Chapter 21
When Torver wakes the next morning, things hit him in a certain order.
First the shame.
Then the hangover.
Finally, the scent of lavender and roses.
As delicately as he can, he removes himself from Lavellin’s arms, his face burning like a candle. He moves carefully around the fae, still asleep in the centre of the bed and emitting the most maddening flowery scent. It doesn’t stir.
Morning light streams through the one window at the back of the room, and he scoops up his clothes from where he’d thrown them a few beds over. Then, Torver flees as quickly as he can, head pounding, pressed by the need to breathe fresh air.
The corridor is a welcome relief—the air smells of stale beer, not Lavellin. Torver hastily laces his trousers and throws his shirt on, grimacing at the unwashed smell of it. He feels sick, wonders if he’s going to throw up.
There are gaps in his memory of the previous night, but he remembers the main things. The route through the winding, wood-paneled corridors to the tavern below—and his conduct with Lavellin. How he’d been so head-splittingly drunk. The lust he’d allowed to overtake him.
Mortification burns his cheeks. He reaches for the string on his finger but finds that it isn’t there—remembers bitterly how Lavellin had taken it from him in the temple ruins.
Instead, he curls his stupid hands into fists, stomping down the stairs, and pushing open the heavy door at their end by thumping his shoulder into it.
“There he is!” Bassen’s voice is chirpy as she calls to him from across the room.
He’d been expecting to find another corridor, must have remembered wrong—how drunk was he?
—the space before him is a daylit version of the tavern.
Its floors are clear of people, empty cups and tankards no longer littering tables at the edge of the room.
The stage is abandoned and there are tables and chairs dotted around the space.
Bassen and Winander are sat, the picture of civility, each sipping from steaming mugs. Bassen waves him over.
“You slept late,” she notes as he weaves through tables. He recognises one of the tall men seated nearby, has a vague memory of the back of the man’s head blocking the view of the bard. “Good time last night?”
Torver runs a trembling hand over his face, the hangover hitting him harder and harder the longer he’s awake.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he grunts, turning his back on her to stumble to the bar.
“Water,” he grumbles to the young serving girl who stands behind it. “Water—please. All the water you have. All the water in Hen Ogledd.”
He ignores Bassen cackling behind him, ignores the water that misses his mouth, dribbling onto his shirt while he stumbles back to the table.
And when the door to the inn upstairs clatters at the end of the tavern, he ignores Lavellin too, back in its raven-haired glamour.
“You seem hungover,” says Winander when Torver re-emerges from his drained cup. The sensation of cold fullness in his stomach might actually make him vomit.
“Astute observation,” Torver replies plainly, looking away when he feels Lavellin settle into the seat beside him.
He knows his face is going red, knows because he can feel the heat all around his dizzy head like a halo. He doesn’t look at it, looks at Bassen instead while she chats happily to Winander about the ongoing journey.
Breakfast is porridge procured from the tavern owner and, during the meal, Bassen and Winander are upbeat enough to mask the air of awkwardness that surrounds Torver like a fog.
If either of them notice how he won’t—can’t—look at Lavellin, then they don’t say anything.
When bread has been bought, waterskins refilled, when the wagon and the ponies have been retrieved from the stables, Torver almost insists that Bassen ride in the back with him.
He even opens his mouth to suggest it, but closes it quickly when Lavellin hops in the back ahead of him, rearranging the waxed fabric and poles under the seats.
He’s reminded that if they come across Enforcers or if there is a checkpoint they can’t avoid—both he and Lavellin will have to hide themselves under the tents.
He settles into the seat by the front, but the discomfort pervades. His knee-jerk disgust in himself is a habit he’s repeated for so long that it’s worn smooth grooves inside of him. Hating himself is easy, almost comforting.
Their eyes meet as the wagon pulls out of the small settlement, back onto the open road, the sky grey above them. Torver jolts as Lavellin allows its glamour to drop.
“You can relax.” Its mouth curves into a small smile. “I know you don’t want to talk about it. We don’t have to.”
“What’s that?” Bassen leans back from the driver’s seat, her elbow over the dividing planks.
“Nothing!” Torver says quickly. “Just muttering about the weather! It turned quickly, didn’t it?”
The storm of the previous night is long over but a tension still hangs in the air, everything smelling of damp earth. The clopping of hooves is muted in the mud, and when the path they tread becomes tree-lined—fat drops of rain from leaves overhead drip down.
Winander laughs. “It always does,” he says before clicking his tongue at the ponies so that they break into a trot. The wagon lurches from side to side. “Summer always ends sooner than you’d like it. The rain is as inevitable as death itself.”
“Lighten the mood, pa.” Torver’s eyes roll before he realises what he’s said. Luckily, Winander laughs. Bassen laughs harder.
“Yeah, pa.” She knocks into him, and he sways in the driving seat, grinning at her.
Watching, Torver doesn’t know if the feeling in his chest is yearning or heartburn. But he’s glad that Bassen has this. And despite his earlier reservations, he’s glad that it’s Winander who has his arm around her, who is pressing kisses to the top of her head.
He lays down, determined to try and nap through his hangover, this journey, Lavellin’s eyes in the side of his head.
“At least let me take the hangover away?” Its voice disturbs him almost instantly.
Lavellin holds out its hand and he knows what it’s offering. That knavish fae trick; taking his pain by feeling some of it for him. He pretends not to have heard, jamming his eyes shut.
