8
NOBLESSE OBLIGE
Aurienne
f the four hundred children brought into Swanstone over the course ofO the Platt’s Pox outbreak, the Haelan managed to pull three hundred out of danger. The remaining patients were in Ward 14, formerly the cafeteria, now converted into a ward with a hundred beds. In those beds lay the remaining patients, still in the throes of the brain fever, being kept alive by Haelan dedication and sheer obstinacy.
Emotional regulation was one of Aurienne’s fortes, but as the outbreak raged, her preferred strategies—suppression, compartmentalisation—lost their efficacy. During today’s shift in Ward 14, a little girl no older than four, scab crusted and delirious, clutched at Aurienne’s fingers and brought her to tears. Aurienne glanced about to check that no one was watching, knelt beside the girl’s bed, and pressed a hug into her wasted body.
She must carry on. Others needed her. She took a steadying breath— hlutoform and the sickly scent of sickness invaded her mouth—brushed away her tears, gave the girl’s hand a final press, and carried on to the next bed.
Like a coward, she did not take note of the girl’s patient ID; she didn’t want to notice her absence if she was gone by the time her next shift rolled around.
Aurienne saw signs of fraying in others, too. Lorelei, the head of Paediatrics, was usually obnoxiously cheerful. Today she was hollow eyed
and functioning by rote, and reporting to Xanthe with uncustomary dispassion. Xanthe herself, with whom Aurienne shared the shift, simmered with a low fury. She listened to Lorelei’s report as she worked a line of beds.
The wrinkled skin at her jowls quivered with the clench of her jaw.
Xanthe was usually explosive. This seething rage troubled Aurienne more than an irritated outburst would have.
Their shift came to its end at seven o’clock in the evening.
“Come,” said Xanthe to Aurienne after they had completed their sanitation protocols. “Let’s get dinner and eat in my office.”
Aurienne and Xanthe made their way to the temporary cafeteria, now housed in a corridor. Aurienne dearly missed the fare at home—tangy salads, her mother’s chicken-stuffed briouates, rfissa fragrant with fenugreek—but seith was best regenerated with heavy, calorie-dense foods, and that was what Swanstone’s kitchens did best. Upon her tray she heaped butter-soaked mushroom pasties, fatty stew, cheeses, and cream tarts.
Xanthe’s office was a pleasant low-ceilinged room on the ground floor of Swanstone’s south end. In the daytime it was flooded with sun; in the nighttime it was lit by a wide hearth; at all times there was reliably a kettle singing within. Aurienne cleared a seat for herself on an ottoman partially interred beneath journals on tissue engineering, limb regeneration, and the treatment of end organ failure. Xanthe almost disappeared into the folds of an armchair, her tray upon her bony knees.
“There’s fuckery at work,” declared Xanthe.
She traded Aurienne a stack of letters for the journal on organ failure.
“What are these?” asked Aurienne.
“I asked colleagues around the Tīendoms to confirm whether any of them had received adequate funding for inoculation development. Four months into this outbreak—thousands of infected children across the Tīendoms—and no one has received anything of substance. Not us, not the universities, not any of the research groups. This in spite of multiple increasingly strident pleas.”
“I was prepared to blame incompetence, but I believe we’ve now moved on to cruelty,” said Aurienne. “I suppose it’s because the Pox is only
affecting the most impoverished children—the ones not ‘worth’ putting money into?”
Xanthe aggressively bit a pickle. “You’d think that, with ten bloody kings and queens jostling for supremacy round here, there would be at least one for whom noblesse would oblige?”
“They aren’t French enough,” said Aurienne.
“That’s the problem. We ought to have let the French have their bloody Norman Conquest and be done with it. But no. We beat them back. And now, eight centuries later, here we are, with ten petty kingdoms, and ten clowns in charge, instead of a Noblesse-Obliging Frenchy.” Xanthe ate a piece of cheese and added, “We’d have better Brie, too.”
Aurienne flicked through the letters from Xanthe’s contacts. Each confirmed receipt of the most nominal sums in support of inoculation development.
“The northernmost Tīendoms are the ones with the lowest rates of the Pox—I suppose that explains their lack of interest,” said Aurienne, running through the numbers. “The Danelaw and Dyfed contributed something—not much, but something. Kent and Mercia are egregious. They’ve got some of the highest incidence rates of the Pox and have given the least to anyone.”
“Dumnonia, too,” said Xanthe. “Clowns. All clowns.”
