When Osric returned to Rosefell Hall, his tācn tingled with vicious annoyance. He had ignored Fairhrim’s deofol for days now, and it was making its irritation known. It felt like it was pressing its canines to the inside of his tācn, insisting on being let through.
Osric, readier now to tackle Fairhrim and her missives head-on, raised his tācn and let the deofol materialise.
Fairhrim’s deofol was a white genet whose usual mode of greeting was insults. It did not diverge from the habit, particularly since Osric had raised its ire.
“Did you just bite me?” asked Osric.
The genet studied Osric and, with a scathing look towards his ensemble, said, “The more pressing question is: Why are you wearing upholstery?”
“It’s a smoking jacket,” said Osric.
“All the sartorial splendour of a futon,” said the genet. “You’ve been ignoring me.”
“I’ve been busy,” said Osric. Because he didn’t want the deofol to know he had been busy desperately moping, he added, “With murders.”
“You look sick.”
“I’m fine, but thank you for your concern.”
“It was an observation, not concern,” said the genet. “The full moon is approaching, and Aurienne is anxious to schedule a planning session for your ill-conceived break-in of the Færwundor.”
“Can she come to Rosefell Hall on Tuesday night?” asked Osric.
“Rather short notice, isn’t it? But that’s typical of you. Short notice, shortsighted, short on brains.”
Osric whipped a throwing knife at the impudent deofol. It was only a creature of seith, and the knife sailed harmlessly through it, but it made him feel better.
“Short-tempered, too,” sniffed the deofol. “I’ll see if she can make it on Tuesday.”
“I’ll send my deofol to confirm the time,” said Osric.
He expected the genet to disappear, but it continued to hover before him. Its tail twitched violently. “Breaking into the Færwundor still strikes me as a terrible idea. What if the Druids catch you?”
“It was your mistress’s idea,” said Osric. “Her precious data pointed her to the Færwundor as the best place for the next healing session.”
“That was before you disclosed that you’re wanted under Druidic law, and that you’re to be subjected to the Threefold Death if caught.”
The Threefold Death was a Druidic punishment. Death inflicted three times: impalement, stoning, and drowning. Professionally, as an assassin, Osric admired the concept. This was commitment to the kill. Several layers of redundancies built in. Personally—well, it was unfortunate that he was on the Druids’ list to receive it, but he’d never let them catch him to dole it out.
“The Druids won’t even know we’re there,” said Osric. “I’m very good at what I do.”
The deofol remained unconvinced. “Aurienne will bring any materials she can find on the Færwundor. She asks you to do the same.”
“I will.”
“If anything happens to her, I will haunt you.”
“I would never let anything happen to her,” said Osric.
He meant this to sound casual, but an emphatic sincerity rang through the words.
It surprised the deofol as well as Osric. The genet twitched a superciliary whisker as it faded into the ether. “Strangely, I believe you.”
Osric felt ready to meet Fairhrim again. There was no peril here; there was no Great Love. Flights of Fancy were not dangerous. He could even flirt with her if he wanted. Perhaps he would flirt with her, just to prove it to himself.
Such was his colossal arrogance.
Aurienne
Regret was unfamiliar to Aurienne Fairhrim. One did not become the Haelan Order’s top researcher by making regret-inducing decisions. She was as prudent as she was clever, her decisions strategic, her choices well reflected, her actions informed by the best parts of integrity and intelligence.
Until fate had placed Osric Mordaunt in her path, and flung her organised life into chaos.
Aurienne’s regret began to roil after Mordaunt, with the orchid cradled against his heart, left her window. It reached a crescendo with the rise of the sun as daylight cast its frank clarity over the night’s events. Aurienne wondered, with increasing alarm, What She Was Doing, giving flowers to assassins perched upon her windowsill.
The orchid—and the romance of Mordaunt’s nighttime visit, and the softness of their whispered conversation, and the sweetness of the hours passed together—was part of a larger, unwanted blurring of lines. The blurring put Aurienne in a cold sweat. She was a Haelan and Mordaunt was a Fyren and these were comfortable absolutes—good and bad, right and wrong, and never the twain shall meet. Between them must always stand the bulwark of hate.
But her feelings towards Mordaunt were seeping past hate and bleeding into something else. Appreciation pulled towards admiration. Admiration flowed into affection. The absolutes were unsteady. Her hate was losing its purity.
