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It was one of Harrowhark's earliest memories: sitting on Crux's lap, peering over the edge of a large, heavy desk at an even larger, heavier book. Crux had propped it up on a stack of smaller books, angling it upwards enough for tiny Harrow to see from her perch.
She was fascinated by what appeared on its pages: intricate diagrams of bones, arranged in the shape of a person, as though someone had been simplified down to their ossiferous core. Around the edges, a fog of spidery lines led from the drawings to complicated words she was only starting to learn how to sound out. But the bones made more sense to her than the letters -- the way metacarpals fit together more intuitive than the relationships between vowels and consonants.
Harrow studied the yellowing pages carefully, seriously, Crux's familiar voice rumbling through her chest.
"...ungrateful chit. This morning Lachrimorta found her hiding in a laundry cart. Said she was trying to escape. Trying to escape this House! She who is a vassal. She who is a debt. She belongs to the Ninth House. Gideon Nav's life is for the Ninth! Her work is for the Ninth! Her bones are for the Ninth!"
At the word "bones" Harrow reached out with one finger to gently touch the page, then turned her solemn gaze to her teacher.
Crux laughed -- the sound, at least in memory, missing the hoarse raspiness it would acquire in later years. "That's right," he said, delighted. "Nav's distal phalange is for the Ninth."
"Distal phalange," repeated Harrow, lisping only slightly, and moved her finger.
"Nav's middle phalange is for the Ninth!" pronounced Crux.
"Middle phalange," echoed Harrow. The remainder of the diagram was too far away for her to touch, but she pointed, and said, voice high but confident, "Nav's proximal phalange is for the Ninth."
"Excellent and correct." Crux's affections did not extend to anything as demonstrative as an embrace, but he did reach around Harrow to point to the next set of bones in the sequence. "Nav's metacarpals are for the Ninth."
And so it went, through the afternoon, repeating the names until they sang through the marrow of Harrow's own bones.
At dinner that night, sitting stiff and straight between her aloof father and timorous Ortus, she gazed out across the room of shuffling, white faced, black robed penitents until her eyes caught on a head of sacrilegiously vibrant red hair. It and a scowl were all that were visible of Gideon above the table.
Harrow watched her, thought about the skull under the hair and the face, how it and all of Gideon's other bones belonged to the Ninth House. The house to which she was the heir. That meant, in a way, Gideon's bones belonged to Harrow. That Gideon belonged to Harrow.
Gideon caught her looking and stuck out her tongue. In return, Harrow glared at her, cold and minatory. They faced off, silently, until Gideon pulled her tongue back in her mouth with a grimace and picked up her fork, turning her attention instead to her plate of shaved snow leeks.
But Harrow kept watching. She focused in on Gideon's hand, moving from plate to mouth, tracking the bones under her skin, reciting in her head. Gideon's scaphoid is for the Ninth. Gideon's lunate is for the Ninth. Gideon's triquetrum is for the Ninth....
Harrow was spent. She lay limply on the four-poster bed amid the mouldering elegance of their quarters in Canaan House, idly watching Gideon's hand. The refrain trickled through her mind, soothing and familiar as a waft of damp air from the catacombs.
Gideon's pisiform is for the Ninth. Gideon's trapezium is for the Ninth. Gideon's trapezoid is for the Ninth.
The bones of Gideon's wrists slid against each other under her skin, wrapped her long fingers around a glass half-full of water. Palamedes had said something about hydration.
The Sixth. Nav had involved the Sixth, of all houses. To... rescue her. As if Harrowhark Nonagesimus wasn't perfectly capable of rescuing herself. Eventually. She'd just needed rest, that was all. She'd been perfectly safe in her bone cocoon.
Harrow watched Gideon's grip tighten around the glass. She was yelling, and she sounded angry, but also -- something else. Harrow frowned as she tried to parse the tone, even as she let the words wash over her.
A drop of liquid hung heavily on the glass's rim, then gave in to its own weight and ran down the side. It stopped against the middle phalange of Gideon's first finger.
Gideon's hands are for the Ninth.
Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always relied on herself. Her own intellect, her own will. The combination of her incredible necromantic power and sheer stubbornness had seen her through the many complications her life had presented. To accept assistance from others was not just a risk, but a certain weakness. Harrow was the first, last, and only person Harrow could trust.
