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It is a truth universally known that an heir to a house in possession of good bone magic must be in want of a wife.
“Griddle,” said Gideon’s necromancer to her one day, “have you heard that the Necrolord is coming to Drearburh?”
Gideon replied that she had not, and idly thought about how she would like to be literally anywhere other than Harrow’s dull-ass study.
“But he is,” returned Harrow; “for a notice has arrived.” A hint of reproach entered her voice. “You would have known if you had not spent the entire day hacking at things with your sword.”
Gideon made a rude gesture, and did not otherwise reply.
“Do you not want to know of his visit?” cried Harrow impatiently.
“You’re going to tell me anyway.”
This was invitation enough. Harrow took a deep breath and launched into a rapid-fire speech that Gideon was quick to tune out. She eyed Harrow’s skeletons instead, and imagined how she would smash the left one to bits—first the tibia and fibula in half, then the femur, then the pelvis and a quick cleave to the ribcage to top it all off. Having finished this exercise, she took a moment to ascertain that Harrow was still talking, offered a vague nod at Harrow’s narrowed eyes, and proceeded to imagine dismantling the skeleton at Harrow’s left. She was halfway through the process—tibia, femur, ulna and radius—when Harrow’s words reasserted themselves in her brain. “—so of course I must marry you once.”
Gideon paused. Narrowed her eyes. What,” quoth she, “the fuck.”
***
A short while later found Gideon nursing a smarting shinbone from an erstwhile attempt to reach the door, while Harrow reattached the left skeleton’s tibia in stony lipped silence. “You weren’t listening,” she bit out.
“Nope,” Gideon said. She morosely poked her shin. Fuck, this was going to bruise.
“The Necrolord is coming to Drearburh.”
“Yeah, I got that part.”
Harrow pursed her lips, which had already been quite pursed. “My parents—"
“—Are very, very dead. Why is this a problem? Can’t you just puppet them out, have them give a wave or two, and be done with it?”
Harrow’s eyes flashed. “He is the Necrolord,” she hissed. “He is the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death. He will know in an instant. And then I too will be very very dead.”
“And the world will be a better place.”
Harrow did not dignify this with the response that Gideon felt it deserved. Instead, she began to pace the length of the room, gesticulating with her hands. “But! If my parents tragically die while he is en-route, and I am safely enthroned by the time he arrives, everything will be above board.”
Gideon considered the idea. “This all sounds like a plausible if horrifyingly amoral plan,” she said at last, somewhat grudgingly. “But why is marriage involved?”
“There’s a clause in the house charter,” Harrow said stiffly. “An heir may only ascend to reverendhood if they are lawfully wedded beforehand.”
“That’s some three-centuries-ago bullshit,” Gideon said, because it was. “It is also spectacularly, incredibly, absolutely not my problem.” On that note, she turned towards the door and grasped the doorknob, intent on a dramatic exit.
The door didn’t open.
Behind her, Harrow let out a quiet huff. “You will find,” she said. “That I’m very willing to make it your problem.”
***
The level of arm twisting, bribery, and skeletal intimidation Harrow was willing to resort to was borderline criminal, and Gideon would have happily complained about it for at least an hour if there was anyone to complain to. Instead, she got to sit in thin lipped silence as Harrow announced their betrothal to the rest of the House.
Harrow’s dead parents nodded their approval to the match with the best shitty puppetry Harrow could manage for the occasion. Aiglamene looked suspicious. Crux looked like he always did. Ortus teared up and started muttering about a poem to commemorate the occasion.
“Smile,” Harrow hissed through her teeth after she had finished announcing their impending nuptials.
Gideon did not smile.
In the shadow of the pew, Harrow aimed a swift kick at the center of Gideon’s shin. She might have been a puny no-muscle-having necromancer, but it did admittedly still hurt a little bit, and Gideon couldn’t help the tears that welled up in her eyes, which regrettably everyone could see since Harrow had stolen and hidden her sunglasses because they were “not bridal enough.”
“Forgive my fiancée’s tears,” Harrow said to the assembly. “She’s a bit overwrought right now.”
“Oh,” gasped Ortus, “so romantic.”
