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“Fusspot?” said Fairhrim.

They glared at each other, Osric with vast distaste, so that she understood that she was the world’s most trying woman, and Fairhrim with raw opprobrium, which made it clear that she thought him deficient in brains as well as morals.

Fairhrim was unafraid, violently unafraid, daring him to continue. They stood close. That was the thing about war: every clash, every battle, brought each nearer and nearer to the other. Their breaths intermingled, passed thresholds their lips would never cross. The wrongness of it was almost erotic.

There was a flush across Fairhrim’s cheeks. Osric felt himself swallow. Suddenly, the eye was not satisfied with seeing; suddenly, the mouth wished to taste.

No more breaths were exchanged, because neither of them breathed. The scarred moon hung above them. Its light fell softly upon blushing cheeks, softly on the strand of hair that clung to Fairhrim’s lip. Her gaze was darkly brilliant. The wind sent dry lavender petals around them like chaff.

Fairhrim, with a blink, drew back. She recovered her usual impassivity, but there was something brittle about it. She whirled her cloak around herself, threw Osric a final glare, and strode away without a parting word.

Osric let her disappear down the road before following her to the waystone. He took his time; he had a post-Fairhrim malaise he needed to walk off.

There was such witchery in a pair of bright eyes.

Pity they had to be hers.

8

Noblesse Oblige

Aurienne

Of the four hundred children brought into Swanstone over the course of the Platt’s Pox outbreak, the Haelan managed to pull three hundred out of danger. The remaining patients were in Ward 14, formerly the cafeteria, now converted into a ward with a hundred beds. In those beds lay the remaining patients, still in the throes of the brain fever, being kept alive by Haelan dedication and sheer obstinacy.

Emotional regulation was one of Aurienne’s fortes, but as the outbreak raged, her preferred strategies—suppression, compartmentalisation—lost their efficacy. During today’s shift in Ward 14, a little girl no older than four, scab crusted and delirious, clutched at Aurienne’s fingers and brought her to tears. Aurienne glanced about to check that no one was watching, knelt beside the girl’s bed, and pressed a hug into her wasted body.

She must carry on. Others needed her. She took a steadying breath—hlutoform and the sickly scent of sickness invaded her mouth—brushed away her tears, gave the girl’s hand a final press, and carried on to thenext bed. Like a coward, she did not take note of the girl’s patient ID; she didn’t want to notice her absence if she was gone by the time her next shift rolled around.

Aurienne saw signs of fraying in others, too. Lorelei, the head of Paediatrics, was usually obnoxiously cheerful. Today she was hollow eyed and functioning by rote, and reporting to Xanthe with uncustomary dispassion. Xanthe herself, with whom Aurienne shared the shift, simmered with a low fury. She listened to Lorelei’s report as she worked a line of beds. The wrinkled skin at her jowls quivered with the clench of her jaw.

Xanthe was usually explosive. This seething rage troubled Aurienne more than an irritated outburst would have.

Their shift came to its end at seven o’clock in the evening.

“Come,” said Xanthe to Aurienne after they had completed their sanitation protocols. “Let’s get dinner and eat in my office.”

Aurienne and Xanthe made their way to the temporary cafeteria, now housed in a corridor. Aurienne dearly missed the fare at home—tangy salads, her mother’s chicken-stuffed briouates, rfissa fragrant with fenugreek—but seith was best regenerated with heavy, calorie-dense foods, and that was what Swanstone’s kitchens did best. Upon her tray she heaped butter-soaked mushroom pasties, fatty stew, cheeses, and cream tarts.

Xanthe’s office was a pleasant low-ceilinged room on the ground floor of Swanstone’s south end. In the daytime it was flooded with sun; in the nighttime it was lit by a wide hearth; at all times there was reliably a kettle singing within. Aurienne cleared a seat for herself on an ottoman partially interred beneath journals on tissue engineering, limb regeneration, and the treatment of end organ failure. Xanthe almost disappeared into the folds of an armchair, her tray upon her bony knees.

“There’s fuckery at work,” declared Xanthe.

She traded Aurienne a stack of letters for the journal on organ failure.

“What are these?” asked Aurienne.

“I asked colleagues around the Tiendoms to confirm whether any of them had received adequate funding for inoculation development. Four months into this outbreak—thousands of infected children across the Tiendoms—and no one has received anything of substance. Not us, not the universities, not any of the research groups. This in spite of multiple increasingly strident pleas.”

“I was prepared to blame incompetence, but I believe we’ve now moved on to cruelty,” said Aurienne. “I suppose it’s because the Pox is only affecting the most impoverished children—the ones not ‘worth’ putting money into?”

Xanthe aggressively bit a pickle. “You’d think that, with ten bloody kings and queens jostling for supremacy round here, there would be at least one for whomnoblessewouldoblige?”

“They aren’t French enough,” said Aurienne.

“That’s the problem. We ought to have let the French have their bloody Norman Conquest and be done with it. But no. We beat them back. And now, eight centuries later, here we are, with ten petty kingdoms, and ten clowns in charge, instead of a Noblesse-Obliging Frenchy.” Xanthe ate a piece of cheese and added, “We’d have better Brie, too.”

Aurienne flicked through the letters from Xanthe’s contacts. Each confirmed receipt of the most nominal sums in support of inoculation development.