Page 129 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

In the days that followed, he found the house haunted by Aurienne. The dogs looked for her. Mementos of their time together found their way into his hands—the map of the Færwundor when he was tidying his desk. The heart-shaped pocket watch keeping time, marking out their separation in even beats. Places were lit by memories, of her curled up on the sofa, or breakfasting at the terrace, or on the sitting room floor, eating cheap pies. The libraries. The waystone; arrivals and departures.

Aurienne had left a half-empty bottle of hlutoform behind. Osric put it on the windowsill in his study. When the breeze blew the right way, and its clean, acrid scent tickled his nose, he could momentarily believe that she was there again.

Osric had given her his signet ring. He had no idea what he had hoped to achieve by this; it had been a desperate gesture. It wasPlease keep a piece of me near you.It wasI place myself in your hands. Every time he looked at the paler circle of skin on his index finger where the ring used to sit, he thought of her. In more pathetic moments, he was jealous of the ring, which was now in hands he himself would never touch again.

Osric, who usually lived without wants or regrets, was now full of them. Aurienne had glided through his life and made it, briefly, lovelier. She had become what he could never have, and so become his greatest torment. He daydreamed of going to Swanstone and asking her to run away with him. To leave behind their Orders and the complications of their lives and start again somewhere else. But he knew her answer; he could hear her crisp delivery. She had knowledge to advance. She had lives to save. She belonged at Swanstone. So they remained daydreams,daydreams that ate away both day and dream, until his heart pumped nothing but dust.

Aurienne had once told him that death wasn’t divisible. She had been wrong. Death was divisible. She was killing him little by little.

At night he saw her over him in the storm at the Thunor moon, a queen crowned in thunder, sea-foam dripping on her skin, dark hair mingling with dark clouds above. She had made a palace of that sky.

He had worked so hard to convince himself that it wasn’t love. And now he must live unloved, he who loved for the very first time.

August passed in a vague and miserable blur.

“Her departure has dimmed you,”said Cinder.

Osric was trying, and failing, to read by the fireside. Attempting to find normalcy when his heart had been ripped from its place.

“We had to part,” said Osric. “Logically. It’s for the best.”

“Logically,” repeated the great black wolf.

“I shall love her forever and never see her again.”

“A consumptive love.”

“A kind of poetry.”

There was a silence.

“Has she severed my link with her yet?” asked Osric.

Cinder shimmered briefly out of existence. “No,” she said when she returned. “I can still reach her tacn.”

“I suppose that’s something.”

Cinder hung low above the ground, as she did when she was displeased. “Her absence hurts you. I think she should know that.”

“Why?”

“She would care.”

Mrs. Parson came into the sitting room, bearing tea and unasked-for opinions. “I agree with Cinder.”

“What would you have me do, exactly?” asked Osric.

“Tell her you love her,” said Cinder and Mrs. Parson at the same time.

“To what end? As soon as I was healed, she fled. You saw.”

“She wasn’t happy,” said Mrs. Parson.

“You’re usually more sensible than this, Mrs. Parson.”

“You’re withering away,” said Mrs. Parson.

“I just need—I just need a bit of time. Distractions. An affair.”