Chapter 17 The Conses Have Quenced
The Conses Have Quenced
Aurienne
In the days that followed, the Haelan and Warden Orders investigated the addresses that Mordaunt had discovered in the Agannor’s office.
Mordaunt had been correct: every address was another Dreor incubator housing more sick children.
Swanstone exercised every emergency response protocol at its disposal to deal with the influx of patients.
They were brought into any ward with a spare bed and even overflowed into Cygnet House, the large outbuilding that normally housed apprentices.
With these discoveries, the time had come for Aurienne and Xanthe to share their findings on the Dreor Order, the Pox, and the three Tīendoms involved.
Prendergast and Abercorn, Xanthe’s fellow Heads of the Haelan Order, were briefed first. Then they invited the leaders of the Warden, Leyfarer, and Ingenaut Orders to Swanstone.
Out of courtesy more than expectation, they also invited the leader of the Hedgewitches, and, to their shock, Vel actually came.
Aurienne was surprised to find Vel accompanied by a Druid.
For two hours, Aurienne and Xanthe presented what they could concretely prove: the Pox-filled Scotch bottles at Wellesley Keep pointing to a deliberate plague, Tristane’s attempted attack on Swanstone, Brackenbury Asylum and the further groups of Pox-infected children held at other locations, Aurienne’s research on the Dreor Order.
There was a resounding silence after they had concluded their exposé.
“I cannot believe this,” said Dinadan, the Head of the Wardens.
Birtwhistle, the Head of the Ingenauts, sat open-mouthed.
élodie, invited in her capacity as lead virologist, dropped her head into her hands. “All this suffering—all this death—on purpose?”
Xanthe gave her a grim nod.
“The last Platt’s Pox epidemic was two hundred years ago,” said élodie, speaking slowly. “In Lichfield.”
“I shall give you one guess as to what Order is headquartered in Lichfield,” said Xanthe.
“The Dreor.” élodie dropped her head back into her hands. “I don’t understand how—how they even produce the Pox in these quantities?”
“It’s time to introduce our guest,” said Xanthe, gesturing to the Druid who had accompanied the Hedgewitch. “Aster is a Druid. She’s helped us piece together the question of how.”
Aster’s green cloak hung loose on her frame. Her face was hollowed out by exhaustion. In her eyes there was a deep sadness. “I suppose you have all heard of the destruction of the Faerwundor?”
There were nods and muttered expressions of sympathy around the table.
“It is—was—the greatest Druidic enclave in the Tīendoms. Some Druids are solitary and chose to live outside of it, near sacred places we hold dear.
I am one of those. I live in the wilder north, near the Stones of Stenness.
My contact with the Faerwundor is irregular.
I visit once or twice a year. My first indication that something was amiss came a few weeks ago, when I sent my deofol to the Faerwundor to let them know I was planning a visit.
I received a deofol in answer from a trusted brother in the Faerwundor advising me to keep away.
He said they had placed themselves in quarantine.
Something had gone wrong in the labs. A disease would be at risk of spilling out into the general population if any of us visited.
“I thought it strange: the Faerwundor’s labs are a pharmaceutical production facility.
We do not study human pathogens there. I spoke with a few other solitary Druids who had received similar warnings to stay away.
We now believe those deofols were sent under duress to avoid us discovering that the Faerwundor had been taken over by the Dreor.
It appears that the Dreor got wind of the extent of our facilities under Glastonbury Tor and decided to make use of them for their foul purposes.
We began to suspect something was wrong when our brothers and sisters at the Faerwundor stopped answering our missives entirely.
Our deofols couldn’t get through. The Druids we sent to investigate at the Faerwundor didn’t come back. ”
Tears filled Aster’s voice. She gathered herself and continued. “By the time we raised alarms among our own—we live scattered all over the Tīendoms, and it was difficult to imagine that something so grave had happened—we were too late.”
“Our informant said the Druids had been dead for at least a fortnight, on the night of the destruction of the Faerwundor,” said Xanthe.
“Apparently a mass slaughter took place after news of the Haelan Order’s inoculation push began to circulate.
The Pox production became useless and the Druids became a liability.
They were killed. The Faerwundor was destroyed shortly after it was infiltrated by our informant, presumably to erase the evidence. ”
“Those of us who remain are devastated by the Druids’ role, however unwilling, in this plague,” said Aster. “I cannot express to you quite the extent of what has been lost. The lives. The knowledge. The gardens. The oak—”
Xanthe squeezed Aster’s hand. The Head of the Hedgewitches pressed their arm into the Druid’s shoulder in silent support.