“Clowns with a distinct lack of empathy.”
“They wouldn’t know empathy if it bit them on the cock.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Aurienne.
“Write a strongly worded letter to each clown,” said Xanthe. “I’ve got them ready.”
Xanthe wriggled out of her armchair and went to her desk. Beside her silver writing ball was yet another stack of letters. Mysteriously, she also pulled out a sealed test tube in which a clear liquid sloshed.
“Erm…what is that?” asked Aurienne.
“A special addition I’m going to include in the letters,” said Xanthe. “A
sort of postscript.”
“A postscript? Labelled biohazard?”
“Yes.”
“Haelan Xanthe, you can’t.”
“Can’t I? Did you not see those children whose so-called lives we just spent three hours prolonging? And the monarchs throwing an insulting handful of thrymsas their way? And in the meantime, life in their castles goes on—masquerades, dances, banquets?”
“It’s awful—it’s wretched—but you can’t do this. You’d better sit on it.”
“I can’t sit on it,” said Xanthe, wiggling the tube. “I’ll get verrucas in my
arsehole.”
“What?”
“Ignis papillomavirus,” said Xanthe, tapping the tube. “Don’t look at me like that. A few warts won’t kill anyone.”
“That’s—that’s an excruciatingly painful condition,” said Aurienne.
“So is the Pox.”
“Have you spoken to the other Heads about this?”
“Prendergast is a diplomat,” said Xanthe, with a dismissive swing of the fire-wart tube. “Sometimes I’m not certain what the difference is between diplomat and doormat. Three or four letters, but much the same thing.
Abercorn is nothing but a fart.”
“He is not,” said Aurienne. (Abercorn was a highly respected endocrinologist.) “In this case, he’s been just as effective as one.”
Aurienne didn’t often dare contradict Xanthe, but her mentor’s anger was leaking dangerously into vengefulness. She took the stack of letters from Xanthe and found that they were directed to kings and queens and variously addressed as Dear Feckless Idiot or Cretin or Absolute Invertebrate.
“Élodie is working on the inoculation,” said Aurienne. “There’s an end in sight. If you were to send these and infect everyone with warts—I know, I know; they aren’t lethal—there would be impacts on our Order.”
“We don’t owe allegiance to any of the clowns.”
“Right, but we are in the territory of the king of the Danelaw, who you’ve addressed as”—Aurienne checked the letter—“an anaemic, inbred, cowardly pig. He could make life difficult for us. He could expel us. You know how long it took us to develop our facilities at Swanstone.”
“I could soften it,” said Xanthe. “Could simply call him a pig.”
But she was, herself, softening. She took the letters from Aurienne’s hands. “It did make me feel better to write them.”
“I know.”
Xanthe’s mouth disappeared upon itself as she sucked at her gums. With a brisk gesture, she threw the letters into the fire. “I am two hundred years old, Aurienne. I think my patience is simply wearing thin.”
Aurienne watched Xanthe’s anger curl and burn in the hearth. She remembered the squeeze of the little girl’s hand, and thought of the monarchs in their castles, with their feasts and their dances and their precious children well isolated from the Pox, and part of her wished Xanthe had sent the letters, warts and all.
THERE WAS ONE POSITIVE IN the days to come, which was that, among all the stressors in Aurienne’s life, the one called Osric Mordaunt would be absent for an entire month. May shimmered beautifully before her: four weeks until the Blædnes moon, four weeks of normalcy, four weeks without interactions with the murderous delinquent.
But, obviously, Fate had other plans. Fate, mused Aurienne, liked to take the piss.
This contribution to modern philosophy went unvoiced because Aurienne was trapped behind her desk by Quincey, going through the correspondence pile.
Mordaunt’s deofol tingled at her tācn. Fate had given her five days of reprieve before he wedged himself back into her life. Frīa save her.
Mordaunt’s money did a lot of good at Swanstone; he, however, was of little added value to Aurienne, except in the sense that he caused her to secrete additional cortisol.
As his deofol tingled at her palm for permission to materialise, Aurienne found herself unable to decide what was more harrowing: the prospect of
dealing with the Fyren, or Quincey and the Administrative Faff.
This was the price—the curse—of being the Best. Everyone wanted a bit of you.
Aurienne ignored the deofol’s request. She didn’t owe the Fyren immediate availability. And if it annoyed him to wait, all the better.
