49 pages • 1-hour read
The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy
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Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain descriptions of violent death, child illness, child death, sexual content, sexual harassment, physical abuse, child abuse, and graphic violence.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Irresistible Bastard Meets Immovable Bitch: Osric”
Osric Mordaunt, a seith (magic) user and an assassin of the Fyren Order, looks over a daguerreotype of Aurienne Fairhrim, the only Haelan (healer) who is capable of healing him of seith rot, a deadly illness in which the seith channels in a person’s body degenerate and die. However, Haelans refuse to treat Fyren assassins like Osric on principle, since the two Orders hold ethical systems that are polar opposites. According to the physickers that Osric consulted, he only has a few months left before he loses his seith completely. If this becomes known to the rest of the Fyren Order, they will kill him because they do not tolerate weak members. The physickers leave after unknowingly drinking a draught to forget their encounter.
Osric dispatches his attendant, Mrs. Parson, to find Aurienne’s weakness so that he will have some leverage in the negotiations. Days later, Mrs. Parsons returns with her findings and advises him to donate a large sum to fund the Haelans’ research for a cure for the Platt’s Pox epidemic that is raging across the land. Osric reluctantly agrees.
Because Aurienne is ensconced in Swanstone fortress and protected by Wardens (the Order of paladins) Osric must use his shadow-walking skills to access Aurienne’s empty office undetected. He passes by several wards of sick children as he goes. As he waits for her, he deliberately gives himself a sinister appearance. When she enters, she mistakes him for the new undertaker. Osric awkwardly corrects her and asks for her help, but she refuses. He then attempts to bribe her with 20 million thrysmas. They argue, and Osric threatens to kidnap her. Just as he is about to act on his threat, Haelan Xanthe, Swanstone’s director, enters with complaints that every monarch has refused to help fund the creation of a vaccine against the Pox. When she takes note of Osric’s proposal, she demands that he make an anonymous donation to their Order to fight the Pox. Despite Aurienne’s many objections, Xanthe agrees to have Aurienne heal Osric to the best of her abilities. Grudgingly, Aurienne links her deofol (her animal familiar) with Osric’s so that they can communicate. Upon learning that Osric is a Fyren, she is disgusted. Osric returns to his home, Rosefell Hall, where he instructs Mrs. Parsons to sell enough valuables to fetch 20 million in gold, but he reassures her that he will steal it back after he is cured.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Aurienne Wishes Death Upon Her New Patient: Aurienne”
Aurienne is appalled that she has to demean herself to help Osric, but as she helps with an influx of Pox patients, she recognizes that Osric’s money will be vital to finding a vaccine, as no one else has offered to fund this research. She arrives at the ward and finds chaos, as the hospitals are already full and patients are being diverted to the Haelan fortress. The virulence of the Pox is unprecedented and affects only children. For days, Aurienne and her colleagues work tirelessly on the new patients. As promised, Osric makes his donation on Friday. Soon, Osric’s deofol comes through Aurienne’s connection to him and gives her directions to meet at the Gogmagog waystone at midnight. Furious at the lack of forewarning, Aurienne makes her way past the Wardens by lying about her destination. She arrives at the Gogmagog and finds Osric.
When she meets Osric, they climb a hill to an abandoned barn, bickering at length. Eventually, Aurienne uses her seith to make an initial diagnosis of Osric’s condition; this requires flesh-to-flesh contact. When he removes his shirt, she finds an extensive amount of scarring and sees that a burst fracture on his cervical spine led compromised his internal seith system. She learns that he obtained the injury during training; Osric has experienced fluctuations in his seith ever since. Aurienne confirms that he has an advanced case of seith rot, for which there is no known cure. Osric obstinately cites her old research into possible treatment through the Old Ways of healing. Aurienne dismisses her old theory’s validity, but Osric wants to try it. Seeing an opportunity to pursue her old hypothesis, Aurienne rationalizes her guilt about experimenting on Osric by telling herself that he is just a morally bankrupt Fyren. She agrees to attempt the healing and demands that they meet at her Order’s various clinics to gain a better understanding of his condition.
