Aurienne
The few hours of sleep that Aurienne and Mordaunt snatched at the Rowany Nosebleed replenished enough of their seith to use the waystone. When they awoke, there was an odd formality in their interactions, a scrambling away from exhaustion-induced intimacies. Breakfast consisted of exceptionally tough pastries from Oist (“Bone-in croissants,” said Mordaunt).
They separated at the waystone with stiff farewells.
Aurienne returned to Swanstone bursting with impatience to hear what had happened at the Færwundor. She rushed to Xanthe’s office.
“Enter,” said Xanthe in response to her knock.
“I’ve just come back,” said Aurienne. “What happened at the Tor?”
Something was wrong. Xanthe did not look up from her desk. Her knuckles were pressed into her forehead.
“The Færwundor is gone,” said Xanthe.
“Gone?” repeated Aurienne. “What do you mean, gone?”
“In pieces. Reduced to rubble. Nothing but ash.”
“But—but I was just there—”
Xanthe looked up. “The villagers are blaming a fire. Others are saying it was a gas explosion. I wouldn’t have thought the Druids were equipped with gas.”
Aurienne stared at her, open-mouthed. “The Dreor detected me and Mordaunt. They must have decided to destroy the evidence. They had already killed off most of the Druids.” With a sickening certainty that she already knew the answer, she asked, “Any survivors?”
“None. It’s a heap of wreckage. We poked about—us and the Wardens who came with us. Couldn’t even find a body. It’s abominable. There will be an investigation, but I’m not certain what’s going to be left to find, except perhaps evidence that the destruction was deliberate.” A hint of the bulldog crept into the set of Xanthe’s jaw. “As soon as we’ve got our hands on proof, we’re having the Dreor Order brought before the Stánrocc, bound hand and foot.”
“Have the entire Order eradicated,” said Aurienne, whose shock kindled into anger.
Xanthe, normally the one frothing at the mouth, blinked at her. “I’m not certain that, politically, we’ll have the clout to annihilate one of the Eight.”
Aurienne couldn’t even pretend to temper her response. “All of this suffering has been intentional. The Pox was deliberate. The Dreor Order did it. That tācn should be made extinct.”
“This is a lapse from your usual dogmatism. We must be careful, or you shall run amok,” said Xanthe. Her mouth wrinkled into a smile, but she looked at Aurienne searchingly for a long time after.
That night, Aurienne found herself unable to sleep. Still the anger simmered in her. The dead Druids. The magnificent oak, destroyed. The misappropriated laboratories. Science put to the service of atrocities instead of life. Her continued wrath frightened her; she hardly recognised herself. She tossed and turned, unable to reconcile herself and her vivid desire for vengeance. Or was it justice?
She could no longer be priggish about her superiority to the Fyren. In a sickening twist, she now wished to go on a murdering spree.
A shadow landed among Aurienne’s white sheets. Acts of Warranted Brutality, who had never once approached Aurienne in bed, now stepped towards her on paws of black velvet. The cat’s eyes gleamed gold in the dark. She walked with sinuous purpose along Aurienne’s thigh, across her stomach, up to her chest. Tiny paw pads pressed at Aurienne’s collarbones. The cat curled herself into a helix. Her whiskers swept at Aurienne’s skin as she placed her small chin upon Aurienne’s racing heart.
Aurienne stilled. The cat was warm.
Aurienne found peace.
The rage had not extinguished itself. It settled on her like a cerement.
After what Aurienne had witnessed at the Færwundor, the tasks that awaited her as Director of the Centre for Seith Research did not seem as overwhelming as usual. She invited Quincey into her office with his pile of Dreaded Admin and faced it head-on. No problems were as horrific as the bloodied bodies of dozens of dead Druids, none as insurmountable as Grön dying before her eyes.
The libraries failed Aurienne. Quincey read their responses to her Dreor Order request with increasing agitation. When he went through the first apologetic notes, Aurienne thought that it was a peculiar coincidence. But as the apologies continued, coincidence no longer sufficed as an explanation. In every library, texts relating to the Dreor Order were missing.
Someone had done a clean sweep of the greatest libraries in the Tīendoms and purged them of Dreor-related material. Yet another act that would have taken months and serious resources to carry out. With every layer of this plot she peeled back, Aurienne felt herself on the cusp of discovering something bigger and bigger.