Gideon was going to kill someone. Possibly herself.
***
“No. Absolutely not.”
“It’s traditional.”
Gideon glared at the moldering black confection of lace and taffeta some snake-oil salesman had pawned off on Harrow as a wedding gown. “There is absolutely no way I’m putting that thing on.”
“All the brides of the ninth house have worn this dress,” Harrow intoned.
“Yeah, I can tell.” Gideon poked at one of the sleeves, wincing at the sudden cloud of dust and moth droppings that fell out of the decomposing lace. “No one is going to believe I consented to wear that thing. They’ll think you lobotomized me.”
“It’s not about what people think,” Harrow snapped. “It’s about tradition, it’s—"
“Look,” Gideon snarled, and for once Harrow actually shut up. “If you’re making me marry you, what you’re getting is me: Gideon Nav. And Gideon Nav does not wear shit like that, not in a million years. So either you marry me and I wear what I want, or you find someone else to marry that’s willing to put that thing on.” She paused to take a breath and think for a second. “Maybe Ortus.”
Shockingly, Harrow didn’t argue. All she did was sniff disdainfully as she refolded the dress. “You’d have looked better in it than Ortus,” she muttered.
Gideon considered this for a moment. “Was that a compliment?”
“What—no, it was not. It was a statement of fact. You would look better than Ortus in the dress. Anyone would look better than Ortus in the dress. It’s Ortus. The bar is on the ground. The bar is six feet underground, as a matter of fact.”
“You think I’d look pretty—”
The murderous skeletons that sprang up from the floor weren’t altogether a surprise to Gideon, but the there-and-then-gone smile on Harrow’s face certainly was.
***
The actual marriage ceremony was almost anticlimactic.
In deference to the fact that it was probably the only wedding she was ever going to get, Gideon wore her best muscle tank. Judging by the way Harrow’s eyebrow twitched, her fiancée was not as appreciative of this as Gideon felt she should have been.
Harrow wore the same sepulchral black robes she always did, but it looked like she’d taken a bit of extra care with her skull paint that day. The pattern was one Harrow didn’t quite recognize, probably some ancient traditional skull you only wore when you were getting married to someone you didn’t actually like.
Harrow had at least departed from tradition in favor of a private ceremony, for which Gideon was profoundly grateful. They were alone in the chapel save for Aiglamene, who was reading the marriage vows, Ortus, who was a witness for the living, and a gaggle of skeleton constructs filling out the back pews, who were to witness for the Dead.
(“They can’t be very good witnesses; they don’t even have eyes,” Gideon had felt compelled to point out.
“It’s traditional,” Harrow had sniped, because of course it was.)
Aiglamene read the very long and very boring vows, while somehow conveying with the tone of her voice that she thought this was a horrible idea for everyone involved. Gideon was roughly seventy percent sure she was right, which was notable in that if anyone had asked her opinion on marrying Harrow a week prior, she’d have been at least ninety five percent sure it was a horrible idea. But hey, people changed.
“You may now kiss.”
Gideon took it all back: this was an awful, terrible, no-good—
Then Harrow kissed her, and Harrow’s lips were soft against hers, and warm.
—wonderful idea.
Dazed, Gideon blinked down at Harrow, before mentally saying ‘fuck it’ and leaning back in to press their mouths together for a second time. Harrow’s lips tasted of skull paint, but then her mouth opened and there was nothing to taste but Harrow herself. Gideon’s hands moved to cradle the back of Harrow’s skull, tangling in the black knots of her hair. When Harrow slipped her tongue over Gideon’s lips, Gideon nearly cried out. God, she wanted to do this forever. She wanted to die of this.
Nearby, someone coughed. “I now pronounce you married,” Aiglamene said.
Gideon pulled back from the kiss, suddenly remembering that the person that had just kissed her within an inch of her life was in fact Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who she had been pretty sure hated her. “Wow!” Gideon said, for lack of anything better to say. And then she promptly fled the chapel.
***
So the wedding itself hadn’t been that bad. But the thing was, after weddings came the thing people did after weddings. That is to say: sex. In beds. They had sex in beds and Gideon had just married Harrow, which meant that conceivably, in a universe where sex happened after weddings, Harrow was going to expect them to fuck each other.
