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Harrow led the two of them back to the Ninth’s quarters in total silence. Fair enough. Gideon didn’t even question it when, rather than use one of the five gazillion bones already in the room for so-called ambiance, Harrow tossed a knuckle out of her pocket and created at least a dozen skeletons to stand guard around them. Paranoia wasn’t a terrible idea these days.
Then one of the skeletons walked into the bathroom.
It seemed like the set-up to some terrible joke, but before Gideon could even begin to come up with a punchline, another skeleton reached under Harrow’s bed and pulled out a small pail of unknown contents. Harrow followed the first skeleton into the bathroom, while the pail skeleton followed Harrow. Gideon, for lack of a better idea, followed all three of them.
It was a spacious bathroom, but less so with burly skeletons hulking on either side of the toilet. Gideon stood outside, peering through the doorway. Harrow was crouching near the side of the tub, hands shaking as she attempted to empty the contents of the pail. Whatever it was, it was white, but unlike bones, it didn’t clatter. Then, inexplicably, Harrow started to run the bath.
The smell of salt filled the room as the emptied pail’s contents met the water from the tap, solving exactly one mystery, and not a particularly useful one at that. Harrow stood and then turned to face Gideon.
“The time has come to tell you everything,” Harrowhark said, unhooking her robe and letting it puddle out into the dusty corners of the floor.
“Great,” said Gideon hysterically. “So what the hell are we doing in the bathroom?”
“Get in the tub, Nav.”
Before she realized what she was doing, Gideon had unhooked her robe, unbuckled her rapier, and taken off precisely one shoe. Then a high-pitched screeching started in the back of her mind, not unlike the sound of bone on bone, or of an elevator lift about to catch on fire. She teetered there, balanced on one socked foot.
“No,” Gideon managed to say, and then, in clipped syllables between her body’s renewed efforts to hyperventilate, “Why? Are you going to get in the tub?”
“Yes,” her necromancer said. “Believe me, Griddle, I am not here to watch you bathe.”
“Harrow,” Gideon said, finding her voice again as she circled so far back into shock that she came out the other side. “Did you stab me on the way here? Am I dead? Or did I just hear you say that you’re here to take a bath with me?”
“I must do honor to the traditions of the Ninth,” Harrow said with what would have been grim determination if not for the increasingly desperate turn in her mouth.
Gideon might have never honestly cavaliered a day in her her life, but she still didn’t think that this was anywhere in the dusty book of cavalier rituals that she’d never bothered to read, or even in any of the thousands of other dusty books of rituals that she’d never bothered to read. Communal bathing was not the way of the Ninth, unless you considered the human fat in the Ninth’s soaps to be a person, which Gideon did not.
“I must respect the legacy and wishes of my parents,” Harrow added.
As if that added any clarity whatsoever to the situation. As if Harrow’s shitty mummified parents were ever what she wanted to be thinking about, let alone when she was in the bath.
“You can leave your clothes on,” Harrow said at last, so quietly that it was almost a whisper, so quietly that it nearly obscured the telltale pitch of a subtle beg.
And, shit, Gideon was blushing. Blushing at the fact that until that moment she had not even considered taking off the rest of her clothes, and, oh fuck, she sure was now that she’d been told not to. Before she could do something profoundly stupid, she kicked off her other boot, cast off her robe, and stalked past Harrow and the toilet skeletons.
Gideon got in the tub. Warm water splashed around her ankles and calves, and then sopped through her clothes and underwear as she sat down. Memories of the last time she’d stepped in this tub, properly nude and not being watched by Harrow and skeletons and apparently Harrow’s parents, flashed tauntingly in her mind. This sucked.
Harrow, unfortunately not taking her eyes off Gideon, ducked out of the bathroom to retrieve the rapier Gideon had unceremoniously tossed outside the door. With both hands, she dragged the blade across the floor even more unceremoniously, making an awful scratching sound on the marble tiles, until the sword leaned on the wall directly below the sink.
“Hey, Nonagesimus, I just want you to know, much as I would absolutely take a bath with my longsword, the rapier super doesn’t need to be over here.” If she was being given a choice, Gideon would still absolutely take the rapier over Harrow, for pretty much any meaning of take, but that went without saying.
“It’s for protection,” Harrow said. Then Harrow was in motion.
Gideon, whose sulking always tended towards the physically spacious, quickly drew her waterlogged legs toward her chest in a fit of panic, kicking a splash of water towards her own face. She coughed and sputtered, tasting a lovely meal of face paint seasoned with salt, and watched in abject horror as her necromancer put one foot in the water, then another, and then promptly fell on her ass.
Okay, the last part wasn’t horrifying. If it wasn’t for getting kicked in the shin on the way down it might have even been funny.
Before Gideon could say anything, Harrow scuttled away into the far side of the bathtub and folded in on herself like a traumatized piece of paper. Harrow was, as usual, phenomenally puny. By Gideon’s rough estimates, you could fit at least three Harrows in an empty tub. More if you somehow got the Harrows to agree to touch each other.
