Page 131 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy
A sick plunge of the stomach. A near fainting.
“The Dreor?” repeated Osric in a whisper.
Leofric was only intermittently observant, but he noticed Osric’s change of countenance. “You all right?”
“G-grand. What do you mean? What’s going to happen?”
“There’s been a massive falling-out between the two Orders, I heard. Not sure what the Haelan did to piss off the Dreor this much, but apparently they’re on the warpath. They’ve torn up the Peace Accords and are heading to Swanstone. I wonder if the Haelan have got a single weapon in that fortress—”
Osric rose abruptly. “I have to go.”
He mulled over the information as he left the pub. He was under no obligation to tell Aurienne anything. He was healed. He had given her the money in exchange, and, what was more, actually let her keep it. The terms of the agreement had been fulfilled.
She had said they must go their separate ways. She had said they must be strangers.
He owed her nothing.
If he did nothing, she might die.
She shouldn’t matter to him. He could do nothing and prove it to himself.
Or he could do something, and grow out of his own rot something better.
26
Choosers of the Fallen
Aurienne
As August passed into September, Aurienne sought refuge in work, of which there was no shortage at Swanstone. But she could not find peace. A great sadness cumbered her, surrounded her like an unstirring mist, lingered like a ghost at the edge of her vision.
She sat at the window at the top of Swanstone’s north tower. Far below, leaves accumulated in the fortress’s moat in puddles of red. The trees grieved summer; she grieved Osric Mordaunt.
The cat was her only company tonight. Acts of Unwarranted Brutality sat on the roof outside the window, where Mordaunt had once sat.
Aurienne had thought to rip off the bandage with her abrupt departure. It had not worked. Perhaps she ought to have opened up to him more, explained more, before it was too late, before it was too painful, before he was too distant to hear her.
Was the separation hurting him as much as it was hurting her?
How had she got here, pining after a Fyren? She conducted an autopsy on her own feelings. No—that wasn’t a good metaphor, because itimplied that the feelings were dead. They weren’t. They were alive. It was a vivisection.
The development had been nonlinear, jumpy. Bursts here and there, from moon to moon, from favour to favour, acts of kindness and care disguised as reciprocity, and so she had gone from hate to dislike to tolerance to affection to—to this.
Love.
(Was that what this was, sitting at a window with a bruise for a heart?)
It had been the right thing to do, to say goodbye, hadn’t it? If it was the right thing, why was she lacerated with uncertainty and regret?
“If it was the right thing to do, why does it hurt so much?”
Only the cat was there. She gave no answer but a slow blink.
“Can you hate someone for what they are, but love them for what they could be?”
The cat’s little paws crisscrossed as she approached Aurienne. She stepped onto her lap, warm and whiskery.
“I don’t know if I’ve made a mistake,” said Aurienne, gathering the cat into her arms. “I don’t know where the mistake lies—in leaving him, or not leaving him.”