Poor Quincey, familiar with Aurienne’s distaste for Dreaded Admin, was doing a rapid-fire questioning session. Aurienne was asked to join a miscellany of Committees, Working Groups, and Task Forces, develop curricula for an assortment of universities, assess potential Haelan apprentices, and devote more time to community clinics.
The tingle in Aurienne’s tācn disappeared. Mordaunt’s deofol had retreated, probably back to its master to report its failure.
“Two referrals for consideration,” said Quincey, placing letters in front of Aurienne. “The first, a compression injury resulting in damaged seith channels. The other I think you’ll like—seith haemorrhages. The patient is an Ingenaut; she’s starting fires every time she stands next to an engine.”
“Ask Whitman if he’d take on the compression injury,” said Aurienne.
“I’ll take the haemorrhage case—she sounds like a good candidate for the micro-occlusion trial. Have her transferred to my ward here, though. I’m not wasting time with waystones.”
Quincey, pleased that he had guessed correctly, made a note, and proceeded to the next item. “We’ve also received this.” He handed Aurienne a memo. “Every Haelan has been asked to continue to give fifteen hours a week to the Pox ward, given the current crisis. The Heads thank you for your understanding in these challenging times.”
Aurienne took the memo, grateful to have been reminded about the challenging times. She might’ve forgotten about them otherwise.
“Finally, these beasts have been clamouring for your attention.” Quincey passed Aurienne a squirming wodge of charts pinned together with vascular clips. “That’s me done. You’ll tell me if I can do anything to be of help?”
“I will,” said Aurienne. “Thank you, Quincey. You’re the only reason I haven’t quit everything and gone into exile.”
Quincey blushed. He had a desperate sort of crush on Aurienne, which he occasionally exhibited by waffling about inane things, which he now, to her chagrin, began to do. He propped himself against her desk in what was probably intended as a debonair lean, and discussed his Friday-night plans, which involved a rhubarb festival and related turf wars.
Aurienne’s tācn prickled again; Mordaunt’s deofol was back for another attempt. Mordaunt was the lowest form of life, but even the most inutile protozoa was occasionally useful, and so, too, was the Fyren.
“I’ve got a deofol coming in,” said Aurienne. She waved Quincey out.
“Good luck with the—the rhubarb mafia. Cartel. Would you shut the door behind you?”
Quincey made his bows and exited. He tried to close the door behind him.
Aurienne heard his sputtered objections—“So sorry, you can’t go in, she’s got a deofol on the way, excuse me, sorry, didn’t you hear me?”—then some general sounds of belligerence, and then the Director of Trauma and Acute Care barged in, accompanied by the Haelan Order’s top virologist.
Cath’s shaved head contrasted sharply with Élodie’s exuberance of flaxen curls. It was one of their many contrapositions; Cath loved graveyards and amputations and boxing, while Élodie liked the piano, obscure diseases, and pressing flowers in books. They were perfect for each other.
“Aurienne won’t mind; it’s just us,” said Cath to Quincey with kind reassurance, as though she hadn’t just manhandled him into submission. To Aurienne she said, “We’ve brought snacks.” Élodie, looking drawn and pale, followed Cath in, and laid herself on the
floor.
“What are you doing?” asked Aurienne. Élodie, in her soft French accent, answered, “Coping.”
This seemed an excellent mechanism to Aurienne, who abandoned her chair to lay herself beside Élodie, her dress splayed in a neat semicircle.
There was, indeed, much to cope with.
Cath joined them on the floor, sitting cross-legged among her snacks (pretzels, cheese cubes, grapes, a large tumbler of tea). She hand-fed
Aurienne and Élodie where they lay and called them the most beautiful corpses; they had shrouds and everything.
Haelan could choose how they wore their whites. Aurienne, favouring structure and femininity, tended towards the Order’s traditional dresses.
Cath’s whites today took the form of high-waisted trousers and a long, fitted frock coat, gorgeously cut, which had the effect of making everyone around her look as though they were wearing sacks. Aurienne made a note to visit the Order’s robe makers and investigate this option.
All their silver epaulettes, however, were identical; Aurienne, Cath, and Élodie had each earned their tācn at the same time, and each therefore bore ten lines, denoting their ten years as Haelan.
“Have that deofol in,” said Élodie, with a gentle touch to Aurienne’s arm.
“We interrupted.”
It repulsed Aurienne to lie to her nearest and dearest, but given that the deofol was a bloody Fyren’s, she hadn’t a choice. “It’s all right. It’s only my mum.” She opted for a sudden, but tactical, change of subject: “Did you hear that we’ve been asked to keep up the fifteen hours at Paeds?”