Aurienne recalled, with appalling vividness, their kiss during the dance. They had said it was for show and then kissed like they meant it. The memory, tinged now with regret, was bittersweet, and bitter had the larger share.
And now she was sending him off with a flower and soft words in the moonlight?
She wasn’t in control.
She regretted the kiss; she regretted the flower; she regretted everything.
Aurienne skittered, panicky, into justifications. The kiss had been factitious. The flower had been a spontaneous marker of gratitude, offered to Mordaunt because he had discovered the Pox in storage in Lord Wellesley’s cellar, and also helped Aurienne work out, possibly, why the plague had been orchestrated in the first place. Mordaunt had also informed her that the terrifying Head of his Order, Tristane, had Swanstone within her sights. The man had done Aurienne and her Order several good turns. For her part, Aurienne had managed to slow down—barely—the degeneration of his seith system, and removed one (1) seith embolism. (She had also healed a lethal stab wound, but given that it had been incurred by Mordaunt in her protection, she didn’t feel it counted.)
So, Aurienne told herself as she dressed, Mordaunt deserved the flower. There was relief in the conclusion.
It was time for her morning rounds. She put the finishing touches on her ensemble, buttoning her Haelan whites up to her neck and twisting her hair into a bun. She pushed a silver curette through it to pin the last unruly strands into place.
She was in control again.
Normally, Aurienne’s priorities were her patients in Swanstone’s Centre for Seith Research, closely followed by the goings-on in her lab. However, in light of Mordaunt’s visit, she foisted these duties upon unsuspecting colleagues who made the mistake of making eye contact with her while not actively saving someone’s life, then dashed to her office.
There she scrawled the following request, as comprehensive as she could make it, given her ignorance of the subject matter:
Any works on the Dreor Order including: creation of, history, ideals, recruitment, expansion, allies, ranks, secrets, systems, locations, conventions (rituals, ceremonies, initiations, other rites), decline, and any connected materials, please and thank you.
She called for Quincey, her assistant. The small owlish man popped his head into her office. “Yes, Haelan Fairhrim?”
Aurienne handed him her scrawl. Quincey took it with confidence: he was one of the few who could decipher her handwriting.
“Send a copy of this request to every academic and research library in the Tīendoms,” said Aurienne. “Ask them to be discreet about the enquiry.”
“Of course.” Quincey looked at Aurienne’s bit of paper and blinked. His confidence in his ability to decipher her handwriting was shaken by the note’s contents. “The—the Dreor Order?”
“Correct,” said Aurienne. “It’s a matter of urgency as well as secrecy. Let me know as soon as you begin to receive materials.”
“Yes, Haelan Fairhrim.”
Quincey bowed his way out and went to clatter feverishly at his writing ball.
Aurienne swept out of her office in search of Xanthe to inform her of the night’s events. Xanthe, an outstanding Haelan specialising in limb and organ regeneration, was one of the three Heads of the Haelan Order. She was also Aurienne’s mentor and confidante. (Occasionally she put the mentor in tormentor, such as when she ordered Aurienne to take on Osric Mordaunt’s case.)
At Ward 5 (Regeneration), Aurienne enquired after Xanthe’s whereabouts and was directed to the toilet.
A tentative knock upon the door revealed Xanthe flushing out her mouth and gargling hlutoform: a patient had ripped out their IV. Xanthe said that it was One Thing to be sprayed in the eye, but to be sprayed in the mouth was Quite Another, sentiments Aurienne found impossible to refute.
“It’s always the ones on an anticoagulant,” said Xanthe. “Blood on the ceiling. Blood in the light fixtures. At least the potted plants are thoroughly hydrated…”
Cleansed of her patient’s redecorating efforts, Xanthe turned to Aurienne with a face equal parts wet and grim. “What is it?”
“Two disturbing updates,” said Aurienne. “I had a late-night visit from Onion Boy. And I got the results back from Élodie’s lab for those bottles he found in Wellesley Keep.”
“What news from Onion Boy?” asked Xanthe, in a voice muffled by a towel. (Onion Boy was the unfortunate code name Mordaunt had been saddled with after his first encounter with Xanthe.)
“Item one,” said Aurienne. “Onion Boy has indicated that the Head of his Order accepted a job at Swanstone. Someone—or several someones—is in danger here.”
“What? The Head of the Fyren Order? Tristane?”
“Yes.”
Xanthe paused her drying, then resumed it with ferocity. “Has Tristane lost the plot? That’s a direct violation of the Peace Accords. We don’t touch other Orders. How dare she?”
