Page 30 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

He advised them that his name was Oist, and that it rhymed withmoist. They thanked him for this information. He led them to a small windowless room consisting of a bed and a hearth.

Mordaunt asked if there was a second bed available. Oist asked him not to be ridiculous.

For food, he served them a curry that could only be described as a punishment.

“Get some of this down your gullets,” he said, placing steaming bowls into their hands. “It’ll knock those shakes right out of you.”

Mordaunt coughed around his first spoonful. Aurienne, having observed Mordaunt’s tribulations, gave the curry a discreet lick, tasted fire, and declared that she’d just have bread. Mordaunt called her a coward.

Oist brought in a washbasin and dry clothes. For Aurienne he provided a clean chemise and for Mordaunt, a nightshirt that smelled like cedar and mothballs. They took turns washing while the other looked studiously into the corner. To be naked with Mordaunt just there was a strange and intimate feeling; Aurienne hurried and tried not to think about it.

They hung their things in front of the fire. Aurienne removed her hagstone from around her neck and hooked it to the top of a chair to let the leather cord dry out. The hagstone—a flat, round stone with a hole through the middle—was a gift, meant to keep nightmares at bay. Aurienne had received it from Amagris, a Hedgewitch whom Aurienne had loved wholeheartedly, and who had broken her whole heart. Amagris was the reason Aurienne swore off love. She kept the hagstone now as a sort of talisman, a reminder to not sink into such vulnerability again.

Aurienne turned her attention to the bed. It was a grim affair, flimsy iron enamelled in white. There was something meditative in its inward collapse: a sense of pending ruination, a surrender to inevitability, a beddish sort of memento mori.

“You think that’s going to hold the two of us?” asked Mordaunt.

Aurienne pressed a hand into the bed. There was a squeak, but itwas indignant, rather than pained. “No sudden movements. The sooner we sleep, the sooner we replenish our seith, and the sooner I can get back to Swanstone and find out what happened at the Færwundor.”

“Wardens hate Dreor as much as Haelan hate Fyren. It’s going to be carnage.”

“Good. That’s all they deserve.”

“What aboutHarm to none?” asked Mordaunt, citing the Haelan maxim.

Aurienne shrugged. “It’s the Wardens doing the Harming.”

Mordaunt lay on the utmost edge of the bed. Aurienne arranged a blanket over herself, as though having a Fyren in bed with her was the most anodyne of events.

He lay stiffly beside her. At length he said, “I can’t believe you’re reversing the rot.”

Saying it made it real. Aurienne had made progress, real, tangible progress, on an impossible thing. She was healing the incurable. She was reversing seith deterioration. She smiled, intoxicated not only by the lingering hallucinogen in her system but by the heady wine of joy.

She gloried in it. The whole world sang. She lay on her side next to Mordaunt on the itchy, straw-filled mattress, and floated in the realisation of a dream.

Mordaunt tucked his hands behind his head and regarded her with eyes mismatched by his Cost. Left, grey; right, white. He managed to look thrillingly handsome, even in the old-fashioned nightshirt, even with his hair clumped together by river water.

“You’re happy,” he said.

“You should be happy, too.”

“I am. Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“My arrogance almost got us killed tonight. I was overconfident. Not paying attention. Showing off.”

“Showing off?”

“You bring out the worst in me,” said Mordaunt. “I should’ve known something was wrong the minute we found those dead Druid sentinels. I should’ve been on high alert.”

“We’d taken a noseful of that flower at that point. Our cognitive functions were already impaired.”

“We almost died.” Mordaunt ran a hand over his face. “You saved our lives. I pride myself on not having debts, but with you around—”

“This evens things out between us.”

“How many times and in how many ways must you save my life before you consider things even?”