Page 168 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

“It’ll be a small consolation for all they’ve lost.”

She stood in front of the burgeoning acorn and its sole tender green shoot for a long time, her hands clasped tightly together. At length she said, “Thank you. Thank Mrs. Parson, too.”

They continued their amble through the hothouse. Aurienne walked to the end of the row, where they had once found a single white rose blooming in spite of her own rot. The rose was still there; Mrs. Parson had trimmed and tidied her. Her leaves were healthy and green. Creamy white buds protruded from her stem.

Her newly burnished name plaque gave both Aurienne and Osric pause.

Her name was the Monafyll.

In a voice barely above a whisper, Aurienne said, “The world is so vast and we know nothing at all.”

They stared at the bronze plaque in silence. The air in the hothouse felt thick, meaning-laden, primeval.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” said Aurienne. “About the Monafyll Stone.”

Osric looked at her enquiringly as she continued:

“That night at the Fairy Glen, something strange happened. I touched the Stone and felt like I was about to enter a ley line.” She took a breath. “I think the Monafyll Stone is a waystone.”

“Awaystone?”

“Yes. But it’s not on the waystone graticule. I’ve checked. I asked the Leyfarer Order if there was ever a record of a waystone there. They’re adamant that the nearest one is at the Slumbering Fern. But I know what I felt when I touched the Stone. I was about to be pulled into a ley line. Before Leyfarers managed to get the ley lines all nice and civilised, waystones were much more random—you learned where they went. Sometimes they changed. And they didn’t always work. I wonder if the Monafyll Stone has dodged mapping, somehow—if the window for its use is extremely specific and narrow. And at the Stone’s foot, I found a colander. I think—I think it was Widdershins’ colander. He wore it on his head the night we went to see him.”

“You think the professor went through?”

Aurienne nodded. “I’ve been making enquiries about his whereabouts for months—I wanted to tell him we’d successfully healed you and made use of his translations. I wanted to help clear his name. But he’s nowhere to be found. I think the Monafyll Stone might go to—to the other side. The place whose boundary we’ve been touching but haven’t crossed. The Elsewhere. The Otherworld.” She looked up at Osric. “You must think me quite mad.”

“You kissed a Fyren in front of your mother.”

“Right,” said Aurienne with a rueful nod. “Of course, I may beutterly wrong and it just leads to the Bunghole. Which would serve me right for such irresponsible speculation.”

She fell silent, but her eyes were vivid with curiosity, the same bright curiosity that had filled them at every full moon, as she healed him. Bringing her research to bear. Unpuzzling a problem.Solving.

“You want to try to go through,” said Osric.

She bit her lip, a bit impish, a bit wild. “Would you come with me if I did?”

“I’m offended that you think it necessary to ask,” said Osric. “I’d go with you anywhere. I want to be by your side for—for a long time.”

“Don’t be by my side. Be in my arms.”

She slipped her arm through his and leaned her head on his shoulder. He thought his heart would burst.

They stepped out of the hothouse. It was the loveliest hour of the year, evening at the spring equinox. The light gentled around them. Frozen grass fractured musically underfoot. An overgrown path led them to a stand of plum trees in bloom. The flowers grew in pink clusters so thick that, however many petals fell, there was no thinning of the glorious froth in the boughs above. Osric and Aurienne took in deep breaths of the blossoms and deeper scents—moss, rushing sap, spring’s pulse in the soil.

Above them, a full moon hung, white and still.

Aurienne, looking up at it, said, “That’s the Cúsc moon. That’s when it all began, last year.”

“What does Cúsc mean?” asked Osric.

“Chaste.”

“Bah.”

“Not chaste in the sense of sexual purity, but rather an older definition: truthfulness or faithfulness, especially to one’s true love.”

“Oh.”