“Onion Boy doesn’t know who or what the target is. It’s the same job Brythe had taken on, which failed due to Onion Boy’s—er—intervention.”
“Did Onion Boy say who’s paying Tristane?”
“He didn’t know. Only that whoever it was is also responsible for blocking the funding for Pox immunisation research throughout the Tīendoms. And they’re still alive—so it isn’t Lord Wellesley. I think we need to inform Élodie, in confidence. She and her lab are the most likely targets, since they’re working on the immunisation.”
“I agree. Tell her, and when she asks for your source, say I’ve instructed that the informant’s identity is not to be disclosed.”
Aurienne nodded. “Onion Boy has also given me advice on how to keep ourselves safe from Tristane. We’ll have to involve the Wardens.”
“Jot down what he told you,” said Xanthe. “I’ll manage the Wardens. If Tristane Épervier sets foot in Swanstone, she’d better hope it’s them who catch her, because if I do, I’m blowing up her liver.” Xanthe seethed for a moment, then asked, “What did Onion Boy ask for payment for all of this information? I suppose we’d better prepare a small fortune?”
A logical query that left Aurienne entirely wrong-footed. “He—he didn’t, actually.”
Xanthe was rarely shocked by anything, but her sparse eyebrows disappeared into her hairline. “He told you for free?”
“Yes.”
“The Fyren gave you intel? Pertaining to his own Order? For nothing? Gratis?”
“Erm—yes,” said Aurienne. “He said it’s because I’m at Swanstone and he wishes to keep me alive. It’s pragmatism, not generosity.”
The look Xanthe gave Aurienne advised her that she was thoroughly unconvinced.
“Second item,” continued Aurienne. “Bioterrorism.”
“You have my attention.”
“As you know, I sent the bottles Onion Boy discovered in Wellesley’s cellar for testing. Got the results back last night. It was as we suspected—the Pox in transport media.”
Xanthe’s jaw clenched. Her wrinkles ran deep.
“This is massive, Aurienne.”
“It is.”
“But why?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? Why bring back a virus that last affected the population a century ago? Why deliberately spread the Pox and produce heaps of dead or brain-dead kids? Who would be so profoundly cruel?”
“You’d better have an answer for me, after this preamble,” said Xanthe.
“I’ve got a hypothesis,” said Aurienne. “It centres on the brain-dead. The Dreor Order.”
“The Dreor Order,” repeated Xanthe slowly.
“We now know that the Pox was deliberately loosed. We know someone poured vast resources into it, and subsequently even more into blocking inoculation development across the Tīendoms. We know the Dreor Order has been in decline for decades. I only know the usual tales about them—that they’re mad, that they’re the walking dead. The last Platt’s Pox outbreak occurred a hundred years ago, in Lichfield—that’s where the Dreor HQ is. I haven’t yet been able to connect these dots with facts. I’ve just reached out to libraries to pull out all available material on the Dreor Order. I may be entirely wrong.”
Xanthe stood round-shouldered, her face drawn by heavy fatigue. “You may also be right. Aurienne, this is ugly.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to need to tell the other Heads.”
“All right, but don’t give them our informant’s name. And emphasize that this is purely speculative. I’m doing some research on the Dreor. When I’ve got something more concrete, we can present the hypothesis to them. At this point, this is nothing more than conjecture on my part.”
Xanthe massaged her temples. “There’s a logic to it. The Dreor Order is almost extinct; they need to repopulate. Does the Pox create an ideal Dreor candidate? I wouldn’t have thought their Order had the funds, or the connections, or the brains for a plan of this magnitude.” Her shrewd eyes narrowed. “If you’re right, any surviving children are at risk. They’d be the prize.”
“We need to keep them safe,” said Aurienne. “We’ve got beds full of survivors here, but there are others all over the Tīendoms.”
“The Hedgewitch Order has just advised us that the Pox is rampaging through their newlings, too.”
“We should bring them into Swanstone. Every child we can.”
“I fear we’re heading into dark days, Aurienne.”
“Haelan Xanthe?” came a voice from outside the toilet.
Xanthe opened the door. A Haelan apprentice in a grey tunic was looking for her. “I’m sorry to disturb you. Have either of you seen Lambert?”
Lambert led Swanstone’s Charity and Donations department. Xanthe answered in the negative, as did Aurienne.
The apprentice sighed. “His wife is at reception. She says he hasn’t been home in days.”