She dismissed Quincey and turned her thinking to privately held collections. However, if the Dreor Order had orchestrated a careful purge of research libraries, was there also a chance that they had done the same for private ones? Could the owners of those collections be counted on not to report a Haelan’s uncharacteristic interest in the Dreor Order?
Who had a private library, who she knew could be trusted?
The answer displeased her spectacularly.
Mordaunt.
She had no desire to ask a favour of him, or to be further in his debt.
Did she have a choice?
One positive among the repeated horrors of the last twenty-four hours was the result of the last healing: she had seen—to be confirmed by diffractor—real progress in Mordaunt’s condition.
Her feelings she was less thrilled with. She was beset by memories of Mordaunt’s lips on her hand, of the weight of his arm on her hips, of the strange bliss of their seclusion. She sought refuge in logic, which she, being devoutly pragmatic, brought to bear upon her emotional problems with unhealthy regularity.
Logic could only explain away so much; it could not explain the small revelries of her heart. These joys she hadn’t felt in ages. She was bewildered, ashamed, both happy and not.
Love wasn’t the risk here, that was one certainty—she had given her heart away once and would never do so again.
Still, confusion and crossness plaited themselves over and over in her head. She shouldn’t think of him. She thought of him. Did he think of her? He shouldn’t think of her. He’d better be thinking of her, because she was thinking of him. She mustn’t think of him.
She wished for serenity; she wished to uncramp her brain.
As a senior Haelan, Aurienne was rarely hands-on in the lab anymore, but in the days that followed, she found solace there, in the rigorous application of methodology and protocol. She seized her feelings with both hands and subjected them to the same; she decanted, she stoppered, she stored securely in spark-proof refrigerated compartments. That was what one did with volatile compounds.
Compartmentalising and compartmentalising again. Could one run out of compartments?
Aurienne fixed tissue specimens and her feelings in 2.5 percent glutaraldehyde until Cath popped in to go to lunch. Cath, the Director of Trauma and Acute Care, was, along with Élodie from Virology, one of Aurienne’s closest friends. Cath kept her head shaved because of her Cost, which caused hair loss. She had a tongue and an intellect as sharp as her wing tips.
Aurienne felt proud of herself as she strode to the cafeteria: she had not thought of Mordaunt for over three hours. Then Cath asked, “How is Tit Wank Man?” and ruined everything.
Tit Wank Man was the nickname—perhaps even more unfortunate than Onion Boy—given to Mordaunt by Cath, who only knew him as a mysterious man that Aurienne had saved from a stab wound.
Aurienne meditated flight. In the most detached tone she could manage, she said, “Tit Wank Man is fine.”
“Only fine? And yes,” added Cath, peaceably, “I am a right nosy cow.”
“Fine,” said Aurienne. “Gone, actually. Out of the picture.”
“Is he?” Cath’s burgundy-lined gaze searched Aurienne’s. “I’d believe you if you weren’t actively looking for exits.”
Aurienne, who had indeed been evaluating the nearest window for auto-defenestration purposes, said, “Don’t be silly.”
They came to Swanstone’s cafeteria. It wasn’t much of one; it consisted of a long row of tables in a corridor, the regular cafeteria having been converted to Ward 14 (Platt’s Pox).
They loaded up their trays and found a table. Seith was best replenished with food, the higher calorie the better; the fare at Swanstone was consequently rich and heavy to fuel seith-depleted Haelan.
Cath heaped a cracker with whipped goat cheese and fig preserve. “Does Xanthe know about this situation with Tit Wank Man?” she asked. “The stabbing and everything?”
“Yes,” said Aurienne.
“He can’t be that bad, then,” said Cath.
Aurienne produced a fixed smile, because yes, he could absolutely be That Bad. He was a bloody Fyren.
“Can Élodie and I meet him?” asked Cath.
“Absolutely not,” said Aurienne. “He’s no one important. Only one of my Occasional Men. Tea?”
“Yes, please.” Cath pushed her cup forward. “Your parents got to meet him, but we can’t?”
“Correct.”
“He’s certainly got you distracted.”
“He hasn’t.”
“You’re pouring the milk into the sugar pot.”
“Bollocks.”
Rescue came in the form of Quincey, who whisked Aurienne away to chair a committee in Haelan Whitman’s place. The committee was on clinical ethics, because why would it be on anything else, while Aurienne scampered about, illicitly putting a Fyren through an unapproved course of treatment that would get her Haelan wings pulled if anyone found out? Fate was, once again, taking the piss.
