3
ONION BOY, HIS TRAVAILS AND MISFORTUNES
Osric
t took the Haelan a week to give Osric a sign of life. His tācn tingled withI the arrival of her deofol while he was ensconced in an armchair that wasn’t his, wiping blood that wasn’t his off a knife that also wasn’t his.
He had just murdered a little Wessexian lordling at the behest of one of the Kentish queen’s men. Most people wished for peace among the perpetually skirmishing Tīendoms; the Fyren Order prayed for war. It was far more lucrative.
Osric recognised Fairhrim’s glassy, cold seith immediately. He flashed his tācn at the ground, and her deofol came through. It took the form of a white, red-eyed creature unlike anything Osric had ever seen before. It looked like someone had a vague idea of what cats, foxes, and weasels looked like, and lumped them all together into one animal.
Most deofols were nebulous creatures of seith. Not so with Fairhrim’s.
She had (rather impressively, it had to be said) rendered every whisker and hair on the thing.
The deofol floated past the corpse at Osric’s feet with a critical sort of sniff and said, “You’re the Fyren, then.”
Not only was Fairhrim’s seith control such that she could render whiskers; it was so powerful that her deofol had physical weight. Osric
learned this when the creature leapt into his lap and found his bladder with all four paws in a single concussive blow.
“You pointy-footed bugger,” gasped Osric.
“That’s a messy kill,” said the deofol, jutting its chin towards the body.
“My client wished to send a message,” said Osric.
“Was the message I don’t know where the jugular is and had to stab him twelve times to find it?” asked the deofol.
So Fairhrim’s deofol was as irritating as she was. No surprises there.
“When I want a—a cat-weasel’s opinion on my work, I’ll ask for it,” said Osric.
“I’m a genet,” said the cat-weasel. “An albino genet. Aurienne was right.
You are stupid.”
“Insult me again and I’ll have your head.”
“You’d be in possession of at least twice the amount of brains, then,” said the deofol. “Perhaps I should let you. It would be the charitable thing.”
If the creature hadn’t been made of seith, Osric would’ve snatched it by the scruff of its neck, but he couldn’t snatch it any more than he could grab Fairhrim’s seith.
“Aurienne has found a place for you to meet,” said the deofol. “Take a waystone to the Princess and the Fool in Hessilhead. You’ll see signs for a
clinic for acute buttock folliculitis.”
“A clinic for what?”
“Spotty bums,” said the deofol. “Follow the signs. Aurienne will be
there.”
“When?”
“Now,” said the deofol.
“Now?” repeated Osric. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“Now,” said the deofol again. “She won’t wait for you.”
It disappeared in a puff of white fur and did not hear Osric’s choicest swear words.
Osric, provoked, took the nearest waystone to the designated pub. First, he was at nobody’s beck and call, least of all this priggish Haelan’s. Second, it was broad daylight, and he hated operating in broad daylight. Third,
between the name of the pub and the signs for a clinic for spotty bums that he was now following through this gods-forsaken little hamlet, he rather felt that she was taking the piss.
The villagers puttering about gave Osric startled looks as he stalked through the hamlet’s streets, his hood up, his greatcoat flaring behind him.
What part of my condition mustn’t be discovered hadn’t this idiot understood?
He found the final spotty-bum sign and knocked upon the clinic door.
The idiot opened the door.
Fairhrim’s greeting consisted of a look. There was a lot in it; she looked at Osric as though he were a wart that had acquired sufficient sentience to
knock on doors.
“Are you bloody serious?” asked Osric.
Fairhrim, taken aback by the wart’s rudeness, straightened. “Excuse me?”
“Summoning me? In broad daylight? In a public place? I told you that my condition mustn’t be discovered.”
“It hasn’t been discovered,” said Fairhrim. “You’re hooded up like death personified. And anyone who did see you will think you’re suffering from folliculitis.”
Osric pointed at one of the overly detailed posters that had haunted his walk. “You had to choose arse acne?”
“To guarantee us privacy,” said Fairhrim. She held the door open. “Get in.”
Osric stepped into the tired little consultation room. The place was lit with new electric lights far too bright for his liking. There was an examination table against the wall. Miscellaneous medical paraphernalia was scattered about, looking both curative and foreboding, rather like Fairhrim herself.
