Page 153 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy
It was over.
She could live again, her heart unshackled, her spirit unflayed.
She leaned against the tall Monafyll Stone, breathing in great breaths of free air.
The Monafyll Stone was cool through her cloak. She ran her handsover its familiar carvings. What hand had made the inscriptions? What being had etched the unknown tongue that had driven Widdershins mad? The serpent, the swan, the fairy tongue, all swam in her vision.
As she passed her tacn over the Monafyll Stone, she felt a familiar sensation of drawing in, of loosening the particles that made her.
She ripped her hand away.
She had been about to enter a ley line.
She stared at the Monafyll Stone open-mouthed.
It was a waystone.
Impossible. Unmapped waystones no longer existed. The Leyfarers had discovered them all in the last century.
Something glimmered in the tall grass at the foot of the Stone. Aurienne nudged it with the toe of her boot until it came loose.
A rusted colander, grown through with wildflowers.
“Widdershins,” said Aurienne.
He had worn the thing as a hat, the night she and Mordaunt visited him.
Aurienne pressed her tacn to the Monafyll Stone again, but the pull didn’t come back. The stone was just stone. Had she imagined it? One didn’t imagine the feeling of being dragged into a ley line.
Aurienne stood unmoving. The fog pressed around her interrogatively.
The hagstone’s broken ligature dangled on either side of her fist.
She blinked and shook her head. This would bear further investigating—but not tonight. She had a convalescence in front of her.
Aurienne walked the spiral’s unravelling path outward, the torn-off hagstone in her palm. Earth massed by landslips rose on either side.Landslipmeant something different here; reality could shift right out from beneath your feet.
Her lingering backwards look at the Monafyll Stone came with an unvoiced promise: she would be back.
She stepped to the edge of one of the Fairy Glen’s shimmeringponds. Fish like living mirrors gleamed under the surface. She dropped the hagstone into the water. It disappeared without a splash. It would guard the small dreams of the fish.
She was light, unburdened—and alone.
What an irony, to free her heart after so many years, only to end up in absolute solitude. She had pushed away the man who could have loved her and who she loved. She had freed herself just in time to realise the amplitude of her mistake.
Now that the hagstone no longer tethered her, she realised how little she cared about the obstacles—their Orders, their unsuitableness. How minor they all were, in the face of the pent-up things in her heart.
She would reap what she had sowed this harvest moon: loneliness.
It grew cold as dusk passed into night. Aurienne’s breaths made ghostly shapes before her; fog hung within fog. Starlight touched at this dreamy opalescence and made the Glen brilliant silver.
Aurienne bid farewell to the Monafyll Stone in her silent spiral. Through the hollows between pinnacles, she retraced her steps.
The shiver of a breeze brought with it the faint scent of smoke.
Blackthorn.
Aurienne froze where she stood. She was going mad. Her heart wished for things and her senses, complicit, manufactured a matching hallucination.
