Chapter 16
Torver doesn’t expect the screams. The volume. The reverberations in the bones of his chest.
He’s never heard a cow scream before. A sheep—yes. On the farm, in the Mere. Fat lambs in the autumn for mother’s stew pot.
His heart stutters inside him as they wail.
The five nearest cows drop instantly to their knees, their enormous shattered flanks colliding with the earth with the force of a fallen tree, blood and flesh mixing with the dirt.
The life has left their gentle eyes even before the things pop, their goo dripping into the grass.
Ten or so cows around them aren’t quite dead, but their bodies are pulverised by her magic all the same.
Shattered bones and splintered horns rise from the earth at angles.
Some are unable to move, their life fading quickly, paralysed by blood loss and the crunching of bone.
Others try to hobble away, screaming as they go.
They drop too, eventually. Their raw throats finally silent.
Bassen works for long seconds, a minute—an eternity. Torver’s palms slick up, his mouth dry, ears tender with the din. The seconds stretch on and Bassen’s gaze is still fixed, her every muscle shaking. The temperature around her grows colder and colder until her breath steams in it.
The freezing air stings Torver’s lungs. He wishes he could look away, but he can’t. The dead and the dying, the still and the twitching—all spread out on the grass. The smell of raw flesh in the air. The birds circling the field in interest, keeping their distance—for now.
A hand on his arm makes him flinch. He swallows his feelings, pushes them down his tight throat, where they belong.
Bassen’s face is furrowed in the slightly pained expression of someone experiencing bliss. She seems fuller, her limbs untrembling. But what Torver notices with the greatest surprise is her hair.
No longer pure white, but a dark brown at the root that fades gradually to silver. Beneath her hair, her skin is no longer pale and washed-out, but warm and golden.
“You did it,” Torver breathes.
He pulls her into a hug and she’s firmer, steadier in his arms. She says nothing and presses her face into his shoulder.
“I did it.” He feels her murmur the words into his shirt. “They’re all dead. Every last one.”
Sure he’s imagining it, Torver feels the guilt radiating from her light brown skin like a scent. It fills the air, a stomach-clenching cloud. When she pries herself from him and looks into his face, her dark eyes are shining with tears.
He links his arm through hers, as he has done so often before, and they go back to the wagon, just a small way off the path. Lavellin and Winander are solemn, standing to attention like soldiers awaiting orders.
Until Bassen says, “If I have a ceiling, then it’s not twenty longhorns.”
Her face, glowing with health, seems like it shouldn’t belong to the drawn, strained voice coming out of it. Winander goes to her, scooping her in his arms, as if he can tell through their strange bond exactly what she needs.
“You did amazing, Bassen,” he says softly and she melts under his touch, beginning to sob.
“The worst part,” she shudders, “is that it felt incredible.”
Winander strokes her hair.
“I feel alive,” she mutters. “Nothing hurts. Nothing in my whole body.”
Torver smiles grimly and he’s hit with a quiet urge to drink. He thinks of taverns, of wine on his tongue, of the edges of everything softening. He twists the string on his finger instead.
“We’ve got to get away from here,” he says. He doesn’t add, before we’re caught. But he evidently thinks it loud enough for the others to hear. Bassen wipes her eyes with her newly steady hand.
“Come on,” she sniffs, taking one last look at the blood-soaked field, the destruction she has wrought.
She takes Winander’s hand and the four of them return to the wagon and the fell ponies still harnessed to it.
The animals’ sides are lathered with sweat, their eyes pinched, nostrils flared at Bassen’s approach.
“You did what you needed to,” Winander says delicately as he guides Bassen to the driving seat. “Let’s push it to the back of your mind now, hm?”
Torver watches her nod as he climbs into the back of the wagon, followed closely by Lavellin. Her hair, its new colours—tones of dark bark and warm honey—waft with the movement. From behind, she could be someone else. Someone entirely new.
“Let’s never speak of this again,” Bassen says, before clicking her tongue to the ponies. They launch straight into an anxious trot and the wagon rolls away from the carnage.
Torver wishes he could make her feel better but he doesn’t know how, has no frame of reference for how guilty she must feel.
He’s uselessly glad that at least she’s the one driving the ponies; Winander can’t steer them somewhere to turn them in to the Enforcers.
Though he doesn’t like the very trackable wheel marks left by the wagon.