“There will be justice served,” said Dinadan. She leapt to her feet and paced. “But I don’t understand. You’re saying the children are to become Dreor. The Pox victims are children. It would take years to train them up and get them a tācn.”
“Correct,” said Aurienne. “This was careful long-term planning. And I mean long term: a ten- or fifteen-year horizon, at the end of which those responsible would have hundreds of Dreor under their control. They were strategic about it—they worked out what disease made the most promising Dreor candidates, targeted a helpless population, and made sure no one would care enough, or have enough money, to do anything about it.”
“For the non-Haelan among us, what exactly about the Pox makes these kids perfect Dreor candidates?” asked Shearwater, the leader of the Leyfarers.
“Not every child is affected by the brain fever, but those that are—and survive it without Haelan intervention—are changed,” said Aurienne.
“Either unusually aggressive and fearless or cognitively impaired to the point that they’re, for all intents and purposes, brain-dead.
The Dreor tācn is known to take only rarely—only with those with the right sort of mind.
The former take, and create Dreor; the latter fail, and create wightlings for those Dreor to control. ”
“Wightlings?” asked Shearwater.
“Brainless foot soldiers,” said Dinadan. “Walking cadavers.”
Aurienne nodded. “With the sheer numbers of kids they infected, I think they wanted loads of wightlings. Even one of those is worth dozens of soldiers—they can’t be killed. They’re practically unstoppable by those without tācn. And somewhere behind them, a Dreor is coming.”
“If the Dreor Order is truly responsible for this plague, my Order won’t stand by,” said Dinadan. “We will be discussing war.”
Shearwater said, “We should be discussing extermination.”
The Hedgewitch, Vel, blinked amber eyes from within their deep hood, but said nothing.
“I don’t think the Dreor Order is the only party responsible,” said Aurienne. “Their Order hasn’t got the resources to implement a plan of this magnitude.”
Xanthe nodded. “Someone organised the mass production of the virus. Someone organised the deliberate infection of thousands of children across the Tīendoms. Someone had the influence to block funding for all of the institutions who could’ve developed a vaccine.
Someone paid Tristane to attack us. Someone arranged for that asylum and all the incubators we found after. ”
“And we received that windfall and were able to counter the whole thing, without even knowing we were doing it,” said élodie. “The vaccine rollout means we’ve taken their years of planning and their millions and millions of thrymsas and plunged them into the toilet.”
“But whose planning?” asked Prendergast. “Whose resources? Who is the Someone?”
“We can only speculate,” said Aurienne.
“Aurienne is being cautious,” said Xanthe. “I will be less cautious. We do have a few data points that might help us identify parties of interest. élodie, which of the Tīendoms were the worst off in terms of infections?”
élodie, who had been listening in bleak silence, blinked. “Euh—Kent, Mercia, and Dumnonia. They were the hardest hit by far. Practically double the contagion rates of any of the Tīendoms. We were never able to account for their numbers.”
“And in our search for funding for the inoculation project, those three also gave the least, did they not?”
“Correct,” said élodie. “Only the most nominal sums.”
“But they had the most to gain from a vaccine,” said Prendergast.
Dinadan drummed her fingers upon the table. “All three of those Tīendoms surround Wessex.”
“What’s the relevance?” asked Birtwhistle.
Dinadan reached for a sheet of paper and drew out a quick map of the Tīendoms. “Wessex is the most powerful of the Tīendoms,” she said.
“None of those three can win a war against her. But if they’ve made an alliance”—here Dinadan drew three arrows going inward from Kent, Mercia, and Dumnonia—“Wessex will be caught in the greatest pincer manoeuvre in history. And if they had an army of Dreor on their side…”
“She’d be done,” said Shearwater.
Dinadan scratched out Wessex with a violent X. “Exactly.”
Birtwhistle, anxious, said, “These are dangerous accusations.”
“No one is making accusations,” said Xanthe. “We are merely analysing available information. I nevertheless recommend secrecy. We mustn’t take a public position or make claims regarding the Pox having been deliberately unleashed. Those responsible mustn’t know we’ve begun to connect the dots.”
Dinadan looked stormy. “They’d better hope the dots don’t connect. My Order is headquartered in Dumnonia. If the Dumnonian queen is part of a three-way conspiracy to raise a Dreor army using children, we’re going to have words.”
Her finger on the handle of her axe hinted that the words would be accompanied by other things.
