Chapter 14 Tintagel Castle
Tintagel Castle
Aurienne
Rather stormy, that last look Mordaunt had cast towards her. Aurienne half expected him to follow her through the waystone.
If he looked at her like that again, her legs were going to get divorced.
She went to her quarters to change out of her holidaying dress and then, with brisk strides (her first meeting was at half two; it was now quarter to three), went to her office.
Her memories of the night’s events had been, at first, genuinely fuzzy. They had come back to her through the morning as the hangover receded. By the time they visited the libraries, she remembered everything. Every twitch, every gasp, every position, every bodily fluid exchanged or ingested.
She blamed the wine for last night’s decision-making. It was why she had paused at the bust of Pliny the Elder. In vino veritas. There had been a bit too much veritas last night. Too much unguarded sincerity. Too much of the bared soul. And the blasphemy of the shuddering clasp of tācn on tācn—
Aurienne’s cheeks warmed at the memories. It meant nothing. It was scratching an itch.
And when she had indulged in the thrill of teasing Mordaunt just now, had that also meant nothing?
She had delighted in his clenched jaw, his restraint.
No wine to blame for her actions there. Only, perhaps, the euphoria of the books, clouding her judgement.
Rosefell Hall was all decaying magnificence, but Mordaunt had prioritised the libraries, and managed to not only maintain but improve them.
This newly discovered competence awoke something in Aurienne and mingled with the bibliophilia latent in every scholar. It made a potent combination.
Two libraries.
Two.
She reached her office and found Felicette, Swanstone’s resident Ingenaut, waiting for her.
“So sorry,” said Aurienne with a grimace. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
Felicette specialised in microfluidics. She and Aurienne were investigating how to mimic Aurienne’s micro-occlusions in the treatment of uncontrolled seith haemorrhages, so that others might treat the condition without Aurienne present.
“You’re one kilosecond late,” said Felicette, consulting a complex pocket watch. “I forgive you.”
Aurienne, thoroughly distracted by thoughts of Mordaunt, was grateful that Felicette was as well prepared as usual.
Aurienne’s monosyllabic contributions got her through most of the meeting.
The Ingenaut went through recent studies on the rheological properties of seith and debated, largely with herself, whether they should go with capillary flow resistors in seith channels or rather find a way to temporarily induce stenosis.
“There is one thing that’s preoccupying me, as we develop this,” said Aurienne. “Abuse or exploitation potential, if the occlusion serum—if that’s what we end up with—gets into the wrong hands. It could be misused.”
“Misused?”
Aurienne couldn’t share that she had been asked to use her occlusions to cripple the leader of the Fyren Order, and that she had shocked the Wardens who had witnessed it into perturbed silence.
She said evasively, “We must make sure it’s confined to medical applications. There’s potential for darker ones. If anyone wanted to incapacitate a member of an Order—or several of them…We would never, of course, but others might.”
Felicette’s brows rose behind her round spectacles. “I suppose you’re right. There is the risk that some arsehole might weaponise it. We’ll have to guard the formula closely. Should we, perhaps, not be publicizing this?”
“Let’s be careful about it. As long as it remains in Swanstone, it can’t be used for harm.”
Felicette made a note. “Right. May I float another idea by you, while I’m in the presence of the seith specialist?
I’ve heard that two of your Haelan are working to master seith transfers.
Have you ever considered some sort of seith battery, or capacitor, but for use by humans rather than engines?
Seith storage is so tricky, though—I’ve a few ideas… ”
Having wrapped up with Felicette, Aurienne went to Xanthe.
She needed to discuss a notion that had made its way into her brain, thanks to Mordaunt.
He had rightly pointed out that Tristane could give Aurienne the information she sought, about who the driving force behind the Pox was and the link to the Dreor Order.
He had given her an idea. That was what he did now, apparently: give her ideas. And books. And orgasms.
All varying degrees of helpful. She had told herself she would keep him at arm’s length.
She hadn’t even managed to keep him at finger’s length.
(They had been very skilled fingers, however.
If one was going to fail, one might as well fail with a lovely, drawn-out orgasm, pleasantly spiced by guilt and self-loathing.)
Aurienne wanted to laugh hysterically. That had happened. She wanted to take herself by the shoulders and shake herself until her teeth clattered. She had slept with a Fyren. What was the matter with her? There was almost a taint of insanity to all of this. Was she actually going mad?