But perhaps...
Was Gideon right about how long she'd been down in the facility? A full day?
Harrow tightened her jaw reflexively.
Gideon is for the Ninth.
Perhaps, in a situation like this, it was tactical to use every tool at her disposal to give the Ninth an advantage over the other houses.
And for all her flaws -- for all her boisterous impropriety and refusal to submit to the authority of her house, the authority of Harrowhark -- Gideon had, in point of fact, dedicated herself to filling the role of cavalier to the best of her ability. She'd trained with a thin needle of death as a sword and a brutish fist of glass as an offhand. She'd submitted to Harrow's edict of silence, kept her face painted, obeyed Harrow's terse notes, and walked into this decaying, haunted mansion a half step behind Harrow as though she were a true cavalier devoted to serving her necromancer.
And if she hadn't exactly kept her head down, well...
Her mind, unbidden, summoned the image of Gideon, in the full robes and skull paint of the Ninth, wearing those ridiculous tinted glasses, thrusting her fist into the gut of the shallow amalgamation of fashion and superciliousness that served the Third House for a cavalier.
Harrow didn't go so far as to smile, but her jaw loosened a fraction of a micrometer.
"Give me the water, Griddle," she said.
Perhaps it was strategic to allow Nav to support Harrow in her efforts. Not that she had been wrong to exclude the other girl from her endeavors to date, of course. But Gideon could be difficult if she felt she was being unfairly kept from something. Allowing her to assist Harrow in her work, as Gideon was clearly determined to do, could keep her from causing more trouble than she already had. She could even, perhaps, be useful.
Harrow took a sip of water, then another, and then, eventually, dug out her notebook and began the process of explaining to Gideon what she'd found.
As Harrow considered the pile of bones that had been dumped at Gideon Nav's feet, a thin, haughty smile curled across her lips. Even at six years old, this exercise was hardly a challenge for her.
Reaching out her necromancy, she began the process of assembling the jumble into a full skeleton, its pose mirroring Gideon's: feet slightly spread, knees bent, back straight and arms steady. The only difference was that the skeleton wasn't holding a sword.
As Harrow worked, she mentally ran through the name of each bone in her head with the comforting repetition -- Gideon's calcaneus is for the Ninth, Gideon's talus is for the Ninth, Gideon's tibia and fibula are for the Ninth.
Gideon's whiny yelp was, unfortunately, also for the Ninth. "Aiglamene!" she complained, the tip of her sword wobbling minutely. "Do I really have to?"
They were in the library, and the sword master was leaning against a desk, taking the weight off her bad leg. She didn't bother to look up from the weathered logbook she was paging through. "You need to learn how to carry the weight of your sword with your core muscles rather than your arms," she answered.
"Yeah, but," said Gideon, uneasily side eyeing the skeleton forming next to her, "why do I have to do it in the middle of one of Nonagesimus's stupid party tricks?"
How absurd, thought Harrow absent-mindededly -- Gideon's ischium is for the Ninth, her ilium is for the Ninth, her lumbar vertebrae are for the Ninth -- they didn't have parties on the Ninth.
"Do not disrespect your Lady's craft," growled Crux, lumbering out from the shelves with a ledger in his hands. "She is the pride of this house. You are its embarrassment. Be grateful you can provide the least bit of service to our Reverend Daughter."
"Besides, I have work to do here," added Aiglamene. "Marshal, we may need to look further back, no one's serviced the generators since..."
Harrow let the words fade into static as she focused on assembling the bones of the wrist -- the pile included three lunates but only one scaphoid, so she took a moment twisting the spare lunate into the correct shape, making a perfect match between her skeleton's right and left wrists. She felt a moment of pleasure -- Harrow had a particular affection for the curving swoop of the scaphoid.
Gideon ruined the moment by sticking out her tongue. Harrow scowled back at her.
They continued their training as the adults muttered over their dusty records, both Gideon and Harrow still with only the movement of bones clattering softly into place breaking their silence. Before long, the skeleton stood fully erect, posture mirroring Gideon's exactly -- a second soldier, unarmed, but otherwise perfectly positioned. Harrow examined it critically, looking back and forth between Gideon's stance and her finished work, making minute adjustments until she was satisfied.
