Page 152 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

The wolf went silent. Shadow flickered and wreathed around her eyes like black flame.

“I need to fix myself before I see him again. There’s a wound I won’t stop touching and so don’t allow to close.” Aurienne’s fingers went to her clavicle, where the hagstone lay. “I’m going to heal it tonight.”

“All is not lost, then.” There was relief in the wolf’s dusky voice—relief and hope.

“What am I to him?” asked Aurienne.

“He has told you a thousand times without words. But if I must use words, you are the Fair Tormentor. The cruellest irony. The most beautiful sorrow.” The wolf fell silent for a moment. “And also raw, bleeding regret.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

The wolf faded away. “My name is Cinder.”

Aurienne took the waystone tothe Slumbering Fern at the Fairy Glen, Isle of Skye.

This was, in a way, where it all began: it was the site of the Monafyll Stone’s discovery, which had led her to her preliminary research project on full moon healings, which had led Osric to her.

She stepped through the Glen. Eons ago, landslips and geological faults had exposed bedrock, which now protruded like bone through the turf. The earth had churned itself into strange landforms here, marvellous fairy castles and pyramids and the bulk of slumbering dragons.

Aurienne held up her tacn to illuminate her path. On either side, streams and small waterfalls gurgled through grassy ridges. She passedbetween stones like waves drawing themselves upwards to break and others humped like the barrows of the dead.

Her objective lay in the bare space of grass in the Glen below: a worn tracery of rings with, at its centre, the Monafyll Stone.

The spiral was a thread winding inward and, by the same path, outward, choked at this time of year by what was left of summer’s growth. Aurienne stopped at the spiral’s tail to wait for moonrise.

At the horizon’s edge, clouds made purple spires in a lucent sky. Stars blazed. The harvest moon rose, golden, lining everything in amber.

The only movement was the rising mist, hoarded by the valleys between stones, and released, with the coming of dusk, to billow dreamily in a small wind.

The hagstone that Amagris had given Aurienne lay, as it had for many years, against her clavicle upon its leather cord. She reached into her dress and held it. It was a flat grey stone the size of a coin, unremarkable save the hole that ran through it.

For many years, Aurienne had used the hagstone as a reminder that she had been hurt, as an albatross round her neck, as a warning against falling in love again.

She had not permitted herself to love again and thus had not permitted herself to be happy. One was meant to use a hagstone to keep bad dreams away. Mrs. Parson said it was keeping all dreams away.

In using it to remind her to escape sorrow, she had lost joy. In dodging a known pain, she had found a new pain.

She ran her thumb around the familiar contours of the stone. Mrs. Parson had told her to let it go. Amagris herself had been surprised that she still had it, and also told her to let it go.

It was time to say goodbye to it. It was time to untether her heart.

Aurienne walked the spiral at the heart of the Fairy Glen.

She did not know whether she walked slow or fast. Time was a dim concept in the spiral; there was only rock and moon and the wild poetryof the wind, whispering in her ears. The path was a gyre beneath her feet; a fern in a fossil, the slow-twisting opening of a rose.

The Monafyll Stone stood pale in the evening light, known only, until then, through diagrams, and later through the plaster cast. This was the real thing, not a drawing, not a cast. It felt like meeting someone important.

Fragrant meadowsweet, wild pansies, and butterfly orchids danced in the spiral, a bit of wildflower bravery at summer’s gloaming, in the waning year when all else was ending.

Aurienne grew dizzy. Felt away from herself. Simultaneously walked and watched herself walk, was both there and not there, making circles upon circles, round as the moon, laced by ribbons of fog, into the spiral’s centre, into the spinning vanishing point.

Revelation was in that spiral. In the translucent fog there were other places, lights, laughter, inviting a drifting across, a traversing. The air was awake, changeful, swallowing sound; reality was fragile. The spiral unravelled the veil, made it as translucent as a petal. One step sideways could bring her through the gossamer. This was the thin place she needed, the fraying between worlds, where the uncurable could be cured—where she had healed Osric and would now heal herself.

The full moon hung over her like a benediction. And there, at the centre of the spiral, between motion and contrary motion, between past and present, between mourning what was and hope for what could be, Aurienne tugged at the necklace.

The leather cord gave way with a soft snap.

What she felt afterwards was not sadness, nor was it joy. It was a divine relief.