21
SOMETHING BECOMING
Osric
hen Osric had asked Fairhrim to dance, she had, at first, done nothingW but stare at him. A very dark time in his life had followed, taking on the proportions of approximately ten years of agony and suspense, until her shrugged “Very well.”
That was where it should have ended. Osric had never intended to steal a kiss, and certainly never intended to linger along her neck. It was meant to be only a dance. But she had looked up at him, and he had discovered how her wet hair caught pentagrams of stars, and watched raindrops trickle down her throat and make a necklace of moon glitter there, and the kleptomaniac urge had risen, and he, weak-willed fool that he was, had yielded to it.
When he had asked her to put the poor bastard out of his misery, he hadn’t been referring to Perfect Aedan. He had been talking about himself.
He had played the smitten fool a little too well. Well enough to believe it.
Afterwards, Fairhrim had fled from him, and left him with an unfinished dance and a fear.
He wished he could unknow what she had tasted like. What it had felt like to hold her quivering stillness in his arms as he made his way down her neck.
Once again they had met upon a threshold, once again they had reached an Almost, and once again she had fled.
She would never cross over. And he was burdened now, with the memory of a swiftly beating heart, exhilaration and pleasure, and the weight of regret.
He wished he could unkiss her.
A FEW DAYS AFTER OSRIC’S stay with Fairhrim, Tristane’s ill-tempered polecat deofol summoned him to the Fyren HQ.
Thanks to Fairhrim’s attentions, he was by then able to walk normally, and not as though he had been stabbed in the gut by a fellow Fyren who was, incidentally, missing under mysterious circumstances.
The Fyren headquarters had moved to an abandoned abattoir. Osric had scouted the place out after one of Fairhrim’s more piquant remarks. It was perfect; there were exsanguination and blood-storage facilities on-site, and no one in the neighbourhood investigated if things got smelly. Fairhrim would no doubt be thrilled to know her input had had such an impact on Osric’s Order.
Upon the abattoir’s rusted gates lingered the cheerful slogan We kill so you don’t have to!
Below it was carved a rough rendition of the Order’s hellhound fangs.
Sacramore was in the abattoir’s dingy reception area, sorting through a diverse pile of contraband.
“Good luck, darling,” he said as Osric walked in. “The butcher is in a
mood.”
Osric pondered Why That Could Be.
He followed a cracked-tile corridor to the killing floor, where Tristane stood, accompanied by Lady Windermere. Around them were enormous meat hooks, upon which recent victims of Tristane’s interrogations were hung upside down. A few of them were still alive. One wheezed aerosolised blood.
There was a sign on the wall indicating the days since the last injury: fourteen. Osric felt that it needed updating.
Tristane gestured him closer. She wore an enormous rubbery apron and yellow boots.
“Lovely outfit,” said Osric. “Crime-scene chic.”
“Thank you,” said Tristane. “It has pockets.”
“What are you doing with these fine gentlemen?”
“A bit of forensic accounting,” said Tristane. “Have you had any word from Brythe recently?”
Lady Windermere, who had been standing beside Tristane in silence, let out a staccato breath, and wiped away a tear.
Osric, with perfect innocent concern, said, “Brythe? Saw him last week at the Harmacy.”
“That’s the last time anyone saw him,” said Tristane.
“He’s missing.” Lady Windermere turned sunken eyes to Osric. “My deofol can’t get through—can’t even find a trace of his seith.”
“Neither can mine,” said Tristane. “Which means he unlinked us—”
“Brythe would never unlink me,” said Lady Windermere in a fierce hiss.
“—or he’s dead,” finished Tristane.
“Dead? Brythe?” Osric scoffed. “Impossible.”
Lady Windermere wrapped her arms around herself. Her thin form swayed. “Then where is he?”
“The alternatives are limited and unsatisfying,” said Tristane. “Few could kill Brythe. Perhaps des circonstances insolites—a freak accident of some kind.”
“I refuse to believe that,” said Lady Windermere. “But you’re right—few could kill him. If he’s dead, that will narrow down my list.” She gave both Tristane and Osric a look, and he knew that the two of them had just made it onto her list.
“Cast your suspicious gaze elsewhere,” said Tristane, pressing a warning fingertip to the hilt of her blaecblade. “Your lover may be dead, but I remind you that I’ve also lost one of my Fyren. And Osric a friend and colleague.”
Osric, who had been personally responsible for converting the dear friend and colleague into ash, nodded gravely.