Her travelling cloak was clasped shut with a silver wing. She removed it to reveal her stiff Haelan dress, high about the neck and impeccably white, save for the sharp silver epaulettes.
“Also,” said Osric, removing his own cloak, “I’m not at your beck and call. Don’t summon me like this again.”
Fairhrim grew rigid. She turned to him and spoke with a false sort of brightness. “Oh? And I’m at yours, am I? You can impose meetings on me, in abandoned barns, at midnight, without offering me any kind of alternative, but meeting during perfectly normal hours under a perfectly well-thought-out pretext in a perfectly suitable location presents difficulties, does it? I showed your schedule the same respect you showed mine; didn’t you like it?”
She fixed him with a Look. Osric developed a new understanding of what gimlet-eyed meant.
Osric decided not to die on this particular hill. “Perhaps we can each make improvements to our scheduling habits when it comes to the other’s
calendar.”
“A compromise?” asked Fairhrim.
“Yes,” said Osric, assuming that this was a positive thing.
It was not. Fairhrim sniffed in Osric’s direction, as though manure from the barn still wafted from him. “I’ve compromised enough just being here today. But, nevertheless, we can compromise. Now, disrobe.”
“I—what?”
“Disrobe,” repeated Fairhrim. Then, slower: “Remove your clothes.
There are gowns in the cupboard. I’ll be back in a minute.”
She left the room before Osric could make an argument. Nudity in the face of her ongoing animosity felt unwise. But refusal felt—well, pathetic.
She was only a Haelan and she was by herself.
Was she by herself? What if she came back with a Warden when he was stark bollock naked? She reeked of hostility.
He would keep his weapons close at hand.
Osric began to undress. This was no small task. After much unclipping, unbelting, and unstrapping, he removed the following inventory from his person: twelve throwing knives, his blaecblade, two backswords, one amputator, and, finally, a dozen syringes and vials containing substances as nasty as they were illegal.
These items he placed upon the examination table with care.
He was less precious about his clothes: waistcoat, shirt, collar, cravat, trousers, underthings, and boots were all tossed towards a chair.
Osric opened the cupboard to discover that the gowns were, judging by their colour and size, intended for little girls, rather than men who liked to cultivate an air of sinister elegance.
He pulled a faded pink thing on, which, when placed over his head, left his dangly bits exposed.
He decided to wrap the gown around his hips like some sort of kilt.
Thus attired, he leaned against a cabinet, looking as suave as one could in a strip of puce-coloured linen, to await Fairhrim’s return.
He felt, once again, that Fairhrim was taking the piss. No one took the piss out of Osric Mordaunt with this level of frequency and nonchalance. She was lucky that she was necessary to him at this moment; he would’ve murdered her for the cheek otherwise.
The Means to an End knocked, and her crisp voice asked, “Ready?”
“Yes,” said Osric. Should the Haelan have brought company to attack him while he was naked, he had throwing knives threaded between his fingers.
Fairhrim swept into the room. Her hard eyes passed over Osric and rested on his knife-bristling fists.
“Really?” was her unimpressed comment. “I can assure you that if I’d planned any harm to you, it would’ve happened already.”
Well. That was cocky.
“You’ve got a high opinion of yourself,” said Osric.
“Deserved, I assure you,” said Fairhrim. She jutted her chin towards his
gown. “That is quite the ensemble.”
“Fetching, isn’t it?”
“Did you try the adult cupboard?” asked Fairhrim.
“What adult cupboard?” asked Osric.
“The one you’re sitting on.”
“Oh,” said Osric. (He had not tried the adult cupboard.) Fairhrim advanced into the room with a critical air that made Osric feel like he was back in the barracks as a young Fyren, awaiting his warchief’s inspection.
“We’re going to need the examination table, if you wouldn’t mind moving this”—Fairhrim made an impatient gesture towards Osric’s weapons —“mess of an arsenal.”
Osric moved his things under Fairhrim’s watchful eye and sat upon the table.
“Is there a single inch of you that isn’t covered in scar tissue?” she asked.
Osric looked down at himself—at his chest, decorated by reminders of various blades; at his forearms, ridged by burns; at his shins, scattered with memories of a long-ago explosion.
