Page 84 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

“Steady on,” said Cath. “Are you planning to annihilate the man?”

“At a minimum.”

“What shoes?” asked Élodie.

Aurienne presented options. “Ridiculous ones or only partially ridiculous ones?”

“Where are you going?” asked Cath.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Partially ridiculous,” said Cath. “Hedge your bets.”

Aurienne accordingly slipped on boots with a low heel. Then, with the blessings of Cath and Élodie, and with her mouth full of a fig that Élodie popped in at the last minute (“An ancient aphrodisiac”), she headed to the waystone.

It wasn’t a date.

That was the conclusion Aurienne was forced to reach when Mordaunt shadow-walked her into an abandoned asylum and presented her with a dormitory full of dying children.

She stared in shock. “What is this place?”

“Leofric and I were scouting it as a headquarters location, but we found it occupied,” said Mordaunt. “I thought you’d want to see.”

“Fria.” Aurienne stepped from bed to bed, pressing her tacn to the children’s clammy foreheads. “Mordaunt—I think this is—I think this is a Dreor incubator.”

“Why are you so dressed up?” asked Mordaunt. “Were you out somewhere?”

“I—yes. I was out somewhere,” lied Aurienne. “I’m going to call in my Order. We’re going to have to get this lot transferred to Swanstone immediately. Their vitals are abnormal—very worrisome, actually.”

“The Agannor had ordered them to be sedated.”

“Thewho?”

“I’ll show you,” said Mordaunt.

“Just a moment,” said Aurienne. “Let me get word to Swanstone.”

She summoned Cíele with instructions to go to Xanthe as quickly as possible and activate Swanstone’s disaster medicine protocols. “Bring all available Haelan and nurses. Wardens, if they’ll come. We’re going to need every bit of help we can get.”

Cíele looked around the ward with his whiskery brows raised. “Fria. There are at least fifty beds in here.”

“I know. To Xanthe—go quickly. If you can’t get through to her, try Prendergast or Abercorn.”

“Understood,” said Cíele, and he disappeared.

Aurienne followed Mordaunt down half-rotted corridors. Theasylum was harrowing. Its blood-smeared walls were a chronology of a double timeline of suffering—those from decades past and those of its recent inmates.

They reached an office. There they found the cadaver of a man, but more importantly—

“Breage,” gasped Aurienne, recognising the Paediatrics matron slumped over on the floor. And near her, the three other missing nurses from Paeds.

“I thought you’d be pleased to see them,” said Mordaunt.

Aurienne rushed to the nurses—thank the gods for the only partially ridiculous shoes—and fell to her knees beside them. She pressed her tacn to their foreheads and was relieved to find them unconscious, but otherwise stable.

“The dead bloke is the Agannor,” said Mordaunt. “The nurses collapsed after he died. He might not have been letting them eat or sleep.”

“What happened with the Agannor?”