A sigh burst from between Cath’s teeth. “I hadn’t. Frīa’s pointy nips. Can we ask for exceptions? I haven’t dared cut my clinic hours, but everything else is in the toilet.”
“I got one,” said Élodie to the ceiling. “An exception, I mean.”
“Well, obviously you got one,” said Cath.
“Has your team made progress on the inoculation?” asked Aurienne. Élodie managed a weak smile. “Given the mad time constraints and the feeling that we are somehow responsible for every additional sick child, I’m pleased. We’ll be able to roll out an immunisation programme soon. Thank the gods. None of our colleagues at the universities have achieved much at
all.”
“None?” asked Cath.
“Their labs have been hamstrung, just like we were,” said Élodie. “No money, save internal funding. No one has managed to squeeze out anything substantial from any of the research councils or the Tīendoms.”
“I heard that from Xanthe,” said Aurienne. “It’s an embarrassment.”
“They’ve all pivoted to new strategic priorities, apparently,” said Élodie, with a vague gesture upwards. “I don’t know the politics.”
“I wouldn’t have thought prolonging mass casualties among children would’ve been the most politically astute move,” mused Aurienne.
“They’re the children no one cares about,” said Cath.
“One day this will be a case study,” said Élodie. She drew bullet points in the air as she planned it. “Vaccine-preventable diseases. Research financing.
Socioeconomic variables.”
Cath’s title suggestion was A Study in Policymaking by Royal Arseholes and the Innocents Who Died as a Result.
“During the last Platt’s Pox outbreak, they had an excuse—inoculation hadn’t yet been developed,” said Élodie. “That was about a hundred years ago.”
“What brought the last outbreak to its end?” asked Aurienne.
“Extinction of the host population,” said Élodie.
“Gods.”
Cath looked grim. “That’s a lot of dead children.”
“Yes,” said Élodie. “The spread was confined to small settlements in Mercia. Lichfield and thereabouts. It was before waystones were in common use, so the virus stayed relatively localised. That’s not the case anymore.
Borders between Tīendoms are open, unless there’s a war.”
“And they won’t shut down the waystones to prevent the spread now, of course,” said Cath. “It would inconvenience too many—and the only ones who are suffering are beggar-children and foundlings.”
Cath passed her tea tumbler to Aurienne, who opened it.
Aurienne inhaled fragrant vapours of peppermint. “Lovely, this.”
“Have you any mugs?” asked Cath.
“No, but I’ve got these,” said Aurienne, reaching for a clattering box of sterile specimen containers. “Brand-new.”
“Grand,” said Cath.
Aurienne divided the tea into perfect sixty-millilitre portions, upon which the three Haelan sipped.
Aurienne’s tācn tingled again, but heavily, almost painfully. Mordaunt’s deofol was insisting again. Bristling with repressed annoyance, Aurienne excused herself to the lav.
Down the hall and behind a locked door, she pointed her tācn to the floor and let Mordaunt’s deofol through. (It was tempting to aim it at the toilet; she mastered the impulse; Harm to none included drowning deofols in the loo, probably.) Smoky black wisps infested the place and coalesced into a wolfish shape.
The white grin of Mordaunt’s deofol materialised among the shadows, followed by a pair of golden eyes.
“You’d better have an excellent reason to have pushed like that,” said Aurienne. “I’ve half a mind to sever my link with your master.”
The deofol attempted an ingratiating grin, but given that it was all sharp teeth, it had rather the opposite effect. “Greetings, Haelan. How are you?
You’re looking very well today, if I may say—”
Aurienne, operating on three hours of sleep, two pretzels, and one specimen container of tea, did not harbour delusions in this regard. “You may not. What do you want?”
“So sorry for pressing you,” said the deofol, lowering itself to its belly and whisking its smoky tail across the floor in obsequious sweeps. “It’s urgent. My master is having—he’s having a seith constipation.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He can hardly push it out. It won’t come to his tācn. He nearly hadn’t
enough to send me.”
“A blockage?” asked Aurienne.
“I don’t know. Can you come?” The deofol resumed its cajoling tail wags. “No one will see you. His steward and groundsman are away.”
“You’re far more polite when you need something,” said Aurienne.
“I know,” said the deofol, with more tooth baring. “I’m manipulative like
that.”
“Where is he?” asked Aurienne.
“The family seat. Rosefell Hall. There’s a private waystone. Will you come? Please?”