“There is,” said Osric. “A few inches, actually. Under the kilt.”
Fairhrim, who had no sense of humour, said aridly, “Spare me further details.”
“These scars mark the hazards of my Order,” said Osric. “We haven’t got fancy Haelan at hand to fix things.”
“If your Order wasn’t so dead set on the mercenary, my Order might have come to an understanding with yours centuries ago. But we digress.”
Fairhrim dragged a large sack out of a wardrobe.
“What’s that?” asked Osric.
“Your body bag,” said Fairhrim.
So she did have a sense of humour. Dry, though. Very dry.
Osric expressed some doubts that his corpse would fit. Fairhrim pulled the sack open to reveal mysterious contraptions. She excavated one from the bottom and dusted it off. Osric recognised it as a small Curie machine.
She rolled the rickety machine into place next to Osric. Her arm brushed his. It was one thing for people to approach him when they didn’t know that he was a Fyren—he was, after all, strikingly good-looking and magnetically charismatic—but when they did know what he was, they stayed well clear.
There was no brushing of arms. Except from Fairhrim, who, apparently, feared nothing.
“Right,” said Fairhrim. “We’ll begin with some imaging. I’d much rather be using our equipment at Swanstone, but, given the circumstances, this will have to do.”
“Why are we using machines? Why aren’t you doing the, you know?” said Osric, with explanatory mystical gestures.
“Because live diagnostics are extremely seith intensive,” said Fairhrim.
“I’ll be able to examine these images at my leisure—and not waste my seith on the likes of you. Stop talking, and don’t move.”
She aimed the machine at Osric’s neck, which was not a sensation he enjoyed. There was the flash of her tācn as she powered up the machine with a surge of seith into its capacitor. It blinked into life with gleeful whirring.
Then came brisk snaps, so close to Osric’s throat that he almost flinched.
Fairhrim switched off the lights and projected grainy images from the Curie machine onto a wall. She stood before the images and studied them in silence.
Stillness reigned in the clinic. Osric found himself watching Fairhrim’s tall figure with something disgustingly like hope. For a hint that, perhaps, everything wasn’t as bad as she had said it was. For an indication that the rot wasn’t rot, and that it would be reversible. For a bit of good news.
Fairhrim stood in the pale light with a finger and thumb at her chin. She did not move, save for her eyes, which flicked along the image on the wall.
Her brows were drawn together. Her cheekbones were prominent in the dim light.
Her precise voice broke the silence and skewered Osric’s hope.
“Pulverised,” said Fairhrim.
“What?” said Osric.
“Your cervical spine. And the healing—such as it was—frankly, appalling. They put your bones back together like a child smashing puzzle pieces together. They damaged your seith channels in the process, and the deterioration set in from there. You would’ve been a candidate for a nodeplasty on the affected seith channels. But no. Instead, we’ve got this cack-handed mess to deal with. Talk to me about the numbness.”
“It’s mostly my hands,” said Osric. “It’s starting to go up my arms.
Hasn’t had an impact on my dexterity, though.”
“Good,” said Fairhrim. “Your lovely colleagues haven’t noticed anything, then.”
“No. I’d be under watch if they had. We cull the weak.”
Fairhrim’s expression turned sanctimonious. “I don’t understand why one would dedicate one’s life to so cruel an Order.”
“Money,” said Osric.
Quite impressive, how Fairhrim could pack all her moral repugnance into a glance.
She wheeled away the Curie machine and swabbed Osric’s neck with some pungent liquid. He felt the cold burn of antiseptic.
“Phenol?” asked Osric.
“Hlutoform,” said Fairhrim. “A broad-spectrum bactericide, virucide, and fungicide. A colleague of mine developed it for use in her operating theatre.
It’s used all over the Tīendoms now.”
She pulled a second machine from the sack of contraptions. “Franklin diffractor,” she explained. “It’ll let me examine your seith fibres.”
All her machines seemed to enjoy being aimed at vulnerable spots. This one made a sort of chuckling sound as Fairhrim pressed a tubelike protrusion to Osric’s bare chest. She attached other bits on long wires to his shoulders, his back, and his knees.
