will—become ninety-seven, I suppose. I haven’t even thought of using my magic in decades.”
“But you have used it?” Lavellin cocks its head to the side. “What was it like?”
Winander’s face turns sheepish. “It was when I was in my forties.” He looks away. “Turns out my natural body experiences a great deal of back and knee pain.”
“You should have told me,” Bassen says quietly, almost a whisper.
Torver’s eyes widen.
“So that’s how you ended up in a retirement village,” he realises. “The retirement system didn’t mess up. It worked as it should have.”
“Exactly,” Winander nods grimly. “I got the letter when I turned sixty-five, just like everyone. My neighbours think I must be someone’s grandson.
They don’t ask—I think they don’t mind or report me because all of my joints work, so I can do jobs for them.
Did you notice all the windowsills and guttering before we left? ”
“I can’t say that I did,” Torver admits.
“They’re all blue because I painted them,” he says.
“You think a bunch of old people are going to risk a fall climbing up a ladder to paint? You think that snooty healer is going to do it for them? Of course not. I have value, so they don’t mind having me around.
I just…can’t leave. My registration papers have my age on.
If I went back to live in the Wen, and my papers got checked…
There’s no need for you two to know this because you’re actually young, and you’re…
” He looks at Lavellin, “Um, foreign, but…they don’t take kindly to people over the retirement age living outside of the villages. ”
Lavellin shifts next to Torver; he can feel it in the planks of the wagon.
“So you can’t revive my victims without potentially killing yourself,” Bassen sighs. Her disappointment looks heavy. It sags her shoulders and rounds her spine.
A long pause ensues. One of the ponies stamps his hoof again.
“I’m sorry,” Winander reaches out and brushes a loose strand of Bassen’s hair behind her ear. “But what do you think? Of the potentially useful cow massacre—not my immortality loophole.”
Bassen smiles wryly and Torver aches for her.
“How can I justify doing this to them?” she asks softly, directing the question to her knees. “I don’t need it. I don’t need it right now.”
Winander’s hand settles on her arm.
“I can’t kill unless I need to. I can’t—” She balls a fist up in her lap. “I can’t be as bloodthirsty as they say I am.”
The leaves of the forest behind them simmer on an errant breeze. It sends a chill over Torver’s skin.
“It’s up to you,” Winander’s voice is soft, his eyes somehow softer when he looks at Bassen. “I can’t revive them without risking my own death, but at least you’ll know if you might be able to kill the Beast. Is that…okay?”
Bassen looks at him, then at Torver. Then finally at Lavellin. The reason they’re here. The fae whose people are across the border preparing an assault. Only two more full moons, and they will attack.
In the longhorn field, the cows have now gathered around their fallen comrade, smelling her and pawing at the grass. And with a determined set of her features, Bassen hauls herself over the wagon planks.
“Torver?” She says his name without looking at him. “I need you for this one, I think.”
He slips from the back of the wagon. Lavellin’s face shifts into some encouraging expression and Torver suppresses the jolt when it looks at him, not at Bassen. He swallows hard and walks next to her, back to the gate of the field.
Bassen moves hesitantly, jarringly. The breeze ruffles the black dress around her, her limp, white hair, and for a brief moment, it’s just like the old days. Just the two of them. Off to a job.
“You okay?” Torver asks.
“This is going to feel like shit,” Bassen sniffs wetly.
His palm hurts. He realises his fingernails are jammed in them. Making red crescent moons. The eyes of Lavellin and Winander trace lines of fire at his back. Bassen must feel it too.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she says quietly, just for him.
“Morally or physically?” he asks, squeezing her hand in his.
“Pick one.”
Bassen turns away from him, towards the field of twenty or so ginger cows. The blood of the fallen already in the air.
She inhales, the temperature drops.
And for the first time, Torver doesn’t look away.