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Fairhrim pulled an actual children’s book out of her satchel and thrust it in Osric’s direction as though it were a weapon. She snapped it open and leafed through it, her finger pressing into the soft, fanciful illustrations as she went. “Thin places. Between places. Places where the stitches between our world and the Otherworld fray. Crossroads. Places at the edges of things.”

She came to a painting of a sunrise. “And times at the edges, too. Dusk or dawn. Or moments between things—between the calm and the storm, between tidal shifts, between winter and spring. And, of course, the common factor is the full moon, which is when all of the most spectacular of these alleged healings occur—but, for all we know, it’s merely a storytelling flourish.”

“The Stone, though,” said Osric. “That’s real.”

“The Monafyll Stone is far more likely to be capturing belief than a real, observable phenomenon,” said Fairhrim. “I need you to understand the high likelihood of failure if we pursue this so-called course of treatment.”

“Call it an experiment,” offered Osric.

His suggestion was not well received. “This poorly conceived enquiry is not anexperiment. It’s an embarrassment. A credibility killer. A career ender—working illicitly with a Fyren notwithstanding. It’s a disgrace to this.”

Fairhrim held up her tacn. She stared at the swan on her palm as though she were betraying it. “If we had the luxury of a thousand full moons, and a thousand subjects, and a thousand Haelan to heal them, and we could tweak the variables at our leisure, then, perhaps, we could call it an experiment. We can’t call it anything but an—an exploratoryforay. The variables at play are truly staggering. Reproducibility is low to nil.”

Fairhrim’s tense shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch, which was, Osric supposed, her best demonstration of despondency. “I told you that this was nothing but a thought experiment. I was curious. I analysed the available data. But, as they say, rubbish in, rubbish out. Looking back now, I’m shocked that I even entertained it for so long. It was doomed to begin with. Some things can’t be healed.”

“But you’re meant to be a seith-system Phenomenon,” said Osric. “A genius.”

Fairhrim gave him a cool look that informed him that he had offended her. “I am. I can deal with seith lesions, blockages, burst microchannels, wholesale severances. I can heal all seven classes of peripheral seith-fibre injuries. No one can reverse seith rot. But I told you I’d try, so I’ll try. We’ll follow the Old Ways. We’ll go to the places where the boundaries are thin. We’ll find in-between times. And I will try to heal you. And if there’s a grain of truth in those old tales, perhaps we’ll find it.”

Osric never learned. There it was again: the flutter of hope, bouncing up past his heart into his throat.

“Where do we begin?”

Fairhrim switched off the Lovelace engine. “I’ve got a short list of locations—a very short list. Few accounts provide enough geographic detail to allow us to find specific places and retrace the steps of the healers. We’ll begin there. I’d much rather proceed with a plan in mind for all twelve moons, but I think, given the advanced state of your condition, we’ve got no choice but to be rather more ad hoc about it.”

Fairhrim looked pained, as though she had never before been ad hoc about anything and it hurt her to be so now.

She consulted a chart. “The next full moon is six days hence. Let’s meet then. Waystone at the Shaggy Chimera, five thirty. Unless you’ve got a murder in the diary?”

This final question was posed with a blandly naive look, which only added to its piquancy.

“I can reschedule the murder,” said Osric.

Fairhrim appeared to have views on this. However, her attention was drawn to her tacn. She held her palm up, and the arrival of a deofol interrupted any opining. The deofol took the form of a strange-looking salamander.

“Whatisthat?” asked Osric.

“An axolotl,” said Fairhrim.

The shabby, wrinkled deofol perched upon Fairhrim’s shoulder. “Hello, dear,” it croaked. “You’re wanted at Swanstone, quick as you can. An entire orphanage was hit with the Pox.”

Fairhrim leapt towards her satchel and began to pack it. “On my way.”

The axolotl observed Osric with a beady black eye.

“Hello, Onion Boy,” said the axolotl. “Nice tutu.”

“It’s a kilt,” said Osric.

But the axolotl had disappeared, leaving Osric speaking to thin air.

“I would’ve called it a loincloth,” said Fairhrim, whose opinion Osric had certainly not asked for, either.

“That was Xanthe’s deofol, I assume?” asked Osric. “Looks as moth-eaten as she is.”

“Moth-eaten?” repeated Fairhrim. “How dare you? Xanthe is over two hundred years old—”

“How? Did she forget to die?”