It wasn’t that Gideon wanted to have sex with Harrow, but it wasn’t that she didn’t want to. And she wasn’t going to like, force the issue but it was probably traditional, and Harrow loved tradition to the point that she’d tried to stuff Gideon in a two-thousand-year-old wedding dress that had hosted moth orgies for at least one thousand of those years. Which was all to say, sex wasn’t necessarily off the table.
Gideon spent a good twenty minutes silently screaming about this in the corridor outside the chapel, and then decided she might as well go find Harrow.
It was easier said than done. Harrow was not in any of her usual haunts. With some trepidation, Gideon screwed her courage to the sticking place and made for Harrow’s bedchamber. (“Bedchambers are where sex happens!” her idiot brain pointed out.)
The door was shut, but judging by the thin finger of light spilling out from beneath it, Harrow was in fact home.
Gideon reached out to grasp the doorknob and took a deep breath. But before she could steal herself to push the door open, it rather abruptly swung inward. In the open doorway stood Harrow, clutching a piece of paper to her chest. Harrow, who was now her wife.
“Hi,” Gideon’s dumb mouth said. “Do we bang now?”
Harrow was still wearing her elaborate skull paint, but Gideon watched with fascination as the patch of bare skin just below her ear turned a dull red. Gideon wondered if she blushed all over, and then promptly blushed all over at the thought.
“What?” Harrow squawked. “No!”
“No?” Gideon asked, poking with some fascination at the sense of disappointment this statement had elicited in her.
“No—look, a letter just arrived. Another one. From the Necrolord.”
“The Necrolord. The King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death,” Gideon felt compelled to clarify, although of course there was only one Necrolord.”
“That one, yes.”
“The Necrolord that is coming here, and was thus the impetus for our recent nuptials.”
“So, here’s the thing,” Harrow said.
Gideon stared.
“It turns out the Necrolord is in fact not coming”
Gideon blinked. Considered this. And—“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Harrow’s lips thinned. “No. Something about troop requisitions and a minor uprising in a system over on the other fucking side of the galaxy.”
“Right then,” Gideon said, which was concededly maybe not what you were supposed to say when your new wife had just told you that your sham marriage was actually completely unnecessary, but in all fairness Gideon had never been in this exact situation before. “I’m going to, uh, go. And maybe hit things in the yard a bunch.”
She turned to leave. And she wasn’t upset, she wasn’t, but if she had been she wouldn’t have wanted Harrow to see it on her face.
Suddenly there was a hand on her forearm. “Griddle.”
“Times a-wasting!” she said with forced cheerfulness. “Things aren’t going to hit themselves.” Gritting her teeth, she pulled away from Harrow’s surprisingly warm hand.
“Griddle, please. The ceremony was real.”
“So undo it.”
“Do you want to undo it?” Harrow asked.
And really, that was too rich. Gideon spun around with a glare. “Now you’re asking my opinion?” She had a whole rant ready to go about how she was only in this mess because Harrow had dragged her into it kicking and screaming—but the whole thing fell apart when she saw the very careful way Harrow was holding herself, the way Harrow wasn’t meeting her eyes, and what looked suspiciously like vulnerability in the lines of Harrow’s face.
“Harrow,” she asked instead. “Do you want to keep on being married?”
“It just seems like it would be inconvenient,” Harrow muttered, still refusing to meet her eyes. “After we went to all the trouble. Undoing it, I mean.”
Gideon couldn’t help the grin stretching across her face, because that wasn’t a “yes” or a “no”, but of the two it was probably closer to the former than the latter. She calculated the likelihood that what she was about to say was going to get her skeleton murdered for real. The likelihood was high. Ah well, YOLO, as the ancient prophets had written.
“So if we stay married… do we get to bang now?”
The murder skeletons that burst from the floor weren’t exactly a “yes,” but they weren’t a “no” either. Judging from the fact that an honest-to-god smile was spreading across Harrow’s face, Gideon decided to feel cautiously optimistic about her chances.