“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 wasbeforeyou 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.
2
Aurienne Is Troubled
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 andMordaunt 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 andtwisting 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 herpatients 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:
