Chapter 22 #2
Torver smiles, thinks that they all have. Thinks that once they climb this mountain, and come down the other side again, then the hardest part will be over.
Torver hasn’t ever climbed a mountain. Hills—yes. Of course. When he trekked from the Mere to the Wen, his mother’s last words to him looping through his head. He climbed over the vales and hills, wove through valleys and fields. But he always went around the mountains.
And now, he is sure that that was a wise decision.
His thighs burn as if they’re on fire, and he’s panting like a herding dog.
It’s embarrassing. Even if he tells himself he has a valid excuse—his bag is extra heavy because when they were unloading the wagon, he had remembered his gold, the relics he’d found in the abandoned temple.
He’d waited until Winander’s back had been turned and retrieved the crumbling box, stuffing it into the bag that now thumps against his back.
It pulls his shoulder blades together, creating a radiating ache across the front of his body.
He tries his best to distract himself. Thinks that when this is all over, he can use the gold that weighs down his bag to buy his forged papers, and he’ll be able to travel here whenever he wants. Through any checkpoint.
He’ll be able to stand at the feet of this mighty mountain and crane his head skyward, to remember the time he had conquered it.
And from there, he’ll travel onward to the Mere, find his mother.
Show her his papers and watch as she dissolves in relief and pulls him into the biggest hug, kissing his cheeks, telling him how much she missed him, how she thought of him every single day.
Invigorated, his mind runs wild with the possibilities. They stretch out before him like the jagged mountain beneath his aching feet.
As they climb, a thick fog descends, making the air and the ground moist. Torver battles to keep his balance, panting and swearing under his breath.
Winander and Lavellin are making him seethe—they bound up the steep slope, over the rocky outcroppings, as if they were having a day at the beach.
The horses are no bother either, even burdened by the tents.
They’ve been bred for centuries for this exact terrain.
Torver would indulge in enormous self pity about being weak and useless, he’d rag on his string if he still had it—if only Bassen wasn’t doing far worse than he is.
She sucks in air like a dying fish, struggling to keep up with them even when they climb slowly.
Even despite her recent health—Torver can’t remember the last time he saw her hands shaking or her ears bleeding, her once-bloodshot eyes now clear—years of underfeeding her magic mean she has little fitness, small muscles, weak lungs.
In the end, Lavellin volunteers to carry her.
It kneels on the ground like a genuflecting knight, and she climbs atop its back.
It hooks its strong arms under her legs and rises as if she weighs nothing, while Winander watches on with his jaw slightly gritted.
They climb like that for what feels like hours, ascending into the cloud of fog that Cole Ridge wears like a crown.
They climb until the sky darkens, until the evening whips around them like the wind.
Despite the moisture that clings to his hair, plastering the dark curls to his forehead, Torver is glad of the fog for how it conceals them.
He only wishes he was strong enough to carry Bassen.
He ruminates on that, how Lavellin is carrying her so easily, begins to suspect that maybe he might be strong enough to take over, is about to offer when—
The ground begins to flatten, the craggy stone disappearing beneath wild, unkempt grasses.
The summit.
And at its barren edge—a circle of seven upright stones. Each rectangle the size of a man. Their group halts. They stand, panting and agog.
“Woah,” Bassen manages from Lavellin’s back.
“Woah indeed,” Torver replies.
The circle is big enough for someone to lie down in the middle, but the stones themselves are unlike the rocks they’ve clambered over to get here. They look a different colour, like they’re a different type of stone entirely.
Torver wonders who on earth constructed the circle. And how did they carry enormous stones up the mountain? The one that it’s taken them all day to summit? His whole body hurts, knees aflame, just from carrying his bag.
Torver walks across the flat top of the mountain towards the stones, and from the corner of his eye, he sees a flurry of movement—Lavellin setting Bassen to the ground and running after him.
Torver reaches out to touch the stone nearest to him.
It’s taller than he is and about twice as broad.
Smooth grey stone that looks like it might be soft to the touch.
His outstretched fingers are close, he can feel an energy radiating through him, when Lavellin is beside him.
It grabs him roughly by the shoulder and pulls him away,
“Torver!” Its voice is panicked and when he turns, at last, to look at it, so is the face that looks back.
