Chapter 29 The Seventh Moon #2
As she passed her tācn over the Monafyll Stone, she felt a familiar sensation of drawing in, of loosening the particles that made her.
She ripped her hand away.
She had been about to enter a ley line.
She stared at the Monafyll Stone open-mouthed.
It was a waystone.
Impossible. Unmapped waystones no longer existed. The Leyfarers had discovered them all in the last century.
Something glimmered in the tall grass at the foot of the Stone. Aurienne nudged it with the toe of her boot until it came loose.
A rusted colander, grown through with wildflowers.
“Widdershins,” said Aurienne.
He had worn the thing as a hat, the night she and Mordaunt visited him.
Aurienne pressed her tācn to the Monafyll Stone again, but the pull didn’t come back. The stone was just stone. Had she imagined it? One didn’t imagine the feeling of being dragged into a ley line.
Aurienne stood unmoving. The fog pressed around her interrogatively.
The hagstone’s broken ligature dangled on either side of her fist.
She blinked and shook her head. This would bear further investigating—but not tonight. She had a convalescence in front of her.
Aurienne walked the spiral’s unravelling path outward, the torn-off hagstone in her palm. Earth massed by landslips rose on either side. Landslip meant something different here; reality could shift right out from beneath your feet.
Her lingering backwards look at the Monafyll Stone came with an unvoiced promise: she would be back.
She stepped to the edge of one of the Fairy Glen’s shimmering ponds. Fish like living mirrors gleamed under the surface. She dropped the hagstone into the water. It disappeared without a splash. It would guard the small dreams of the fish.
She was light, unburdened—and alone.
What an irony, to free her heart after so many years, only to end up in absolute solitude. She had pushed away the man who could have loved her and who she loved. She had freed herself just in time to realise the amplitude of her mistake.
Now that the hagstone no longer tethered her, she realised how little she cared about the obstacles—their Orders, their unsuitableness. How minor they all were, in the face of the pent-up things in her heart.
She would reap what she had sowed this harvest moon: loneliness.
It grew cold as dusk passed into night. Aurienne’s breaths made ghostly shapes before her; fog hung within fog. Starlight touched at this dreamy opalescence and made the Glen brilliant silver.
Aurienne bid farewell to the Monafyll Stone in her silent spiral. Through the hollows between pinnacles, she retraced her steps.
The shiver of a breeze brought with it the faint scent of smoke.
Blackthorn.
Aurienne froze where she stood. She was going mad. Her heart wished for things and her senses, complicit, manufactured a matching hallucination.
There, between rocks: an absence of stars.
A figure stood like the essence of night, draped in a cloak of fine-cut shadows.
Osric was here.
An answer to her heart-wish.
Aurienne hadn’t seen him since their talk at his bedside. Sensations jerked through her—a violent pang at the heart, the dark ache of guilt, regret, fear, and then happiness, tolling through her like a bell, drowning it all out.
He took a step towards her.
“You,” breathed Aurienne.
He faltered. “If you don’t wish me to be here, I understand. I’ll leave at once.”
That was where it could have ended. But she wouldn’t let him go. That was the impossible thing.
“Stay,” said Aurienne. “How did you know to come here?”
“A friend.” Osric studied her from within the depths of his hood. In a voice grave with concern, he asked, “Are you all right?”
After what she’d done to him, she expected coldness or mockery. She hadn’t expected concern. “I’m fine.”
“You were here for a healing,” said Osric.
“Yes.”
“Then what’s wrong with you?”
“I daren’t make a list,” said Aurienne.
Osric was quiet for a moment before answering, “I doubt it’s longer than mine.”
He watched Aurienne as she stepped through wet grass towards him, as though he didn’t believe that she was all right and wanted to assess her, check her gait, scrutinise her for signs of some infirmity.
There was none to find. She was all right. She had cured a most stubborn ailment. Her heart beat in her chest, delicate and tender and new. She wanted to reach for Osric’s hands, but she had pushed those hands away cruelly before, and so she dared not. Atonement must come first.
“How are your eyes?” she asked.
“Healed.”
“Show me.”
Osric drew back his hood. He was perfectly healed. Silver eyes caught the moon’s liquid gold. And yet there was tragedy in them.
“You gave the ring back,” he said.
Aurienne saw that atonement must come now.
The fog rose amid the great stones heaped around them, lifting the dim earth to the sky. Ever and again, a breeze whispered between them. Autumn summoned her nighttime scents from the earth.
Osric stood, dark and blurred, like the shape of her regret; like an unpromised hereafter, possibly lost.
“Harm to none has been hammered into me all of my life,” said Aurienne. “Since meeting you, I’ve learned to be less rigid about it. Most of the instances of harm were justified by circumstance and necessity. So I tell myself, anyway. But one wasn’t.”
She clasped her hands together instead of reaching for his.
“In wanting to protect myself from pain, I harmed you, badly. I regret it. And even after I pushed you away, that night at the waystone, you came back. You gave your seith, your fortune, your eyes, and almost your life, to save me. You gave too much. I watched the lifeblood pour out of you. I thought it was the end of you. I—” Aurienne took a breath; the hurt of the memory was still acute.
“I showed you only selfishness, and you gave almost unto death. I did wrong. I don’t expect your forgiveness.
I only want you to know how much I’m sorry. ”
Osric’s hair was moonlight across his brow. At length he said, “I would do it all again.”
“You almost lost your life. I’m not worth that.”
“You don’t get to decide what you’re worth to me.”
“You’re worth too much to me to die.”
Silence fell, brimming with the strain of things oft thought, heartfelt, never uttered. The fog pooled around them like a silver sea. Light from an Elsewhere shimmered through it.