Gideon politely kept her knees against her body, leaving a solid foot of space between the two of them. Despite literally everyone’s best efforts, they were still connected by the water itself, its circulation marked by the gross flecks of face paint that drifted between them. Ew.
“I’m going to ask again,” Gideon said. “Why are we sitting in a bathtub?”
“The Ninth House has a secret, Nav,” said Harrow. “Only my family knows of it. And even we could never discuss it, unless—this was my mother’s rule—we were immersed in salt water. We kept a ceremonial pool for the purpose, hidden from the rest of the House. It was cold and deep and I hated every moment I was in it. But my mother is dead, and I find now that—if I really am to betray my family’s most sacred trust—I am obliged at the least to keep, intact, her rule. This—the tub, the salt, the water—was the best option I had.”
Gideon thought on this for a while, performing the same feverish inventory of Canaan House that Harrow must have done. She considered pots in the kitchens and basins in the lyctor labs, all just as small as their current situation, if not smaller. She considered the grimy chemical pit next to the training room, still filled with foul-smelling slime. She considered—Oh.
“This whole house is surrounded by water. You know that, right?” Gideon’s hysteria was back, because after a few blessed moments of almost making sense, Harrow was apparently back to being so cryptically thick that she didn’t notice an entire planet’s worth of water. “Big, cold, dark, salty water, probably full of monsters? Did I mention big?”
“Hundreds of meters below us, not to mention under the watchful eyes of the Emperor and his myriad of stellar outposts,” Harrow said dismissively. “I considered it at first, I will admit. But our privacy, above all else, must be ensured.”
“Funny, because I’m not feeling that privacy right now,” said Gideon, though maybe Harrow felt more privacy because of the whole thing where she was scrunched into the corner of the bathtub, glittering black eyes watching Gideon with some inscrutable expression. Gideon hated inscrutable expressions.
“Regardless, we should have done this sooner,” Harrow said, which was one hell of a statement. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, Griddle. I mean simply that if I had told you my suspicions about Septimus’s meat-puppet on the first day, none of this would have happened.”
“The first day?”
And with that, it was anger time. As far as anger times went, this one sucked, because Harrow was right there, smirking some little imperious smirk about how good she was at deceiving people about corpses, and they were still connected by a foot of water, and the goddamn water wasn’t even boiling or flashing red or anything, it was just sitting there, placidly, its own water variant of an imperious smirk.
“You’re telling me you knew he was dead from day one? And, what, you didn’t tell me because you wanted to get the mood lighting just right for your little murder party smugfest bath? You killed someone, Harrow. Where the hell are your priorities?”
“I didn’t kill him,” Harrow said. “He was already dead.”
“Death first to vultures and scavengers, my dick,” said Gideon. “But I’m not just talking about Mr. Corpsebag. You sent two children into the facility to get fucked up by a huge bone creature. To look for a guy who was in a box in your closet the whole time.”
Harrow exhaled, sending tiny ripples across the surface of the tub.
“I panicked,” she said. “At the time, it seemed that the primary dangers were Sextus and Septimus. I took it upon myself to watch over them, confident that the teenagers, whatever else may have been said of them, would not challenge you in a necromantic duel. I even thought it elegant.”
“You could have told me you were freaking out. If you told me Septimus’s cavalier was five bags of flesh in a mummy suit—”
“I didn’t have evidence, Nav!”
“You had his head in a box!” Gideon threw up her hands in the air. This was a bad move. It sent an arc of water into the space between them, giving her a blissful half-second where she didn’t have to look at Harrow’s face.
“Well, yes,” Harrow said, in a way that made Gideon want to shout some more. “I didn’t have evidence that you would take that as anything other than an act of bad faith against the Seventh, that you wouldn’t go straight to Septimus with everything you thought you’d learned. I wanted to wait until I could give you something irrefutable. I had reason to believe that you would trust her more than you trusted me.”
Gideon contorted her face into exactly what she thought of Harrow’s irrational grudge. Then she found herself, like a fucking idiot, concocting imagined scenarios to make Harrow even more jealous, if that was how this was going to be. Something with a romance novel dropped into bathwater strewn with rose petals, and oh, Gideon the Ninth, won’t you be a dear and fetch it for me, and, hey, look at that, Nonagesimus, you aren’t the only one who can do bathtub confession time. Heat traveled up her cheeks, joining the blush that she’d been staunchly ignoring for however long this had all been going on. Her face hurt. This was stupid.
“I did not want to alienate you more than I already had. And then it seemed as though—we were on a more even footing,” said Harrow at last. She was stumbling in a way that Gideon had never seen, a way quite unlike the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House. Between words, her trembling fingers sloughed off huge chunks of facepaint. “Our—we— It was too tenuous to risk. And then…”
Too tenuous to risk. “Harrow,” Gideon said slowly, thoughts of Dulcinea forgotten, “if I hadn’t gone to Palamedes—and I nearly didn’t go to Palamedes—I would have waited for you here, with my sword drawn, and I would have gone for you. I was so convinced you were behind everything. That you’d killed Jeannemary and Isaac. Magnus and Abigail.”
