Chapter 11 Things That Could Never Be #3
“She was at Swanstone, giving a seminar with a few others of her Order. Antimitotic agents in yew trees: fascinating stuff. We talked afterwards. She was intrigued by me; I was immediately besotted with her. Long after the seminar was over, we found reasons to meet. She was fresh, and brilliant, and beautiful, and so different to anyone I’d ever been with, and I was young and stupid.
She taught me more about plant science than all my father’s botanical journals combined.
We slept together under the stars. I thought it was serious.
I thought it was going somewhere. Somewhere like—forever.
“I loved her wholeheartedly. In the most literal sense of the word. With all of me. She was so knowledgeable. Clever. And beautiful in the way only witches can be.” Aurienne followed the curve of the glass of wine with a fingertip.
“She loved me, but not as I loved her. Hedgewitches are solitary. They aren’t lovers in the sense we know.
They certainly aren’t wives. I learned that they don’t do forevers.
After a few months, I became just a footnote to her.
She told me that we couldn’t be—not in the way I wanted us to be.
That Hedgewitches don’t form long-lasting attachments.
That she was moving on. Not with someone else—someone better than me—that would’ve hurt me less, I think; there would’ve been logic in it.
But she was simply moving on. She expected me to do so, too.
“It’s hard to move on when you’re torn from bliss to pain. I was so desperately unhappy. I grieved her for months. Eventually, grief became numbness. I discipline my affections now. I amuse myself. I don’t give myself.”
Aurienne found herself drunk enough to share the final, embarrassing blow: “She told me that I wasn’t wild enough for her.”
“Ouch,” said Mordaunt.
Torn between wanting to cry and wanting to laugh hysterically, Aurienne said, “Not wild enough. Not wild enough. I went to the toilet in a hole in the ground. H-how is that not wild enough?”
Mordaunt stared at her. Then—she could not blame him—he burst into laughter.
Aurienne both laughed and sobbed into her hands. “I went days without bathing. Is that not wild? I endured insects. I ate dirty mushrooms. I was rained upon, without an umbrella.”
“You were perfectly wild,” said Mordaunt. “No umbrella? Feral.”
“Thank you.” Aurienne sniffed. “I hope she’s happy, wherever she is. I want her to be happy. I certainly haven’t been.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Years. Six? Seven?”
“So that’s why you’ve sworn off love,” said Mordaunt. “Scar tissue.”
Aurienne shook her head. “Not quite.”
“I would have thought that scars were a sort of healing,” said Mordaunt.
“They aren’t. They’re a reminder. Even when years have passed—even when you can’t remember how you got them. They still ache when it rains.”
Aurienne touched the hagstone at her neck, a gift from Amagris, and now a weight, a memento, a reminder to keep her heart bound away.
“If only it was just scar tissue. Love is the slow turn of a knife. It’s still in me.
I don’t know if I’ll ever stop missing her.
So—my advice about wanting what you can’t have?
Don’t. You mustn’t court sorrow. Don’t run, arms wide open, into an inevitable goodbye. ”
One of the two remaining candles extinguished itself. A filament of smoke paled and disappeared. It reminded Aurienne of the ribboning vapour at the falls.
The laughter faded from Mordaunt. Something in him had extinguished, too. The boyish happiness from earlier was gone. Where the moon touched him, it lay like a frost. He sat unmoving in the darkness, half man, half ghost.
They still hadn’t spoken of the kiss.
Aurienne, wishing to clear the air, attempted it. “About what happened earlier—”
Mordaunt had been waiting for this. He was quick to interrupt. “Another crime of passion.”
In the face of this dismissal, Aurienne, too, retreated into the safety of the facetious. “Right. I am a safe flirt, after all.”
“You really are. Too afraid of the risk of pain to risk feeling anything else.”
“Is it wisdom or cowardice?” asked Aurienne.
“It’s—understandable.”
“That was some deep flirting. With tongue.”
“I told you—I am nothing if not immoderate. I hope you didn’t take it to mean anything—”
“No,” lied Aurienne hastily. “You were going to say something at the lake, and then you didn’t. What was it?”
“I don’t recall.” Mordaunt shrugged. “It can’t have been important.”
“No. I suppose it wasn’t.”
There was a lie-filled silence. Aurienne straightened a spoon upon the white tablecloth. Mordaunt cleared his throat. Aurienne spun a curl of hair around a fingertip. The remaining candle, suffocated by the enormity of the lies, extinguished itself.
Mordaunt’s gaze was drenched in mourning.
He straightened and refilled their glasses. He held his up. Aurienne confusedly raised hers, too, not sure what they could possibly be toasting.
“To things that could never be,” said Mordaunt.
Aurienne smiled a sad smile.
She touched her glass to his, and they drank to impossible things, and the wine tasted like twenty summers.