Lady Windermere lowered her gaze to the floor.
One of the wheezing, upside-down men—a redheaded, skinny fellow— created a timely diversion by burbling for mercy. Tristane poked about through some crates, muttering about gags. She found a harmonica in her apron pocket, which she jammed into the man’s mouth.
“There,” she said, patting him on his upside-down chin. “You may do something useful with your breathing. Give us a bit of ambience.”
The harmonica’s discordant whistles filled the room.
“Kind of you,” said Osric. “This is cosy.”
“I know,” said Tristane. “I’m a real softie when it comes down to it.
That’s my trouble.”
Amid the harmonica’s sepulchral melody, Osric asked, “Will you launch a search for Brythe?”
“Windermere will be leading it,” said Tristane. “Beaufort and Sacramore will help her.”
“If I hear anything through my contacts, I’ll let you both know
immediately,” said Osric.
“Thank you,” said Lady Windermere.
She left. The harmonica turned melancholy.
“You said you last saw Brythe at the Harmacy?” asked Tristane when
Lady Windermere was gone.
“Yes—Sacramore was there, too.”
Tristane sighed. “He was heading out on a job that day. I think he’s dead.
He can’t be on the run. He had the payout of a lifetime coming his way.”
“What job was it?” asked Osric.
“One that it was imperative he not fail,” said Tristane.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to look for him?”
“No,” said Tristane. “That’s not the priority. The priority is completing the job.”
“Shall I take care of it? I do like a payout.”
Tristane listened to the sad harmonica. Her triangle of hair swayed mournfully. “It wasn’t a job I would normally agree that we would take on. It
involves another Order.”
“Oh?”
“I made an exceptional decision on an exceptional basis.”
“What exceptional basis?”
“Money.”
“Well, obviously.”
Tristane’s hard eyes surveilled Osric. “Aren’t you going to query me about the advisability of attacking another Order?”
“Did Brythe?”
“No, but Brythe considers nothing beyond the money. It’s why I asked him in the first place. You’re just as rapacious, I know—but you’ve got a Particle of intelligence and political acumen.”
“An entire Particle?” said Osric. “You flatter me. Can the job be done without evidence of Fyren involvement?”
“That was, of course, the idea,” said Tristane. “Otherwise I’d be pulled up to the Stánrocc to explain myself to the Heads of every other Order, and
probably sentenced to death.”
“What Order was the target?”
“That’s not for you to know,” said Tristane. “Sacramore was against my taking it on. Bit of a traditionalist. However, if no one knew our Order was responsible, his reservations would be moot.”
“Who’s the client?”
“Someone worth breaking a few rules for.” Tristane meandered through the hanging men as one would through a peaceful Zen garden, with her hands behind her back. “Some sombre idiot donated a substantial wodge—twenty million—to an Order when all other funding avenues had been strategically blocked by the client.”
This was a bit awkward for Osric, given that the sombre idiot was, you know, him.
“And now Brythe has disappeared,” continued Tristane. “He can’t have been caught—if they’d caught a Fyren, I’d have been dragged before the
Stánrocc already to explain why I’ve broken two hundred years of Peace Accords.”
Osric gestured to their bloodied audience. “Haven’t this lot heard a little too much?”
“I suppose,” said Tristane. She paused. A knob on the wall caught her attention. “What do you think this does?”
“A mystery knob,” said Osric. “Pull it.”
“I have tugged a few mystery knobs in my lifetime,” said Tristane.
Tristane pulled the mystery knob. It severed the man next to her clean down the middle.
“Ah,” said Tristane, observing the result. “Very good. I wouldn’t go to a pie shop round here for a little while if I were you.”
“Thank you for the tip.”
“You’re dismissed,” said Tristane. “Come to me if you hear anything about Brythe. I will pass the information to Lady Windermere. You saw today that she’s…quite emotional about this.”
“Understood. And the job?”
“Leave the job to me.” Tristane walked pensively away from Osric, her boots squelching in fresh offal. “On n’est jamais si bien servi que par soi- même.”
Which, Osric understood from his rudimentary French, meant that she was going to do it—whatever it was—herself.
Which meant that Tristane was going to pick up where Brythe had left off, and go to Swanstone.
Which meant that Osric needed to see Fairhrim immediately.
A few other Fyren were milling about the reception area when Osric exited the killing floor. Sacramore asked him whether he’d join them at the Dog’s Bollocks for drinks. Osric, panicky, produced some sort of strangled gurgle from his larynx—he hoped it sounded like a viable excuse—and strode off.