Vel, the Hedgewitch, spoke for the first time. They addressed the question to Aurienne. “Have we any evidence of the Kentish queen’s involvement?”
“Nothing concrete,” said Aurienne.
“If something surfaces, bring it to me,” said Vel. “Our Order’s newlings have been ravaged by the Pox. I, too, will have…words.”
The little hairs on the back of Aurienne’s neck rose. “All right.”
“If this all ends up being true, I would like the Haelan Order to react strongly,” said Abercorn as Prendergast nodded. “But we cannot withdraw Haelan from all three of those Tīendoms. The population would suffer too much.”
“I agree,” said Xanthe. “We could at most refuse to aid royal households.”
“The Leyfarers would face a similar problem,” said Shearwater. “If we block ley lines, it’s the population who suffers, not the royals. Mind you—if they declare war, we will shut down the waystones within their borders.”
“The immunisation programme has an extremely high uptake,” said élodie. “And now that we’ve found their incubators, we’ve effectively destroyed their plans.”
“Where are you keeping the sick children now?” asked Dinadan.
“Swanstone and Cygnet House,” said élodie. “That’s one of Swanstone’s outbuildings. We hadn’t enough beds within the walls.”
“Move them into the fortress proper,” said Dinadan. “They’re what’s valuable now. The last of the investment.”
Xanthe nodded. “We’ll make the arrangements.”
“There’s one thing I want to know,” said Dinadan. “You mentioned an informant, for Wellesley Keep and Brackenbury—the one who also warned us about Tristane. Who is this anonymous source who’s helped so much?”
“His anonymity is nonnegotiable,” said Xanthe.
“Well, pass along our thanks,” said Dinadan. “He’s done a lot of good.”
There were nods around the table. Aurienne held back a smile.
He really had.
With all that was going on at Swanstone, Aurienne hoped that Cath and élodie would forget what they had seen in the toilet at the asylum and also never speak to her again.
A vain hope, obviously. Aurienne successfully dodged them for a few days, until they caught her in the cafeteria. First she saw élodie beelining towards her from one end of the corridor. Like a coward, she fled, abandoning her tray and dashing in the opposite direction.
Cath appeared at the other end of the corridor.
“Bollocks,” said Aurienne.
Cath and élodie advanced on Aurienne like twin steamrollers. Apprentices flung themselves out of the way. Haelan dived for safety. The cries of widows rent the air. Aurienne was forced back into her seat, compressed by Cath on her left and élodie on her right.
“So,” said Cath.
“What’s going on between you and Tit Wank Man?” asked élodie.
“Nothing,” said Aurienne.
“We literally saw you kiss him,” said Cath.
“He kissed me,” said Aurienne.
“How long have you been seeing each other?”
“We’re not. That wouldn’t be—appropriate,” said Aurienne. “We have a close working relationship, that’s all.”
“Very close,” said Cath. “A bit of tongue involved.”
“He’s pretty,” said élodie.
“A magnifico,” said Cath.
“A voice not unpleasing,” said élodie.
“As far as informants go, the best looking I’ve seen,” said Cath. “Who is he?”
“I can’t tell you,” said Aurienne. “I can’t talk about him. And I cannot have feelings for him.”
Aurienne hadn’t expected her voice to break, but it did. She dropped her face into her hands.
Cath and élodie exchanged looks. They ceased their teasing and grew serious.
“Are we to take it you do have feelings for him?” asked Cath.
A tortured groan was Aurienne’s answer.
“Once all this is over, he’ll be just another person, won’t he?” asked élodie. “When he’s no longer an informant. You’re allowed to have feelings, you know.”
“The issue isn’t love—well, it is—but it’s also specifically him. But there’s goodness in him. It wants hauling up, but it’s there. He’s proven it several times.”
“Then?”
“He’s—not allowed. He’s forbidden.”
“He can’t be that bad,” said Cath gently. “You said Xanthe knew about him.”
“You’re acting like he’s some sort of murderer,” said élodie.
To which Aurienne could make no answer.
With the beginning of August came Lammas, the date of Tristane’s execution.
The Haelan Order was invited to the Stánrocc to witness the event.
They declined: they had greater emergencies to deal with and, in Xanthe’s words, preferred to spend their time preserving the lives of those who deserved theirs rather than witness the death of one who didn’t.
Lammas came and went. The Haelan Order learned that Tristane never made it to the Stánrocc. She escaped during her transfer from Tintagel Castle.
Aurienne wouldn’t know anything about that.