"Gideon, reverse stance," called Aiglamene. The other girl eagerly complied, and the captain looked up from the desk long enough to cast a critical eye over her. "Sit back in your hips a little more, or you'll end up on your face. Keep that left elbow high. There. Now, stay."
Harrow frowned -- now Gideon's back was to her skeleton, identical rather than mirrored. She glanced to Crux, to see if he had a new assignment for her as well, but he was jabbing a gnarled finger at a column of figures, arguing a point with Aiglamene.
Harrowhark squared her shoulders. She was the only Ninth House necromancer of her generation -- the future of her House rested on her abilities. She didn't have the luxury of taking a break. She needed to learn.
She looked at her skeleton again. Then, carefully, she began to duplicate each bone, replicating her skeleton on Gideon's other side.
"Hold still, Griddle," she commanded. The other girl was fidgeting, eyeing the second construct that was raising itself into a flanking position on her other side.
Gideon made a low sound in the back of her throat but, with a quick glance over to her teacher, complied.
Harrow lost herself in the flow of her necromancy. One humerus became two, raised up beside Gideon to join to a second clavicle, the bones undergoing a sort of mitosis as they duplicated themselves and grew to form a second, perfect skeleton. She realized she was humming under her breath, a wordless, tuneless sound, accompanying the refrain in her head -- her temporal bone for the Ninth, occipital bone for the Ninth, parietal for the Ninth -- and then they were finished.
Two perfect skeletons, fully erect, both formed in the image of the irascible red-headed girl who stood between them, her face gone flushed and sweaty from the combination of holding her sword aloft for long minutes and the restraint of holding back from attacking the necromantically animated skeletons.
Harrow stood back and reviewed her work with satisfaction, distractedly wiping blood where it dripped from her nose. Three servants of the Ninth -- one fleshed and two clean bone -- all lined up and ready to obey.
Gideon, as though sensing her thoughts, bared her teeth and growled. In response, Harrow doubled another scaphoid and chucked it at Gideon's face.
The ensuing scuffle finally drew the adults' full attention, and ended only when Aiglamene grabbed Gideon by the collar and dragged her from the library with a lecture about the virtues of loyalty and duty.
Harrow rubbed at the blood dripping from her nose and groaned. Around her, the ancient, sterile white walls of the Imaging lab echoed her frustration back at her. The shelves, dusty and empty, offered no help. No books or notes or even a half-rotten diagram to guide her. Dozens of skeletons -- dozens -- and she was no closer to understanding what, exactly, the construct was testing her on. The construct she wasn't even able to see. That she had to rely on Nav to describe for her.
She put her hands back on the pedestal, and the strangely reflective black glass of the panel wrapped around them, beginning the trial yet again.
Her skeleton and its armful of bones waited patiently in front of the door she could not see. The now-familiar sound of the blaring klaxon came through the tinny speaker, followed by the shfft of the mechanical door of Response opening.
Harrowhark chewed on the inside of her cheek. She had planned her approach, and now she readied her necromancy to unfold each shard of bone into its own dextrous fighter, to spring up an osseous army --
-- and felt her skeleton fall.
No. Not just fall. It had been tripped.
And instead of bones in her mind --
"Harrow," came through the speakers, "if you wanted a cavalier you could replace with skeletons, you should've kept Ortus."
-- Griddle.
A rush of sensation, emotion, feeling, noise. A hand gripping textured metal -- a hormonal burst of fear-excitement-anticipation -- sweat slicking skin -- the scent of smashed bone -- stomach churning -- muscles tensed, ready --
"What?" Harrow gasped. "What, seriously?"
She saw -- felt -- sensed -- a cloud of bone, a miasma of necromantic potential, assembling into --
the construct
-- and then she shifted -- Gideon shifted her weight -- went to swing -- and everything in Harrow's mind rolled, muscles and tendons and thoughts and perceptions and sensations -- calculating weight and momentum and angles, considering the impact force of weapon against bone, comprehensions foreign to Harrow bleeding into her brain --
It was too much. Too messy. She squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lip and leaned into the pedestal and desperately tried to untangle it -- find a thread of sense in all that meat and electricity --
"Harrow!"
