Page 89 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy
“Are you her date? Was this your idea of a romantic rendezvous?” asked Élodie.
“Your hair is interesting,” said Cath. “It looks like baleen.”
Mordaunt looked both frightened and put upon.
“Don’t bully him,” said Aurienne. “It’s thanks to him that we found this place.”
Élodie gasped. “Tit Wank Man is the informant?”
“How lovely to meet you,” said Cath.
“Fria’s peace be on you,” said Élodie sweetly.
Mordaunt pulled his cowl up wordlessly, then squeezed between the two of them and disappeared.
Élodie and Cath rounded on Aurienne. She threw up a warding hand before they could open their mouths. “No time for your inquisitions. Seith transfers.”
She fled.
A long night stretched intoa long morning. By the time the last batch of infected children had been brought into Swanstone, it was almost noon. The exhausted Haelan who had been at the asylum handed the reins to their colleagues and crawled to their quarters, Aurienne included. She drew her curtains shut with Cost-raw hands and fell into a deep sleep.
It was night when she awoke. The events at the asylum played out over and over in her mind—the horror of bed after bed of barely breathing children, the shuffling wightlings, the sick thrill of harming them. Her tacn as a weapon.
At the far end of Aurienne’s quarters, the plaster cast of the Monafyll Stone loomed like a white waystone in the moonlight. Aurienne had reconstructed it after she and Mordaunt had taken it from Widdershins’ shed. A shadow was perched on top of the plaster cast, a dark little prologue to the lunar calendar that curled in unknown languages below her paws.
Acts of Warranted Brutality was making one of her nighttime visits.
“I did some bad things,” said Aurienne.
The cat blinked at her.
“Have you come to listen to my confession?”
The cat tilted her head.
“I did notHarm to none. I used my seith in ways we’re not meant to.I made pulp out of half a dozen wightlings. Verity had to put them out of their misery.”
A perfect black triangle of an ear flicked Aurienne’s way.
“I should feel sick. Disturbed. I don’t. I was angry. I would do it again.”
Aurienne voiced a hard-learned, horrible truth—one that abashed her, cracked her bastion of righteousness, tainted the purity of the moral high ground.
“The pursuit of rights sometimes involves wrongs,” she whispered.
The cat jumped off the Monafyll Stone and made her way, with graceful little cat steps, to the bed. She was nearly invisible, save for her whiskers gleaming white. She leapt onto Aurienne where she lay.
The little piece of darkness settled onto her heart, purring in approval.
17
The Conses Have Quenced
Aurienne
In the days that followed, the Haelan and Warden Orders investigated the addresses that Mordaunt had discovered in the Agannor’s office. Mordaunt had been correct: every address was another Dreor incubator housing more sick children. Swanstone exercised every emergency response protocol at its disposal to deal with the influx of patients. They were brought into any ward with a spare bed and even overflowed into Cygnet House, the large outbuilding that normally housed apprentices.
With these discoveries, the time had come for Aurienne and Xanthe to share their findings on the Dreor Order, the Pox, and the three Tiendoms involved. Prendergast and Abercorn, Xanthe’s fellow Heads of the Haelan Order, were briefed first. Then they invited the leaders of the Warden, Leyfarer, and Ingenaut Orders to Swanstone. Out of courtesy more than expectation, they also invited the leader of the Hedgewitches, and, to their shock, Vel actually came. Aurienne was surprised to find Vel accompanied by a Druid.
