Chapter 23
The next day, Torver can hardly move.
His muscles have seized from the climbing and his legs are so stiff that he has to bite back a yelp when he tries to crawl out of the tent. The sound alerts Lavellin, who rouses and offers to take the pain for him.
Torver politely declines, wishing he had his own magic and making some joke about not needing the fae to save him. The ice between them has thawed somewhat, and it grins wider than the joke merits, though a nervous apprehension still gnaws at Torver’s gut.
It had taken an age to fall asleep the previous night.
He had allowed Lavellin to curl itself around him, as if in apology.
At points, like a dog curled at its master’s feet.
Its arm dangled languidly over his hip, its hand mere inches away from the part of his body that silently throbbed for its attentions.
“Can I read into this now?” it had murmured into his neck.
He’d pretended to already be asleep—feeling at once whole, and torn apart. Reflecting on the truths that were his internal north star. That he is stupid and useless, but that his mother loves him. Lavellin had held him tight while he considered, at last, that the reverse might be true.
The journey down the mountain is almost as difficult.
As is the realisation that, because they no longer have Winander’s wagon, the rest of the journey will have to be completed on foot.
Torver makes sure to complain heartily about the pains in his knees, just in case the others weren’t aware.
Bassen chuckles and rolls her eyes, although she’s decidedly less smug when there are more hills to climb and her thighs burn just the same as his.
But he feels a strange pride watching her climb on her weedy legs. She can do anything, his best friend.
The onward march eventually eases out the muscle aches of the previous day and Torver feels quietly proud of himself too.
He climbed not only a whole mountain, but the mountain.
The tallest mountain in the People’s Kingdom—he’d scaled its height and watched a fae break the stone circle at its top.
Even if their unspoken truce makes him unwilling to ask why.
What had happened atop that mountain circles around his head like the single osprey that seems to be following them.
He entertains the thought of never returning to the Mere, of leaving his mother to it.
The thought makes him flinch with guilt—but it feels for the first time like a possibility.
After all, doesn’t he have his own life in the Wen?
With Bassen? With…whoever else he chooses to have at his side?
The thought feels blasphemous, makes him frown. So he’s grateful for the distraction when Lavellin tells them tales from Rheged as they walk.
Tales of an ancient fae regent who had fallen for a kelpie, a horse by day and a hooved man by night.
Of the hedgehogs of Elver Hill who tunnelled into the Rath and granted luck to the fae monarch in exchange for smooth furs to wear.
Of an ancient fae who had been so in love that it had walked between the Rhegedian settlement of Kessick to its lover’s home in Ballow every day over broken seashells until its feet were worn away.
Despite the heaviness in his muscles, Torver walks with a spring in his step, listening.
The hours pass and Cole Ridge was the last landmark before Dunmail Raise. The hours pass and all Torver can think is that they are so close.
Lavellin sights it first. Because, of course it does. With its powerful fae senses, its eyes like a falcon’s.
The valley of Dunmail Raise, with its dramatic ring of mountains, the long tarn at its pit—it greets them as if it’s been awaiting their arrival.
The water glitters, catching the rays of the sun from between the dissipating clouds.
Ducks and other waterfowl glide across its shimmering surface, diving for pondweed, for silvery fish.
They scatter when a familiar bird clad in black and white swoops low over the surface of the water, snatching a fat trout with its talons.
The sun is low in the sky, casting everything in brass and gold. They let the ponies drink the cool water, eat the long grass, while they unload them. Bassen pulls Torver into a hug.
“Tomorrow!” she says on a breath that huffs hot on his neck. “Tomorrow, this will all be over.”
At the other end of the long tarn, stones rise into the sky.
The resting place of the Last King.
Torver wilts under the significance.
King Dunmail’s bones are a walk away. His gold and ruby crown is somewhere in the depths of these waters. The sleeping Beast, kept in slumber by the obedience of a people, is so close, he swears he can feel it. The importance of his surroundings tugs on him, a thread around his belly.
When he assembles the tent for the final time before their quest is complete, he feels as though he’s doing it in the midst of history itself.
Like his name will now be woven into the legends passed down from Aneirin the Bard.
Emlin and his descendants will sing of Torver and of Bassen, of Lavellin and Winander. What they did here.
Lavellin wades into the water, proclaims it to be warm, and uses its fae senses and speed to catch fish with its hands, the talons of its nails.