Gideon. She'd been yelling, Harrow realized dimly. Her mind was overcrowded -- overflowing --
"Stop thinking!"
"What?" Gideon's voice hollow over the speaker, vibrant in her head.
"I can't -- it's too -- damn it!"
She was gasping now, struggling to get a grip on the slippery surface that was Gidoen's mind. She almost had it -- but then she was moving again -- Gideon was moving -- fighting -- she was hit -- pain -- a whiteout of feedback -- Gideon's agony blowing out Harrow's senses -- too much -- if she could just narrow the field --
"Nav," she gasped. "Close one eye."
-- and suddenly the intensity dropped a notch, and Harrow found a toehold of stability as Gideon obeyed, like touching bottom in a saltwater pool. She grasped for the surety of Gideon's skeleton (Gideon's spine is for the Ninth, Gideon's ribs are for the Ninth), bones supporting the chaos of nerves and tendons and muscles and organs. With one eye shut the noise dimmed, just a bit, just enough for Harrow to untangle the grasping, tangled neurons of Gideon's perception and make sense of what her cavalier was seeing. Through the view of Gideon's eyes, she began to pick at the necromantic theorem of the construct --
-- and she almost had it, almost had it, but suddenly everything was overwhelming and chaotic, and Nav -- damn her -- had both eyes open and moving, and then PAIN, radiating down her arm until her fingers loosened on her sword -- no, not a sword, a glass plate --
Harrow lifted her hands and staggered back, panting. The test.
Not multidexterity, then. It wasn't testing her skeleton's autonomy. It wasn't testing her control, or her range, it was testing --
The door slid open. Gideon stood there, rolling a throbbing shoulder back so the muscles of her chest and arms stretched and strained at her shirt, sweat sticking her collar to her neck and her hair to her forehead, bone shards dusting the folds of her clothes and drifting across her cheeks.
Harrow could still feel it. The pain in that shoulder. The strength of Gideon's muscles. The quickfire of her reactions. Her adrenaline rush as she faced the construct. The noise, the life of her, echoing through Harrow's brain, like a dream she couldn't shake upon waking.
"The hell," said Gideon, "was that?"
Harrow licked her lips, tried to swallow, unable to settle the manic fever dream memory of Gideon's spirit inside her.
"It's the test." The noise. The life of her. She couldn't look at Gideon straight on, overwhelmed. "You're the test."
***
Much later, Harrowhark snarled and banged her fists onto the glass of the platform. Why couldn't she get this? She'd had a rest -- well, fallen unconscious, but close enough -- spent hours at that uncomfortable, unnecessary distraction of a party -- and she could not get a grip on Gideon's consciousness.
It would be easy to blame Griddle, but to give the girl credit, she was doing everything Harrow asked. It was Harrow's inadequacy of control -- of skill -- that was the problem.
"Again," she insisted. "Try the pain thing again, I think that helped."
Gideon's acquiescing grumble was cut off as Harrow put her hands back on the panel, the door slammed shut, and necromancer was thrown again into the noise of her cavalier.
There was just so much of her. Harrow tried again to let the motion of Gideon's body fade into the background of the motor cortex and basal ganglia from whence it came, every dodge and sword swing rooted in muscle memory as much as in Gideon's conscious thought.
Then a stab of pain -- Gideon had bitten her tongue -- it cracked through her nervous system, illuminating everything like a flash of lightning, and Harrow looked, saw the shape of things, tried to keep it --
"Harrow, just let me take a whack at it--"
It was an odd echoing sensation, hearing Gideon's voice from the speaker in the lab and from the inside of her skull at the same time.
"Not yet. Nearly. The bitten tongue was good. Hold it off for a second, Nav! You could do this asleep!"
And she nearly could. Harrow had always figured Gideon loved sword fighting because it was simple -- because it could be mastered by anyone willing to pursue it with enough stubborn, dogged intensity -- nothing like the elegant and complex theorems of necromancy that required a superior mind as well as hard work.
But what Griddle was doing -- it had its own complexity about it. The way she danced out of the construct's way, parrying thick trunks of bone with her whip-thin rapier, deflecting its momentum, different parts of her mind keeping tabs on each of the construct's sword-like arms, its feet, her own position in the room -- it wasn't necromancy, at all, but it was becoming clear to Harrowhark that what Gideon did had its own elegance.
