Page 116 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy
Amagris turned back to Fairhrim. “I hope you heal yourself, too.”
“Er—I’m not sick,” said Fairhrim.
“You’re the one with the deeper wound,” said Amagris. “I would know. I made it.”
The acknowledgement was made neutrally, tinged by neither regret nor sorrow—only, perhaps, a bit of pity. (And Osric had thought Fairhrim cold. Fairhrim was downright cuddly, compared to the Hedgewitch.)
Fairhrim looked at her drink.
Amagris caught sight of the worn leather strap peeking out at Fairhrim’s neck. “You ought to get rid of that. You mustn’t let the past tether your heart.”
Fairhrim pressed her hand to the front of her dress, under which the hagstone rested upon her breast. She made no answer.
“I’ll leave you now. Merry meet, merry part, and merry meet again,” said Amagris, but there was nothing merry about it.
Osric observed Fairhrim warily. He wasn’t certain what Amagris had just done: was this the beginning of some sort of closure? Or a reopened wound?
Amagris joined another table. Fairhrim made moon eyes at her all the way there.
Pathetic.
But who was Osric to judge?
Fairhrim sat in piteous silence. She drank nothing more.
Osric interceded, not because he was jealous but because it was so sad to witness.
“Fairhrim.”
“What?”
“Snap out of it. You’ve got more sense than this.”
Fairhrim looked as though being credited with sense displeased her. She did snap out of it, however, and excused herself to go to the loo.
Osric thought that he was done being upstaged by absurdly attractive people, but his hope was in vain, because that was when the Leyfarer walked in.
He was not at all what Osric had envisaged when Fairhrim’s deofol had mentioned him. Osric hadn’t much of an opinion on Leyfarers—they were useful in the way road workers are useful; they made ley lines passable and convenient, and when they didn’t, he cursed them heartily.
He had imagined today’s Leyfarer as a skinny man with prawn-like eyes and ears like Sweet Aedan’s. Ill proportioned. Geeky. Overexcited about cartography.
But no. The Leyfarer was a bit shorter than Osric but more muscular, and he moved with the quiet swagger of the man who knows he is good-looking. Though his expression was mellow, the set of his jaw told of ruggedness and grit. He wore a lambskin jacket with a large shearling collar.
As he walked into the pub, he pulled off the jacket and flung it over a shoulder. He wore a short-sleeved shirt beneath it, which revealed tanned arms covered all over with tattoos of maps and sea monsters and anchors and things.
Most offensively of all, he had Good Hair.
The Leyfarer pulled out a cigar. He slipped it behind his ear when the witch behind the bar advised him that he’d best be keeping it unlit.
“Wouldn’t dream of vexing you, love,” said the Leyfarer with a wink.
The Leyfarer glanced around the pub and identified Osric as his likely client amid unimpressed Hedgewitches. He approached with a dark gaze full of appraisal, as though he, too, had formed a judgement.
There wasn’t much to judge. Because Leyfarers were Bright Path walkers, Osric had taken precautions to be forgettable and inconspicuous and as un-Fyren-like as possible. He had made himself unobtrusive (other than, obviously, his striking looks): his hands were clad in black leather; he wore a nondescript greatcoat; his boots were coated in mud.
Given that the Leyfarer was arrogant and attractive, part of Osric now wanted the Leyfarer to suspect that he was a Fyren, just so that he would Know His Place. Fairhrim, however, would kill Osric if he mucked up their ride to the Isle of Stígr.
Fairhrim returned from the loo. She was wet about the face and hairline, as though she had put her entire head in the toilet. Osric made a note to tell her about sinks.
