Page 57 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

The candles dimmed further. Their light reached neither of their faces.

When Mordaunt next spoke, all levity had disappeared. “Have you ever wanted something you can’t have?”

“If you’re you, I suppose you simply steal it,” said Aurienne.

“That’s not always possible.”

“What’s the something?”

“A delusion.” Mordaunt fell quiet for a while, then said, “You told me you loved once and that you’d never do it again.”

“Do you wish to learn from my misery?” asked Aurienne.

“Teach me.”

Aurienne swirled the remaining wine in her glass. “I’ve probably had enough to drink to tell you the story.”

“We are a little bit tiddly,” said Mordaunt.

And Aurienne, who had definitely had too much to drink, told him about Amagris. “I fell in love with a Hedgewitch.”

“Ah.”

“She was at Swanstone, giving a seminar with a few others of her Order. Antimitotic agents in yew trees: fascinating stuff. We talked afterwards. She was intrigued by me; I was immediately besotted with her. Long after the seminar was over, we found reasons to meet. She was fresh, and brilliant, and beautiful, and so different to anyone I’d ever been with, and I was young and stupid. She taught me more about plant science than all my father’s botanical journals combined. We slept together under the stars. I thought it was serious. I thought it was going somewhere. Somewhere like—forever.

“I loved her wholeheartedly. In the most literal sense of the word. With all of me. She was so knowledgeable. Clever. And beautiful in the way only witches can be.” Aurienne followed the curve of the glass of wine with a fingertip. “She loved me, but not as I loved her. Hedgewitches are solitary. They aren’tloversin the sense we know. They certainly aren’t wives. I learned that they don’t do forevers. After a few months, I became just a footnote to her. She told me that we couldn’t be—not in the way I wanted us to be. That Hedgewitches don’t form long-lasting attachments. That she was moving on. Not with someone else—someone better than me—that would’ve hurt me less, I think; there would’ve been logic in it. But she was simply moving on. She expected me to do so, too.

“It’s hard to move on when you’re torn from bliss to pain. I was so desperately unhappy. I grieved her for months. Eventually, grief became numbness. I discipline my affections now. I amuse myself. I don’t give myself.”

Aurienne found herself drunk enough to share the final, embarrassing blow: “She told me that I wasn’t wild enough for her.”

“Ouch,” said Mordaunt.

Torn between wanting to cry and wanting to laugh hysterically, Aurienne said, “Not wild enough.Not wild enough. I went to the toilet in a hole in the ground. H-how is that not wild enough?”

Mordaunt stared at her. Then—she could not blame him—he burst into laughter.

Aurienne both laughed and sobbed into her hands. “I wentdayswithout bathing. Is that not wild? I endured insects. I ate dirty mushrooms. I was rained upon, without an umbrella.”

“You were perfectly wild,” said Mordaunt. “No umbrella? Feral.”

“Thank you.” Aurienne sniffed. “I hope she’s happy, wherever she is. I want her to be happy. I certainly haven’t been.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Years. Six? Seven?”

“So that’s why you’ve sworn off love,” said Mordaunt. “Scar tissue.”

Aurienne shook her head. “Not quite.”

“I would have thought that scars were a sort of healing,” said Mordaunt.

“They aren’t. They’re a reminder. Even when years have passed—even when you can’t remember how you got them. They still ache when it rains.”

Aurienne touched the hagstone at her neck, a gift from Amagris, and now a weight, a memento, a reminder to keep her heart bound away. “If only it was just scar tissue. Love is the slow turn of a knife. It’s still in me. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop missing her. So—my advice about wanting what you can’t have? Don’t. You mustn’t court sorrow. Don’t run, arms wide open, into an inevitable goodbye.”

One of the two remaining candles extinguished itself. A filament of smoke paled and disappeared. It reminded Aurienne of the ribboning vapour at the falls.