Later, Aurienne meets Xanthe and explains this new development. While Aurienne intends to simply go through the motions, Xanthe insists that she take the assignment seriously, reasoning that because the arrangement is secret, they won’t need to go through an ethics board to seize this opportunity to experiment.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Onion Boy, His Travails and Misfortunes: Osric”
After a week, Osric receives a visit from Aurienne’s deofol just as he is murdering a minor Wessexian lord. Her deofol instructs him to meet Aurienne immediately at a clinic for acute buttock folliculitis. Disgruntled, Osric meets her there. After some bickering, they reach a tense agreement to be considerate of each other’s respective schedules. Amid their bantering over his looks, Osric is surprised to realize that Aurienne isn’t more fearful of him. She installs machinery to assess his seith system, determining when his injured spine was healed, the healers damaged his seith channels in the process. They speak of the growing numbness in his limbs. Aurienne points out the extensive damage and explains that no one currently has the ability to revive dead seith channels. The only reason Osric can still use his seith is because his tācn (the mark of his Order, which helps him to channel his magical abilities) is located on his left hand, while most of the dead seith channels are on his right hand.
Aurienne implants markers in his system to better assess his progressive degeneration. She explains that her theory on the Old Ways hinges on the Monafyll Stone, a 500-year-old artifact containing a lunar cycle, a healing path, and instructions written in fairy languages. Aurienne reiterates that attempting this healing path is a fool’s errand, but Osric has no other alternative and wants to try it. She explains that they need to be in specific places where the boundary between their world and the Otherworld is thin. They must also meet at specific times, such as like dusk, dawn, or during the full moon. She instructs him to meet her again in six days, during the full moon at the Shaggy Chimera. Just then, Xanthe’s deofol (an axolotl) comes through and requests that Aurienne return to Swanstone immediately to help with the arrival of an entire orphanage of Pox-ridden children. Osric makes a dismissive remark about leaving him to take care of “invalids,” and Aurienne takes offense.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Aurienne Suffers in Nature: Aurienne”
Aurienne recalls that she was tricked into becoming the director of the Swanstone’s Centre for Seith Research when the leaders of her Order threatened to appoint the incompetent Haelan Murdock-Biddle in her stead. Since taking on the role, she has had to deal with more administrative busywork than actual research. Days after her meeting with Osric, she guides the apprentices who are working on her current study on seith channel trauma.
On the night of the full moon, she goes to the Shaggy Chimera waystone, where the edge of a pool allegedly has curative properties. When Osric arrives with blood on his clothes, he boasts about the details of his recent kill. Appalled, she waits for sundown; Osric comments that the place does not feel “thin.” When the sun reaches the skyline, Osric removes his neckcloth, and Aurienne pushes her seith into him. When she withdraws it, however, there is no change in his condition. Osric begs her to try again, and Aurienne eventually relents and mentions a hot spring with a history of healing in Kentigern. As they leave and take a waystone to travel to the Randy Unicorn pub, Osric insinuates that he has a history with that pub.
Chapter 5 Summary: “They Quarrel Again: Aurienne”
Aurienne goes with Osric to the spa town of Kentigern, where she discovers that the Randy Unicorn is a brothel. When Aurienne hesitates, Osric accuses her of prudishness, but she mentions that she often works with sex workers. When they enter, Aurienne is accosted by a gentleman before following Osric to the baths. They are instructed to disrobe before entering the thermal baths, and after they shower, Aurienne cannot help but notice Osric’s proportions, which she deems “not objectionable.”