“Don’t move,” said Fairhrim again, as Osric felt himself about to be lanced at point-blank range by the giggling machine.
On the wall, the pictures of his bones were replaced by a shining network of lines, vaguely in the shape of a man.
Again Fairhrim studied the images in silence, interrupted only by her snapped “Stay still” when Osric dared take in too deep a breath.
And again, Osric found himself studying her as she studied him, looking for a sign that things were not All That Bad.
Fairhrim was quick to ruin it.
“It’s bad,” said Fairhrim. She pointed to lines that shimmered white.
“Intact.” She then indicated lines speckled with black. “Damaged by seith degeneration, commonly known as seith rot.”
Many of the lines projected onto the wall were black, emanating from a cluster at the base of the figure’s neck. It was a sobering sight.
Fairhrim pressed some buttons on the diffractor, which brought the seith fibres into even sharper relief. She measured things with silver instruments and made notes in a chart. “The numbness you’re experiencing is called torpraxia. It’s what happens when decaying seith fibres interact with your nerves. It’s normally more pronounced in extremities.”
She ran her finger up and down Osric’s limbs, as well as his back and chest, and took note of where his numbness began and ended.
“Can’t you simply—simply push a bit of seith into those rotted lines?
Like you do when you’re healing wounds?” asked Osric.
A stupid question, probably. Yes—confirmed by the look Fairhrim levelled at him.
She gathered together enough small words to explain it to him. “No. We cannot simply push a bit of seith into those lines. We are talking about one of the most delicate, and poorly understood, structures in the human body.
Unlike in the nervous system, we’ve never managed to trigger the activation of latent circuits in a degenerating seith system, or the genesis of new channels. There is no plasticity—no regeneration. Grafting attempts fail.
Transplants fail. What’s dead stays dead.”
Fairhrim traced a blackened line on the wall with a fingertip. “There have been hundreds of experimental studies and trials—by me, by my Order before me, by universities, by physickers and chirurgeons. All of them have failed. There is no clinically validated treatment for seith degeneration—only speculative hypotheses, including mine, which I very much regret having shared at this particular moment.” Irrelevantly, she added, “Lucky your tācn is on your left palm.”
Only walkers of the Dusken Paths had their tācn on their left palms; Osric therefore failed to see why this pleased Fairhrim among her otherwise dismal accounting. “Er—why?”
“Those lines are relatively untouched by the degeneration. It’s why you’re still able to use your seith. The fluctuations you mentioned will get worse, however.” Fairhrim pointed at a place near the figure’s armpit. “Your decline will accelerate once these nodes deteriorate.”
Osric stared at the figure projected on the wall, crisscrossed with its rotted black lines. Now he tasted sickness; now he tasted the bitterness of despair. He wanted to throw a knife into the figure’s head. He wanted to crash the stupid chuckling Franklin diffractor into the floor. He wanted to put a hand to Fairhrim’s throat and make her say what he wanted to hear, rather
than these terse truths.
He didn’t want to die.
“Normally I’d hold your hand and say some gentle things about how difficult this must be to hear,” said Fairhrim, “but I’d rather not waste my breath making a Fyren feel better.”
There were, at least, no worries about things getting mopey.
“Good,” said Osric. “Don’t bother. I’m downright cheerful. Because you’ve got a speculative hypothesis, and you’re going to test it out on me, and it’s going to work.”
Fairhrim gave him a look that was equal parts haughtiness and irritation.
“It isn’t. It’s a waste of time. Given that I won’t be able to monitor your progress through regular visits at Swanstone, I’d like to put seith markers in
you. Is that all right?”
“Why wouldn’t it be all right?”
“It’s not a common practice anymore. They’re painful to insert. And we have much better instruments to monitor progress now—but you can’t
exactly visit me at Swanstone daily.”
“Do it, then.”
“It’s going to hurt,” said Fairhrim.
“Have you seen my scars?”
“Very well,” said Fairhrim. She pressed her tācn to his shoulder. “I’m going to put eight throughout your system.”
Her seith flared as she pressed in the first marker. It did, indeed, hurt—a potent, lingering, stinging pain, as of a thick needle jutting into the most tender parts of Osric’s seith channels. Eight times, eight deeply unpleasant times, Fairhrim stabbed her markers in. Out of sheer machismo, Osric did not flinch as she worked her way to his forearm, up his back, and down his legs.
