Chapter 20 Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin
Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin
Aurienne
Under rain-swollen clouds, Aurienne stepped out of the hothouse, followed by Mordaunt.
They discovered a patch of strawberries off the path, which Mordaunt—surprised at his own garden’s bounty—insisted upon tasting.
Aurienne held out her dressing gown and he dropped strawberries into it, and they ate them while meandering on overgrown paths.
Mordaunt kept taking out the pocket watch with boyish delight. Cíele had been right: the present had surprised and touched Mordaunt.
They were halfway back to the house when the rain began to fall in earnest. It was not a gentle rain; it was an August storm that, by the time they ran for cover, turned to hail.
“This way,” said Mordaunt, and he took Aurienne’s hand and pulled her along.
He led her through a curtain of blue-green ivy, covering the entrance to a sort of grotto. A spring tinkled musically somewhere in the dimness. Aurienne had expected a rough stone interior, but the grotto’s walls were encrusted with white shells and bits of coral.
Aurienne had wrapped Mrs. Parson’s shawl around her head to shield herself from the storm. Mordaunt laughed at the sight of her. As for him, he had his wet shirt open, of course, and his damp hair effortlessly sprung into the most charming of waves, and mirth made him more handsome still.
“What is this place?” asked Aurienne.
“The nymphaeum,” said Mordaunt. “May I trespass upon you for a bit of shawl?”
Aurienne obliged. Mordaunt furled back his cuffs, an activity that retained too much of Aurienne’s attention, and used the shawl to wipe rain from his face.
“I fancy the place saw far more use as a lovers’ tryst than nymph worship,” he said.
Aurienne stepped deeper into the grotto. Dead leaves crunched underfoot. “I suppose it’s been a long time since it saw use by lovers, too.”
She pushed away long fronds of ivy to discover spirals upon spirals; fossils of ammonites had been embedded into the wall amid the seashells.
She and Mordaunt watched the storm from the nymphaeum’s narrow entrance. The trailing ivy danced in the wind, back and forth, up and down, tracing the cold-hot air. Like all dances, it carried meaning.
The sky turned a dangerous purple. Hail lashed down, tore at foliage in a hiss, frothed the pond.
There was a wild romance to standing there together, watching this savage undoing.
The scents of crushed flowers and ice, of summer and winter, mingled into something heady.
Aurienne found herself aware of Mordaunt’s nearness.
The touch of his shoulder against hers sent something tender, yet softly electric, through her.
The wind blew Aurienne’s dressing gown up. Mordaunt caught sight of her bare legs and looked away. She wore nothing under the garment, a decision that felt far more risqué now than it had just after her bath.
Her plait came loose. Her hair danced like the ivy. She gathered it up to plait it again, but Mordaunt’s hands found her wrists.
“Don’t,” he said. “Let it be. There’s a nymph here again, after all these centuries.”
Poetic. Ridiculous. Aurienne couldn’t help but smile.
His breath caught at the sight. Her hair tumbled and danced, joyous in the wind.
He drew her wrists down. His palms slid against her skin in a long caress until he held her hands in his. Once again, Aurienne felt herself on the edge of the something beyond right and wrong, or good and evil.
The storm raged. They stood hand in hand like lovers. Grave and sweet. Beautiful and strange. He brushed a strand of hair from her face. There again was that gentleness that she considered more attractive than power.
He drew a strand of her hair between his fingers. “I can feel again, thanks to you.” He brushed a fingertip against her cheek. “It’s a bit addictive.”
His touch left a little glow behind, equally addictive. She wanted more of it. Her breathing came fast and light.
Mordaunt’s eyes were soft. The soul of that white rose was in him, of imperfection reaching for better, of goodness in spite of, of the courage to grow out of the mire. His countenance was gentled by yearning.
Aurienne knew that it was anatomically impossible, but gods, she felt her heart was about to explode. For so long she had controlled, she had forced her feelings down into their compartments. She had pressed her heart away until it had hardened and dried up.
But she had been wrong. It had not dried up.
It had become chrysalis.
Now it burst forth, all silken flutters. The butterflies escaped containment.
She wanted to kiss him.
Normally the past and the future squeezed so hard at her that there was no present; it was extinguished between what was, behind, and consequence, ahead.
She drew his face to hers. Now she was in the present.
In the moment, drowning in the bliss of it.
Lightheaded and faint, she was hardly conscious of anything other than his lips barely brushing hers.
The butterflies exploded in triumph.
Happiness was there, if she would only reach for it.