Safely away from the abattoir, Osric summoned Cinder, his deofol, with instructions to find Fairhrim sharpish, and tell her they had to meet. Fairhrim had told Osric that she would never reject his deofol again—and yet, a few
minutes later, Cinder returned, her ears pinned back, to report that she hadn’t got through.
“She’s either ignoring me or sound asleep,” said Cinder, her voice husky with displeasure.
“Sound asleep? At half two in the morning? Ridiculous,” said Osric.
“What do you want to do?” asked Cinder.
“You’re going to keep trying and I’m going to make my way to Swanstone. Come back to me if you get through.”
Cinder nodded and faded from existence in a smudge of smoke.
Osric took a waystone to the Publish or Perish, from whence he sped to Swanstone. The frozen waterways bordering the fortress during his February visit had melted into proper ponds and moats, populated now by flocks of drowsy swans. They were, like Fairhrim, pretty, foul tempered, and best appreciated from a distance. They detected something of him as he shadow- walked past and hissed in his direction.
The white fortress’s battlements loomed overhead. Osric slipped into shadow, awaiting the touch of the returning Cinder against his tācn. None came. Osric stared at the ramparts above him, glowing here and there with warding. Very well: he would be visiting Fairhrim in person once again.
Slowly, carefully, using his utmost finesse to dodge the Wardens’ trapping wards, he made his way to the roof of the highest tower of Swanstone.
“I CAN’T BELIEVE FAIRHRIM DOESN’T trust me,” said Osric to himself as he broke into her bedroom.
The window was large and round. Its lock gave him no trouble. He swung it open. However, there was a significant, Warden-driven upgrade to the security, if one actually wished to go inside: there was a ward around the entirety of the window frame, glowing midnight blue. This was not a ward
that could be dodged or danced around. Osric would no longer be able to enter Swanstone undetected.
The good news was, neither could Tristane.
He peered inside. Fairhrim’s quarters were larger than he’d expected, encompassing the full circumference of the tower, with a high, vaulted ceiling. The decor consisted of angular furnishings looking singularly inhospitable, on which lay many books, and when not books, plants under glass cloches, and when not plants, meticulously labelled skulls. Into one of the cloches gazed a pubey sort of cat, black and scruffy. Osric recognised it as the kitten he had found at Wellesley Keep and consecrated to Fairhrim’s care. The ungrateful creature hissed at him.
Fairhrim lay in a bed against the far wall. She was in a deep sleep—the senseless, boneless sleep of one recovering from seith exhaustion. Her arm hung off the side of the bed. Osric was pleased to discover that the sight of her hand did not, this time, turn him to lewdness. It was bloody with evidence of her Cost. Her tācn shimmered with a glowing pulse now and again as Cinder tried to get through.
His deofol’s efforts came to fruition. Fairhrim sighed herself awake, cracked an eye open to stare at her tācn, and pointed it at the floor.
Cinder took shape. Fairhrim’s cat, seeing the shadow of the great wolf, fled.
In a sleep-cracked voice, Fairhrim muttered, “What?” to Cinder.
“Good evening,” said Cinder.
“Hiya,” said Osric, given that he was there, too.
Fairhrim’s bleary stare turned to Osric’s silhouette at the window.
“I wish to awaken from this bad dream,” declared Fairhrim. Then, having processed the reality of the situation, she sat up with a jerk. “Don’t touch the
window. There are wards—”
“I saw.”
“You’re mad to have come here.” Fairhrim kicked off her sheets. “Has something happened? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” said Osric. “But I’ve made a worrying discovery.”
He dismissed Cinder, who dissolved into smoke.
Osric cursed inwardly, because Fairhrim, bereft of all her party accoutrements, her eyes black rimmed with fatigue, her hands crusted over with scabs, was, unfortunately, still beautiful. When she wasn’t sharing a room with him at her parents’ house, she slept in a thin, satiny nightdress, which clung to her in interesting ways. Given that her sleeping attire was of no consequence to him, he directed a powerful curiosity towards his knee while she put on a dressing gown. Her hair was pulled into a sleep-frizzed plait that unravelled down her back.
As she approached Osric, wide-eyed in the dark, she looked unusually vulnerable. Something about it made him want to be gentle.
“Did they add wards to every point of entry?” asked Osric, gesturing with distaste at the blue glow tucked into the frame.