He did not complain. He merely perspired.
Fairhrim observed him with mild approval before removing a third contraption from the wardrobe. Osric hoped that she hadn’t noticed the bead of sweat trickling down between his shoulder blades.
“Another machine?” asked Osric.
“Yes. I’m going to give you an overview of my speculative hypothesis, so that you understand what foolishness you’re asking us to embark on.”
“That’s a Lovelace engine,” said Osric, recognising the newfangled
thingy.
“Well done.”
“I do pride myself on not being a complete idiot.”
“Do you?”
Fairhrim sounded genuinely surprised. Osric fantasised about throttling her for the second time in so many minutes.
Fairhrim pressed her tācn to the engine. It beeped into life. Osric stewed in his annoyance.
The figure on the wall with the rotted seith lines disappeared. It was replaced by a diagram of an oblong, grimy-looking stone adorned with vertical inscriptions.
“You’ve heard of the Monafyll Stone, of course,” said Fairhrim.
“No,” said Osric.
Fairhrim blinked at him. On her otherwise imperturbable countenance, it was an expression of astonishment. “I suppose I oughtn’t be shocked. It was only the greatest archaeological discovery of the century, but it’s got nothing to do with murders or money and therefore wouldn’t be of interest to you.”
“Thank you,” said Osric. “You’re growing to understand me.”
The prospect of such a rapprochement did not seem to enthuse Fairhrim.
“A brief history lesson, then. The Monafyll Stone is believed to be at least five centuries old. At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a lunar calendar, naming each of the year’s full moons. The appellations may be familiar to you; some of the nomenclature is still in use.”
Beside the drawing of the Stone, a list appeared:
Hrímfrost (Hoarfrost) Moon
Hyngre (Hunger) Moon
Cúsc (Chaste) Moon
Hara (Hare) Moon
Blædnes (Blooming) Moon
Begbéam (Bramble) Moon
Hunig (Honey) Moon
Thunor (Thunder) Moon
Bédríp (Harvest) Moon
Meodu (Mead) Moon
Gnyrn (Mourning) Moon Endeláf (Last) Moon
“Scholars aren’t in agreement on the Monafyll Stone’s purpose, but they do agree that it’s more than just a lunar chart. You notice these marks?”
Fairhrim pointed at divots on the outside edge of the Stone.
“A worm?” hazarded Osric. “A chicken?”
“A serpent and a swan,” said Fairhrim. “And these—herbs, a pestle, a potion, and, here at the bottom, a healing hand. Typical healing iconography —but it’s unusual to find it superimposed on a lunar calendar. The number seven is marked in several places. Scholars have suggested that this depicts some kind of healing path, or pilgrimage, or ritual, to be followed at the full moon.”
“So it is about the Old Ways,” said Osric. “Have we got to dance about in henges?”
There was hauteur in the tilt of Fairhrim’s chin. “If it were that simple to achieve wonder cures, don’t you think everyone would be doing it?”
“What are those lines?” asked Osric, pointing at curling marks carved along the moons down the Stone’s centre.
“Possibly decorative elements. Possibly natural erosion. Possibly an unknown variant of a dead language. One philologist has proposed that it may be one of the fairy tongues.” Fairhrim looked as though the notion offended her. “Of course, that idea isn’t well received by academics.
Ultimately, whatever this Stone represented—if it was, indeed, a heretofore
undiscovered mode of healing—has been lost to time. We have no directions other than the list of moons and these healing motifs. Ten years ago, an enterprising young Haelan decided to explore the matter further—
unfortunately.”
“Fortunately,” corrected Osric.
Fairhrim did not agree, as evinced by her pinched nostrils. She tapped at the Lovelace engine. The Monafyll Stone disappeared. What followed was a rapid-fire sequence of images: pages from books, lines of poetry, snippets of fairy stories, scrawls on birch bark, transcripts of long-ago conversations between long-dead people. Fairhrim flipped through these items with curt commentary; they were all tales of miraculous healings at the full moon.
