Chapter 27
The cavernous chamber echoes with the thudding of Torver’s steps.
He feels that he is going mad, pacing back and forth in front of the bones of the Beast. Bassen tries to hug him.
He just shakes her off and mutters to himself incomprehensibly.
Pacing lines in the mud with his aching, muddy body under the torchlight—afflicted by images of the torture being exacted on his Lavellin.
His chuntering echoes off the cavern walls, until Winander grabs him roughly by the shoulders. His hazel eyes fix him in place.
“Torver, you have to calm down.”
“How can I calm down!”
The knife inside Torver twists again as he wriggles free of Winander’s grip. He screws his eyes shut, but it doesn’t stop the images.
Lavellin’s soft mouth on his, its body under his hands.
The feeling of its secret magic controlling him. Rooting him to the spot.
But even through the burning of its betrayal, the thought of it being tortured—the thought of never seeing it again—tears his heart asunder.
He can’t stop picturing what Dunmail could be doing.
A hundred strings on a hundred fingers, hitting and choking and horror.
The Forever King’s time-crazed smoke filling its precious lungs, his fire burning away its shining hair.
Its screams filling the halls of the Citadel and he—and he—
“Torv?” Bassen approaches him slowly, trying again to twine her arms around him. He breathes and he can’t stop breathing. Can’t stop breathing until he’s hyperventilating and she says his name again, more forcefully. “Torver, please.”
He presses his face into her shoulder, finally allows himself to be held. His panicked breaths eventually slow. His knees wobble and Bassen sinks to the floor with him. Winander comes to join them and they sit in the mud, the skeleton of the Beast at their back.
Torver’s body is alight. Too much air has made his fingers and lips tingle. He draws in slow breaths, trying to find a calm that won’t come.
“We need to rescue it,” Torver quietly declares to both and neither of them.
He needs to get to it. Needs to save it. Even if it’s just to hear from its own lips that it doesn’t love him, or at least, not enough to tell him the truth about itself. That he never should have had dealings with a fae.
“We do. But…” Winander exhales. “How can we even get out of here? We don’t have our thread to the entrance anymore. And the only reason we survived the journey in was because of Lavellin’s fae vision. And Dunmail leading us the right way in that…bird form.”
He says the words with a tone of disgust and Torver feels validated by the sentiment.
“Fucking bird form.” He spits the words onto his knees, curving forward like he’s praying to something.
Bassen’s hand rubs a gentle circle over his shoulder blade and he’s reminded of their flight from the Wen. How he’d returned from his supply run to that village—to find Lavellin massaging Bassen’s shoulders. Perhaps Bassen is reminded of that too, because she stops. Her hand retreats to her lap.
“They have too much power,” Winander covers his face with his hands. “Dunmail said he’s taking it to the Citadel, didn’t he? So not only does he have the Meddera, but he has all the Enforcers of the Wen…”
A fat tear leaks out of Torver’s eye and drags a track down his face.
“Don’t say that, Win,” Bassen’s voice wavers, almost cracks. “It’s not hopeless. We can…”
“We can what?” Winander’s teeth sink into his lip. Torver copies, wants to chew right through.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Winander finishes, his voice and expression distraught.
Bassen’s posture collapses until she’s curled in on herself like a woodlouse.
“If we could get down there, I could… I could kill them,” Bassen mumbles. Torver doesn’t know if she really means that, doesn’t want to know. “I’d kill them all,” she says.
Winander takes her hand in his.
“They’d only cage you again,” Torver manages through gritted teeth. Then he remembers with a sting— “Lavellin tried to tell us about rowanwood, didn’t it?”
Torver sits up, folding his knees so his legs press against his chest. Even though he’s past the panic, despair still makes him heavy. He wants to sink into the mud until it rises above his head. He wants never to return to the surface.
Bassen clears her throat, her voice thick with emotion. “At least…at least when the fae invade, they can’t use the Beast as a weapon. It’s already dead.”
“Yes, exactly,” Winander adds hollowly. “We’ve succeeded on that front, at least.”
Torver clenches at the idea that any of this was a success. He feels crushed by the weight of everything, how fate seems to bat him around like the ocean bats driftwood, like the beck carries the fallen leaf downstream.
He has achieved nothing. The Meddera will continue to rule, doing the secret bidding of King Dunmail. And who knows what he’ll be able to do with the information he’ll torture out of Lavellin? Who knows what else the fae can do? Who knows what else Lavellin hid?
“I’m sorry, Torver,” Bassen leans her head against his shoulder. The vibrations of her voice reverberate down his collarbone, but the weight of her on him is no comfort. “I’m so sorry.”
“What good is that?” Torver sniffs. “Lavellin’s gone. He’s hurting it. And I can’t…”
Despite everything, the culmination of its many small betrayals, he would give anything to get it back. To save it.
He leans back and flinches when the sore backs of his ribs hit something hard.
Turning around, he’s made small by the sight of the Beast’s bones.
Its canines are the length of his legs. The fact that, in another world, he could have been bonded to such a creature, stirs him.
Swirls him and muddles him so that even though his cheeks are still damp from his tears, he doesn’t know how he feels.
His lack of magic was never a personal fault, but his unique source of strength.
Fresh tears well in his eyes at the realisation that it shouldn’t have repelled his mother to the point where she threw him into the wilderness.
Casting him out like a dandelion seed to be propelled by the wind.
She should have loved him, because he does deserve to be loved. Like how Lavellin loves him.
He’s sure of it.
“It was right about me.” He rises shakily to his feet.
He’s not a freak.
If history had gone differently—he would be the most powerful person alive.
And this Beast would be his bonded mount.
He presses his palm to the cold bone of its jaw.
Feels the hard, porous material under his fingertips.
Wonders if the part of him that’s always felt empty, gaping, the part he filled with ragged string, with violent lovers—if that lacuna was just the space set aside for this creature. His dragon that died an age ago.
“I was right about you too, remember?” Bassen stands too. “I always told you that you’re fine as you are. If that thing were alive right now, you’d be in charge of it. It would do anything you told it. You’re not useless—stupid, as you always say.”
“If it were alive…”
The realisation hits Torver like a hammer.
He grabs Bassen by the shoulders.
“I know what to do.”
Bassen’s eyes widen and she looks panicked at his sudden energy, the frantic power of his grip on her. Adrenaline rushes through his blood, setting him ablaze.
“What, Torv?”
Torver’s face splits in a grin, practically bouncing up and down on his feet. He turns to Winander.
“You.”
Winander pales. “Me?”
Torver, almost manic, chuckles. The simplicity of it. The solution that was in front of them the whole time.
“We can do it, Winander,” he says. “We can get out of here, rescue Lavellin, and defeat Dunmail and the Meddera!”
“Torver, you can’t be saying what I think you’re saying…” Winander frowns, stepping backward, his feet squelching in the mud.
“Winander.” Torver grins. “You can do it. You just need to bring the Beast back to life.”