“I didn’t—I don’t—I never have,” said Harrow, “and—I know.”
“You would have killed me.”
“Or vice versa.”
Startled into silence, Gideon drifted into the uneasy realization that, for the moment, there was nothing left to say. Harrow, speaking and stumbling, had seemed vulnerable, nothing like the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House. Now, without words as well as without paint, Harrow was rapidly becoming something even more uncharacteristic: a living human body, inches from Gideon’s own.
Gideon had been this close to Harrow’s body before, closer even. A list of those times was rattling around in her brain already, complete with ratings, absolutely unasked for. I carried her up a ladder, her bone corset poked me in the shoulder, 3/10. She carried me up a ladder, how the fuck did she manage that, 7/10 for effort. I gave her a hug, two innocent children died, 0/10. But this was different.
Hemmed in by the unyielding walls of the tub, mere paces away from where either one of them might have killed the other that very day, Gideon couldn’t help but feel connection thrumming through the air and water between them. She wasn’t dead. Harrow wasn’t dead. They were sitting in a bathtub.
Her entire body was tingling with something between excitement and protest. She had forgotten how to move, forgotten how to do anything other than put every ounce of strength and concentration towards not moving.
Belatedly, she realized this applied to her eyes too, locked with Harrow’s for some unspeakable amount of time. She exhaled, more shakily than she would have liked, and wrenched her gaze away to a particularly grimy patch of mold on the ceiling. She told herself that this was more or less the same thing as looking at Harrow anyway.
The moment passed, but the silence stretched on.
Finally, Gideon found herself asking: “What do you know about the conditioner pathogen that bumped off all the kids—the one that happened when I was little, before you were born?”
“I am undone without you,” said Harrow, much later.
Gideon knew what to do. She stood up, letting the salt water flow off her shoulders in a dirty waterfall. She stepped out of the tub, dripping all over the robes on the floor. She extended a hand to the unblinking shadow in the corner of the tub.
“This isn’t the place,” said Gideon. “Come with me.”
She was rewarded for her efforts. Both of Harrow’s hands latched on to her like claws, nearly wrenching her wrist out of its socket, as if Harrow was hanging off a much greater chasm than the lip of a bathtub. Her necromancer stumbled to her feet.
Gideon gathered up her rapier, Harrow marshaled her skeletons. They donned the dripped-on robes on the floor for a semblance of warmth. Neither of them bothered to drain the mucky water still rippling in their wake back in the tub.
In the main room, Harrow’s eyes furtively darted between Gideon’s rapier and the mass of blankets on the necromantic bed, neither of which were part of the plan. When Harrow saw that they were exiting the quarters entirely, she silently raised two more skeletons.
They left a trail of water to the kitchens, meeting nobody along the way, saying absolutely nothing. Behind an unassuming door in a room full of pots, Gideon finally found what she was looking for: a rattling lift smelling strongly of fish, its lower half crusted over with salt. Harrow, without any need for indication from Gideon, stepped inside. Gideon followed, a perfect half-step behind.
On the ride down, there were several moments where it seemed that Gideon’s flair for the dramatic had doomed them both. The lift, probably not used by anyone wearing flesh for the past ten thousand years, squealed and ratcheted down the length of the tower, weathered stone passing so close to the cage that Gideon could have reached out and touched it, if she’d been in the mood to lose a finger.
As they drew closer to the water, Gideon lifted her gaze upward. The stars were out tonight in full force. Good. In deference to Harrow, she wouldn’t talk about anything that had transpired upstairs, not here, not in words. But if there was anyone out there watching, then they deserved to bear witness to what Gideon was going to do. The whole damn universe deserved to know that Harrow was forgiven, even if they could never know what for.
The lift reached a screeching halt a foot above the water’s surface. Gideon wrapped her arms around Harrow Nonagesimus. She stepped off the platform and the whole world went dark and cold, bitterly cold. This was nothing like the tepid discomfort of the tub, but Harrow was still there, a beacon of warmth in her arms, limp and peaceful. Gideon squeezed her more tightly.
This was enough for Harrow to realize that she was being hugged. She began to thrash as though her fingernails were being ripped from their beds. Salt water entered Gideon’s throat, freezing all the way down the back of her esophagus. Gideon did not let go, no matter how many times this happened.
They ended up huddled together in the rusty corner of the lift, chilled to every single one of their bones. Gideon peeled Harrow’s head off her shoulder by the hair and beheld it. She pressed her mouth to the place where Harrow’s nose met the bone of her frontal sinus, and the sound that Harrow made embarrassed them both.
“One flesh, one end, bitch," said Gideon confidentially.
The Ninth House necromancer flushed nearly black. Gideon tilted her head up and caught her gaze: “Say it, loser.”
“One flesh—one end,” Harrow repeated fumblingly, and then could say no more.