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“Oh? Does training involve being bludgeoned by a sledgehammer?”

“A maul, rather.”

“Barbaric,” said Aurienne.

Mordaunt shrugged. “Valuable lessons were learned.”

“I thought those brutish training methods had been outlawed by the Peace Accords,” said Aurienne.

“I’ll let you advise my warchief of that. She’d be delighted to hear your input.”

“How long since the initial injury?” asked Aurienne.

“A few months.”

“And you’ve only just begun to feel the impact on your seith?”

“Yes. Fluctuations in the past weeks. I’ve had the best physickers available look at it—save for your Order’s precious experts, of course.”

“They’ve already told you the fractures at your neck didn’t heal as they should’ve? And that the injury damaged your seith system?”

“Yes. They said it’s seith rot.”

“It is. An advanced case.” Aurienne touched at the diagnostic image, illuminating parts of it in brighter white. “Fascinating. And incurable.”

In the glow of the diagnostic schema, Mordaunt’s jaw clenched. “The physickers said you’d be able to help.”

“You were lied to,” said Aurienne. “I suppose they fancied keeping their heads, given your Order’s reputation, so they threw you the most tentative of lifelines and scurried away. Seith degeneration isn’t curable.”

“They said you dabbled in the Old Ways,” said Mordaunt.

Aurienne held back a scoff. Was that what this was about? Was that stupid venture still haunting her? Ridiculous.

“No one dabbles in the Old Ways,” said Aurienne. “I’ve got—I had—an interest in some folklore, nothing more.”

“They said you presented something at one of the universities.”

Aurienne made a note to find Fordyce and Shuttleworth and make them suffer for their idiocy. “I didn’t present anything. I discussed the most nascent of ideas, informally, with colleagues. Did Fordyce and Shuttleworth mention that this was ten years ago?”

“Tenyears?”

“Yes. It was nothing but a flight of fancy, when I was an inexperienced Haelan only just starting out. I didn’t even have a working hypothesis. I abandoned the idea long ago. We’re talking about fairy tales.”

“What was the flight of fancy?” asked Mordaunt.

“An integration of the Old Ways into modern healing practice. If it’s the Old Ways you’re interested in, I can give you a list of thirty academics far more versed in them than I. You can go kidnap them.”

“Are they looking at applications for curing seith rot?”

“No,” said Aurienne. “And neither am I. It was nothing but a thought experiment. An intellectual exercise. A scholarly fantasy at best. Are you seriously telling me you’d subject yourself to an unproven course of treatment informed by the worst parts of folk medicine and wishful thinking?”

A person of moderate intelligence would say no in response to this dire assessment. An imbecile would say yes.

“Yes,” said Mordaunt.

Aurienne pursed her lips in the face of this unsurprising confirmation. “Our agreement was for me to heal you to the best of my ability—which does not, I assure you, mean the clinical application of fairy tales.”

“What can you do, then?” asked Mordaunt.