Page 29 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy
The brightness of it eclipsed the rising sun.
Osric felt as though he was seeing her for the first time, or that a veil had been lifted, or that that he’d been looking at a half-open Frostbell for months, and it had just bloomed and revealed this—this arresting, annihilating, soul-wrecking loveliness.
Emotion coursed through him: bewilderment, hope, the purity of gratitude. She was healing him. She was giving him the gift of more time on this imperfect earth.
“I need to examine you properly,” said Fairhrim. She spoke in that punctilious way of hers, of which Osric had grown fond. “We’ll have to get a diffractor on you. Perhaps I’m misremembering that node. I’ll have a look at my notes from the last scan. I do have a good memory, but one never knows—after that hallucinogen, my brain still doesn’t feel right. What?”
A curl of hair was plastered against her cheek, damp with river water.
Osric pushed the hair behind her ear. “You’re brilliant. You’re terrifying. If it wasn’t so impossible, I’d be at a real risk of falling in love with you.”
Hope was the colour of the blush across Fairhrim’s cheeks.
6
Kintsugi
Aurienne
“If it wasn’t so impossible, I’d be at a real risk of falling in love with you.” Mordaunt’s touch, his unexpected tenderness, and his words, huskily spoken, left Aurienne as stunned as though he had kissed her.
Dawn invented him all over again; it traced the latent nobility in his countenance and inlaid his scars with white gold. His eyes were full of light.
She oughtn’t to find him beautiful. It was like finding death beautiful. The ends of things.
Wet leather followed the curve of Aurienne’s cheek and lingered at her jaw.
Mordaunt withdrew his hand. The usual drollery tugged at his lips, but a strange expression lingered on his face, and Aurienne harboured a fugitive idea that he might not be entirely joking.
She was distracted by the painful spasm of a teeth-rattling shiver. She clenched her jaw to suppress it.
“We need to get out of here,” said Mordaunt. “Let’s get to a waystone.”
“We haven’t a thimbleful of seith between us,” said Aurienne.
“Then we’ll find somewhere to warm up and rest.”
Mordaunt rose from the mud with a wetschlorppand helped Aurienne to her feet.
“You don’t think any of the Dreor would’ve followed us?” she asked with a backwards look towards the river.
“I don’t see how they would’ve got through that. The only reason we did was the shadow-walk; we’d have been crushed to bits otherwise. Shout if you see one and I’ll go stand on its head.”
They stumbled and shivered their way along the towpath that ran parallel to the river. They came to a real bijou of an inn, partly ensconced in the riverbank. A crooked sign informed them of the inn’s name: The Rowany Nosebleed.Rotted wood made up its sides, and its roof was an ancient boat hull. Aurienne wouldn’t have been surprised if it was run by literal river rats.
Near it squatted a small waystone, which neither Aurienne nor Mordaunt had enough seith to use.
“Food and we’ll have a bit of a kip to recover our seith,” said Mordaunt.
They entered the tiny inn. Mordaunt discovered various beams in the ceiling by means of his forehead.
The innkeeper was a small man, but the look he gave them was one of vast suspicion. Aurienne supposed that he was right to be suspicious. She and Mordaunt looked like they’d just crawled out of a particularly wet dung-cart.
Mordaunt flung a soggy coin purse onto the bar. “There’s a generous hundred thrymsas for food, fire, and bed.”
“If you’d be so good as to accept us,” added Aurienne.
The man counted the coins. With a markedly friendlier expression, he said, “Follow me.”