Aurienne permitted herself no further thoughts of Mordaunt thereafter, save for one legitimate concern: she was anxious to get a diffractor on him to confirm what changes had followed the healing at the Færwundor. He was equally anxious on this front and sent his deofol to Aurienne regularly, enquiring about the date for their next meeting. However, with the rollout of the Pox immunisation programme, all of the Haelan Order’s clinics, including the ones in remote villages where Aurienne normally met Mordaunt, were booked up.
She wasn’t able to reserve one until a chance cancellation a fortnight later, at which point both she and Mordaunt were bursting with frustration.
“I might have a place for us to meet,” said Aurienne to Mordaunt’s deofol, who had once again darkened her tācn with her presence.
She locked the door to her quarters as the deofol’s black miasma melded into a wolfish shape.
“I’m confirming whether or not they’ve got a diffractor available,” continued Aurienne. “Not every clinic has one.”
Mordaunt’s deofol, whose past interactions with Aurienne largely involved snark and teeth, behaved herself. The wolf laid herself at Aurienne’s feet like a patient, smoky rug and said, “Take your time, Haelan.”
Aurienne flipped through an enormous binder detailing clinic inventories. “Yes—we’re in luck. There’s a diffractor there. Tell Mordaunt we’re to meet tomorrow, in Grasmere. The waystone is at the Deceptive Banana. I know it’s short notice.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the wolf. “He will be pleased to be there. Thank you, Haelan.”
Aurienne snapped the binder shut. The wolf could be so polite when she wanted to be. “We’ll meet there at noon, and if Mordaunt complains that it’s broad daylight—”
“He won’t,” said the wolf. A bow followed. “You have our gratitude.”
Instead of fading away as usual, however, the deofol lingered at Aurienne’s eye level.
Uncomfortable under the creature’s black-souled scrutiny, Aurienne asked, “Was there something else?”
“I believe you are the Fair Tormentor,” said the wolf.
“The what?”
“Only something he’s been muttering about. I think he’s fond of you.”
“Fond?” repeated Aurienne.
“Curious, isn’t it?” said the wolf.
“Has he forgotten that I walk one of the Bright Paths and that he’s got a great flaming hellhound on his hand?”
The deofol shrugged. “All light involves burning.”
Aurienne went to bed mulling over this cryptic observation.
Her repose was short-lived. A few hours later, she was awoken by the press of velvety seith at her tācn.
She raised her tācn to let Xanthe’s deofol, Saophal, through. The axolotl shimmered into existence and said, “You’re wanted urgently. Follow me.”
Aurienne lurched into alertness. A thousand reasons why she might be wanted urgently spiralled into increasingly ridiculous suppositions—was it to do with the Færwundor? Was it to do with Mordaunt? Had someone discovered their deal? Was she about to be sacked, have her Haelan wings stripped, be thrown out of Swanstone?
“Chop-chop, dear, bit of pep in the step, please,” said Saophal as Aurienne pulled on her boots.
Aurienne threw a cloak over her sleeping things. “What’s going on?”
“We have need of your skills for a patient,” said Saophal, perching herself upon Aurienne’s shoulder. “You’re being summoned to Ward Thirteen.”
“Ward Thirteen?” repeated Aurienne in confusion as she descended the north tower’s spiral stairs. Ward 13 was a disused ward in Swanstone’s dungeons. In less civilised times, it had served as the Order’s lunatic asylum.
“How are your seith reserves?” asked Saophal.
“All right. I’ve slept a bit. What time is it?”
“Half three,” said Saophal.
“What’s the matter with the patient?” asked Aurienne. “Presentation? Symptoms? Why Ward Thirteen? Is it something contagious? Are we isolating?”
Saophal clung to Aurienne’s shoulder as she ran. “We’re going to need you to disable their seith system.”
“Disable it? What? You mean my micro-occlusions?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s experimental, reserved for specific therapeutic scenarios like seith haemorrhages— Oh, so sorry, Haelan Abercorn—”
“Qu-quite all right—didn’t need my diaphragm anyway,” wheezed Abercorn, whom Aurienne had just run into, elbow first. Around the corner behind him whipped Haelan Prendergast. Both were hastily adjusting housecoats over their sleeping things.
Along with Xanthe, Abercorn and Prendergast made up the Haelan Order’s leadership. Why were they here? Aurienne grew more anxious.
