Chapter 6 Kintsugi
Kintsugi
Aurienne
“If it wasn’t so impossible, I’d be at a real risk of falling in love with you.” Mordaunt’s touch, his unexpected tenderness, and his words, huskily spoken, left Aurienne as stunned as though he had kissed her.
Dawn invented him all over again; it traced the latent nobility in his countenance and inlaid his scars with white gold. His eyes were full of light.
She oughtn’t to find him beautiful. It was like finding death beautiful. The ends of things.
Wet leather followed the curve of Aurienne’s cheek and lingered at her jaw.
Mordaunt withdrew his hand. The usual drollery tugged at his lips, but a strange expression lingered on his face, and Aurienne harboured a fugitive idea that he might not be entirely joking.
She was distracted by the painful spasm of a teeth-rattling shiver. She clenched her jaw to suppress it.
“We need to get out of here,” said Mordaunt. “Let’s get to a waystone.”
“We haven’t a thimbleful of seith between us,” said Aurienne.
“Then we’ll find somewhere to warm up and rest.”
Mordaunt rose from the mud with a wet schlorpp and helped Aurienne to her feet.
“You don’t think any of the Dreor would’ve followed us?” she asked with a backwards look towards the river.
“I don’t see how they would’ve got through that. The only reason we did was the shadow-walk; we’d have been crushed to bits otherwise. Shout if you see one and I’ll go stand on its head.”
They stumbled and shivered their way along the towpath that ran parallel to the river.
They came to a real bijou of an inn, partly ensconced in the riverbank.
A crooked sign informed them of the inn’s name: The Rowany Nosebleed.
Rotted wood made up its sides, and its roof was an ancient boat hull.
Aurienne wouldn’t have been surprised if it was run by literal river rats.
Near it squatted a small waystone, which neither Aurienne nor Mordaunt had enough seith to use.
“Food and we’ll have a bit of a kip to recover our seith,” said Mordaunt.
They entered the tiny inn. Mordaunt discovered various beams in the ceiling by means of his forehead.
The innkeeper was a small man, but the look he gave them was one of vast suspicion. Aurienne supposed that he was right to be suspicious. She and Mordaunt looked like they’d just crawled out of a particularly wet dung-cart.
Mordaunt flung a soggy coin purse onto the bar. “There’s a generous hundred thrymsas for food, fire, and bed.”
“If you’d be so good as to accept us,” added Aurienne.
The man counted the coins. With a markedly friendlier expression, he said, “Follow me.”
He advised them that his name was Oist, and that it rhymed with moist. They thanked him for this information. He led them to a small windowless room consisting of a bed and a hearth.
Mordaunt asked if there was a second bed available. Oist asked him not to be ridiculous.
For food, he served them a curry that could only be described as a punishment.
“Get some of this down your gullets,” he said, placing steaming bowls into their hands. “It’ll knock those shakes right out of you.”
Mordaunt coughed around his first spoonful. Aurienne, having observed Mordaunt’s tribulations, gave the curry a discreet lick, tasted fire, and declared that she’d just have bread. Mordaunt called her a coward.
Oist brought in a washbasin and dry clothes.
For Aurienne he provided a clean chemise and for Mordaunt, a nightshirt that smelled like cedar and mothballs.
They took turns washing while the other looked studiously into the corner.
To be naked with Mordaunt just there was a strange and intimate feeling; Aurienne hurried and tried not to think about it.
They hung their things in front of the fire.
Aurienne removed her hagstone from around her neck and hooked it to the top of a chair to let the leather cord dry out.
The hagstone—a flat, round stone with a hole through the middle—was a gift, meant to keep nightmares at bay.
Aurienne had received it from Amagris, a Hedgewitch whom Aurienne had loved wholeheartedly, and who had broken her whole heart.
Amagris was the reason Aurienne swore off love.
She kept the hagstone now as a sort of talisman, a reminder to not sink into such vulnerability again.
Aurienne turned her attention to the bed. It was a grim affair, flimsy iron enamelled in white. There was something meditative in its inward collapse: a sense of pending ruination, a surrender to inevitability, a beddish sort of memento mori.
“You think that’s going to hold the two of us?” asked Mordaunt.
Aurienne pressed a hand into the bed. There was a squeak, but it was indignant, rather than pained. “No sudden movements. The sooner we sleep, the sooner we replenish our seith, and the sooner I can get back to Swanstone and find out what happened at the Faerwundor.”
“Wardens hate Dreor as much as Haelan hate Fyren. It’s going to be carnage.”