And suddenly everything slid into place.
Nothing about Gideon got less noisy, but suddenly Harrow understood the noise. It all had a place, wove a predictable pattern, and from within that structure Harrow could look out and --
"I can see it," she said, awed.
The construct, which until now had been just a blur of bones and danger and the occasional enticing flash of necromancy, was crisp and clear in her/Gideon's vision. Suddenly Harrow could see how it was held together, how the theorems -- theorems! multiple! -- knitted together to form the beast, regenerate its damaged parts, shift it across the room as it came after Gideon with a low stab --
Oh shit.
"Nav!"
Again she felt Gideon's burst of adrenaline, the sudden firing of muscles, the push of her calves and the tightening of her core as she dodged and rolled out of the way, but this time it didn't overwhelm her. It -- made sense, somehow. It was the same feeling she got when she untangled a particularly convoluted necromantic riddle, took it from theory into practice, pulled it from a dusty matrix of numbers and calculations into solid, comprehensible bone. But this wasn't bone -- it was Gideon.
"Tell me what to do!" Gideon's voice wailed over the speakers and from within her head.
Gideon's body is for the Ninth.
"Hit these in order! Left lateral radius!"
A quicksilver execution of intricate movement, wrists and elbows and shoulders and back and legs and feet, nerves and tendons and muscles and bones, and Gideon's blade sliced through exactly where Harrow had directed.
"Bottom-right tibia, lower quadrant, near the notch. Don't make any other hits."
And again, Gideon obeyed.
Harrow had seen Gideon with a sword before, but never like this. Never from the inside. It was like turning out the seams of an intricately embroidered robe, seeing the hidden whorls and snarls of the threads, all the complexity that went into the neat, orderly decorations on the outside.
As easily as Harrow had unpicked the theory of the construct, Gideon dismantled its physical form. She ducked, dodged, feinted, parried, all with Harrow sitting in the back of her brain, along for the ride.
And then, abruptly, it ended.
Harrow rocked back on her heels, briefly stunned by how quiet and still the world was. After a moment, her blurred vision focused and she saw the decrepit equipment of the Imaging lab around her. She lurched towards the door, which opened for her with a whoosh as a cheerful beep sounded from the overhead speakers.
And there was Gideon, sweaty, panting, watching as a pile of fine bone dust on the floor trickled away from a lead box, which opened with a satisfying click to reveal -- a key.
Harrow reached for it, but Gideon was faster. God, was she fast. She slipped the key onto its keyring, and held it up for Harrow to look at.
The key was thick, ornate, and scarlet. It hung from Gideon's fingers like a tantalizing, poisonous fruit. It represented her first triumph on the quest to obtain Lyctorhood -- a first step towards immortality.
Yet Harrowhark found herself looking past the gently swaying key to Gideon.
With her robes discarded, the cavalier was dressed only in pants and shirtsleeves, the latter soaked through with the sweat of exertion. Her absurdly bright hair was in disarray, pointing in every direction at once. Her paint was mostly smeared off, exposing her red, patchy skin. Her unsettling golden eyes shifted from the key to lock onto Harrow's.
And Harrow let herself just -- look.
The strength of Gideon's muscles for the Ninth. The intricate coordination of her movements -- for the Ninth.
Gideon's sword, for the Ninth.
Harrow had been watching Gideon all her life, but for the first time, she'd seen her.
"But for the love of the Emperor, Griddle," she said gruffly, "you are something else with that sword."
Harrow watched as the blood drained from Gideon's face, leaving her pale under the smears of paint. Dark pupils dilated slightly in golden eyes, and her cavalier made a strangled noise in the back of her throat as she rocked back on her heels.
Harrow should've left it there, should've taken that as a caution, but she was giddy with success, still intoxicated from the feeling of power and skill in Gideon's muscles, and the words spilled out of her mouth without forethought.
"I was in the privileged position of feeling you fight." She flexed her fingers around the memory of a rapier hilt, rough and warm in her hand, and licked her lips. "I don't think I'd ever really watched you... not in context... Well, all I can say is thank the Tomb that nobody knows you're not really one of us. If I didn't know that, I'd be saying that you were Matthias Nonius come again or something equally saccharine."