“All unsubstantiated,” Fairhrim hastened to add. “A fine collection of apocrypha, really. But, nevertheless, a considerable number of accounts. Full- moon healings are a recurring motif throughout our history, from our children’s stories to our theologies. The Monafyll Stone’s discovery was regarded as nothing more than a contribution to this motif by most scholars.
Rightfully so. The full moon’s alleged potencies have been the subject of enquiry over centuries now, and the results have always been failure. But I— overexcited, naive girl that I was—thought I could do better.”
Fairhrim, standing perfectly upright, with her hair compressed into the most severe of buns, and her starchy dress buttoned up to her throat, did not look like she had ever been an overexcited girl in her life.
“The Stone’s discovery and its explicit connection between the moons and healing spurred me on to investigate whether or not there was a grain of truth in the miracle tales,” she continued. “I wanted to analyse the apocrypha and seek out commonalities. Patterns. Recurrences too strange to be coincidence.”
“And? Did you find those things?” asked Osric.
A shallow sigh escaped Fairhrim. “I found problems. Acquiring all of these sources, and translating them where necessary, cost a fortune, of course.”
“I’m involved now. Cost is no longer a factor,” said Osric—generously, he thought.
Fairhrim did not agree. Judging by the clench of her jaw, she thought it, on the contrary, unseemly. “Do you simply buy or kill your way out of every difficulty life presents you?”
“I use the resources at my disposal,” said Osric. “You should, too.”
“Resources as blood drenched as yours cross certain ethical bounds.”
“Your ethical bounds keep you so confined, it’s a wonder you can move.”
“I don’t know how you move, given the weight of your sins.”
They glared at each other. Fairhrim was all edges: dark eyes piercing, lips pressed thin.
She said, “Shall we return to the topic at hand?”
Osric said, “Let’s.”
Fairhrim continued her explanation in a clipped voice. “I’m not one for qualitative analyses but I hadn’t any choice with this particular dataset, if I can be so bold as to call this hotchpotch that. I began to capture and code anything that seemed even marginally relevant—names, places, times, seasons, ailments, demographics—and created this monster.”
Now projected onto the wall was an enormous diagram segmented by tables within tables, and arrows and labels, and large red question marks scattered about. The healers purported to have brought about the full-moon cures were a varied lot: wisewomen, Druids, witches, alchemists, physickers, fairy folk, the gods themselves. The places were equally varied: barrows, wells, crossroads, hill forts, death roads, mountaintops, ponds, islands, doorways, spirit-ways. The diagram also captured moments—sunrise and sunset, high noon, midnight—season, weather, and, finally, which of the twelve full moons was in the sky, if the source indicated it at all. The diagram was populated to bursting with data on probabilities, scales assessing the validity of the sources, odds ratios, recurrences, confidence intervals, and replicability.
If this was only the beginning, it was massively impressive, though Osric would rather eat his puce gown than say so to Fairhrim.
She herself, however, did not seem to think so. She swept a disdainful hand towards the data. “The only meaningful thing I was able to draw from the mess was the importance of place, and the importance of time, for these
alleged healings. And the most irritating part is that I needn’t have gone to all this trouble, because the importance of those things is reiterated time and time again in any children’s book, or folktale, or fairy story.”
Fairhrim pulled an actual children’s book out of her satchel and thrust it in Osric’s direction as though it were a weapon. She snapped it open and leafed through it, her finger pressing into the soft, fanciful illustrations as she went. “Thin places. Between places. Places where the stitches between our world and the Otherworld fray. Crossroads. Places at the edges of things.”
She came to a painting of a sunrise. “And times at the edges, too. Dusk or dawn. Or moments between things—between the calm and the storm, between tidal shifts, between winter and spring. And, of course, the common factor is the full moon, which is when all of the most spectacular of these alleged healings occur—but, for all we know, it’s merely a storytelling flourish.”
“The Stone, though,” said Osric. “That’s real.”
“The Monafyll Stone is far more likely to be capturing belief than a real, observable phenomenon,” said Fairhrim. “I need you to understand the high likelihood of failure if we pursue this so-called course of treatment.”
“Call it an experiment,” offered Osric.
