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“Sleep,” said Fairhrim.

She strode towards the door.

“Fairhrim?” called Osric.

“What?”

“What’s an episiotomy scissor?”

“It’s used in childbirth.”

“A scissor? In childbirth? What for?”

“Cutting the perineum, between the vagina and anus.”

Having delivered this newest eight-word horror story, Fairhrim quit the room, taking whatever was left of Osric’s innocence with her.

It was good fun beingFairhrim’s ailing Friend. It obliged her to be kind to him whenever there were others present, which was a nice change, and one he took advantage of (it was unnatural, pleasurably novel). It also provided endless scope to annoy her, while forcing her to keep the most cutting of her remarks to herself.

She disbursed them liberally upon him whenever they were alone, however. That night, feeling considerably better, Osric asked for a Scotch, of the same bottle, preferably, as the one he had been served from the night of the opera. Fairhrim told him that if he was feeling well enough for a Scotch, he could go fetch it himself instead of lying there twitching his mandibles at her like some sort of larva.

Her childhood bedroom held a single bed, the sofa, and the spirit of young Fairhrim. On the walls were botanical plates and framed pages torn from medical texts—illustrations of humans and animals in various states of dissection. (“Yes,” said Fairhrim, when she saw Osric observing them, “I disappointed my mother early by being more interested in the biological sciences than the harder stuff. Too whimsical, she said.”)

There was a balcony at the far end of the room, giving onto the back garden. The favourite activity of Osric’s guests was to come in and throw the curtains open with gasps about the salubriousness of the sun; he stumbled up after they were gone to draw them closed again.

For the benefit of Osric’s visitors, Fairhrim made up a complicated Syndrome that explained his collapse and long recovery. No one questioned her—she was a Haelan, after all—but Radia remarked with asniff that they invented a new Syndrome every day. To explain his constant wearing of gloves to hide a rather telling tacn, Fairhrim declared that he had eczema.

Osric got to know Fairhrim’s parents through their visits to his suite. Radia was a more outgoing version of Fairhrim—intelligent, wry, gleefully critical. She had come to the Tiendoms from the Rif region of Tamazgha as a teenager and earned her tacn—as well as a slight Dublin accent—from the Ingenaut Order a few years thereafter. Osric learned that she was the one responsible for thericheinnouveau riche; she had made her family’s fortune by inventing some sort of tube.

“A compression fitting,” specified Radia, when Osric called it a tube. “Really, Aurienne, are we certain he hasn’t suffered brain damage from his Syndrome?”

Fairhrim’s response was a mere tightening of the mouth.

Anyway, the compression fitting was, apparently, now a part of the irrigation booms used by every farmer in the Tiendoms, and so the tube had made the family.

“Poor creature,” said Radia, standing at the foot of Osric’s bed. “And what about his eczema? Haven’t your lot at Swanstone worked out anything better than a salve and gloves?”

“Treatment takes time,” said Fairhrim. “Short of transplanting a new set of hands on him, there’s nothing to be done but wait.”

“That’s the problem with human beings,” said Radia. “Insufficient spare parts. I’ve noticed a bit of a limp when he walks, too. Have you looked into it?”

Was this what they were doing? Cataloguing what was wrong with him, and why Fairhrim hadn’t fixed it?

“It’s part of his flare-up,” said Fairhrim. “He’ll get better.”

“And mightn’t we do something about those scars?” asked Radia, pointing a dissatisfied finger towards Osric’s face. “Poor man could’ve been handsome if he didn’t have the blueprint for Carn Euny on his face.”

“Mum, kindly stop troubleshooting my guest,” said Fairhrim, steering her mother out of the room.

Fairhrim’s father was a professor of botany. He was a chatty, bookish sort of man, and the master of a large greenhouse that took over most of the back garden. When he discovered that Osric was possessed of moderate intelligence and was too infirm to run away, he adopted him as a personal companion for his afternoon teas, and spent many hours at his bedside discussing algal mats.

From these conversations, Osric discovered that he was one of a series of occasional Friends whom Fairhrim’s parents had met over the years, and that it was expected that he would not be the last. These Friends inevitably made catastrophic errors, such as breathing too loudly, or blinking moistly, or existing, and Fairhrim swept them out of her life as swiftly as she had let them in.

“You’re different to Aurienne’s usual type, though,” said Rosbert. “Bit less tweed on you.”

“Oh?”

“Sugar?”