The deofol was now attempting puppy-dog eyes, but, given that it was a creature of soul-corroding darkness, the endeavour was more perturbing than
anything else.
“Fine,” said Aurienne.
“Thank you,” breathed the deofol. “I’ll tell him you’re on the way.”
“I’ll be there in a bit,” said Aurienne. “I’ve got to wrap up here. Leave.
You mustn’t be seen.”
“Of course,” said the deofol, bowing its head low as it faded away.
“Thank you, Haelan. He’ll be waiting for you.”
Aurienne returned to her office to find both Trauma and Virology enjoying a nap on the floor. She let out an envious yawn as she packed her satchel. Thanks to Mordaunt and his newest crisis, her nap would have to wait.
She glided about on tiptoe, gathering her things as Cath and Élodie slept.
Her efforts were for naught, however; just as she was snapping her satchel shut, an eruption of shouts echoed from the courtyard below her office.
Aurienne strode to the window, intending to whip it open and berate the culprits—raucous apprentices with the Friday happies off to the pub, probably—but, as she pushed open the window, she saw that the commotion wasn’t caused by raucous apprentices. It was the Wardens.
“What on earth?” gasped Aurienne.
She was joined by a bleary-eyed Élodie and a grouchy Cath. They caught the tail end of a fight: the blue glow of the Wardens’ tācn (the horned head of an auroch), the glimmer of their trapping wards, and the capture of three or four black-clad figures. The Wardens speared the figures into the ground— who twitched and went still.
On the far side of the courtyard, curious apprentices popped heads round a door. A Warden snapped an order at them; they pivoted and ran back in.
Swanstone guards jogged into the courtyard, bearing torches. By their light, Aurienne could see blood splattered across the flagstones, and the figures of three men and a woman, hooded and cloaked, impaled into the ground.
One of the Wardens lifted a dead man by the scruff of his neck and tore off his hood. His head lolled. Another Warden pulled her spear out of the corpse—or plucked, rather; she made it look effortless, even though she had driven it through the man’s spine. The third Warden searched his body, stripping it of clothes as she went, until the dead man was naked, save for the blood running down his middle from the gory hole at his diaphragm.
The Wardens proceeded in this manner with the three other corpses. The first man had fared the best, frankly; the others had fought the trapping wards, and so dropped a limb or two when lifted to be searched.
Aurienne recognised none of the bodies.
Cath made a low whistle. “Fresh organs for Transplant Surg.”
“And fodder for the anatomy lab,” said Aurienne.
Cath pointed to a severed foot. “Pop a piece of string on that and you’ve got a mad good-luck charm.”
“Regardez—the Heads are coming out,” said Élodie.
Xanthe’s small figure entered the circle of torchlight, along with bald Abercorn and skinny Prendergast.
“What have you discovered?” asked Abercorn, as Aurienne, Cath, and Élodie eavesdropped like naughty apprentices.
“We detected them hours ago, sniffing around the moat,” said Verity, the tallest of the Wardens. “Lured them in with spotty warding along the east wall. They were skittish, but eventually came through. Nothing of use on them for identification.”
“What are those?” asked Prendergast, indicating a pile near the corpses.
“Incendiary devices,” said Verity. “Call your resident Ingenaut. They must be inspected and disarmed.”
One of the other Wardens, Haven, held a gleaming dagger to the light.
“They were well equipped. This is quality kit. A lot of gold on them, too.”
“Any idea what they wanted?” asked Xanthe.
Verity’s steel sabaton nudged at a heap of ropes, gloves, and grappling hooks. “They were geared up for an incursion. Not sure to what end. We didn’t wish to allow them into Swanstone proper to find out.”
“Were they members of any Order?” asked Prendergast.
“No.” Haven unfurled the corpses’ limp hands. “No tācn.”
Xanthe’s dry, annoyed voice rang across the courtyard. “Perhaps next time we could try a live capture, so that we might interrogate them?”
Haven turned her helmeted head to Xanthe. “Our command is to kill intruders on sight. You may speak to the Head of our Order if you wish to change the agreement.”
Aurienne stiffened at Haven’s tone. Élodie produced a small gasp of outrage.
Xanthe was less ruffled than her audience. “Very well. If you’re done with the bodies, we’ll find a use for them. Thank you for your vigilance tonight.”
The Wardens had, at least, the wherewithal to salute her and the other Heads, before stamping off to return to their posts.
