Page 90 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy
For two hours, Aurienne and Xanthe presented what they couldconcretely prove: the Pox-filled Scotch bottles at Wellesley Keep pointing to a deliberate plague, Tristane’s attempted attack on Swanstone, Brackenbury Asylum and the further groups of Pox-infected children held at other locations, Aurienne’s research on the Dreor Order.
There was a resounding silence after they had concluded their exposé.
“I cannot believe this,” said Dinadan, the Head of the Wardens.
Birtwhistle, the Head of the Ingenauts, sat open-mouthed.
Élodie, invited in her capacity as lead virologist, dropped her head into her hands. “All this suffering—all this death—on purpose?”
Xanthe gave her a grim nod.
“The last Platt’s Pox epidemic was two hundred years ago,” said Élodie, speaking slowly. “In Lichfield.”
“I shall give you one guess as to what Order is headquartered in Lichfield,” said Xanthe.
“The Dreor.” Élodie dropped her head back into her hands. “I don’t understand how—how they even produce the Pox in these quantities?”
“It’s time to introduce our guest,” said Xanthe, gesturing to the Druid who had accompanied the Hedgewitch. “Aster is a Druid. She’s helped us piece together the question of how.”
Aster’s green cloak hung loose on her frame. Her face was hollowed out by exhaustion. In her eyes there was a deep sadness. “I suppose you have all heard of the destruction of the Færwundor?”
There were nods and muttered expressions of sympathy around the table.
“It is—was—the greatest Druidic enclave in the Tiendoms. Some Druids are solitary and chose to live outside of it, near sacred places we hold dear. I am one of those. I live in the wilder north, near the Stones of Stenness. My contact with the Færwundor is irregular. I visit once or twice a year. My first indication that something was amiss came a few weeks ago, when I sent my deofol to the Færwundor to let them know I was planning a visit. I received a deofol in answer from a trusted brotherin the Færwundor advising me to keep away. He said they had placed themselves in quarantine. Something had gone wrong in the labs. A disease would be at risk of spilling out into the general population if any of us visited.
“I thought it strange: the Færwundor’s labs are a pharmaceutical production facility. We do not study human pathogens there. I spoke with a few other solitary Druids who had received similar warnings to stay away. We now believe those deofols were sent under duress to avoid us discovering that the Færwundor had been taken over by the Dreor. It appears that the Dreor got wind of the extent of our facilities under Glastonbury Tor and decided to make use of them for their foul purposes. We began to suspect something was wrong when our brothers and sisters at the Færwundor stopped answering our missives entirely. Our deofols couldn’t get through. The Druids we sent to investigate at the Færwundor didn’t come back.”
Tears filled Aster’s voice. She gathered herself and continued. “By the time we raised alarms among our own—we live scattered all over the Tiendoms, and it was difficult to imagine that something so grave had happened—we were too late.”
“Our informant said the Druids had been dead for at least a fortnight, on the night of the destruction of the Færwundor,” said Xanthe. “Apparently a mass slaughter took place after news of the Haelan Order’s inoculation push began to circulate. The Pox production became useless and the Druids became a liability. They were killed. The Færwundor was destroyed shortly after it was infiltrated by our informant, presumably to erase the evidence.”
“Those of us who remain are devastated by the Druids’ role, however unwilling, in this plague,” said Aster. “I cannot express to you quite the extent of what has been lost. The lives. The knowledge. The gardens. Theoak—”
Xanthe squeezed Aster’s hand. The Head of the Hedgewitches pressed their arm into the Druid’s shoulder in silent support.
“There will be justice served,” said Dinadan. She leapt to her feet and paced. “But I don’t understand. You’re saying the children are to become Dreor. The Pox victims are children. It would take years to train them up and get them a tacn.”
“Correct,” said Aurienne. “This was careful long-term planning. And I meanlongterm: a ten- or fifteen-year horizon, at the end of which those responsible would have hundreds of Dreor under their control. They were strategic about it—they worked out what disease made the most promising Dreor candidates, targeted a helpless population, and made sure no one would care enough, or have enough money, to do anything about it.”
“For the non-Haelan among us, what exactly about the Pox makes these kids perfect Dreor candidates?” asked Shearwater, the leader of the Leyfarers.
“Not every child is affected by the brain fever, but those that are—and survive it without Haelan intervention—are changed,” said Aurienne. “Either unusually aggressive and fearless or cognitively impaired to the point that they’re, for all intents and purposes, brain-dead. The Dreor tacn is known to take only rarely—only with those with the right sort ofmind. The former take, and create Dreor; the latter fail, and create wightlings for those Dreor to control.”
“Wightlings?” asked Shearwater.
“Brainless foot soldiers,” said Dinadan. “Walking cadavers.”
Aurienne nodded. “With the sheer numbers of kids they infected, I think they wanted loads of wightlings. Even one of those is worth dozens of soldiers—they can’t be killed. They’re practically unstoppable by those without tacn. And somewhere behind them, a Dreor is coming.”
“If the Dreor Order is truly responsible for this plague, my Order won’t stand by,” said Dinadan. “We will be discussing war.”
Shearwater said, “We should be discussing extermination.”
The Hedgewitch, Vel, blinked amber eyes from within their deep hood, but said nothing.
“I don’t think the Dreor Order is the only party responsible,” said Aurienne. “Their Order hasn’t got the resources to implement a plan of this magnitude.”
Xanthe nodded. “Someone organised the mass production of the virus. Someone organised the deliberate infection of thousands of children across the Tiendoms. Someone had the influence to block funding for all of the institutions who could’ve developed a vaccine. Someone paid Tristane to attack us. Someone arranged for that asylum and all the incubators we found after.”
