Chapter 7 The Patient in Ward 13
Aurienne
The few hours of sleep that Aurienne and Mordaunt snatched at the Rowany Nosebleed replenished enough of their seith to use the waystone.
When they awoke, there was an odd formality in their interactions, a scrambling away from exhaustion-induced intimacies.
Breakfast consisted of exceptionally tough pastries from Oist (“Bone-in croissants,” said Mordaunt).
They separated at the waystone with stiff farewells.
Aurienne returned to Swanstone bursting with impatience to hear what had happened at the Faerwundor. She rushed to Xanthe’s office.
“Enter,” said Xanthe in response to her knock.
“I’ve just come back,” said Aurienne. “What happened at the Tor?”
Something was wrong. Xanthe did not look up from her desk. Her knuckles were pressed into her forehead.
“The Faerwundor is gone,” said Xanthe.
“Gone?” repeated Aurienne. “What do you mean, gone?”
“In pieces. Reduced to rubble. Nothing but ash.”
“But—but I was just there—”
Xanthe looked up. “The villagers are blaming a fire. Others are saying it was a gas explosion. I wouldn’t have thought the Druids were equipped with gas.”
Aurienne stared at her, open-mouthed. “The Dreor detected me and Mordaunt. They must have decided to destroy the evidence. They had already killed off most of the Druids.” With a sickening certainty that she already knew the answer, she asked, “Any survivors?”
“None. It’s a heap of wreckage. We poked about—us and the Wardens who came with us.
Couldn’t even find a body. It’s abominable.
There will be an investigation, but I’m not certain what’s going to be left to find, except perhaps evidence that the destruction was deliberate.
” A hint of the bulldog crept into the set of Xanthe’s jaw.
“As soon as we’ve got our hands on proof, we’re having the Dreor Order brought before the Stánrocc, bound hand and foot. ”
“Have the entire Order eradicated,” said Aurienne, whose shock kindled into anger.
Xanthe, normally the one frothing at the mouth, blinked at her. “I’m not certain that, politically, we’ll have the clout to annihilate one of the Eight.”
Aurienne couldn’t even pretend to temper her response. “All of this suffering has been intentional. The Pox was deliberate. The Dreor Order did it. That tācn should be made extinct.”
“This is a lapse from your usual dogmatism. We must be careful, or you shall run amok,” said Xanthe. Her mouth wrinkled into a smile, but she looked at Aurienne searchingly for a long time after.
That night, Aurienne found herself unable to sleep.
Still the anger simmered in her. The dead Druids.
The magnificent oak, destroyed. The misappropriated laboratories.
Science put to the service of atrocities instead of life.
Her continued wrath frightened her; she hardly recognised herself.
She tossed and turned, unable to reconcile herself and her vivid desire for vengeance. Or was it justice?
She could no longer be priggish about her superiority to the Fyren. In a sickening twist, she now wished to go on a murdering spree.
A shadow landed among Aurienne’s white sheets.
Acts of Warranted Brutality, who had never once approached Aurienne in bed, now stepped towards her on paws of black velvet.
The cat’s eyes gleamed gold in the dark.
She walked with sinuous purpose along Aurienne’s thigh, across her stomach, up to her chest. Tiny paw pads pressed at Aurienne’s collarbones.
The cat curled herself into a helix. Her whiskers swept at Aurienne’s skin as she placed her small chin upon Aurienne’s racing heart.
Aurienne stilled. The cat was warm.
Aurienne found peace.
The rage had not extinguished itself. It settled on her like a cerement.
After what Aurienne had witnessed at the Faerwundor, the tasks that awaited her as Director of the Centre for Seith Research did not seem as overwhelming as usual.
She invited Quincey into her office with his pile of Dreaded Admin and faced it head-on.
No problems were as horrific as the bloodied bodies of dozens of dead Druids, none as insurmountable as Gron dying before her eyes.
The libraries failed Aurienne. Quincey read their responses to her Dreor Order request with increasing agitation.
When he went through the first apologetic notes, Aurienne thought that it was a peculiar coincidence.
But as the apologies continued, coincidence no longer sufficed as an explanation.
In every library, texts relating to the Dreor Order were missing.
Someone had done a clean sweep of the greatest libraries in the Tīendoms and purged them of Dreor-related material.
Yet another act that would have taken months and serious resources to carry out.
With every layer of this plot she peeled back, Aurienne felt herself on the cusp of discovering something bigger and bigger.
She dismissed Quincey and turned her thinking to privately held collections.
