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He was tall, but she was tall, too, and found the back of his neck an easy reach. Setting aside her disgust at wasting seith on so vile a creature again, she pressed her tacn to his skin.

Like the rest of him, the skin at Mordaunt’s nape was marred. On the diagonal, Aurienne felt the ropiness of a long ridge of scar tissue—the mark of a whip, if she were to guess. Then there was the messiness where the maul had hit him to create the injury that had so damaged his seith system.

Her tacn glowed white between her fingers as she summoned her seith. Mordaunt stood rigid, tense, anticipatory.

Aurienne followed her seith into him and travelled the damaged lines of his seith channels. Deep into his seith system she pushed, through his brachial line into the intercostal, into the subcostal, into the lumbar, and down into the sacral plexus. She lingered longest where the degeneration had set in, at splitting myelin sheaths and deteriorating nodes, along seith channels that were little more than necrotised furrows.

The sun hovered at the edge of the horizon and was, for a moment, both under it and over it, and, for a moment, it was neither day nor night.

The earth tilted. The sun found its vanishing point.

And Aurienne’s seith—and all her years of experience, and her finesse, and her control—did nothing at all.

She withdrew from Mordaunt and blinked herself back into the world, into an evening of pale violet.

The full moon had risen.

Mordaunt rubbed at the back of his neck. “Should I feel—different?”

“It didn’t work,” said Aurienne flatly.

Failure—and embarrassment at having tried something as stupid as this—made her callous. She’d been right. Nothing to be found here but a loss of time and temper.

“It was just like every other attempt at healing seith rot,” said Aurienne. “You can’t bring dead things back to life.”

Mordaunt’s jaw was clenched. He had done worse than her: he had hoped in earnest, and his disappointment was all the harsher. He tied his neckcloth on and drew his hood over his head. Now only his mouth was visible, pulled down in a bitter line.

“You thought it’d be that easy?” asked Aurienne.

“With the right combination of place and time and Haelan, I was foolish enough to cherish a hope.”

“This process is going to involve a lot of trial and error,” said Aurienne. “Mostly error. You’d better get used to it.”

Mordaunt was distraught and sulky. To be fair to him—not that he deserved fairness, but Aurienne could be generous—he was going to die.

“Mightn’t we make another attempt tonight?” asked Mordaunt. “While the moon is full?”

“The data favours sunset as the best time for this particular moon,” said Aurienne. “Anything else will be a waste of time. Not that this wasn’t already a waste of time.”

“Surely twenty million thrymsas buys me a measly second attempt,” said Mordaunt. “Indulge me with one more imposition on your time.”

“And squander my seith again? I think not. We can both find better ways to spend the evening.”

Aurienne turned towards the waystone, intent on regaining Swanstone and leaving Mordaunt to his doomed hopes.

Gloved fingers caught her sleeve.

Mordaunt, abandoning, with evident pain, all dignity, said, “Please.”

Above them hung the full moon—ghastly, beautiful, uplit by the dead sun.

A solitary raven made an arcing trajectory across the sky.

Xanthe had told Aurienne to give the thing a real go.

She had enough seith.

In the face of her unyielding silence, Mordaunt salvaged the shreds of his dignity; his face closed, his earnestness disappeared. He pulled his cowl over his face, became a thing of shadow, and turned away.