Page 33 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

A log in the hearth fell. Mordaunt stirred. He had been asleep, then. Aurienne heard a soft inhale; the breathing against her neck stopped. She shifted onto her back. He looked at her with an eye of grey and an eye of white and a face seamed with the scars of past suffering. He didn’t lift his arm off her.

They did not move, but their shadows quivered against the roughwalls, stretched and gleamed, splintered and came together amid salvos of firelight.

Minutes passed like hours in this place of altered time. Aurienne enjoyed the details. The slow way Mordaunt ran his eyes over her face, as though he, too, savoured, and drank her in. Her wrist against his forearm and the poetry of skin against skin. The way the fire cast its warmth across them in fractured gold, in broken lines of light.

The fire signified. It Meant. As did the shadows of the birds on the moor, as did the rain’s calligraphies. If she looked a little away, a little beyond, with eyes unfocused, the meanings were there, uncertain, darting, erasing and rewriting themselves. Every flicker on Mordaunt’s face and upon Aurienne’s skin unveiled a bit of their story: hate and tenderness, romance and folly, push and pull, something ancient and yet fire-new.

Was it telling or foretelling?

The world grew billowy and vague. Aurienne watched the fire cast its restless dreams upon the ceiling. The advance, the retreat, the shadow, and the light.

7

The Patient in Ward 13

Aurienne

The few hours of sleep that Aurienne and Mordaunt snatched at the Rowany Nosebleed replenished enough of their seith to use the waystone. When they awoke, there was an odd formality in their interactions, a scrambling away from exhaustion-induced intimacies. Breakfast consisted of exceptionally tough pastries from Oist (“Bone-in croissants,” said Mordaunt).

They separated at the waystone with stiff farewells.

Aurienne returned to Swanstone bursting with impatience to hear what had happened at the Færwundor. She rushed to Xanthe’s office.

“Enter,” said Xanthe in response to her knock.

“I’ve just come back,” said Aurienne. “What happened at the Tor?”

Something was wrong. Xanthe did not look up from her desk. Her knuckles were pressed into her forehead.

“The Færwundor is gone,” said Xanthe.

“Gone?” repeated Aurienne. “What do you mean, gone?”

“In pieces. Reduced to rubble. Nothing but ash.”

“But—but I wasjustthere—”

Xanthe looked up. “The villagers are blaming a fire. Others are saying it was a gas explosion. I wouldn’t have thought the Druids were equipped with gas.”

Aurienne stared at her, open-mouthed. “The Dreor detected me and Mordaunt. They must have decided to destroy the evidence. They had already killed off most of the Druids.” With a sickening certainty that she already knew the answer, she asked, “Any survivors?”

“None. It’s a heap of wreckage. We poked about—us and the Wardens who came with us. Couldn’t even find a body. It’s abominable. There will be an investigation, but I’m not certain what’s going to be left to find, except perhaps evidence that the destruction was deliberate.” A hint of the bulldog crept into the set of Xanthe’s jaw. “As soon as we’ve got our hands on proof, we’re having the Dreor Order brought before the Stánrocc, bound hand and foot.”

“Have the entire Order eradicated,” said Aurienne, whose shock kindled into anger.

Xanthe, normally the one frothing at the mouth, blinked at her. “I’m not certain that, politically, we’ll have the clout to annihilate one of the Eight.”

Aurienne couldn’t even pretend to temper her response. “All of this suffering has been intentional. The Pox was deliberate. The Dreor Order did it. That tacn should be made extinct.”

“This is a lapse from your usual dogmatism. We must be careful, or you shall run amok,” said Xanthe. Her mouth wrinkled into a smile, but she looked at Aurienne searchingly for a long time after.

That night, Aurienne found herselfunable to sleep. Still the anger simmered in her. The dead Druids. The magnificent oak, destroyed. The misappropriated laboratories. Science put to the service ofatrocities instead of life. Her continued wrath frightened her; she hardly recognised herself. She tossed and turned, unable to reconcile herself and her vivid desire for vengeance. Or was it justice?

She could no longer be priggish about her superiority to the Fyren. In a sickening twist, she now wished to go on a murdering spree.

A shadow landed among Aurienne’s white sheets. Acts of Warranted Brutality, who had never once approached Aurienne in bed, now stepped towards her on paws of black velvet. The cat’s eyes gleamed gold in the dark. She walked with sinuous purpose along Aurienne’s thigh, across her stomach, up to her chest. Tiny paw pads pressed at Aurienne’s collarbones. The cat curled herself into a helix. Her whiskers swept at Aurienne’s skin as she placed her small chin upon Aurienne’s racing heart.

Aurienne stilled. The cat was warm.