Chapter 22
They travel like that for days and nights. Quiet and simmering.
A routine develops. Stilted conversation throughout the day in which Torver can barely bring himself to look Lavellin in the face. Followed by nights sleeping with it pressed against him, his arms filled with the heat of its body, his hands tangled in its sunstone hair.
It’s all muscle and jutting hips and he won’t admit he enjoys the feeling of its chest against his cheek.
How, when it’s his turn to lie on his back and have Lavellin lay its head on him, he feels broad and strong, its dainty face rising and falling with his breaths.
How it sleeps with one arm slung over him, its thumb hooked under the waistline of his trousers.
He sleeps with his teeth gritted. His dreams are no longer of wings and claws. Instead they are vivid, panting, wet.
The journey is long, monotonous, and the silence aches.
Rocked endlessly by the moving wagon and unable to think straight, Torver finds himself performing small, devout acts.
He pretends to himself that his aims are a mystery, that he isn’t vying for Lavellin’s attention.
That he doesn’t need it like the air in lungs.
Feigning mindlessness, he polishes the loop of metal he wears in his ear until it shines.
Plucks the nodding heads of wild lavenders, squeezing them until they release their cloying scent on his wrists.
He combs through his dark hair with his fingers held in a loose claw, hoping to look neat, cared for.
He does this all for an imaginary attention, picturing the soft fluttering of his heart as its hands twitch in its lap, longing to reach out and touch him. For his hubris, for his pride, he is punished with actually receiving what he craves.
It sits close to him, tenderly toys with the hem of his sleeve, meets his gaze with a reverent intensity. But his heart doesn’t flutter softly, a flitting moth dancing around its candle maypole. It thuds like a blacksmith’s hammer—on the edge of panic-inducing unpleasantness. An almost-pain.
Not even Bassen can distract him from the internal tumult.
She teaches him about the new Meddera—their names and their magics—but the information goes in one ear and out the other.
Between Torver’s fae-induced panics, in the endless hours of seldom-trodden paths, pilgrimage routes, and narrow roads, there is nothing else to do but think.
He thinks involuntarily of the Beast, wrought even more lifelike in his mind by Emlin’s songs.
That just makes his chest clench up even further. Particularly as the days pass, and the mountains of the north begin to loom close. Close enough to make out their details; how they wear their heath like it’s clothing, how grey clouds adorn their tops like caps.
Bassen gives the impression of noticing neither the approaching mountains nor the tense, wooden air in the back of the wagon.
She’s enamoured with Winander, and he with her.
It’s strange to be on the outside of it, looking in.
How her cheeks have a rowanberry flush, how he encourages her to kill enough to sate her magic’s thirst.
He talks her through the guilt, all justifications sounding plausible from his wise, old mouth.
And anyway, he tells her, the Enforcers can no longer track them, following the trail of her kills.
The knights lost track of them after the ruins, wandering off ahead of them, so Bassen can and should kill everything she needs to.
He makes it sound so logical that none of them can argue.
Her gaunt cheeks fill in, her silver hair-ends gain colour one by one, and whether her power is amplified by the presence of her magic’s soulbound opposite or she had it in her all along, her abilities only become stronger. She kills cattle and boar and tailless wildcats.
One time, when they stop by the side of a fast-flowing river, she even kills a bear.
It’s enormous and brutish and violently brown, but she ends it, barely concentrating, from across the water.
The river runs red when they leave it behind, a flock of crows and a lone osprey descending on the exposed flesh.
The days blend into one long, endless stream, punctuated with milestones, things that stand out in Torver’s mind.
The bear, Lavellin tenderly caressing the skin of his wrist, an icy rainshower.
At some point, Winander expresses aloud that they should be confident in their mission.
Torver can’t help but agree and he dares to believe that their mission is feasible.
They can kill the sleeping Beast. Bassen is so strong.
But the proof that the gods exist still and that they laugh at him—it comes as the biggest break in the monotony. It comes on the day they approach the path that will lead them around Cole Ridge.
Lavellin straightens its languid slouch, takes its feet from the seats and puts them flat on the floor.
“Can you hear that?” Its eyes comb the horizon.
“Take a guess,” Torver mutters. He can hear nothing at all of note, other than Lavellin’s voice.
