Yrene✨’s Reviews > The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy > Status Update

Page 353


Fairhrim lay in a bed against the far wall. She was in a deep sleep— the senseless, boneless sleep of one recovering from seith exhaustion.

Her arm hung off the side of the bed. Osric was pleased to discover that the sight of her hand did not, this time, turn him to lewdness. It was bloody with evidence of her Cost. Her täcn shimmered with a glowing pulse now and again as Cinder tried to get through.
His deofol's efforts came to fruition. Fairhrim sighed herself awake, cracked an eye open to stare at her taen, and pointed it at the floor.

Cinder took shape. Fairhrim's cat, seeing the shadow of the great wolf, fled.

In a sleep-cracked voice, Fairhrim muttered, "What?" to Cinder.
"Good evening," said Cinder.
"Hiya," said Osric, given that he was there, too.
Fairhrim's bleary stare turned to Osric's silhouette at the window.
"I wish to awaken from this bad dream," declared Fairhrim. Then, having processed the reality of the situation, she sat up with a jerk.
"Don't touch the window. There are wards—"
"I saw."
"You're mad to have come here." Fairhrim kicked off her sheets.
"Has something happened? Are you all right?"
"I’m fine," said Osric. "But I've made a worrying discovery."

He dismissed Cinder, who dissolved into smoke.
Osric cursed inwardly, because Fairhrim, bereft of all her party accoutrements, her eyes black rimmed with fatigue, her hands crusted over with scabs, was, unfortunately, still beautiful.

When she wasn't sharing a room with him at her parents' house, she slept in a thin, satiny nightdress, which clung to her in interesting ways. Given that her sleeping attire was of no consequence to him, he directed a powerful curiosity towards his knee while she put on a dressing gown. Her hair was pulled into a sleep-frizzed plait that unravelled down her back.

As she approached Osric, wide-eyed in the dark, she looked unusually vulnerable. Something about it made him want to be gentle.

Page 356


Fairhrim recollected something with a jolt. "Gods—-it's been so hectic, I haven't had a chance to send you my deofol with the news."
"What news?"
"I just received the test results for the substance in the bottles from Wellesley Keep."
"And?"
"It was the Pox."
"We knew it."
"We were right. Appallingly, we were right."
"I almost drank it."
"It wouldn't have affected you. It only infects the young." Fairhrim's face was drawn. "I think theyre using the bottles to store the virus. The cellar would be the right temperature. Not sure how they're producing it, or spreading it. But do you know how horrific this is? Do you know how many brain-dead children we're struggling to bring back, quarantined in our wards here? Hundreds. And that's just at Swanstone. There are survivors everywhere, just-surviving, if someone is giving them care. They may never live again, not really."

"Wellesley had entire crates of those bottles in his cellar."
Fairhrim sat up with a sudden combativeness. "Every bottle will soon be useless. Élodie is rolling out an immunisation programme. Our lead virologist," she added, in the face of Osric's blank look.

"It explains so much about the virulence of the Pox outbreak to know that it was deliberately being unleashed. But it also raises a thousand more ques-tions, such as, you know-why anyone would do such a thing. Why would Wellesley trigger an outbreak of an obscure disease that had all but disappeared? To what end? To what possible benefit? And if what Tristane told you is true, it means Wellesley was working for someone else. Someone even more powerful, who blocked all the funding avenues for researchers seeking to stop the spread of the Pox-and who is now furious that my Order sidestepped those blockages. Someone who has now paid millions upon millions to have Tristane herself involved.
Do you know how mad that is? Incomprehensible. Absurd. What's worth this much money?"

"The only thing ever worth this much money—-this many expenditures, this many resources—is war," said Osric.
"What war? Whose war? Wessex and Kent?"
"I know your Order is apolitical, but you need to step outside of your ivory tower occasionally," said Osric. "Take your pick of any two of the Tiendoms sharing a land border. Actually, sharing a border is optional. Throw two darts at a map."
"What war is fought by brain-dead children?" asked Fairhrim.
"I don't know," said Osric.

"I couldn't think of worse soldiers," said Faithrim. "Of what possible utility..? They've no souls left, the poor things—-they're just shells whose biological functions are continuing to—"
Fairhrim cut herself off.
A slow horror dawned on her face. "Mordaunt?"
"What?"
"How-how are Dreor made?"
There was a long silence.
Osric said, "Fuck."

Fairhrim pressed her damaged hands to cheeks gone pale.
It was a night of breath-held, uncanny stillness. The moon, waxing, drew a white path over the flat black sea. There wasn't the slightest shiver of a breeze. Only their talk disturbed the silence, strange whispers passing to and fro, bridging two loyalties; the soft, portentous whispers of something becoming.

"I owe you—we owe you—so many thanks," said Fairhrim. "The only reason Élodie could work on her inoculation project was because of you. We only discovered the Pox bottles because of you. You killed one of your own for the protection of my Order—"
"For you" was Osric's swift correction.
"—and you've just helped me work out, possibly, the why behind this awful plague."

She regarded Osric with a gaze full of wonder.
(Such witchery, such witchery in a pair of bright eyes.)
"Why are you helping me?" asked Fairhrim.
"Someone is going to die at Swanstone, and I can't have it be you," said Osric.

Fairhrim, who could pass the ward at the window unhindered, pressed her fingers to his arm, which sent, as always, a rush through him. There was a time when she had flinched away from touching him at all. "Thank you-truly."

Then, more exhilarating still, she asked, "Are you free Friday next?"

"Why?"
"It's the full moon. And we're going to break into the Færwundor." Osric stared at her in shock. She had been categorical in her refusal.
"You—you're going to do it?"
"You won't let us get caught," said Fairhrim. After a beat, she added,
"I trust you."
The words landed heavily on Osric's chest, ran deep, heightened the exhilaration.

"We've managed to slow your degeneration," continued Fairhrim. “Let's see if we can reverse it. After what you've done, it's the least I can do."

The sparkle in her eyes might have been the stars; it might have been a secret smile.

Osric felt the weight of some doomed and inexpressible truth.
They tarried long at that window, not quite in, and not quite out.
They succumbed to the slow enchantment of a June night. White moths, pale and brilliant in the dark, spun by in shivering constellations, flowed into one another, collapsed in and out of one another, and, whirling upwards, became part of the sky. In the east, clouds gleamed with tomorrow in them.
They talked until the stars went out.

Fairhrim, silver framed in the window, became a focal point: a notan study of light and dark. Unimportant things became important. Her lashes painting their own shadows against her cheeks. Moonlight subliming her hair. Her hand beside Osric's on the windowsill, so close their fingers brushed.
Her touch was an aching, fragile beauty. It was a hinge that swung him into something else. An awareness. An understanding that came in a bursting, ecstatic, agonised thrill.

He and she sat in the moonlight as lover and beloved.
He hadn't paid attention. He had been stupid-gods, so stupid. He no longer owned his heart.