"Harrow." Gideon closed her mouth, swallowed, opened it again. The tips of her ears had gone scarlet. "Don't say these things to me. I still have a million reasons to be mad at you. It's hard to do that and worry you got brain injured."
Looking at Gideon's wide, bright eyes, Harrow suddenly realized she'd lost control of the situation -- and of herself. She turned away, brushed off her robes, and walked towards the door, putting distance between them again.
As she went, she said in her most business-like tone, "I'm merely saying you're an incredible swordswoman. You're still a dreadful human being."
Gideon's swordplay is for the Ninth. Gideon's obedience is for the Ninth.
All the noise and color of Gideon's being, singing through Harrow's mind.
She turned back and smiled. She couldn't help it -- here there was intrigue, and mystery, and trouble to be had. Her whole life, Gideon and trouble had been synonymous. So it was only natural to involve her.
Navigating Canaan House on her own -- it had felt clean, and cold, and comprehensible. Working with Nav felt messy, and warm, and... powerful.
Harrow grinned a little wider as Gideon gaped at her. "We have a key, Griddle. Now for the door."
***
Hours later, Harrowhark felt much colder, the flush of victory faded. Of course she'd known the facility was dangerous -- Teacher had been unambiguous on that point, as if it hadn't been enough that the place was so haunted it had blazed across her necromantic senses the moment their shuttle had fallen within the planet's halo. But knowing and seeing the crumpled bodies of Abigail Pent and Magnus Quinn were two different things.
Still. That didn't change what she was here for.
Harrow buried thoughts of the Fifth and returned to the diagrams and notations she'd scrawled feverishly in her notebook. The theorem was intricate but elegant -- laying out the completed methodology for transference, for utilizing a living soul.
The facility was dangerous, but nonetheless she'd won. Passed the test, found the key, unlocked the door, and acquired the knowledge housed in this Lyctoral laboratory. She'd done it.
But -- not alone.
She glanced across the room to Gideon, who was digging through a nightstand set between two beds. Like the four-poster and its cavalier cot in the Ninth's rooms, they were close enough that two people sleeping in them would have no privacy -- would hear the rustle of sheets each time the other rolled over, could listen to each other's breathing and track whether their partner was laying awake anxiously, or sleeping peacefully, or was troubled by bad dreams.
Gideon had taken some object from the drawer and was staring at it, eyebrows furrowed and golden eyes hidden behind the opaque lenses of her ridiculous glasses.
Harrow frowned and turned back to her notebook. At least Griddle had made herself that disorderly tangle of blankets the next room over, and Harrow didn't have to do anything as distasteful as listen to her cavalier sleep.
"I'm done," she announced abruptly. "Tell me anything of import."
Gideon walked down the stairs behind her, and said, "I think a cav and their necro lived here."
Harrow turned and nodded. "I drew the same conclusion."
"It's seriously old, too." Gideon held something in her hand out for Harrow's inspection. "Look at this Second House seal I found. It's not just old, it's super unbelievably seriously old."
"Yes," agreed Harrow. "Sextus could tell us how old, but I've no desire to ask him." She paused, then added, "You should probably put it back."
"Yeah, okay," said Gideon, and turned back up the stairs.
Harrow's eyes fell on the two beds again. A cav and their necro lived here, Gideon had said. A cav and their necro. Like the adept belonged to the cavalier. Did Gideon think of Harrowhark like that? As her necromancer? Did she trail one step behind her, as they moved through the shadows of Canaan House like shadows themselves, and think, "that's my necromancer, Harrowhark"?
The thought hit a wall in her mind, slick as the glass panel in Imaging, and slid off. Harrow bit her lip. It was odd phrasing, that was all. Much more correct to have said "a necro and their cav."
She looked at the beds again. They were lined up next to each other -- if two people were sleeping in them, they could roll over and look at each other, face to face. They would be close enough that one could reach out an arm and touch the other if they so desired. And she realized with an unpleasant jolt that there was no way to know which bed had belonged to whom -- necromancer or cavalier. They were arranged like the pair were equals.
Gideon was moving around the room restlessly, touching the swords in their stands, leaning in to look at the photographs pinned to the walls. Harrow wondered what she was thinking -- wondered, in a rush, if she ever knew what Gideon was thinking.