They travel like that all day, getting intermittently rained on.
Torver eventually abandons his attempts at sleep and Winander measures their progress against features on Bassen’s chicken-blood map.
A river that veers west like a shepherd’s crook, the view of a dark-leafed wood between two mountains, an abandoned bothy with no roof.
When they stop for the night, the clouds grow dark even as the sun sets behind them.
A hunger pervades. Breakfast, the hurried lunch they had beside a pen of snuffling boar—they feel like lifetimes ago and Torver loses his sea legs when Winander stops the ponies in a clearing.
He wobbles to the end of the wagon, peculiar in its stillness when it had been rocking and jolting under him all day.
He retrieves his pack and distributes the plums he’d picked the other day and they eat them in exhausted silence. Lavellin finishes its fruit quickly, second only to Winander. It leaves its plum stone on its seat while it goes to help the man unharness his horses.
Torver swallows a tart mouthful. The stone looks at him, glistens in the fading light.
His jaw sets and he’s afflicted by the thought it had been inside Lavellin’s mouth.
He picks the heavy seed up, ignores the frisson at its warmth, its wetness.
He throws it with the remains of his own plum into the long grass.
Shaking out his arms, he dismounts the wagon and joins Bassen at the edge of the clearing.
“We’re about half way there,” Bassen tells him, watching Winander tethering the ponies to the wagon. She wipes her fruit-sticky hands on the front of her dress, the linen absorbing the sweet juice in streaks. Torver sighs.
“Feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?” Torver asks. “Since everything was… normal.”
Bassen shrugs, rests her head against him. “When it was just the two of us.”
Torver breathes out pensively.
“What do you think will happen?” he asks.
Bassen shifts. He feels the movement of her shrug against his upper arm.
“I think… I think we get there, get under the cairn, and I kill it.”
“Simple as that?”
“I can’t…” She shrugs again. “I can’t let myself think any other way. We go there, and I kill it. There’s not much room for anything else.”
Torver wishes there were still gods, powers that would listen. He wishes he could pray for it to be that easy. That his prayers might be answered.
“And after?” he asks, watching Lavellin begin to unload the tent fabric, carefully avoiding the iron pegs.
“After?” Bassen straightens, chuckling. “We… change things. We take its skull straight to the Meddera and demand the end to the registrations, the papers, the executions. And we take its claws to King Eveling, and say nice try.”
Torver can’t help but laugh, the preposterous notion. “With bows on,” he says.
“Sealed with a kiss.”
Torver puts his arm around her and squeezes, a one-sided approximation of a hug.
It’s not something he thinks of often, but in that moment, he’s grateful that they never fell in love.
He half-expected it to happen at some point, against his will or otherwise.
He looks to the sky, the way Lavellin does, thankful that no matter what happens, he will always have her. And she will always have him.
“I should go and help set the tent up,” he says at last. “Lavellin can’t touch the iron.”
He goes to walk away, makes it about two steps before she stops him with a hand on his arm.
“Hey,” she says, cheeks rounded in a reassuring smile. “It will be okay, Torv. We’ll figure this all out.”
He smiles back.
“I hope so,” he says.
They assemble the tents quickly, Torver largely deflecting Lavellin’s attempts at conversation.
As soon as all the pegs are in the ground, the poles secured, he kicks off his boots and crawls inside, armed with blankets.
The night is another chilly one, the air nipping at his exposed toes, and he quickly arranges one of the blankets around himself.
He lays on his back and affixes his eyes to the top of the tent, listening to Lavellin crawl in after him.
It shuffles into some supine position close by. There is a long silence, punctuated only by the creaks of trees, the chirruping of far-off insects.
“Torver, I…”
He tenses when he hears it. He keeps his gaze fixed ahead, despite the earnestness of its velvet voice.
“I know you’re mad at me. Or yourself. But you shouldn’t feel embarrassed, I didn’t mean to reject you—you were just drunk. It wouldn't have been right for us to do anything.”
Torver shudders with embarrassment. Why can’t it let this go? Pretend it never happened like he’s trying to?
“It’s fine, don’t worry.” He swallows hard. “I was drunk. I don’t know what got into me. You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t read into it.”
He dares to turn, to face it.
It’s lying on its side, one arm curved up to languidly cushion its head. Its long, coppery hair weaves around its bicep in glossy tendrils, its bottom lip caught between gold-tipped canines.
“Shouldn’t read into it,” it repeats, raising its free hand from the ground and placing it on Torver’s hip. Even over his trousers, he can feel the warmth of it. The weight is comforting, steady.
Its blown-wide pupils darken and Torver realises it must hear the hammering of his heart in response to its touch.
“Not at all,” he swallows.
There is a long moment before it points out, “It’s cold tonight.”
“It is.”
The air simmers, their breaths mingling. Their eye contact is a silent conversation.
Then, Lavellin raises its arm and Torver moves slowly to his place, the spot where its shoulder meets its chest. The soft curve where his head fits perfectly, where its warmth soothes his cheek like a kiss.
“This means nothing,” he says. “Don’t read into it.”
He puts an arm over the fae, his hand curving around its tantalising waist and pulling its heat closer. It angles its face downward so that its searing lips are pressed to the crown of his head.
“I wouldn’t dream of it, my sweet.” Its lips move against his hair, its sultry breath dancing on his scalp.