11
TRANSCENDENCE FLEETING
Aurienne
here was no sea, no sky, no lighthouse. Only air shattered by wings, onlyT the squeeze of Mordaunt’s glove against her fingers.
Black-fringed white filled Aurienne’s eyes, pleated upon itself, fell, lurched. Light fractured in chinks between wings and through feathers, light from a golden world where an unceasing sun shone.
There was something at work in the celestial clamour—something half- conscious, something not good and yet not evil. Aurienne felt a loosening.
The rules became less rigid. Things wouldn’t withstand; things wouldn’t say no.
She hesitated. Air trembled at her cheek. A window had opened.
Could she do it?
The lighthouse flashed. A hundred thousand bright eyes were on her.
Aurienne, facing Mordaunt, reached for the back of his neck and clasped him in a simple embrace. Her palm found his nape—warm skin notched with scar tissue, and ridged, now, with goose bumps. She felt the breath of wings against her cheek and of Mordaunt against her lips.
A hundred thousand eyes whirled above, below, through, around, within, without.
Aurienne awoke her tācn, and there, at the very rim of the world, in the light of another place, between the winged and the earthbound, between sea and sky, between dark and brightness beaming, she pushed her seith into Mordaunt.
He shuddered. The space between heaven and earth contracted; the sky became something they could touch. Her seith surged; the birds surged; the very air surged. The gannets in their infinities swept upwards, far beyond the lighthouse, far into the violet heavens.
The wind slipped into a murmur, said something too quiet to hear.
The window closed.
Aurienne pulled her hand from Mordaunt’s neck. They stood and stared at each other, breathless, suspended, astonished.
Mordaunt’s collar was crooked; his hair was disastrous. Aurienne felt herself in a similar state, and drained, too—swept up by the moment, she had poured her seith into him in quantities unwise.
Aurienne held her tācn to Mordaunt’s clavicle. Low seith or not, she had to know whether it had worked. She cast a live diagnostic.
His eyes were riveted to her. He still clasped her left hand. There was desperation in his intensity; his pulse raced; his lips formed an unvoiced please.
The only sound now was the quiet breathing of the sea, as though some great creature had returned to slumber.
Aurienne’s diagnostic image glowed feeble white in the intermittent beam of the lighthouse. Her hands began to chap with her Cost; every second of the display was a drain on her already low seith.
Nothing in Mordaunt’s seith system had changed.
Aurienne shook her head.
“I really thought,” Aurienne began, at the same time as Mordaunt said, “But that felt—”
But no. They had thought and felt wrong.
“Fuck,” said Mordaunt.
Aurienne said nothing. Disappointment and relief roiled within her.
Disappointment because she had felt so close—so close to an impossibility.
Relief that she hadn’t managed, because she had always known that this was going to end in failure, and this confirmed that she was right, and—and beyond anything else, a Fyren didn’t deserve to be healed. And then the disappointment again, because she had wanted to succeed. And then the
relief, because she hadn’t.
They were still holding hands.
The emotional roil was joined by the rise of nausea. That live diagnostic had pulled too much from Aurienne’s reserves. Black crept into her vision.
Her hands stung; her knuckles split; her nails grew bloody.
“Fairhrim?” came Mordaunt’s voice.
“I need to sit down,” said Aurienne.
She grasped at the glass door.
Mordaunt opened it for her. His hand released hers and moved to her elbow. She pulled away; he kept his hold.
“I don’t need you to—” began Aurienne, and then one of her legs buckled.
Mordaunt helped her through the door. He didn’t say Don’t be stupid, but she saw it in the annoyed tightening of his jaw.
Aurienne grasped the doorjamb as she passed it. No tunnel vision, no shakes—she would be fine. She had simply overdone it a bit.
“Seith drain?” asked Mordaunt.
“Yes.”
There was a soft intake of breath. He had noticed her hands. “Your
Cost?”
“Only the beginning.”
“Shit.”
Mordaunt propped Aurienne on the ledge that rimmed the inside of the lantern room. He stood in front of her, irresolute, his brows drawn, his mouth an anxious press. The concern on his features was unsettling. His mouth was for snarking, not for looking worried on her account.
“I’m fine,” said Aurienne.
Mordaunt’s eyes remained on her bloodied hands.
“Ugly, isn’t it?” said Aurienne.
“We don’t choose our Cost,” said Mordaunt. He sat beside her. “If this thing was ever to work, I would’ve imagined that that was the—the kind of moment.”
Aurienne nodded. They had come to the very edge of something today.
Something very like what the tales spoke of—a flickering and a fraying of this world and the revelation of another beyond the gossamer. In the thundering rush of wings, it had felt like they were somewhere on that cusp, where the impossible was possible, where the unhealable could heal.