In the thermal baths, a sign warns them not to have sex. The graffiti beneath it wryly states that a man named Scrope has already ejaculated here. Disgusted but resigned, Aurienne follows Osric to the furthest bath. Osric enters, but Aurienne believes it is too unsanitary. Though neither believes that the thermal baths are a “thin” place, Aurienne still attempts to inject her seith into Osric, but the procedure fails once again. Desperately, Osric demands the identity of the disgraced philologist who helped to develop the theory of this healing, but Aurienne chastises him for his high expectations. They quibble and quarrel, infuriating each other and Aurienne leaves him alone in the bath.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
In this section, Knightley aligns her narrative structure with the conventions of the romantasy genre by utilizing two specific third-person, limited perspectives that alternately reveal Osric and Aurienne’s inner thoughts. With the shifts in perspective noted through chapter headings, the interwoven chapters allow the author to trace the developments of the well-worn enemies-to-lovers trope. In these first chapters, Knightley specifically emphasizes the “enemies” portion of the trope by focusing on the pair’s hostile, contemptuous thoughts toward one another. For instance, after Aurienne diagnoses Osric, her private monologue celebrates the fact that he is “on his way to a horrid, drawn-out death (48). She then realizes, “No. Mordaunt was a Fyren. A drawn-out death wasn’t in the cards. […] His own kind would make short work of him well before the disease did. Which meant one less killer for hire terrorising the populace. Excellent” (48). Upon realizing that his disease has essentially condemned him to execution by his own Order, Aurienne shows not a single scrap of concern for his welfare, and her uncompromising attitude contradicts the gentle, helpful image of her healing order, thereby illustrating The Blurred Line between Good and Evil. Likewise, Osric is equally displeased with Aurienne’s indifference, and he privately thinks that she would be “far more tolerable dead” (72). In this way, the initial stages of the pair’s relationship essentially define their metaphorical battle lines, establishing a baseline of mutual hostility that will eventually dissolve into mutual regard.
As these opening scenes indicate, Osric’s bloody occupation and questionable moral alignment give him the trappings of a villain and hint at his eventual ascension to the role of a classic antihero. In the novel’s early chapters, both his profession and his swaggering attitude are intended to contrast with Aurienne’s relative piety and conscientious adoption of mainstream societal notions about good and evil. Unlike Aurienne, Osric is not someone who naturally acts for the good of others, and his ghoulish lack of remorse over his kills highlights his blithely amoral outlook on the world. A prime example of his attitude can be seen when he boasts of eating his victim’s food after killing the man. As he tells Aurienne, “He’d hardly touched it. What? What’s the matter? Have you mistaken me for someone respectable?” (79). Thus, if Osric’s fortunes were not linked to Aurienne’s through the shared venture of trying to find a cure for his deadly case of seith rot, Osric might well have played the part of an outright antagonist. In the beginning, only his illness and imminent demise prevent him from being Aurienne’s fated enemy. However, despite his devil-may-care attitude toward other people’s lives, the novel does foreshadow Osric’s potential for significant growth via his growing affinity with the healer who vexes him so intensely.
While Osric extravagantly displays his moral depravity, this section also acknowledges that the blurred line between good and evil can easily apply to Aurienne as well. Although she works to effect good in the world, her harsh interactions with Osric complicate the simplistic idea that she is wholly “good.” Specifically, her indifference to Osric’s plight combines with her sneaking desire to see “one less killer for hire terrorising the populace” (48), and these bitter thoughts directly contradict the Haelan motto of “harm to none” (77). Even the motto gives rise to an ethical dilemma around the specific definition of “harm.” The very essence of the wording implies that Aurienne should not wish any harm done to Osric despite his career path. In this context, her reluctance to treat him with nothing more than bare-minimum diagnoses can potentially be considered “harm”—the kind that arises from inaction. Conversely, she also knows that curing Osric would result in indirect harm, given that he would then continue to kill others as part of his profession. This example is just one of the many unresolved dilemmas that Knightley poses during the course of the novel, leaving the reader with the burden of deciding how best to answer.
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