Page 51 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

Fairhrim sucked her lolly menacingly at him.

He had missed her.

He did not tell her. She had betrayed him. She was the Worst.

They stepped into a rocky gorge whose walls were covered in wild irises and ferns that filtered the light gold green. As they advanced, they were greeted by the drone of bees, superseded, as they neared the falls, by dragonflies darting to and fro on blurred wings. Ahead of them resonated a continuous crash.

They walked wordlessly in the press of sound. Mist drifted towards them. After a twist in the path they found themselves at a wooden viewing platform opening onto a glade of weeping willows, bisected by an emerald green stream. Far above the glade, a rock pinnacle pushed into the sky; the falls cascaded like a veil from their highest edge.

Osric and Fairhrim took in deep breaths. The air, ribboned with vapour, was divinely fresh.

“I think,” said Fairhrim, “we’ll want to be up there.”

“No,” said Osric.

“Yes. At the top of the falls. There’s a path—look.”

Osric looked. Between two tree trunks was a steep and narrow smear of mud, leading up from the nicely civilised wooden platform.

“That’s not a path,” said Osric. “That’s the remains of a rockslide.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s vertical.”

Fairhrim removed her gloves and hat and hung them upon the platform’s rail. “Your precious Widdershins mentioned rainbows, so we are going to get ourselves among the rainbows, all right? Assuming the sun cooperates.”

Fairhrim hiked up her skirts and tied them off at her knee. Her garters were visible, not that Osric was interested in looking at them. He pulled his cravat off and stuffed it into a pocket, furled back his cuffs, and removed his gloves. He abandoned his fashionable cane; one couldn’t be fashionable while monkeying one’s way up a mud chute.

“If it was darker, I could’ve simply shadow-walked us,” said Osric.

“If it was darker, we’d have missed the sunset,” said Fairhrim.

That was what Fairhrim did. Skewer everything with logic and leave behind a twitching corpse.

“Have you got a watch on you?” asked Fairhrim. “I left mine in my bags.”

Osric produced it. Fairhrim hooked a finger around his wrist, tilted the watch face towards herself, and said, “Twenty minutes until sunset. Let’s get up there.”

They scrambled and slipped their way upwards, assisting each other at intervals. Osric found himself appointed, briefly, to a new capacity as a ladder. Which might have offended him, but did not, because Fairhrim’s breasts pressed against him as she climbed past him, which made him forgiving.

He pushed her up, and she pulled him up, and they carried on upwards. Fairhrim lost her footing, and Osric caught her and swung her into himself, and Fairhrim, who rarely swore, squeaked a frightenedfuckinto his shoulder. Osric could make no reply but excessive perspiration, which he hoped she didn’t notice. He felt her breath through his damp shirt. He also felt her arse, because it was what he was using to hold her against him.

All unworthy of note. She had betrayed him. She was of No Interest.

“I’d forgotten,” said Osric. “You’re afraid of heights.”

“I’m all right,” said Fairhrim, though her dilated pupils gave the lie to the assertion.

She held Osric for another moment before steeling herself and clambering away, her eyes glued to her hands. He realised that her every reach upwards was a moment of bravery.

Exhausted and smeared with muck, they reached the pinnacle. Upon Fairhrim’s bum was a distinct muddy handprint, which Osric said nothing of, but felt satisfied about.

A small plateau awaited them at the top, cut through by a gushing torrent. The torrent swept past them and over the rim, and gave Osric a peculiar feeling of losing ground, of being swept away.

Through the mist coming off the cataract, a panorama of undulating mountains curved like a wall around the lake. The view was so breathtaking that even Fairhrim momentarily forgot her fear and joined Osric at the edge—though she remained a step behind him, and clung to his elbow with a trembling hand.

She cast a dissatisfied look at the sky, which remained clouded. “No sun and no rainbows at all. But we’ve got to try anyway.”