Page 140 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

The wound at his chest gaped and gushed blood.

“Osric,” cried Aurienne.

He was dying.

The grief was pain; it bent her in half.

Her palm split across her tacn and still she pressed it to Mordaunt’s chest, pouring healing into him. Her vision blackened at the edges. There was bone visible at her knuckles.

Someone pulled her hands away from him. “Aurienne—you’re out of seith—stop—”

Aurienne yanked them back. “I will heal him until my hands are gone.”

“Let me help, you idiot—”

It was Cath. She had so overused her seith that her Cost was in absolute overdrive, her scalp was peeling back and her lash line was bloody welts. Aurienne didn’t know what horror to attend to—Mordaunt bleeding out, or Cath, so maimed, or her own hands, more bone than flesh, or Hraith and Beorgan, who had just fallen near them, grey-faced, dead-eyed, or the Haelan collapsing all around them.

“Your eyes,” sobbed Aurienne, reaching out to Cath’s dear face.

“Your hands,” said Cath, a mix of tears and blood streaming down her cheeks. Her tacn was on Osric’s chest, drawing out the last of herseith as she tried to stop his bleeding. “Aurienne, I think we’re all going to die.”

Cath’s voice grew fainter and fainter. Aurienne, seith drained to the bitterest end, was on the verge of passing out. In the periphery of her vision came the massive form of a Dreor. He had one of Felicette’s projectiles protruding from his eye, but he didn’t need seith to swing his scythe towards Osric.

Aurienne threw herself on top of Osric—was it still Osric, or was it Osric’s body? She expected the point of the scythe between her shoulder blades. Instead came the clang of metal on metal.

Her fading vision filled with shadow.

The shadow took the form of a shapely calf in a long black boot.

Aurienne looked up.

It was Tristane.

27

Hel Is Empty and All the Devils Are Here

Aurienne

Tristane looked down at Aurienne and winked. “We meet again.”

Her blaecblade had parried the scythe. Then, taking a leaf out of Mordaunt’s playbook, she walked right through the Dreor.

The line of Wardens had broken. They were now each single-handedly combating five or six Dreor.

One of the Dreor spotted Tristane. “Another fucking Fyren?”

“Send her to Hel,” said another.

“No need.” Tristane pulled down her cowl. “I’m here.”

Silence fell over the gory battlefield that was Swanstone. The hellhound upon Tristane’s palm glowed its unholy red. Tristane laughed. Every hair at the back of Aurienne’s neck lifted.

Tristane stepped forward and ruptured Dreor after Dreor from within. With every blink of an eye, she was somewhere else—the breach, the south wall where Verity limped, the door Haven still guarded, back to the breach where Ataraxia had fallen to her knees. She moved impossibly fast, impossibly far. She reached through Dreor as she went,tugging out hearts, brains, windpipes. Her teeth gleamed; her Gorgon eyes were aglow with delight. Red seith heaved and stained the air—or was it a mist of blood, or was it a terrible divinity?

Above the ramparts, over the beach still swarming with wightlings, a line of leycraft appeared. TheFarewellwas among them. The Leyfarers had come, and they had brought the Ingenauts, and the Ingenauts had brought incendiary devices. They carpeted the beach with bombs. Wightlings and Dreor burst where they stood.

Out of nowhere, tattooed arms wrapped around Dreor necks from behind. Silver billhooks gleamed.