Chapter 17 #2
Lavellin’s face scrunches slightly, like there is something tart in its pink mouth. The wind moves a strand of copper hair so that it strokes its cheek.
“You look at me,” it says. “You don’t think you do, but you do.”
Torver’s grip on the parapet tightens.
“I know because I look at you too,” it shrugs. The expression on its softly angled face is tender.
The world freezes, the gold forgotten.
“I—” Panic takes Torver in its claws. “I don’t know what you mean.”
It comes out a whisper and Lavellin steps closer, as if to hear him better. It turns to face him.
“I think you do.” Its eyes rove his face, dragging over his lips like a warm thumb.
And everything he’s been crushing down into the pit of himself bubbles up for a second. The box inside his mind, the one he constructed to house his unfeelable feelings—it’s beginning to splinter apart like the box of gold in the wagon.
“Are all fae so direct?” A nervous laugh escapes him.
“Lying isn’t natural to us,” it replies seriously. “We can, but we need to use magic to do it. It’s like glamouring the truth. And it’s difficult.”
“I see,” he swallows. “So if I ask you a question, you have to tell me the truth?”
“It’s easier than lying.”
“That’s true of anyone.”
Its expression sours. “Is it?”
Torver brings his hands to hang by his sides, where they make fists. He ignores the very pointed expression it’s aiming his way.
“If you catch me looking at you,” he grinds out. “It’s because you’re fae. You’re weird. I’ve never met one before you, and I’ll likely never meet another one after you. That’s all. Weird.”
He almost dares to ask why it’s always looking at him. What this dance is that it refers to. But a part of him knows, and all his other parts don’t want to hear it. Except for one part in particular that throbs when it closes the gap between them and twines its arm around him.
Its hand rests on his hip and burns there, the centre of his universe for one throbbing second.
“Is that really all?” it breathes into his shoulder, leaning against him and looking out at the trees.
Torver is so clenched he fears his spine might snap. But he feels its jaw working loose, how its body relaxes into his. He dares to soften, and instead of pushing it roughly from him, he tells it—
“You don’t want me.”
A finger on his hip moves slightly.
“If I followed instruction about what I am to want,” Lavellin murmurs. “I would not be in this Kingdom.”
Torver shakes his head. His stupid, unmagic head. He feels delicate, precarious, like a butterfly perched upon a thistle.
“No,” he says, swallows gently. “If you knew. If you knew the real me—you wouldn’t want me.”
The weight on his shoulder lifts and those opal-green eyes meet his. Its face so achingly close. Their breaths mingle. The smell of flowers and mint.
“Do you think you’d want me? If you knew the real me?” The low rumble of its voice makes the hairs on Torver’s body stand.
Everything stills. The breath in his lungs, the blood in his veins. The entire world. He wonders if they are going to kiss.
He doesn’t let himself imagine what that would be like, feels only the ghost of it on his tingling lips when he walks away.
“You don’t want me,” he reminds them both.
The other side of the parapet greets him with disappointment. He hears a small sigh behind him.
There is a long silence, the seconds like drops of icy water dripping down his back.
He feels dense, aching, but then Lavellin approaches him at speed.
It moves to his side of the tower with a purpose that makes his heart stutter.
But it doesn’t look at him, it looks over the edge of the parapet, eyes fixed on distant trees.
“Torver, can you hear that?” Its voice is sharp.
“Hear what?”
Lavellin’s hands reach out to grip the parapet’s edge, its knuckles white, the bones pressed flush to its skin.
“Clanking.”
“Wh–what?” Torver strains his ears but hears nothing. “Clanking—like armour clanking? Like Enforcer clanking?”
The muscles of Lavellin’s jaw flicker, making its scars ripple.
“Yes.” It looks at him. “They’re far—but I think they’re getting closer.”
Torver’s mind empties with the immediacy of a falling stone. Filling instead with a panicked tumult. Enforcers? How could—how could they know to—
Winander.
Torver squeezes his eyes shut, the pulse behind them pounding through his skull. Perhaps if he squeezes hard enough, the answers will appear. “Bassens’s going to have to kill our way out, isn’t she? Where is she? We need her—we need—”
Lavellin’s eyes widen. “That’s horrible.”
“Well, what are the chances that a band of Enforcers travelling off the official roads also got lost in the exact way we did and happened across the path to these untouched ruins?”
Lavellin’s chest rises and falls quickly, its eyes darting over the treetops.
“Not likely, I’d say,” Torver says. “So they’ve either been following us—”
“Where from?” Lavellin’s voice has lost its rich depth, rising in pitch. “The cow fields? Or since the Wen?”
“—or it’s that fucking Winander. I told her. I told her.”
Torver’s face finds his hands and he looses a long breath into his fingers. “We need Bassen. We don’t have a choice! We have no choice but for Bassen to kill them—to kill people, and oh fuck, she’s probably off somewhere getting railed behind a pillar by that traitor and how can we—”
Lavellin takes him by both of his hands and pries them away from his face. He can see the fear in its eyes.
“Torver, we can do this,” its breaths come quick, its words quicker. “We can do this. You can do this. We don’t have to kill them. We don’t have to make Bassen kill them.”
But Torver is still plummeting a downward spiral. His breathing is shallow, images of smokemanced shackles, his taut and burning neck when he’s swinging from it by a noose, the crowds of the Wen watching him gutter out like a candle. Joining Wast wherever the man was thrown to rot.
“How can I do anything, Lav?” His eyes fill with prickling tears.
“I’m stupid! Fucking stupid and I don’t have any magic!
How can I save us from this? We need Bassen and she’s going to have to do the awful thing, and this was probably my fault!
It’s probably that Enforcer from the Wen, she’s probably been following me ever since I got robbed and it’s all my—”
He stops himself when he realises. Lavellin’s hands are still holding his. It’s looking at him, brows knit together.
Because now it knows the worst thing about him.
Because he just told it.
“You don’t have a magic? How is that possible?”
Torver crumples, a tear spilling from his eye and screaming hot down his cheek.
“Surprise.”
He tries to smile, but it feels like a grimace, biting like a Dodwood rat. It doesn’t say anything. Must be swallowing its disgust, their situation more pressing than the ways in which Torver is foul and inhuman. Because its face quickly changes, its expression instead set with determination.
“Look, Torver,” it tells him. “That doesn’t matter. We can do this. I can glamour you.”
Torver sniffs. It doesn’t matter? He wishes it didn’t matter. But he forces the thoughts down, where they can unbury themselves later, and he wipes his face with his sleeve. “Glamour me?”
Lavellin nods, looking at him with tenderness, with hope. With belief.
“You’ll be able to talk because you’re not having to concentrate to hold it in place. I’ll make you look like someone else and you can just go and talk to them. Convince them they’ve followed the wrong people.”
“I—”
It cuts him off, gripping his shoulders and shaking him lightly.
“You can do this, Torver,” it tells him, eyes burning. “Tell them anything you have to. Flirt with them if you must! It will work, you’re very handsome.”
Torver swallows down the last of his tears, its warm hands loosening on his shoulders and he, stupidly, can only say—“Handsome?”
“Yes, now come on!”
It takes him, once again, by the hand and leads him at a run down the stairs of the tower.