In the silence, he dares a glance at the retreating field. The mounds of flesh. What it will mean for the poor farmer to discover it. He frowns until his forehead hurts, twisting the string around his finger and ignoring Lavellin, who sits at the far end of the wagon, clearing its throat at him.
He doesn’t want to think of the cows, but he wants to think of Lavellin even less after the artificial intimacy of having slept in its arms.
But it doesn’t give up, eventually going so far as to say his name.
“Torver.”
And something about the shape of his name in its mouth makes him lurch. The way it rolls its rs, the way its tongue is involved.
He swallows the thought and looks at it finally. The colours of it are bright under the blue sky; its soft expression takes him aback.
It gives him a smile, its rose-coloured lips curving over pointed teeth, eyes darting to his hands.
“Come here,” it tells him.
“What?” Torver shakes his head.
“I said come here.” Lavellin beckons him to the end of the wagon with a single, curved finger. “I grow tired of my own company. I miss you.”
Torver thinks of resisting, but decides against it. He staggers to the end of the moving vehicle. He nearly trips when the wheels jolt on a gnarled tree root, sitting heavily opposite the fae, rolling its sleeves to air its smooth, veined forearms.
“You miss me, do you?” Torver affixes it with some exasperated expression. “We’ve been together all day, Lav.”
Its face softens, forearms twining in front of it almost self-consciously. If he could believe that Lavellin had ever felt such an emotion.
“I don’t know,” it shrugs. “Been a strange day, hasn’t it? You’ve been avoiding me, it seems. You were the first person I met down here. I like talking to you. And I want you to stop hurting yourself with that ring.”
Torver ignores that last part with a frown.
“I would hardly call that incident in the Dodwood a first meeting.” He readjusts the neckline of his shirt, running his thumb over the stitching. “You knocked me down, then we both got eaten alive. I think the only reason I still have ears is because you were shielding me with your body.”
He shudders at the memory.
“You never thanked me for that,” it points out.
Torver huffs out a laugh. “I suppose I didn’t,” he says. “Well— thank you, Lavellin.”
He pretends to bow to it. A deep and gracious affair that leaves his head in line with his parted knees.
“You don’t have to thank me,” it says, its eyes meeting his when he resurfaces. It has an uncanny talent for making him feel on edge and his arms pebble with goosebumps. “I was happy to do it.”
“Then why bring it up?” Torver frowns.
Lavellin shrugs. “To distract you. You twist that—thing on your finger when you’re upset or you don’t want to think. It hurts you. I can tell.”
So that’s why it summoned him. Torver feels exposed, touches his shirt again to check it is still on his body. He goes to touch his string, but stops himself.
“That’s none of your business,” he says, sitting on his hands instead.
Lavellin is unaffected by his sullen tone, and chuckles pleasantly.
“You’re so sour,” it tells him. “You’ve been odd ever since the morning I scented your bed. I thought you wanted me to dream?”
A flush rises up Torver’s neck and he tries to laugh it off, running his hand over the stubble on his jaw. The woodland air seems overripe, a little putrid now. “Now what, by the Beast below, makes you think that?”
“You’re a dreamwalker, Torver.” It shakes its head, smiling so that its canine is visible when its tongue flicks over the golden tip. “Did you think I’d forget? When you went into my head while I was asleep and…taunted me.”
Torver, ice down his spine, realises two things in quick succession.
First, that Lavellin still believes that he has magic. He’d told it that he was a dreamwalker and it has no reason to doubt him.
Second, whatever dream it had had to make its weird fae body emit those…hormones, Lavellin thinks that it hadn’t simply happened, but that Torver had done it.
He schools the dawning horror from his face too late and Lavellin smirks.
“It was delicious,” it concedes. “But, alas, my body took over. You paid the price the next morning anyway, didn’t you? I could practically see your heart beating through your chest.”
The clacking of the ponies’ hooves chant in a four-beat admonition. Stu-pid, stu-pid.
He doesn’t know if he should lean into the lie.
If he should say yes, that was me. I made you have some horny dream, just to taunt you.
Or if he should admit his disgusting secret.
That his useless body has no magic in it at all.
That everyone who has ever existed has been able to do something, except for him.
He settles on a compromise—the truth, but not the whole truth.
“It had nothing to do with me,” he shrugs, ever so nonchalant. “If you had a sex dream about me then that was entirely your own doing.”
It’s Lavellin’s turn to go red and Torver quietly loves the way that looks.