Chapter 19
The temple ruins have lost their novelty. Torver wants to leave, but the ponies aren’t harnessed and aren’t his and he can’t leave Bassen behind, no matter how angry he has made her.
He regrets their fight, even if it was only borne of stress. She’s probably feeling guilty about the Enforcers secretly following them from the cow field.
Lavellin has followed the sounds of their argument and the fae appears, hesitant, from behind time-pocked walls. Torver feels embarrassed, like he’s a child caught doing something bad. Like he’s about to receive his consequence.
He wants to call I’m sorry to Bassen’s retreating back, but he stops himself. Just watches Bassen and Winander walk to the edge of the clearing, to sit on a fallen log and watch the grazing ponies, fingers entwined.
Torver runs his hands through his hair, and he wants to be distracted, wants to not think about the words he and Bassen have just exchanged.
If he wants that enough to face Lavellin—it doesn’t give him a choice.
It strides over to him, its hair held back by a ribbon, the nape of its slender neck open to the air.
“Thank you again,” Torver says, mounting the wagon for something to do, somewhere to sit. He lowers himself to the floor of it, his back against the seat. “A few weeks ago, I would’ve hated to admit it…but you saved us. With all your fae magic.”
Lavellin doesn’t wait to be invited and climbs into the wagon after him.
“Yes,” it says, sliding onto the floor alongside Torver’s outstretched limbs. Not close enough for their legs to touch, but close enough for Torver to feel its heat. “My weird fae magic saved the day.”
It looks at him expectantly, waiting to see how he reacts. Torver cringes when he remembers his words to it. Before it’d heard the Enforcers coming.
“I called you weird, didn’t I?” he cringes. “I’m sorry. I just—I can’t say anything right today. Perhaps the gods really have cursed me.”
Lavellin’s eyes meet his and a jolt shoots through him.
“Having no magic at all…certainly seems like it might be a curse,” Lavellin says carefully, a flash of hurt crossing its features. “I’m sorry you felt like you couldn’t tell me… But you mustn’t think like that. Everything the gods do, it’s for a reason.”
Torver presses his face to his hands.
“I can’t believe you got it out of me,” he laments. “My greatest shame. I’m so stupid.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that.” Lavellin’s hand flexes. Like it’s going to reach out and touch him. It doesn’t, just says, “You’re not stupid. You hid it well. Until you didn’t.”
“Really?”
“I had no idea.” Its gaze is unwavering, its accent a musical lilt. “I know you didn’t mean to tell me. But—thank you, regardless. You can trust me with your secret. If you would still like it to be a secret.”
Torver’s gaze leaves Lavellin’s angled face. In the distance, Bassen and Winander are kissing tenderly, his hand hidden in her brown and silver hair.
“I’ll tell Winander eventually,” Torver decides.
The scars on Lavellin’s face shift with the movement of its ripe lips. “And in the meantime?”
Torver swallows hard, touches the loop of string on his sore, sore finger.
“In the meantime,” he says. “Thank you for being someone I can tell my secrets to.”
Lavellin smiles at him. It leans forward slightly.
Torver shifts on the wagon planks.
He sucks in a breath with the fresh breaking of skin on his finger. It’s what he deserves for that split-second, thought-beneath-a-thought—an unfounded urge to touch Lavellin, to take it in his arms, to hold it.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that, either.” Its voice is low and when he looks up, Lavellin’s eyes are not on his, but on his hand.
Before it can be stopped, Lavellin’s fingers are on his, gently prising the string from around his red and swollen flesh. It examines the mottling of the skin, the permanent damage he’s inflicted through years of scraping hard twine against himself in the same place. Over and over.
It doesn’t need to ask him why he does it. Its searching gaze asks the question more gently than its voice ever could.
“I…” He’s not sure how to give words to it. He doesn’t enjoy it, only knows that it feels right. When he needs it. When he deserves it.
He shrugs. “A bad habit.”
Ever so tenderly, Lavellin lifts his hand closer to its face. It inspects the damaged finger again before pressing a small, warm kiss there. Torver’s arm jerks as if bitten.
It lets him go.
“Do you mind if I keep hold of this?” Lavellin lifts the small piece of string. Before he can answer, it adds, “As payment—for all my weird, fae magic.”
“I…” Torver frowns. “Just keep it safe, okay?”
He retracts his hand back toward himself, crossing his leg over the other to put more space between them. “I’ve had that thing for years. Keep it safe.”
Lavellin smiles, its lips parting, exposing sharp teeth.