The thrill of Aurienne’s early forays into these stories found her again; she almost believed—she wanted to believe. And now she must wait an entire month until the next full moon. (Baffling, to be anticipating her next rendezvous with Mordaunt, but, well—she was rather looking forward to trying again.) “Are you feeling better?” asked Mordaunt.
“A bit. You can stop looking so concerned. It unsettles me.”
“I need you. I need your hands. I’ll be as concerned as I like when they look like mincemeat.”
“When I’ve recovered my seith, I’ll heal the mess.”
“You should rest,” said Mordaunt.
Aurienne tilted her head back and leaned, at first, against the glass pane behind her. The glass was uncomfortable and slippery. Exhausted, and past caring what he thought, she slid off it, and rested her cheek upon the soft velvet of Mordaunt’s cloaked shoulder.
She closed her eyes and breathed until her breaths matched the cadence of the waves somewhere below them—the long ins, the slow outs. The lighthouse sent its beam out in search of something in the dark. For leagues and leagues over the sea, shadows split, closed up, and were split again.
Aurienne’s faintness receded. She opened her eyes.
The lavender sky had given way to black. The Blædnes moon had risen.
Night made a dark looking glass of the windows. Mordaunt was watching her in the reflection. The lighthouse flared and sent his face into sharp relief —the scar across his mouth, the features she wouldn’t admit were handsome, the eyes palely reflecting light.
Fyren.
But also—also just a man.
He sat, scarred and imperfect, under a scarred and imperfect moon.
Motionless, alert, intent upon her. His breath fanned against her temple, heartbeat-slow, the careful, measured slowness of a man controlling his breathing. The shape of his mouth mattered. His stubble caught her hair.
Just a man. Being so near him in that moment freed the thought from Aurienne. Just a man who, as they stood in the light of another place, had nearly touched his lips to hers. Just a man who had whispered, desperately, “Please.”
He leaned into her, or she into him, until their arms touched. Their joined reflection in the window made a soft and pleasing trigonometry. There was a strange intimacy in feeling the heat radiating from him. Aurienne wondered if he thought the same. No answer came, save the mute press of his arm against hers.
It meant nothing. It couldn’t mean anything, because of what she was and what he was. These were sweet nothings of an entirely new kind.
Meaningless. Futile.
Mordaunt shifted. His signet ring brushed against her; carved stone, blood-warm, caressed her wrist. Her skin received it like a kiss.
Aurienne vacillated between being repulsed and drawn in, between wanting more and wishing to move away, an ebb and a flow as changeful as the waves below, as throbbing and intermittent as the lighthouse strobe. This was the real in-between. Did he, too, feel the push and pull?
The light flared. She glanced up. She caught him unguarded. Instead of mirrorlike silver she found chasmal grey. The intensity in his gaze shocked her even as she found her answer. He looked at her as one who wished to worship, and one who wished to defile.
The next time the light flashed, the mirror was back.
They sat for a long time, leaning against each other, existing in two states at once.
Hate could feel strangely like something else.
AURIENNE DIDN’T USUALLY HAVE TO apply her emotion-regulation strategies to life outside the wards, but it occurred to her that if she were going to, for example, decide that sleeping on Osric Mordaunt’s shoulder was a good idea, she would be wise to. A bit of suppression wouldn’t go amiss.
“Sorry,” said Aurienne, pulling away from the man in question.
“It’s all right,” said Mordaunt. His throat sounded dry; he cleared it.
They both found their feet. Mordaunt shook his cloak as though airing it out.
Aurienne ran sore fingers through disorderly curls and pinned them back into place with her silver curette. “The tide’s well and truly come in. How long did I sleep?”
“Not sure,” said Mordaunt. “An hour, maybe.”
“We’re stuck here for at least another few hours, then.”
“Goody.”
Aurienne peered downwards. “With the sea this high, those men won’t come back—not unless they’ve got a boat.”
“I wish they would,” said Mordaunt. “I’d have some entertainment.”
“I suppose you’ve got to kill people regularly or go wild with boredom.”
“Mad with it,” said Mordaunt. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” said Aurienne. “I never leave Swanstone without a few snacks in my satchel, but my departure was so rushed, I haven’t anything at all— Erm, where are you going?”
Mordaunt was halfway down the spiral staircase. “The kitchen. You need to eat.”
“I’m not going to steal anyone’s food,” said Aurienne.
Mordaunt’s sigh echoed towards her. “They stole the food from someone
else. Does that make it better?”
“It compounds the problem.”
“No—it cancels itself out. Basic maths.”
Aurienne, still feeling a bit lightheaded, decided that she couldn’t afford to be picky. She therefore did not further argue about the Fyren’s questionable mathematics.
The lantern room’s intermittent light faded as she descended the stairs.
She discovered the placement of the kitchen worktop by smashing her hip into it.
“I forgot,” came Mordaunt’s voice. “You’re useless in the dark.”