“Yes. The Wardens brought in Tenet.”
“Who?”
“One of their ward specialists.”
“Aren’t they all ward specialists?”
“Yes, but she’s an expert among experts. She’s been added to their detachment here. She mapped out all of our seith signatures—every Haelan, every member of our personnel, every guard, every patient. Any person crossing any threshold who isn’t from Swanstone will trigger alarms—and probably lose a limb. It cost a bloody fortune, but you said we had to be discreet in our enhancements.”
“The one time you follow my advice, it inconveniences me,” sighed Osric, settling into a seated position on the roof.
Fairhrim pushed aside a few plants and, after a moment’s hesitation—and decidedly not looking down—she clambered onto the window’s broad ledge, so that she and Osric were separated only by the space of the open window.
“Nice flowers,” said Osric.
Fairhrim repositioned one of the glass cloches. “Orchids. I’m fond of them; their blooms last a very long time.”
“Ah,” said Osric. (Desperate feeling: he had thought they were ephemeral.) “Tell me what’s going on,” said Fairhrim.
“Complications.”
Osric described what he’d learned from Tristane—the questions raised by Brythe’s disappearance, the outrageous payout involved in the hit, the mysterious client who had deliberately blocked the Haelan Order’s funding.
Fairhrim absorbed Osric’s every word, her fingers pressed to her lips. She studied him in silence when he had finished his accounting. “It terrifies me
that you’re terrified of Tristane.”
“As it should,” said Osric.
“Why are you so frightened of her?”
“She’s French.”
“Be serious.”
“Everything I can do, she can do better, faster, bloodier. Her shadow- walking is a thing of legend. She can move from one shadow to the next over real distances, not only a few dozen feet, like me—and I’m considered outstanding. Her blaecblade might as well be her hand. She’s taken over three thousand souls—in this lifetime, anyway. I told you some of us call her Hel herself. The goddess of the dead, walking among us.”
“What do we do?” asked Fairhrim. “How do we prepare?”
“These new wards are a good starting point. You want to deter her— make her think twice about entering Swanstone. She won’t risk being caught by Wardens. Add wards everywhere, not just at points of entry to the fortress proper. The bridge connecting Swanstone to the mainland. Any waterways below the fortress. Hatches. Dumbwaiters. Holes in roofs. Sewers.
Everywhere there’s a shadow. She’s formidable, but you’re forewarned.
That’s an advantage her victims don’t usually get.”
They talked. And something extraordinary happened, because, for once, their talk wasn’t arguments; it wasn’t negotiations; it wasn’t provocations; it wasn’t wheeling and dealing—it was the terra incognita of collaboration. It was coming up with a plan, together.
Night deepened and cooled, but the fortress’s sun-filled stones released the rays that had baked them all afternoon, and kept Osric and Fairhrim warm. And it was lovely to sit there, leaning against his side of the window while Fairhrim rested against hers, mind pressed against mind, untangling.
There was pleasure in it. He thought that she, too, was enjoying it; her words were appreciative rather than cutting; her looks, encouraging; her nods, satisfied.
Fairhrim recollected something with a jolt. “Gods—it’s been so hectic, I haven’t had a chance to send you my deofol with the news.”
“What news?”
“I just received the test results for the substance in the bottles from
Wellesley Keep.”
“And?”
“It was the Pox.”
“We knew it.”
“We were right. Appallingly, we were right.”
“I almost drank it.”
“It wouldn’t have affected you. It only infects the young.” Fairhrim’s face was drawn. “I think they’re using the bottles to store the virus. The cellar would be the right temperature. Not sure how they’re producing it, or spreading it. But do you know how horrific this is? Do you know how many brain-dead children we’re struggling to bring back, quarantined in our wards here? Hundreds. And that’s just at Swanstone. There are survivors everywhere, just—surviving, if someone is giving them care. They may never live again, not really.”
“Wellesley had entire crates of those bottles in his cellar.”
Fairhrim sat up with a sudden combativeness. “Every bottle will soon be useless. Élodie is rolling out an immunisation programme. Our lead virologist,” she added, in the face of Osric’s blank look. “It explains so much about the virulence of the Pox outbreak to know that it was deliberately being unleashed. But it also raises a thousand more questions, such as, you know —why anyone would do such a thing. Why would Wellesley trigger an outbreak of an obscure disease that had all but disappeared? To what end? To what possible benefit? And if what Tristane told you is true, it means Wellesley was working for someone else. Someone even more powerful, who blocked all the funding avenues for researchers seeking to stop the spread of the Pox—and who is now furious that my Order sidestepped those blockages.