Aurienne, Élodie, and Cath settled onto the window ledge to observe the goings-on like the Fates. The bodies were carted away; the blood was mopped up; the clothes were carried off. Felicette, the bespectacled and slightly mad Ingenaut who lived at Swanstone, observed the incendiary devices, then gathered them up in her arms and trotted off like a child with new presents. The three Heads retreated into the fortress, looking grave.
“I wonder what they wanted,” said Élodie. “Can’t’ve been the medicinal garden again, not with those bombs. Unless they wanted to destroy it.”
Aurienne gasped at the hideous thought.
“We’ve a healthy vault,” said Cath. “Perhaps the bombs were a distraction.”
“D’you think they’ll let us out?” asked Aurienne. “I’m meant to be going to see—to see my parents tonight.”
Another lie because of the Fyren. Disgusting. Resentment fermented within Aurienne like some sort of yeast.
“Must you go, tonight of all nights?” asked Élodie.
“She’ll be fine,” said Cath. “A Warden will probably escort her to the waystone.”
Cath was right. When Aurienne approached Verity at the front gate a quarter of an hour later, she was questioned on the necessity of an outing.
Aurienne lied again, yeastily, and was escorted to the waystone at the Publish or Perish.
Verity was on edge. Her helmeted head swept left and right as they crossed the bridge from Swanstone to the village; her spear was loose in her gauntlet; her shoulders were tense even under her pauldrons. Her wards shimmered under her feet.
“Will there be an investigation, or something, to work out who those people were?” asked Aurienne.
Verity’s sentences were more terse than usual. “Not by us. We’re not here to play detective. You’ll have to ask your Heads.”
“I’m certain they’ll launch one,” said Aurienne. “Those weren’t run-of- the-mill thieves.”
“They weren’t. There was money behind them.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Don’t worry, Halean.” Verity clasped Aurienne’s shoulder with a heavy, steel-clad hand. “If more come, they’ll meet the same fate. They didn’t even have a tācn.”
“I suppose few things must really worry you when you’re stationed at
Swanstone.”
“Few.”
“What would?”
“The Agannor Order making a move.” Verity’s helmet took on a thoughtful tilt. “Imagine having to fight your own spear-sister because she’s possessed by one of those fiends. Or perhaps an onslaught of Dreor. Unlikely in this day and age.”
Aurienne found it interesting that the Fyren Order didn’t make Verity’s list. Mordaunt would doubtlessly be offended.
“But this is idle talk,” said Verity. “The Peace Accords forbid such foulness among the Orders.”
“I’ve never met either an Agannor or a Dreor,” said Aurienne.
“Good,” said Verity. “I hope you never do. We had a Dreor attack once at Tintagel. It was terrorising the village outside our walls. It took two of us to
bring it down. Like fighting a rabid dog, only the dog had plate armour and a
scythe, and was bigger even than me.”
“What happened?” asked Aurienne.
“We captured it. Dinadan—the Head of the Wardens—convened the other Orders to the Stánrocc to come to an agreement on what to do with the creature. Our position was that the Dreor had committed an act of aggression against the Warden Order and should be executed, in keeping with the Peace Accords. The Bright Paths all voted in favour; the Fyren and Agannor voted against; the Hedgewitches abstained. The Dreor Order didn’t send a representative. So the Bright Paths won. When we got back to Tintagel, we got a ward on each of the Dreor’s boots and split it in half. Then we burned it.
It was laughing the entire time.”
“Are they all mad?” asked Aurienne.
“No. They’ve got different—well, I suppose you could call them ranks.
Some take the tācn and carry on as you or I did after we received ours. Some take the tācn and lose their minds. Apparently, the weaker the will, the greater the risk. So I’ve heard, anyway. I don’t know much. One oughtn’t know much about the Dusken Paths.”
At the Publish or Perish, Aurienne tapped a coin on the window to get the attention of Grette, the publican, and left it on the sill.
Verity stood by as Aurienne pressed seith into the runes for the pub near her parents’ home in London.
“Thank you for the escort,” said Aurienne. “And the reassurance. I hope the rest of the night is less eventful. Wes hāl—be well.”
Verity gave Aurienne a sharp salute as she was drawn into the waystone graticule.
Then it was time for more Mordaunt-inspired fun; upon materialising at the waystone in London, Aurienne ran into one of her parents’ neighbours, and had to fabricate another story to make her getaway from him.
She took the waystone to a random pub, and from there was finally able to reach her destination: Rosefell Hall, the Mordaunt family seat.