His suggestion was not well received. “This poorly conceived enquiry is not an experiment. It’s an embarrassment. A credibility killer. A career ender —working illicitly with a Fyren notwithstanding. It’s a disgrace to this.”
Fairhrim held up her tācn. She stared at the swan on her palm as though she were betraying it. “If we had the luxury of a thousand full moons, and a thousand subjects, and a thousand Haelan to heal them, and we could tweak the variables at our leisure, then, perhaps, we could call it an experiment. We can’t call it anything but an—an exploratory foray. The variables at play are truly staggering. Reproducibility is low to nil.”
Fairhrim’s tense shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch, which was, Osric supposed, her best demonstration of despondency. “I told you that this was nothing but a thought experiment. I was curious. I analysed the available data. But, as they say, rubbish in, rubbish out. Looking back now, I’m
shocked that I even entertained it for so long. It was doomed to begin with.
Some things can’t be healed.”
“But you’re meant to be a seith-system Phenomenon,” said Osric. “A genius.”
Fairhrim gave him a cool look that informed him that he had offended her. “I am. I can deal with seith lesions, blockages, burst microchannels, wholesale severances. I can heal all seven classes of peripheral seith-fibre injuries. No one can reverse seith rot. But I told you I’d try, so I’ll try. We’ll follow the Old Ways. We’ll go to the places where the boundaries are thin.
We’ll find in-between times. And I will try to heal you. And if there’s a grain of truth in those old tales, perhaps we’ll find it.”
Osric never learned. There it was again: the flutter of hope, bouncing up
past his heart into his throat.
“Where do we begin?”
Fairhrim switched off the Lovelace engine. “I’ve got a short list of locations—a very short list. Few accounts provide enough geographic detail to allow us to find specific places and retrace the steps of the healers. We’ll begin there. I’d much rather proceed with a plan in mind for all twelve moons, but I think, given the advanced state of your condition, we’ve got no choice but to be rather more ad hoc about it.”
Fairhrim looked pained, as though she had never before been ad hoc about anything and it hurt her to be so now.
She consulted a chart. “The next full moon is six days hence. Let’s meet then. Waystone at the Shaggy Chimera, five thirty. Unless you’ve got a murder in the diary?”
This final question was posed with a blandly naive look, which only added to its piquancy.
“I can reschedule the murder,” said Osric.
Fairhrim appeared to have views on this. However, her attention was drawn to her tācn. She held her palm up, and the arrival of a deofol interrupted any opining. The deofol took the form of a strange-looking
salamander.
“What is that?” asked Osric.
“An axolotl,” said Fairhrim.
The shabby, wrinkled deofol perched upon Fairhrim’s shoulder. “Hello, dear,” it croaked. “You’re wanted at Swanstone, quick as you can. An entire orphanage was hit with the Pox.”
Fairhrim leapt towards her satchel and began to pack it. “On my way.”
The axolotl observed Osric with a beady black eye.
“Hello, Onion Boy,” said the axolotl. “Nice tutu.”
“It’s a kilt,” said Osric.
But the axolotl had disappeared, leaving Osric speaking to thin air.
“I would’ve called it a loincloth,” said Fairhrim, whose opinion Osric had certainly not asked for, either.
“That was Xanthe’s deofol, I assume?” asked Osric. “Looks as moth- eaten as she is.”
“Moth-eaten?” repeated Fairhrim. “How dare you? Xanthe is over two
hundred years old—”
“How? Did she forget to die?”
“—and you aren’t in any shape to insult anyone’s physique, I can assure
you.”
“Excuse me?”
Fairhrim made for the door. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got real patients to take care of.”
Osric made a shooing motion. “Good. Go look after your invalids.”
Fairhrim pivoted. “Invalids? You’re the most invalid of them all. I’ve never dealt with such a congenitally weak intellect.”
“Watch your insolence. I’ve cut out tongues for lesser insults.”
“You’ve just insulted me, my patients, and Xanthe, in so many seconds, and I’m the insolent one? If anyone should have a glossectomy, it’s you, and I would gladly volunteer to perform it.”
“A what?”
But Fairhrim was gone. The door snapped closed behind her.
Osric scowled at it, then threw a knife into it for good measure.
What a pity this Haelan was of use to him. She’d be far more tolerable dead.