“In there,” said Saophal.
Aurienne pushed open the door of what had once been a cell in Ward 13. Abercorn and Prendergast crowded in after her. Barbarous restraints rusted on the walls, but those were not what held the patient today.
Five Wardens, their gauntlets removed, their tācn blindingly bright, were standing in a circle. Wards, sizzling with power, crisscrossed between the five of them. At the centre of the circle slumped a woman, stripped of vestment save the shimmering wards at her ankles and wrists. Her head hung low; her slick black hair was in disarray. Her face was bloody. One of her ankles looked broken.
Xanthe, in a droopy nightgown, was already there. Uplit by the wards, her wrinkles looked especially deep. She waved Aurienne, Abercorn, and Prendergast in.
“What’s happened?” asked Abercorn.
“Who is this?” asked Prendergast.
Verity, the leader of the Wardens who rotated through Swanstone, reached into the wards. She pulled the prisoner’s limp hand out and unfurled her left palm.
Upon it grinned a hellhound’s skull.
Gasps filled the room.
“A Fyren, at Swanstone?” asked Prendergast.
“This isn’t just any Fyren,” said Verity. “This is the Fyren Order’s warchief. Tristane Épervier.”
There was a surge in the wards holding Tristane. The eyes of the Wardens glittered hard and angry.
“How was she caught?” asked Prendergast.
“Seith-sensitive warding at the waystone,” answered the Warden named Tenet. “A novel application requested by your Order. Anyone whose signature didn’t match Swanstone’s list was captured as soon as they came out of the ley line. It worked.”
Aurienne and Xanthe exchanged glances. It had been Aurienne’s idea to expand the wards beyond Swanstone’s boundaries, conveyed to Xanthe and thence to the Wardens. She hadn’t expected it to be this successful.
“Tristane’s kit isn’t indicative of a friendly visit,” said Verity. She held up a pouch clinking with glassware. “Poisons in this one.” Another sack was held up. “Grenades.” A glittering handful of metal followed. “Weapons of various descriptions. And, finally, this.”
Verity held up a long, wicked dagger. Aurienne recognised it as a Fyren blaecblade. None present would know the significance of the gold upon its hilt save Aurienne, who held back a shocked intake of breath. Fyren marked their kill count using fine gold threads wrapped around the hilt. Mordaunt’s blaecblade was impressively glittery. Tristane’s hilt was a sickening hunk of solid gold.
Verity turned to Xanthe. “You had warned our Order of a threat disclosed by an anonymous source—was this the threat?”
“I had been told that there was a threat, not specifically which threat,” said Xanthe. “But I reckon this would be it.”
Aurienne said nothing, given that she was the anonymous source.
“A shameless contravention of the Peace Accords,” said Abercorn. “To attempt ingress at Swanstone, armed to the teeth like this—and it’s the Fyren warchief—”
“Shocking,” said Prendergast. “Absolutely shocking.”
“We’ll convene a meeting at the Stánrocc to decide what’s to be done with her,” said Xanthe. She turned to the Wardens whose wards held Tristane in place. “I commend you on your self-restraint. She doesn’t look too injured.”
“Tenet recognised her, which is the only reason we didn’t kill her,” said Verity. “We didn’t want to trigger an outright war by shredding the Fyren Order’s leader to bits.”
“She would’ve deserved it,” said Tenet. A twitch of her fingers yanked one of the binds inward; Tristane’s arm bent into an unnatural angle. “She almost killed Ataraxia. She’s in your trauma ward now.”
“As soon as Tristane regains consciousness, she’s going to be a threat,” said Verity. “These wards are seith-intensive; we can’t hold her indefinitely without breaks to rest.”
“Right,” said Xanthe. “But with her seith blocked, you’ll be able to treat her as a regular prisoner—and we are in the fortunate position of counting Aurienne Fairhrim among us. Aurienne, you have the floor.”
The Wardens observed Aurienne. They had, to date, known her as a Haelan among many Haelan, sweeping from one crisis to the next in high-necked Haelan whites. Now they regarded her with a new interest.
“Blocking seith?” repeated Haven. “How?”
Aurienne stepped forward. “I’m developing a technique to help control seith haemorrhages. It’s still experimental. I can insert tiny occlusions into seith channels. In this case, I’ll block every channel that goes to her tācn. She won’t be able to use it.”