However, if the Dreor Order had orchestrated a careful purge of research libraries, was there also a chance that they had done the same for private ones?
Could the owners of those collections be counted on not to report a Haelan’s uncharacteristic interest in the Dreor Order?
Who had a private library, who she knew could be trusted?
The answer displeased her spectacularly.
Mordaunt.
She had no desire to ask a favour of him, or to be further in his debt.
Did she have a choice?
One positive among the repeated horrors of the last twenty-four hours was the result of the last healing: she had seen—to be confirmed by diffractor—real progress in Mordaunt’s condition.
Her feelings she was less thrilled with.
She was beset by memories of Mordaunt’s lips on her hand, of the weight of his arm on her hips, of the strange bliss of their seclusion.
She sought refuge in logic, which she, being devoutly pragmatic, brought to bear upon her emotional problems with unhealthy regularity.
Logic could only explain away so much; it could not explain the small revelries of her heart. These joys she hadn’t felt in ages. She was bewildered, ashamed, both happy and not.
Love wasn’t the risk here, that was one certainty—she had given her heart away once and would never do so again.
Still, confusion and crossness plaited themselves over and over in her head. She shouldn’t think of him. She thought of him. Did he think of her? He shouldn’t think of her. He’d better be thinking of her, because she was thinking of him. She mustn’t think of him.
She wished for serenity; she wished to uncramp her brain.
As a senior Haelan, Aurienne was rarely hands-on in the lab anymore, but in the days that followed, she found solace there, in the rigorous application of methodology and protocol.
She seized her feelings with both hands and subjected them to the same; she decanted, she stoppered, she stored securely in spark-proof refrigerated compartments.
That was what one did with volatile compounds.
Compartmentalising and compartmentalising again. Could one run out of compartments?
Aurienne fixed tissue specimens and her feelings in 2.
5 percent glutaraldehyde until Cath popped in to go to lunch.
Cath, the Director of Trauma and Acute Care, was, along with élodie from Virology, one of Aurienne’s closest friends.
Cath kept her head shaved because of her Cost, which caused hair loss.
She had a tongue and an intellect as sharp as her wing tips.
Aurienne felt proud of herself as she strode to the cafeteria: she had not thought of Mordaunt for over three hours. Then Cath asked, “How is Tit Wank Man?” and ruined everything.
Tit Wank Man was the nickname—perhaps even more unfortunate than Onion Boy—given to Mordaunt by Cath, who only knew him as a mysterious man that Aurienne had saved from a stab wound.
Aurienne meditated flight. In the most detached tone she could manage, she said, “Tit Wank Man is fine.”
“Only fine? And yes,” added Cath, peaceably, “I am a right nosy cow.”
“Fine,” said Aurienne. “Gone, actually. Out of the picture.”
“Is he?” Cath’s burgundy-lined gaze searched Aurienne’s. “I’d believe you if you weren’t actively looking for exits.”
Aurienne, who had indeed been evaluating the nearest window for auto-defenestration purposes, said, “Don’t be silly.”
They came to Swanstone’s cafeteria. It wasn’t much of one; it consisted of a long row of tables in a corridor, the regular cafeteria having been converted to Ward 14 (Platt’s Pox).
They loaded up their trays and found a table. Seith was best replenished with food, the higher calorie the better; the fare at Swanstone was consequently rich and heavy to fuel seith-depleted Haelan.
Cath heaped a cracker with whipped goat cheese and fig preserve. “Does Xanthe know about this situation with Tit Wank Man?” she asked. “The stabbing and everything?”
“Yes,” said Aurienne.
“He can’t be that bad, then,” said Cath.
Aurienne produced a fixed smile, because yes, he could absolutely be That Bad. He was a bloody Fyren.
“Can élodie and I meet him?” asked Cath.
“Absolutely not,” said Aurienne. “He’s no one important. Only one of my Occasional Men. Tea?”
“Yes, please.” Cath pushed her cup forward. “Your parents got to meet him, but we can’t?”
“Correct.”
“He’s certainly got you distracted.”
“He hasn’t.”
“You’re pouring the milk into the sugar pot.”
“Bollocks.”
Rescue came in the form of Quincey, who whisked Aurienne away to chair a committee in Haelan Whitman’s place.
The committee was on clinical ethics, because why would it be on anything else, while Aurienne scampered about, illicitly putting a Fyren through an unapproved course of treatment that would get her Haelan wings pulled if anyone found out? Fate was, once again, taking the piss.