Chapter 25 Such Sweet Sorrow
Such Sweet Sorrow
Osric
So Osric and Aurienne came to their inevitable goodbye.
Osric had known it was coming, but foreknowledge of the pain did nothing to alleviate it.
He had wished to make more time together at Rosefell Hall.
More chances to say the things that lay heavy on his heart.
He had tried. But, after the diffractor had been put away, Aurienne hadn’t wished to celebrate, or find an excuse to stay.
She had concluded their agreement like the business deal it was, swiftly, decisively.
All her brilliance had vanished into the waystone, leaving Osric behind with a pile of what-ifs and a hand unheld. He let her go. He let her go, this dream, this could-have-been.
The worst part was that Aurienne, too, was unhappy.
She tried to keep it walled in, but it had been obvious in the sorrow-drawn line of her brows, in the way she wrapped her arms around herself as they walked to the waystone, in her final, half-hearted wave, which came with the glimpse of the tācn that bound her to her Order and excluded him from her life.
We are nothing but a could-have-been.
Another of her eight-word horror stories.
There had been pain in her, too. Perversely, that gave him a bit of hope.
(He was still sick. Hope, the bane, the wretched disease.)
In the days that followed, he found the house haunted by Aurienne.
The dogs looked for her. Mementos of their time together found their way into his hands—the map of the Faerwundor when he was tidying his desk.
The heart-shaped pocket watch keeping time, marking out their separation in even beats.
Places were lit by memories, of her curled up on the sofa, or breakfasting at the terrace, or on the sitting room floor, eating cheap pies.
The libraries. The waystone; arrivals and departures.
Aurienne had left a half-empty bottle of hlutoform behind. Osric put it on the windowsill in his study. When the breeze blew the right way, and its clean, acrid scent tickled his nose, he could momentarily believe that she was there again.
Osric had given her his signet ring. He had no idea what he had hoped to achieve by this; it had been a desperate gesture.
It was Please keep a piece of me near you.
It was I place myself in your hands. Every time he looked at the paler circle of skin on his index finger where the ring used to sit, he thought of her.
In more pathetic moments, he was jealous of the ring, which was now in hands he himself would never touch again.
Osric, who usually lived without wants or regrets, was now full of them.
Aurienne had glided through his life and made it, briefly, lovelier.
She had become what he could never have, and so become his greatest torment.
He daydreamed of going to Swanstone and asking her to run away with him.
To leave behind their Orders and the complications of their lives and start again somewhere else.
But he knew her answer; he could hear her crisp delivery.
She had knowledge to advance. She had lives to save.
She belonged at Swanstone. So they remained daydreams, daydreams that ate away both day and dream, until his heart pumped nothing but dust.
Aurienne had once told him that death wasn’t divisible. She had been wrong. Death was divisible. She was killing him little by little.
At night he saw her over him in the storm at the Thunor moon, a queen crowned in thunder, sea-foam dripping on her skin, dark hair mingling with dark clouds above. She had made a palace of that sky.
He had worked so hard to convince himself that it wasn’t love. And now he must live unloved, he who loved for the very first time.
August passed in a vague and miserable blur.
“Her departure has dimmed you,” said Cinder.
Osric was trying, and failing, to read by the fireside. Attempting to find normalcy when his heart had been ripped from its place.
“We had to part,” said Osric. “Logically. It’s for the best.”
“Logically,” repeated the great black wolf.
“I shall love her forever and never see her again.”
“A consumptive love.”
“A kind of poetry.”
There was a silence.
“Has she severed my link with her yet?” asked Osric.
Cinder shimmered briefly out of existence. “No,” she said when she returned. “I can still reach her tācn.”
“I suppose that’s something.”
Cinder hung low above the ground, as she did when she was displeased. “Her absence hurts you. I think she should know that.”
“Why?”
“She would care.”
Mrs. Parson came into the sitting room, bearing tea and unasked-for opinions. “I agree with Cinder.”
“What would you have me do, exactly?” asked Osric.
“Tell her you love her,” said Cinder and Mrs. Parson at the same time.
“To what end? As soon as I was healed, she fled. You saw.”
“She wasn’t happy,” said Mrs. Parson.
“You’re usually more sensible than this, Mrs. Parson.”
“You’re withering away,” said Mrs. Parson.
“I just need—I just need a bit of time. Distractions. An affair.”
Cinder folded her ears back in impatience. “So go and have the affair.”
Mrs. Parson nodded. Both she and Cinder regarded Osric as though waiting for him to leap out of his chair and seduce the nearest available housewife.
“He won’t,” said Mrs. Parson to Cinder.
“I know,” said Cinder.
“There is only the Fair Tormentor,” came the voice of the critique cricket. “There is no one else in his heart.”
“I really don’t need you here, too,” said Osric.
“You’re being stubborn,” said Mrs. Parson.
“An idiot,” said Cinder.
“Thick as pig shit,” said the cricket.
“Fairhrim and I had a deal, and we both fulfilled its terms,” said Osric. “We will never cross paths again. I’m a Fyren and she’s a Haelan, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Didn’t you have a plan to steal the money back after the deal was over?” asked Mrs. Parson.
“I did.”
“I note the past tense,” said the cricket.
Osric glared at his inquisition committee. “I don’t want to steal the money back anymore. It wouldn’t be—it wouldn’t be right.”
“Since when has that bothered you?” asked Cinder.
“What changed?” asked Mrs. Parson.
“Me.” Osric put his face in his hands.
“I believe,” said the cricket, “that Honour has returned to this house.”
Life went on ruthlessly, with no respect for men suffering Agonies.
Osric’s tācn buzzed with seith of every description except the cool, steady one he wished to feel.
Tristane’s and Sacramore’s deofols came through often.
Instability roiled in the southernmost Tīendoms, and the Fyren Order had never been so busy.
In the same week, Osric took a job in Dumnonia on behalf of Wessex, in Wessex on behalf of Dumnonia, and then for Kent back in Wessex.
His seith flowed sure and strong, with no further fluctuations. He thought of Aurienne every time he used his tācn.
He watched the moon wax through September. It sickened him that it would reach fullness and that he wouldn’t have an excuse to meet her.
One night, while collecting payment at the Dog’s Bollocks, he heard a rumour regarding Swanstone.
“How is Haelan Hot Tits?” asked Leofric.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Osric. An enormous, sweaty lie.
“Sound lad,” said Leofric. “Best to be rid of connections. Things are going to happen at Swanstone.”
With a choky haste, Osric asked, “Things?”
Leofric tapped his nose.
“What things, Leofric?” asked Osric again.
“The Dreor, mate.”
A sick plunge of the stomach. A near fainting.
“The Dreor?” repeated Osric in a whisper.
Leofric was only intermittently observant, but he noticed Osric’s change of countenance. “You all right?”
“G-grand. What do you mean? What’s going to happen?”
“There’s been a massive falling-out between the two Orders, I heard.
Not sure what the Haelan did to piss off the Dreor this much, but apparently they’re on the warpath.
They’ve torn up the Peace Accords and are heading to Swanstone.
I wonder if the Haelan have got a single weapon in that fortress—”
Osric rose abruptly. “I have to go.”
He mulled over the information as he left the pub. He was under no obligation to tell Aurienne anything. He was healed. He had given her the money in exchange, and, what was more, actually let her keep it. The terms of the agreement had been fulfilled.
She had said they must go their separate ways. She had said they must be strangers.
He owed her nothing.
If he did nothing, she might die.
She shouldn’t matter to him. He could do nothing and prove it to himself.
Or he could do something, and grow out of his own rot something better.