The fae leans forward, taps Bassen and Winander on their shoulders. “Stop the cart—please, just for a minute.”
Winander frowns and gently pulls on the reins. The ponies come to a stop, one of them tossing its head so that its mane sails into the air. Lavellin sits, poised like a hunting dog. Its eyes harden with concentration.
Torver tries to listen, but all he hears is his own steady breath. The rustle of brambles and grasses. The wind through tor and tree.
“Clanking,” Lavellin murmurs, resurfacing from its meditation. Its dark brows knit together, making a line down the centre of its forehead. “It’s so quiet that I could barely hear it over the wagon but—it’s there.”
Winander exhales. “Enforcers nearby, then.”
“Not nearby,” Lavellin clarifies. “But close enough to worry.”
“There’s only one path around Cole Ridge.” Bassen’s lips press into a thin line.
She consults the map folded on the seat, the corner of it underneath her to stop the thing from blowing away in the cool wind. “And it’s ahead of us,” she says.
Torver winces. “Bastards must have set up a checkpoint.”
“It’s because we’re getting closer to the border,” Bassen sighs. “And this is the only route to the cairn.”
She unfolds the map further and turns in her seat in order to spread it over the planks between the four of them. Her steady finger points to the enormous blot towards the top of the map.
“See how close Cole Ridge is to Dunmail Raise and the border? They’ll be trying to stop all traffic going around the mountain because the border is forbidden and they’re still looking for a certain someone…”
Lavellin flicks its hair over its shoulder. “Best of luck to them, whoever they are.”
Bassen almost chuckles.
“So what should we do?” Torver frowns, leaning closer to get a better view. “We can’t exactly go back.”
Winander tuts softly, like he’s thinking. Then—
“We’ll have to go over it,” he announces.
“Over it, sure,” Torver chuckles. “As if me and Lavellin wouldn’t get killed on the spot at a checkpoint. And you and Bass would at least be arrested and taken back to the Wen.”
“Not the checkpoint, son,” Winander rolls his eyes. “The mountain.”
Torver’s mouth falls open slightly. Not far, just enough for the cold air to brush along his tongue, his teeth.
“You realise that Cole Ridge is the tallest mountain in the whole of the People’s Kingdom?”
Winander doesn’t dignify that with a direct response at first. His face just softens at Torver’s incredulity and he places an amicable hand on the younger man’s shoulder.
“Back in my day, we used to climb that thing for fun, you know. We’d camp at the summit on the summer solstice, when the night was only dark for a few hours…” His voice takes on a tone that Torver hasn’t heard before, one thick with nostalgia.
“What do you mean back in your day? You’re immortal, it still is your day!”
Winander huffs. “I meant when I was young the first time! When my original friends were still alive.”
“Oh.” That takes the wind out of Torver’s sails a little.
“So it’s hikeable?” Bassen asks, saving Torver the embarrassment of trying to dig himself out of his hole.
Winander makes some expression, a half-grimace.
“Without proper hiking supplies and without training, it will be hard. It will take a day or two at least—and we’d have to abandon the wagon. Load the ponies up with the tents on their backs and lead them up by hand.”
“Well…let’s do that then,” Bassen says with a forced chirpiness. “Our only other option is going through that checkpoint and me having to kill our way through.”
She says it irreverently, like it doesn’t make her jaw tighten. Torver can see the muscles feathering.
“I’d prefer to avoid that, if possible,” Winander presses a kiss to her temple, leaning forward to reach so that the seat under him creaks.
“Yeah.” She looks to the side. “I’ve never killed a human before.”
“Let’s keep it that way, then,” Winander smiles.
Lavellin leans slightly closer to Torver from its seat opposite him. It tries to ask, conversationally, what he thinks about the idea but he bats it away. He still can’t look at it for too long.
It opens its rose mouth, raises a finger in front of it as if to say something else but Torver, blushing, dismounts the wagon. He hurries to the front, to the fell ponies, and helps Winander figure out how to use their harnesses to strap the tents across their backs.
Torver strokes the face of the one nearest to him, runs his hands over the shaggy underside of its head. Bassen stays away so as not to spook them, and she talks with Lavellin about the suitability of their skirts for mountain-walking, deciding to change into trousers for the task.
“They’ve worked hard, haven’t they?” Winander says proudly, patting one of the ponies on the rump.