Aurienne raised the cold light of her tācn. “How are you seeing anything
at all?”
“Trade secrets,” said Mordaunt.
“Is it to do with shadow-walking?”
“None of your business.” Mordaunt found a gas lamp and lit it. “Stop wasting your seith; you’re meant to be recovering it.”
“The output for a bit of light from my tācn is absolutely minimal—but, all right. Thank you for the light,” said Aurienne. She reserved Mordaunt’s trade secrets for future prying.
Mordaunt clattered about the worktop and assembled the bandits’ supplies into a heap. He and Aurienne studied them in the lamplight. It was a pile of icebox debris, really—grey potatoes, overripe grapes, things too elusive for identification. The scent of bin juice wafted towards them.
“Lucullan magnificence,” said Mordaunt.
“How to choose from among all these delights?” asked Aurienne.
Mordaunt ate a grape. “This feels rather like eating…eyes.”
“What’s this?” asked Aurienne, holding up a bowl of things.
“Earlobes,” said Mordaunt.
Aurienne found a plate of scrambled eggs that looked like boogers, which she pushed towards Mordaunt. He traded it for a wrinkled saucisson.
Aurienne inspected its mouldy white edge.
“Smegma,” said Mordaunt.
“You’re disgusting,” said Aurienne.
Mordaunt found a carton of something, which he tossed into the centre of the table. It exploded like a full nappy.
“Bechamel?” proposed Aurienne.
“Think it might be a bit off?”
“It’s blue.”
“Here,” said Mordaunt, and he heaved an enormous pumpkin onto the
table.
“How am I meant to eat this?”
“Unhinge your jaw.”
“It’s rotten,” said Aurienne, pointing at an ominous crevice in the pumpkin—information which Mordaunt received with stoic dignity by saying, “That smells like a Dreor’s arsehole.”
“How would you know what that smells like?”
“I’m surmising based upon one encounter.”
“You fought a Dreor?”
“Absolutely not. I’m not that mad. I ran away.” Mordaunt lifted the lid off a tray of, possibly, pasta. “Thoughts?”
Aurienne inspected it. “Have you ever seen what comes out when someone’s taken a tapeworm tablet?”
“Gods,” said Mordaunt. “You’re disgusting.”
“I’d kill for just a cup of tea,” said Aurienne. She searched the cupboards.
Mordaunt said that he would kill for a cup of tea, too, only literally, unlike her, the coward. Aurienne found a battered pot. Mordaunt found a tin labelled Tea containing desiccated remains of things. When consulted, Aurienne opined that it might’ve been tea, or perhaps floor sweepings; Mordaunt said it was hair from a mermaid’s armpit. They boiled it.
Mordaunt gave his mug an aristocratic sniff, as one might when working out the notes of a fine wine. “I’m getting—fish got wanked off into a pot.”
They set aside the tea.
AT LENGTH, THE TIDE RECEDED, and Aurienne and Mordaunt made their way down the lighthouse’s spiral stair, and back across the bridge.
As they approached the waystone at the remains of the Woolf, they became aware of an imminent problem.
There was a large group of men gathered at the waystone, sitting, standing, milling about. Men who looked rather like bandits who had scampered off to find reinforcements.
Aurienne said that this was Most Inopportune.
Mordaunt made the unoriginal suggestion that he should kill them all.
“No,” said Aurienne. “We can find another waystone.”
“This is the only waystone out here,” said Mordaunt.
“We could negotiate.”
“Do they seem willing to negotiate?” asked Mordaunt, rightly, because the men were unsheathing their weapons. There was a gleam in his eye as he studied the assembled men. “I could take them all out from here.”
“No,” said Aurienne.
“Or I could go in closer and—”
“No.”
“What about—”
“No.”
“But we really must punish them for that tea,” said Mordaunt. “I’ll just kill them a little.”
“Kill them a little? Death isn’t divisible.”
They were unable to conclude their argument on murder as a fractionable activity because the men fanned out and began an approach. Aurienne recognised two of them from their earlier encounter with Mordaunt. Their reinforcements—four dozen men, perhaps—had given them fresh courage to face the Fyren.
From their chatter, Aurienne understood that they had applied a certain bandity logic to the situation; they had decided that if a lady had hired a Fyren for protection, she must be Worth Something. Some of the men eyed Aurienne, others her satchel. (The latter contained only burn gel, plasters, and a splint, for a total value of thirty thrymsas.) The bandits had summoned their chief, a large man moving with confidence bolstered by the numbers behind him. He rubbed his hands like a
fly that has found a particularly succulent poo.
As for Mordaunt, there was gleeful anticipation in his eye. Aurienne knew that he would have no scruples about murdering all of these men.
Scruples did not form a part of his composition.
The bandit chief grinned at Aurienne. He did not have teeth so much as one or two sarsen stones. “A pretty thing like you come to visit us all the way out here? What luck.”
