Page 43 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

“Let Tristane face the consequences of her actions,” said Fairhrim.

“No.” Osric shadow-walked past her into the corridor. He wiggled his fingers behind him as he strode away. “Until next time, Fairhrim. Thanks for the tip-off.”

“Mordaunt,” said Fairhrim. Her voice was heavy with disappointment. “Please don’t do this.”

Osric blew her a kiss over his shoulder.

There was a flash of light. Fairhrim flooded the corridor with illumination from her tacn. The next shadow was a step too far for Osric to reach it in the shadow-walk.

“Adorable,” said Osric. “But just because I can’t shadow-walk doesn’t mean I can’t, you know—walk.”

“You know so little of my abilities,” said Fairhrim.

Osric had told her the same once—though less arrogantly, surely. Anyway, what was a pacifist Haelan without a single offensive ability going to do from all the way over there?

She raised her tacn. Eight pinpricks of ice flared burning cold in Osric’s body. Her seith, so familiar to him through all of their healings, was inside him, and now took on a frigid, paralytic quality. His joints seized. His jaw locked. He fell to his knees.

She hadn’t even touched him. Impossible.Impossible.

He heard Fairhrim’s footsteps behind him. He couldn’t turn his neck.

“You shouldn’t have forced my hand,” she said.

Osric, lock-jawed, could make no answer. Minutes ago, he had inspected the image of himself on the wall and seen the bright pinpricks of her seith markers dotting his system. Those were what she had just used against him. How long had she had a kill switch inside him? How long had she kept it in her back pocket? Who did she think she was?

Fairhrim stood before him, her eyes aglitter with cold fury. “You’ll be in this state for two hours, which will be long enough for the Wardens to get Tristane situated at Tintagel Castle. I was stupid enough to trust you. I will never make that mistake again.”

Then—to add the sting of insult to injury—she pressed a fingertip into Osric’s shoulder and tilted him into a wardrobe whose door was ajar. She had waited until he had walked exactly there to freeze him, for her own convenience. She shut the door on him. Her footsteps receded down the corridor and out of the clinic.

Fairhrim had, as always, been precise. It took Osric two hours tothaw out of the paralysis she had imposed upon him. The wardrobe was full of skeletons and mops. Two hours in the darkness, in the company of skeletons, with a “Well done!” star sticker on his forehead, was ample time to stew with wrath, and work himself into a filthy temper, and decide that he hated Fairhrim. How dare she?

She was not a Flight of Fancy. She was a self-righteous terror. She was a Means to an End, and only a Means to an End, and would never be anything more.

When he had recovered the use of his limbs, Osric left the clinic.

He had, at least, stuck to his Resolution.

He stole the diffractor on the way out.

9

The Stánrocc

Osric

Some things are cold and yet burn. Mint. Hlutoform. Blinding winter sun off snow. Fairhrim. Fairhrim’sbetrayal.

Osric had enough self-awareness to know that the betrayal went both ways; he had promised her something and immediately broken the promise. But her betrayal was worse: it was premeditated. She had bided her time. She had put these seith markers in him and known, all these months, that she could bring him to his knees.

His betrayal was a reaction. Hers was Betrayal Aforethought, and therefore worse.

That day, the Fyren Order received a summons to the Stánrocc to explain, if they could, their leader’s attempted attack on the Haelan Order.

The Fyren Order held a grim meeting. As the Order’s second-in-command, Sacramore was the lucky designee appointed to represent them at the Stánrocc. The Stánrocc was a stone circle where the eight Orders gathered to resolve occasional disputes among their members.Clashes between the Orders themselves had grown rare since the signing of the Peace Accords, which banned direct acts of aggression between Orders, on penalty of death.

Sacramore was not pleased with his promotion. He spun his blaecblade upon his palm and, irascible and distrait, paced in front of the assembled Fyren. Approximately eighty of the Order had shown up to the meeting, resulting in an opinionated hubbub:

“Really? Tristane had to go for Swanstone? So we could piss off both the Haelan and the Warden Orders at once?”