Page 67 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

Fairhrim had been discovered by the dogs. “I think they like me,” she said solemnly as she drowned under wriggling bodies. Perjury and Forgery gambolled about, playing touch-you-last. High Treason the borzoi attempted to fit on her lap; Rigor Mortis the Great Dane made a shawl of himself across her shoulders. Outraging Public Decency licked her to the point of washing her away. Arson, a retriever who had never shown an inclination to retrieve anything in his life, shoved something into her hand to incite her to play fetch. Never mind that it was an expensive antique bonbon spoon, highly prized by Osric.

It took Osric and Fairhrim a moment to work out where to point the diffractor’s projector, the walls of the sitting room being covered in a quantity of paintings and tapestries.

The diffractor remained cross and barely agreed to collaborate with Fairhrim, who spent ten minutes coaxing it to life with pushes of seith, and another ten untangling its wires, which had converted themselvesinto a sort of salad. Eventually, the hlutoform was sprayed, Osric was denuded (he drew a fine ivory doily over himself for the sake of decency), the tentacles were affixed, and Osric’s seith system came into view.

He found himself hardly nervous—hardly even hopeful. He didn’t need to hope. He already knew she’d advanced his healing again. But Fairhrim, who believed nothing unless she had witnessed, quantified, and recorded it herself, rose to examine the results.

Mrs. Parson’s concoction had revived her; there was life in her once more. She studied the figure projected on the wall by the diffractor with her usual intensity, motionless as a caryatid. Given that they weren’t at a clinic, she didn’t have any of her specialised measuring instruments with her. She made do with the long silver implement that held her bun in place. Her curls fell down her back as she pulled it out.

Even to Osric’s untrained eye, things looked better in the figure projected on the wall—there was an obvious recession in the deteriorating seith channels. Fairhrim did not celebrate. Her joyous outburst at the top of the waterfall had, apparently, fulfilled her quota of emotions for the entire year. She merely nodded and made notes in the twitching chart that readPt: U. Ganglion.

She turned back to the projection. “This is interesting.”

“What is?” asked Osric.

“The healing is most pronounced here, here, here—” Fairhrim pointed at eight different locations throughout the figure. “That’s where my seith markers used to be. They’re gone now, obviously. I used them up when I incapacitated you.”

The blackness in the seith channels had indeed receded most around where those blasted markers had been—the ones she’d used to take him down with a wave of her tacn when they’d quarrelled at the clinic.

“Why did that happen?” asked Osric. “Localised healing?”

“I don’t know,” said Fairhrim. “As I told you when I first put them in you, we no longer use seith markers to track progress—it hasn’t beena practice for decades. We have other, less invasive mechanisms available. The only reason I used them with you is because you can’t come to Swanstone for frequent monitoring. I’ve never seen something like this.”

“Put them back in,” said Osric.

“What?”

“The seith markers. If they’re helping, I want them back in,” said Osric.

Fairhrim’s eyebrows rose. “You’d let me, even if you know what I can use them for?”

“Do you promise not to do it again?”

“Yes. Do you promise not to give me a reason to do it again?”

“Yes.”

These two promises of no value whatsoever exchanged, Osric extended his arm towards her. “Do it.”

As she had many months ago, Fairhrim pressed her tacn to Osric eight times, and eight times he felt sharp, needlelike pain, deep in his seith channels. He was stoic about it and gasped instead of crying out, but his back was damp with sweat when she finished, and his lip tender where he’d bitten it.

“Well done,” said Fairhrim, patting him on the shoulder.

She returned to her notes. She glanced up at Osric as she wrote. An almost smile stole across her face.

Osric had once thought her mouth hard. He had been wrong. Features that had seemed all edge were now delicately drawn and adorable. He had once thought her cold, metallic, purely functional, like a lead pipe or a sewing needle. There, too, he had been wrong. Familiarity and their increasing intimacy had sweetened her, and the passing of time, and her caring, and her intelligence, and the tingle of her wit had made her lovely.

It had been a mistake to ask her why she’d sworn off love and press her about the Hedgewitch. He had learned what had hurt her. He had discovered the unhealed wound.

Love is the slow turn of a knife.

Osric had wanted an answer and he’d got one. He’d been happier before, when things still felt possible. This truth flayed the things that danced in his heart.

It was bittersweet to be there with her, in that room, amid all of his rarities and beloved treasures, and know that he could never count her among the things that were his. She was doing impossible things and was, herself, impossible.

How strange to be confronted with the unattainable. How rare to find something that couldn’t be had.

Osric had told himself that there was no peril when it came to Fairhrim, that what he felt for her was mere fancy—the same desire that overcame him when coveting a rare thing he didn’t yet own.