Aurienne flung a hand towards him—necessary dramatics, given the Fyren—and said, “Don’t come any closer, please. You needn’t die today.”
“Pretty?” interjected Mordaunt. “Who’s prettier, her or me?”
This gave the bandit chief pause. He pressed a meaty finger to his chin and consulted his colleagues.
Aurienne begged them to flee while they could; Mordaunt hushed her and said, “Let them talk.” One bandit piped up that she had better eyelashes but he had better cheekbones, and thus mortally insulted them both.
The bandit chief emerged from the conference and said, “About the same.”
Aurienne gasped in outrage. Mordaunt, labouring under the delusion that he was prettier, also gasped.
“Well,” said Mordaunt, “now you’re definitely going to die.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said the bandit chief. “Fyren or not, there’s forty of us and only one of you.”
Aurienne expected Mordaunt to loose twenty throwing knives and slay the men where they stood. However, he merely bent over to fix the lace of his boot.
The bandit chief took this as a show of submission. “Now,” he said, “let’s have the lady come over here, nice and slow.”
“You’re making a mistake,” said Aurienne. “He’s going to kill you. Let us get to the waystone and he’ll leave you alone. I’ve no money.” She rattled her open satchel. “Look: nothing of value.”
“You haven’t got money here,” said the chief, “but you’ve got money somewhere. It costs millions to hire a Fyren.”
“I didn’t hire him,” said Aurienne.
“Daddy did, then, and he’ll pay a pretty sum to get his daughter back.”
“No. The Fyren wasn’t hired. He’s here of his own volition, not for money.”
The bandit chief scoffed. “A Fyren? Not here for money?”
“You’re right to be cynical,” said Aurienne, “but this time, it’s true.
Please believe me. Let us go.”
“The Fyren are good, but they aren’t gods, girl. He’s only one man.”
Mordaunt was still bent over beside Aurienne, fiddling with his boot.
“What,” hissed Aurienne, “are you doing?”
“Got to keep things sporting,” said Mordaunt. He pulled a bootlace free.
“Besides, I don’t want to dirty my knives. You stay here and clutch your pearls.”
“Clutch my—don’t kill them,” said Aurienne, stepping in front of him.
“They’re idiots—utterly lacking in judgement. We must give them a chance.”
“You’ve already given them a chance,” said Mordaunt. “Besides, they
threatened to kidnap you.”
“And? You threatened to kidnap me.”
“Exactly: only I can do that. You can’t tell me this lot will be a huge loss
to the world.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“Death is a normal part of life,” said Mordaunt.
“You can’t play god and accelerate it,” said Aurienne.
“Tss. You play god and slow it down; how’s that different?”
“Because it’s for Good.”
“They aren’t Good.”
One of the bandits, having tired, apparently, of this theoretical exchange, whipped a throwing axe towards Aurienne and Mordaunt. Mordaunt caught it as it spun between them (reflexes, admittedly, impressive), turned to the bandits, and commented at large, “That was a mistake.”
He dropped the axe. He moved towards the bandits, armed solely with his bootlace, with such nonchalance that if Aurienne had been a bandit, she would’ve been offended.
The bootlace dangled. The glove came off. The red tācn glistened like a bloodstain.
There was a shudder among the more intelligent members of the mob at the sight of the hellhound’s skull. Then there were rallying shouts about how the lady was worth millions, and this was Only One Man. He couldn’t take them all on; obviously—obviously—it was all for show, intimidating, like; the tācn probably wasn’t even real—what was he going to do, kill them all?
Mordaunt twirled the bootlace as he advanced.
“Arrogant bastard,” said the bandit chief.
“Can’t argue that,” said Mordaunt.
“Run, you idiots,” said Aurienne, her hands pressed to her mouth.
“You’re going to learn some lessons today,” said the bandit chief.
“I think the teaching will be mutual,” said Mordaunt.
The bandit chief gestured his myrmidons forward. Their strategy, such as it was, consisted of swarming Mordaunt, who, for his part, turned to Aurienne and, with another of his odious winks, said, “Self-defence.”
A strange melee ensued, during which Mordaunt, with an air of roguish enjoyment, strangled men left and right with his bootlace, while they drove their blades towards him and gutted one another instead. He was vastly outnumbered, and yet with his every balletic step, two or three bandits collapsed, and his tācn glowed its diabolical red, and bodies hit the ground, and he had shadow-walked behind his next victim. He was, indeed, very good at what he did. The problem was that what he did was Very Bad.
It was going to be a wholesale single-bootlace massacre until the bandit chief, wielding a spear, hit Mordaunt with a glancing blow over the shoulder.
Then Mordaunt grew serious, plucked the spear from the chief’s hand, and skewered him and the two men behind him into a grotesque bandit brochette.
All forty died.
Aurienne clutched at her pearls.