“The safest, my sweet thing.”
It feels like hours have passed, and perhaps they have, when Bassen and Winander return to the wagon. Bassen smiles at him—forgiveness or a mere truce, Torver doesn’t care. The relief is intoxicating.
Winander suggests they set off again, gathering up the longlines of his ponies. He and Lavellin reharness them to the vehicle while Torver and Bassen retreat to a distance so she doesn’t spook the animals.
“I’m sorry—” he starts.
“Don’t.”
Bassen shakes her head, the side of her mouth tilted up in a half-smile.
He takes a second to bask in it, then changes the subject. “How’re you feeling?” he tries. A question he’s often thinking of, even if he doesn’t say it.
“I feel disturbingly good.” Bassen leans her weight against a nearby tree.
“Killing all those cows… it was terrible, but for the first time in years, I’m not having to experience my consequence—I finally sated it.
” She lets out a breath. “I’m not slowly dying.
I’d forgotten what that felt like, to be alive. ”
Torver watches her watching Winander, how he lovingly strokes one of the ponies’ foreheads before fastening a buckle under its chin.
“I’d wager he’s making you feel better too.”
A flush rises in Bassen’s cheeks and at once they are their old selves again. Their fights have never lasted long. He’s never known how to be without her.
“A lot better,” he continues. nudging her with his elbow, watching her flush. “Tell me, how did it feel to fuck an old man?”
“Torver!” Bassen’s outrage comes out in the form of a laugh and a slap on the arm. She lowers her voice to add, “And what kind of girl do you think I am? We’ve only kissed.”
“So far.”
“So far,” she agrees. “Anyway, he’s not an old man. You’ve seen him! He looks like you or me.”
Torver muses on that. “Yeah,” he says. “But is it not strange to be with someone who’s been alive for so much longer?”
“Eh,” Bassen makes some noncommittal motion with her hand. “No stranger than those romance books where the maiden falls for a two-hundred-year-old vampire. You love those things. You’ve read every one on my shelves.”
Torver tries to play off his embarrassment as something cool, something coy.
“Sorry for liking a bit of romance,” he says, and when Bassen raises a questioning brow at him, he hastily adds, “In theory.”
Thankfully, Bassen doesn’t press the matter. He does not do love and he won’t have her thinking otherwise.
After the preparations are complete, Winander beckons them to the wagon and Torver climbs into the back, where Lavellin is waiting for him.
He does his best to ignore it, or at least not fixate on it, as the wagon rolls away from the ruins.
He sits near the front and doesn’t let the happy couple have a moment’s peace.
Having decided that Winander is to be trusted, Torver finds him to be good company.
He’s even able to shake the gnawing feeling in his stomach—even if it’s just temporarily.
The landscape shifts as they go, rattling through forests and clearings, over hills and vales, between tors and tarns. The weather shifts too; the skies grow dull and grey. A light drizzle becomes a shower becomes a downpour that leaves them each tenting themselves under their cloaks.
The sky flashes angrily, followed by horrendous rolls of thunder that have the horses bolting over the paths before Winander can rein them in.
In the end, Lavellin has to mount one, leaning to keep its hand on the neck of the other, its magical fae touch soothing and quieting them.
Eventually the dirt pilgrimage route meets with a real path and at last, there is a settlement, made of a throuple of red-stone cottages, some stables, and a tavern that advertises rooms for rent with the help of large wooden boards nailed to its walls.
Its bricks are clouded with moss, and weeds grow between the sparse paving stones at its feet.
The ground around it is carved up by hoofprints and as they approach, Torver can hear a buzzing, like distant bees or, more likely, a crowd inside.
Usually, Torver would be more careful, more discerning. Are there Enforcers passing through? Have they set up a checkpoint nearby? What about Officials? Is there any reason that someone here would want to see his papers?
But he’s soaked to his dripping skin, rivulets running down every limb of him.
“We have to stop here,” he whines over the peals of thunder.
Lavellin glamours away its ears while Winander takes the ponies and some of Bassen’s yan to see about stabling them for the night.
Torver eyes the tavern door, its splintering wood soaked with rain.
His mouth begins to water, remembering trips to taverns past. Ale on his tongue, and when that ale gets the best of him, the tongues of other people on his tongue.
Each time, an escape from his reality—being a magicless freak, motherless, in exile from the lakeside Mere.
One wrong look from an Enforcer and his neck will find its noose.
He needs this now more than ever, because all of those things are still true, except now, there’s even more.