The notion was supported by Xanthe, who, when apprised of Aurienne’s idea, looked at her as though she had lost several plots.
“You want to interrogate Tristane?” asked Xanthe.
“Yes,” said Aurienne. She resisted the urge to wring her hands together, as she used to do as a young apprentice when questioned by Xanthe.
“I’ve got an excellent reason to visit her again: the seith occlusions.
If we knew who hired her, we’d be one step closer to knowing who’s behind all of this—the Pox outbreak, the destruction of the Druids and the Faerwundor, the deaths of so many. ”
“Tristane has already been questioned,” said Xanthe. “It was futile. She’s a Fyren. She won’t give away her clients. It would rather ruin her Order’s business model.”
“She was questioned by Wardens who had no idea of her real purpose, and all within the confines of the conduct permitted by the Peace Accords,” said Aurienne.
Xanthe’s eyebrows rose until her forehead was all wrinkle. “You’d like to step out of those confines?”
“I’d like to use whatever means necessary to find out who is responsible for the Pox.”
“Whatever means necessary?” repeated Xanthe. “On the captive leader of another Order? Do you wish to end up in front of the Stánrocc, too?”
“Tristane is going to be put to death. And when she dies, our last opportunity to discover who was behind this plague dies with her. Besides,” added Aurienne, “I don’t plan on being caught.”
Xanthe propped her bent hands under her chin. “Where have you mislaid your black-and-white, right-and-wrong, absolutist ethics?”
“It would compromise my ethics more to let her die without finding out who’s behind this. They deserve consequences.”
Xanthe studied Aurienne in silence. Her black eyes were piercing, assessing. Aurienne was surprised to find the assessment end in delight. “You’ve grown.”
“It’s about achieving a greater goal.”
“Welcome to leadership.”
Xanthe, still bubbling in that delight, made her way to her desk and drew a calendar towards herself. “We haven’t any time to waste. Tristane is being executed at Lammas. That’s August first.”
“Did you mark the date of her execution with a heart?”
“She came to my Order’s threshold planning one or several murders; why wouldn’t I mark it with a heart?” asked Xanthe. “If you’re going to interrogate Tristane, I also suspect that she’s behind Lambert’s disappearance. And perhaps even our missing nurses. See what you can find out about that.”
“I will.”
“I shall make the arrangements with Dinadan, for us to visit Tintagel Castle. You’re just about due to refresh Tristane’s seith occlusions, anyway.”
“Us?”
“Someone’s going to have to distract the Wardens while you take Any Means Necessary with Tristane,” said Xanthe.
“Right.”
“And how is Onion Boy’s treatment progressing?” asked Xanthe.
Aurienne’s sigh did little to capture the confusing enormity of the answer.
“The results are promising. No—I’m being modest—the results are breathtaking.
I’m almost too frightened to tell you, because none of it should be possible, and I can’t explain it through any of the science available to me. It’s distressing.”
“It oughtn’t distress you,” said Xanthe. “Research is a constant reminder that we know nothing. We’ve just triggered nephrogenesis in adult mice, which baffles me and goes against everything we currently know.”
“At least you’re in the lab, not spuddling about in lakes at the full moon.”
“It sounds lovely.”
“It’s a farce,” said Aurienne. “But the farce is working, which vexes me. I’ll tidy my notes and show you.”
(She did not mention that she and Onion Boy had had sex; it didn’t seem immediately relevant.)
Aurienne left Xanthe’s office. Xanthe assumed she meant to torture the information out of Tristane.
And Aurienne, equipped with a Haelan’s expertise and mastery over seith, would be capable of some creative, traceless pain induction.
Some small, sick part of her—the part that spent too much time with Mordaunt, probably—had thought through the possibilities.
But she had once reviewed the research on the efficacy of torture in intelligence gathering and had found the results lacking.
She was better than that. She would not draw her methods from the Fyren playbook. She would find another way.
She went to her quarters, where Mordaunt’s books on the Dreor Order awaited.
She was, at long last, able to crack them open, and get her eager hands on information.
The books were of varying utility—the Dreor Order took up at best a brief chapter, at worst a few stanzas of a poem; some of the descriptions were little more than hearsay, very few included direct witness accounts—but it was more than Aurienne had managed to obtain from any of the libraries in the Tīendoms, and she was grateful for it.