“Can many Haelan do this?” asked Tenet, her brows so high they disappeared under her helmet.
Aurienne understood her concern; the very notion of losing one’s seith was terrifying to anyone who had a tācn.
“Theoretically, any Haelan could,” said Aurienne.
“She’s being modest,” said Xanthe. “The answer is no. Aurienne can because her control of seith is as perfect as humanly possible.”
Aurienne asked if anyone had hlutoform on them. Prendergast discovered a half-used vial in his housecoat.
Soaking her hands in the antiseptic froth, Aurienne continued her impromptu lecture. “It’s an effective method of interrupting seith flow using mechanical means, but it’s only temporary. Lasts about seven days. One of my forthcoming projects involves reversibly blocking seith channels with microfluidic devices, so that treatment could be administered by others. Er—may I put my hand among the wards?”
“They won’t hurt you,” said Verity. “Proceed.”
Aurienne reached into the circle. Wards pulsed and crisscrossed against her hand, adding their dreamlike illumination to a situation that was already surreal. She knelt near Tristane and pressed her tācn to the woman’s bare forearm.
She had anticipated well-developed seith channels, as she would expect to find in anyone who had trained enough to earn a tācn. What she discovered was far beyond that—an incredibly profuse, dense system, teeming with seith. The sheer quantities of it were abnormal. Compared to most people’s seith reserves, Tristane’s felt like a well—dark and deep, and with no discernible end.
Impressive. No wonder Tristane was so powerful. No wonder Mordaunt feared her.
Aurienne occluded the lumens of the delicate seith channels just below Tristane’s left wrist, blocking her use of her tācn.
Tristane’s tācn—so familiar to Aurienne, yet so strange on another’s hand—seemed to bare its teeth at her. It reminded her of what Mordaunt was: one of this group of killers; mercenary, mad, utterly devoid of conscience.
And yet it was because of Mordaunt that Tristane now lay, limp and helpless, here in the deepest dungeon of Swanstone. Whatever blood she had planned to spill remained unspilled thanks to him.
“There,” said Aurienne, withdrawing from contact with Tristane. “A complete seith conduction block, to the best of my abilities. Her seith system is impressive, but it should be unusable now. In principle, she won’t be able to activate her tācn for at least a week. There shouldn’t be any long-term damage to her seith system.”
“Not that she deserves consideration in that respect,” sniffed Abercorn.
Aurienne stepped out of the warded circle. The Haelan Order’s Heads had witnessed this procedure before, but the Wardens hadn’t—they hadn’t even known that such a thing was possible—and they eyed her with a new wariness. She had just stripped the Fyren Order’s leader of her power with the touch of her hand. They held themselves at a new distance from her as she passed.
The Wardens conferred briefly among themselves before addressing the Haelan leaders.
“This dungeon is only adequate for temporary holding,” said Verity. “While we convene the other Orders to the Stánrocc, we recommend moving Tristane to our headquarters at Tintagel Castle for holding and questioning.”
Xanthe turned to her fellow Heads. “Objections to this means of proceeding?”
“None,” said Abercorn. “Get this murderous lunatic out of here.”
“Agreed,” said Prendergast. “Good luck getting any information out of her, though. She’s a Fyren. She won’t inform on a client.”
“I can come to Tintagel to refresh the occlusions, if the Stánrocc doesn’t meet within the week, for the safety of the Wardens watching her,” said Aurienne.
Verity surprised Aurienne by giving her a deep bow. “We will arrange an escort, should that be necessary.” She turned to Prendergast. “I’ll speak to Dinadan to have more Wardens deployed here, as we discussed.”
“More Wardens?” asked Abercorn.
Prendergast nodded. “I was going to break the news to you both this morning. Breage and some nurses from Paeds are missing.”
“Missing? What do you mean, missing?”
“We can’t locate them.” Prendergast rubbed at his thin face. “Their families haven’t seen them in weeks.”
“Given this,” said Xanthe, with a disgusted jerk of the chin towards Tristane, “we must suspect foul play.”
The Heads of the Haelan Order came together into a cluster to carry on their grave talk. The Wardens discussed the logistics of Tristane’s transfer among themselves.
Aurienne rinsed her hands with the last of the hlutoform. Some instinct—some latent, never-before-triggered prey instinct—made her glance up.
Tristane was awake and looking straight at her.
One eye was green and the other was full of blood.