Someone who has now paid millions upon millions to have Tristane herself involved. Do you know how mad that is? Incomprehensible. Absurd. What’s worth this much money?”
“The only thing ever worth this much money—this many expenditures, this many resources—is war,” said Osric.
“What war? Whose war? Wessex and Kent?”
“I know your Order is apolitical, but you need to step outside of your ivory tower occasionally,” said Osric. “Take your pick of any two of the Tīendoms sharing a land border. Actually, sharing a border is optional.
Throw two darts at a map.”
“What war is fought by brain-dead children?” asked Fairhrim.
“I don’t know,” said Osric.
“I couldn’t think of worse soldiers,” said Fairhrim. “Of what possible utility…? They’ve no souls left, the poor things—they’re just shells whose biological functions are continuing to—”
Fairhrim cut herself off.
A slow horror dawned on her face. “Mordaunt?”
“What?”
“How—how are Dreor made?”
There was a long silence.
Osric said, “Fuck.”
Fairhrim pressed her damaged hands to cheeks gone pale.
It was a night of breath-held, uncanny stillness. The moon, waxing, drew a white path over the flat black sea. There wasn’t the slightest shiver of a breeze. Only their talk disturbed the silence, strange whispers passing to and fro, bridging two loyalties; the soft, portentous whispers of something becoming.
“I owe you—we owe you—so many thanks,” said Fairhrim. “The only reason Élodie could work on her inoculation project was because of you. We only discovered the Pox bottles because of you. You killed one of your own
for the protection of my Order—”
“For you” was Osric’s swift correction.
“—and you’ve just helped me work out, possibly, the why behind this awful plague.”
She regarded Osric with a gaze full of wonder. (Such witchery, such witchery in a pair of bright eyes.) “Why are you helping me?” asked Fairhrim.
“Someone is going to die at Swanstone, and I can’t have it be you,” said Osric.
Fairhrim, who could pass the ward at the window unhindered, pressed her fingers to his arm, which sent, as always, a rush through him. There was a time when she had flinched away from touching him at all. “Thank you— truly.”
Then, more exhilarating still, she asked, “Are you free Friday next?”
“Why?”
“It’s the full moon. And we’re going to break into the Færwundor.”
Osric stared at her in shock. She had been categorical in her refusal. “You —you’re going to do it?”
“You won’t let us get caught,” said Fairhrim. After a beat, she added, “I trust you.”
The words landed heavily on Osric’s chest, ran deep, heightened the exhilaration.
“We’ve managed to slow your degeneration,” continued Fairhrim. “Let’s see if we can reverse it. After what you’ve done, it’s the least I can do.”
The sparkle in her eyes might have been the stars; it might have been a secret smile.
Osric felt the weight of some doomed and inexpressible truth.
They tarried long at that window, not quite in, and not quite out. They succumbed to the slow enchantment of a June night. White moths, pale and brilliant in the dark, spun by in shivering constellations, flowed into one another, collapsed in and out of one another, and, whirling upwards, became part of the sky. In the east, clouds gleamed with tomorrow in them.
They talked until the stars went out.
Fairhrim, silver framed in the window, became a focal point: a notan study of light and dark. Unimportant things became important. Her lashes
painting their own shadows against her cheeks. Moonlight subliming her hair.
Her hand beside Osric’s on the windowsill, so close their fingers brushed.
Her touch was an aching, fragile beauty. It was a hinge that swung him into something else. An awareness. An understanding that came in a bursting, ecstatic, agonised thrill.
He and she sat in the moonlight as lover and beloved.
He hadn’t paid attention. He had been stupid—gods, so stupid. He no longer owned his heart.
The thief was unconscious of her crime. She asked, “Is something the matter?”
And, for once in Osric’s life, the lie didn’t come easily. It was too enormous. He shook his head and held the truth between his teeth.
The realisation was a breaking point. He saw before him the beautiful impossibility of it all, league upon league of impossibility stretching between them. It was ruthless folly; it was the sorrow of a thing ending before it could begin; it was a new circle of torment; it was a delicious wound. What joy seamed by misery. What pleasure fraught with pain.
It hadn’t been love at first sight, but at last sight—gods, at last sight— Far above, the moon hung like a promise.