She had thought that he would simply take the kiss, as he had taken all his life. But he did not. He waited. He confirmed that latent nobility she knew was in him. Chivalry. Self-denial. Decency.
His eyes were half-closed, as of one enjoying a pleasurable torment.
“I want to be irresponsible,” said Aurienne. “I want to kiss you.”
His eyes opened and caught her in quicksilver.
“You like to collect rare things,” said Aurienne.
“Paradoxically, I wish your kisses weren’t so rare,” said Mordaunt. “I wish they were as recklessly abundant as the blossoms on that laburnum.”
“Wouldn’t you tire of them?”
“Impossible.”
Aurienne felt, again, that sense of impending doom, of fate’s tug, of lightning about to strike. The lightheadedness threatened to push her into a swoon. Her heart did not beat; it leapt and thudded and churned.
He pressed his forehead to hers. Their wet hair tangled. He sighed against her lips.
Rain and hail whipped at the earth in constellations, trigonometries, truths writ in water, truths writ in ice.
Something drew them together, fate or souls or hearts; whatever it was, she wanted to be whole with him, she wanted them pleated within each other, dashed together like the hail and the rain.
She pressed her mouth to his.
He had been right: neither of them was destined for an ordinary sort of love.
She tasted rain and the sweetness of strawberries.
He rested a forearm against the wall behind her.
She ran her hands through his hair and pulled him closer.
The kiss turned passionate. She was alight—bones, nerves, flesh, skin, all awakened.
She was bliss-filled. Endorphin-drunk. Kissing him as hard as he kissed her.
Dizzy, tremulous, alive; she hadn’t been alive until now.
She tried to capture it all in memory, the scent of the storm, the crash and the roar, and him, in his steaming shirt, tasting of late summer—
Then, just as he pushed her against the wall of the grotto, and shells dug into her back, and she wrapped a leg around his waist, her tācn stung.
With effort, Aurienne drew away from Mordaunt and looked at her palm.
It took her a moment to understand what was happening through the fog of feel-good hormones.
A very impatient deofol was asking to come through.
“Frīa, why now?” breathed Aurienne.
Mordaunt, breathing heavily himself, asked, “What is it?”
The deofol buzzed at Aurienne’s tācn again so fiercely it hurt.
“S-sorry,” said Aurienne. “Cath’s deofol. I’d better let it through.”
“You’re joking.”
They pulled apart. Aurienne dragged the dressing gown into a semblance of decency. Mordaunt, red mouthed, tousle haired, backed farther into the grotto as Cath’s deofol, an enormous, impatient wasp, materialised.
“Gods,” said Aurienne, shaking her sore hand. “Will you never learn to be gentle?”
“No,” said the wasp. “Cath’s got an urgent case. Replantation of a severed arm. Patient is a Leyfarer. Tripped next to his craft’s propeller. Will you come?”
Aurienne had no choice. A civilian losing the use of their seith was one thing; a Leyfarer losing his tācn was quite another. “I’ll return to Swanstone at once.”
“Why are you in a cave?” asked the wasp, swivelling her triangular head around.
“I’m—sightseeing,” said Aurienne.
The wasp’s antennae twitched her way and took in her borrowed attire. “And why are you dressed like an auntie with rheumatism?”
“Erm—”
The wasp buzzed closer to Aurienne’s face. “You look like you’ve just been snogged to within an inch of your life.”
“Don’t be silly. Tell Cath I’m on my way.”
“What a perfectly torrid scene,” said the wasp. “I can’t wait to hear the details.”
With a final obnoxious buzz, she spun into nothingness.
Aurienne leaned against the wall of the grotto with a sigh. The sigh came from deep within—not from her lungs, but from disappointment.
Mordaunt reappeared.
“I’m so sorry,” said Aurienne. “I’ve got to go.”
“I know.”
“I can’t be irresponsible, after all.”
“It’s all right.”
“I shouldn’t have done that,” said Aurienne, with a general gesture at everything. The flirting, the kisses, Mordaunt.
“Why did you do it?” he asked.
“Because I would have been miserable if I hadn’t.”
“And what are you now?”
“Miserable anyway,” said Aurienne. “That’s the problem with entertaining things that could never be.”
Mordaunt was pained and silent.
The storm had passed. Rain fell like a curtain of sighs.
They left the nymphaeum, two miserable, unsuitable fools, trudging through mud. They went up the juniper-laden steps and walked towards the house.
They passed the terrace. The hail had stripped the laburnum bare. The tree’s thousands and thousands of blooms lay crushed and damp on the ground, like whipped butterflies.