“Good. That’s all they deserve.”
“What about Harm to none?” asked Mordaunt, citing the Haelan maxim.
Aurienne shrugged. “It’s the Wardens doing the Harming.”
Mordaunt lay on the utmost edge of the bed. Aurienne arranged a blanket over herself, as though having a Fyren in bed with her was the most anodyne of events.
He lay stiffly beside her. At length he said, “I can’t believe you’re reversing the rot.”
Saying it made it real. Aurienne had made progress, real, tangible progress, on an impossible thing. She was healing the incurable. She was reversing seith deterioration. She smiled, intoxicated not only by the lingering hallucinogen in her system but by the heady wine of joy.
She gloried in it. The whole world sang. She lay on her side next to Mordaunt on the itchy, straw-filled mattress, and floated in the realisation of a dream.
Mordaunt tucked his hands behind his head and regarded her with eyes mismatched by his Cost. Left, grey; right, white. He managed to look thrillingly handsome, even in the old-fashioned nightshirt, even with his hair clumped together by river water.
“You’re happy,” he said.
“You should be happy, too.”
“I am. Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“My arrogance almost got us killed tonight. I was overconfident. Not paying attention. Showing off.”
“Showing off?”
“You bring out the worst in me,” said Mordaunt. “I should’ve known something was wrong the minute we found those dead Druid sentinels. I should’ve been on high alert.”
“We’d taken a noseful of that flower at that point. Our cognitive functions were already impaired.”
“We almost died.” Mordaunt ran a hand over his face. “You saved our lives. I pride myself on not having debts, but with you around—”
“This evens things out between us.”
“How many times and in how many ways must you save my life before you consider things even?”
“I could rattle off the long list of things you’ve done for me and my Order, but we’re meant to be sleeping,” said Aurienne.
“You overused your seith terribly today. I know—you didn’t have a choice.
But be careful in the future. The risk of a seith embolus recurring is high, even with the progress we’re making. Your system is fragile.”
Mordaunt wasn’t listening. “Perhaps I was wrong,” he mused. “Perhaps you bring out the best in me. Perhaps I bring out the best in you.”
“What?”
“Look at what you’re doing with my seith rot. You took something that’s been in plain sight for hundreds of years—stories that no one took seriously—and bent your considerable brain to them. But you needed me to coerce you into the pursuit.”
There was an irritating amount of truth in this. Aurienne, therefore, did not respond.
“I’ve annoyed you because I’m right,” said Mordaunt. “And yes, I’m going to be smug about it. Cast your bayonet gaze elsewhere.”
Aurienne did so. It landed on the opening of his shirt, where a few hairs emerged from the V at his chest. The material clung to his pectorals, suggesting an outline of well-developed muscles that might be traced with a fingertip.
Aurienne had no need of such suggestions. She shifted her attention to the wall.
“You’re doing it,” continued Mordaunt. “I told you that you were doing it, at the clinic. I ought to kiss your hand again. But I won’t do it without your leave, this time.”
And with that, Mordaunt casually, gracefully, reached his hand towards Aurienne’s.
What was this? Some mockery? Some power play? Aurienne’s stare was met by the taunt of Mordaunt’s raised eyebrow: he didn’t think she’d grant him leave. Her gaze went to his outstretched palm. Such a well-shaped hand—what a pity about the stain of the tācn marring it. Marring the entire man.
Aurienne didn’t move. Mordaunt withdrew his hand, amused, as though he’d just been proven right.
The impudence provoked Aurienne into bravado.
Mordaunt’s amusement turned to surprise as Aurienne slipped her hand into his.
His palm was rough, like hers. Both were marked by the calluses of their professions.
She gave him her left hand. He could read into it, if he would, that she did not wish to befoul her tācn by pressing it to his.
Aurienne expected a showy, gallant kiss upon the back of her hand—and that was what she got, to begin.
When she didn’t immediately pull away, however, Mordaunt pressed his lips softly to her knuckles, among the blisters and cracks caused by her Cost. He moved down the backs of her fingers and up her wrist. Her heart stirred in warm surprise.
Again and again his lips found her skin, hardly breaking contact before moving to the next spot.
Kisses upon kisses heaped on each other, and the world was singing again.
Were these even kisses? Aurienne didn’t know what to call them. Kisses? Prayers?
Mordaunt was rapt. His eyes were half-closed. He drenched her in gentleness. He turned her hand over and pressed his mouth to the centre of her palm, where her tācn would be if she walked the Dusken Path.
She had expected a kiss. She hadn’t expected to be venerated.