They cook them over a campfire, and eat them with apples plucked from nearby trees.
The air is thick—excitement, anxiety, smoke from the fire, it all mixes until Torver is delirious on lungfuls of it.
As they eat, Winander tells a story he was told as a young boy, describing how when Dunmail died, his body didn’t wither, but stayed whole and unrotten. Waiting to return in the time of the People’s Kingdom’s greatest need.
“If you go to the tarn and find the crown that he threw in, you can take it to the cairn,” Winander explains, extricating fish bones from fish flesh. “Knock three times and return his crown to him and he’ll come once more to the Kingdom’s defence. Knock without it…”
Despite himself, Torver leans forward, listening with rapt interest.
“Then the wind itself will whisper, not yet, men, not yet.”
Lavellin frowns, tossing crispy fish skin into the water, where gathered ducks descend on it. “What if a woman knocks without the crown?”
Bassen laughs. “I hardly think that’s the point, Lavellin.”
“Nice story though,” Torver shrugs. “Was it like a bedtime story from the area you’re from? Like a regional variation of the lore?”
“It’s a proper story!” Winander insists. “Do you not remember that night we got to listen to Emlin the Bard?”
It feels so long ago, but Torver can’t forget it.
The night is seared into his memory like a scorching brand on leather, how he’d pushed his thumb into Lavellin’s mouth, frotted against it, drunkenly trying to get it to have its way with him.
How it hadn’t taken advantage of the situation to brutalise him, like he would have let it.
How it held him instead and kissed him softly on the crown of his head.
The thought stirs something in his chest.
“Vaguely,” he says, looking away.
“Well, he mentioned it in one of the songs!” Winander says. “Do you not remember? The one that went like…”
Torver hums as Winander begins to cheerfully vocalise a half-familiar melody.
“That night was a bit of a blur, if I’m honest.” Torver’s hand rises to scratch the nape of his neck.
“You must have been really drunk,” Winander’s head tilts, the shadow on his face shifts, cast by the length of his nose. Lavellin leans back on its hands, amused.
“Our Torver knows how to party,” Bassen says proudly. “You should have seen him back in the Wen. Every few weeks—off to a different tavern to pick up some woman!”
Torver reddens. “That is not how it went down.”
“Sorry,” Bassen tuts. “Women and men.”
Winander’s brow raises in polite interest. “Oh, like men too, do you? I used to get up to a bit of that in my twenties—we all did in those days.”
Torver huffs. “Men like me,” he says belligerently. “I don’t like anyone. Not women, not men—”
He nearly adds not Lavellin. He stops the words behind his teeth and considers them instead.
“Ah, yes. How could anyone forget, Torv?” Bassen snipes. “You don’t do love, do you?”
Lavellin tilts its head to the side and he meets its eyes, feels the frisson. Chews on it, laughing away Bassen’s comment.
But when she and Winander go to bed, he doesn’t feel ready.
Doesn’t want to go back into that tent.
Doesn’t want to face the enormity of what’s transpiring inside of him because he is Torver, and Torver doesn’t do love. Torver doesn’t deserve it.
But when he refuses to go to bed, when he stays seated on the shore of the lake, the day dying before his eyes, Lavellin stays with him.
The silence is hot; it burns like Torver’s leg—Lavellin’s leg only a hairsbreadth away. Their knees could touch if he moved himself the smallest amount. His skin prickles, lines of electricity caressing his body.
The cairn is in the distance, with its Beast beneath, and he wonders if his obedience has kept it asleep for too long. Were it not for something stubborn and acrid in the pit of him, he might admit that he is tired of obeying. Exhausted.
He’s scared, but Lavellin is so close to him and this is happening. This is happening and he needs it like air, needs it like he needs his heart to keep beating.
Lavellin touches his arm. He flinches.
“What?” he snaps. Jolts like he’s tripping over.
“Sorry,” its low voice is timid. “I was going to ask if you were cold.”
Torver rolls his head, working out the tension in his neck.
“You made me jump,” he shudders, turning away. “Touching me without warning.”
Lavellin’s expression hardens. “Warning,” it mutters. It thrusts its hands into its pockets.
Unplaced emotion roils in Torver’s body. Bubbling up with a sudden intensity that takes him aback. He sets his jaw in a hard line, clenching his hands.
“Don’t be sour,” he says, even rolls his eyes for good measure. “Awful habit.”