“What are you doing? Get off.” He shakes the fae’s warm hand from his shoulder.
It looks uncomfortable, like it doesn’t want to say. It brushes its long hair, whipped by the wind all over its face, behind its pointed ear. And for a split second Torver thinks, I know how to braid hair.
He shakes the thought away with a violence. He frowns and starts again towards the stones, intending to cross into the circle. But Lavellin grabs him again.
“Torver, please.” It grips his arm and guides him away from the circle, towards Bassen, Winander and the ponies. “It’s a…fae thing. Just don’t go in there, alright? I don’t know if it’s safe.”
Winander nods in agreement, approaching them.
“You come across these sometimes on the fells,” he says.
“The circles are usually broken with one or two stones knocked over. This one is complete, so we were always too scared to get close when we were kids. It has a weird energy. They used to say that if you set foot inside a stone circle, a Rath would appear and eat you.”
Lavellin exhales in a quiet outrage and Torver grumbles but doesn’t push the matter further.
He runs his hand through the hair sticking to his forehead, trying to use the moisture of the air to slick it back out of his eyes.
The wind is cold and now that he’s no longer internally heated with the exertion of climbing, the air chills him to the bone.
“We should camp here for the night, the sun is starting to go down,” Winander says, leading them back to the tents on his ponies. “We should rest up and head down tomorrow.”
“But it’s horrible up here!” Torver protests.
“You’ll like it even less with both your legs broken because you’ve tried the descent in the dark, son.”
Torver frowns, wishes Winander wouldn’t call him that. Although, maybe he does like it a little bit? He’s never been a man’s son. And Winander is certainly old enough…
He shakes that thought away, too. The exhaustion has clearly affected him. Perhaps it would be a good idea to camp here, get some rest. Even if it means another night pressed against Lavellin for warmth, the reactions of his body betraying him.
They set up the tents, far away from the stone circle at Lavellin’s request, on the other side of the plateaued top of the summit.
By now, Torver is an expert at the assembly of the tent that he and Lavellin share. He erects the poles and hammers in the iron pegs with a practiced ease.
The ponies hungrily strip the ground of its grass on their tethers and Bassen calls, “Goodnight!” before climbing into her tent with Winander.
Torver waves goodnight from the entrance to his own tent and crawls inside.
He nestles among the blankets, arranging himself against the cold ground.
The long grass underneath the tent feels as close to a mattress as Torver has experienced since the tavern.
He grimaces at the memory and pushes his face into the crook of his elbow, hoping to hide his fierce blush when Lavellin comes to join him.
Despite himself, the air is cold, his clothes damp, and he’ll need the fae’s body heat if he’s going to get to sleep.
But Lavellin doesn’t come.
Torver is alone for long minutes that seem to stretch on forever, until he’s cold and miserable and loosely ashamed. Thinking over and over of how he had gotten drunk and basically tried to get it to fuck him. How he would have let it do anything to him. How it had politely refused.
His stomach tightens as his frustration builds. What on earth is Lavellin doing out there?
He climbs back out of the tent, into the evening that is darkening by the second.
Torver’s neck prickles. He can barely make out Lavellin in the low light. It’s way across the other side of the summit. Stalking the circle of stones.
Frowning, Torver steals out of the tent, keeping his steps as light as possible, walking towards Lavellin’s turned back. It has both lean hands pressed to the nearest stone, its head tilted back as if to examine its top.
Torver creeps closer, trying to figure out what it’s doing. He’s sure it doesn’t know he’s there. Until it speaks, back still turned.
“I didn’t think you’d follow me.”
Torver’s heart jolts painfully. Lavellin turns around; the scars on its face seem even paler than usual against its skin.
“I thought you were still mad at me,” it adds, sullenly.
Torver inhales, approaches slowly. “Mad at you?”
“Or yourself. Whatever it is that means you’re ignoring me.”
“I’m not!” He frowns, unsure what to say, what to do with his hands. “Ignoring you. I’m just…”
He trails off. Frowns deeper at the stones.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
The stone behind Lavellin towers over them both. Its six siblings stand in their circle, as if appraising them in the dark. Wondering, too, what Lavellin will do.