Their entire lives they'd been forced to coexist crammed into the same small world. They'd spent the time constantly at each other's throats, filling their personal universe with an elaborate tangle of violence and revenge.
And yet, Gideon's thoughts were foreign territory. Harrow had been in her cavalier's mind, scrambling, oozing with blood sweat just to understand well enough to see -- and even that brief, intimate glimpse revealed how much she didn't know.
Again, Harrow thought of the Fifth -- their sad, crumpled bodies jumbled up together on the metal grille flooring, cold faces limned in fluorescent light.
"Griddle, I'm going to study this spell, and learn it. Then I will be one step closer to -- to knowing." She took a deep breath, and added, "We cannot suffer the same fate as Quinn and Pent."
Gideon didn't turn away from the photo she was examining. "He's really dead," she said, and her voice was thick with emotion.
"Yes. I will be more upset if he suddenly changes condition," said Harrow impatiently. "He was a stranger, Nav. Why does it affect you so much?"
Gideon stepped to the center of the room and began doing something unnecessarily athletic that involved folding in half at the waist and stretching her arms to the floor. Her voice was still strained as she said, "He was nice to me. He didn't have to bother with me, to make time for me, or remember my name, but he did." She touched her toes, then continued, quietly, "Hell, you treat me more like a stranger than Magnus Quinn did and I've known you all my life. Anyway, I don't want to talk about it."
Harrow looked at her cavalier for a moment, then took a step forward. She reached out, her hand bare and pale except where her fingers were stained with ink. Her gloves were tucked into her belt, forgotten. She touched Gideon's shoulder and Gideon, obedient as always, turned her face up to Harrow's.
"I can no longer accept," she said slowly, frowning, desperately sorting through every word she'd ever learned to try to express to Gideon what she could barely comprehend herself, "being a stranger to you."
Gideon jolted fully upright and took a step back. She'd shoved her tinted glasses on top of her head, and her golden eyes burned into Harrow with panic. "Whoa, hey," she said, "yes you can, you once told me to dig myself an ice grave. Stop before this gets weird."
It was already weird. It had never not been weird. Harrow's entire life had been nothing but an ocean of weird, seeping through the seams of her clothing and the pores of her skin like cold salt water with its own tides. Didn't Gideon see that? That they were drowning in it together?
Harrow stifled a laugh that tasted like a sob and clenched her fists so tightly her fingernails bit ragged half-circles into the tender skin of her palms.
"I need you," she said, keeping her voice as level as she could, trying to be reassuring, "to trust me."
But Gideon's panic only deepened. She took another half step back, and said frantically, her voice breaking, "I need you to be trustworthy."
They stared at each other for long moments, Gideon with wide, wild eyes like a trapped animal, Harrow holding her jaw tight and her back stiff and her arms rigid like she was braced for a blow.
Finally, she breathed out hard, and asked, "In what way can I earn your trust?" and waited.
She'd given Gideon a blank check, and she was terrified of what the other girl might ask of her. Was more terrified of what she might give.
But all her cavalier said was, "Let us sleep for eight bloody hours and never talk like this again."
Harrow relaxed, minutely, and nodded. "Eight and a half, and we start again immediately in the morning."
"Done."
"Done."
Later that night, Harrow lay awake puzzling over the theorem, and the doors, and the myriad mysteries of Canaan House. As she did, she caught the faintest rustle from the next room over, and held her breath, and listened as her cavalier moved restlessly in her sleep.
Gideon.
She was the last thing in the world Harrow wanted to need.
Gideon settled down into silence, and Harrow started breathing again.
She wondered if Gideon had noticed that Harrow had never brought up the question of Harrow trusting Gideon.
Gideon screamed and lifted the sword above her head. Even at eleven and even with the narrow walls of the mausoleum hemming her in, she managed to make short work of Harrow's initial pair of skeletons.
Harrow dug into her pocket for another fistful of phalanges and threw them, raising another skeleton between herself and the only other girl on the planet.
Gideon promptly destroyed that too. Her face was red and her nose was running.
"So what if my mother's dead," she said, not even trying to hide how hard she was crying. "At least she loved me! Enough to make sure I lived even when she died! I'm sure she loved me a lot more than yours could ever love you!"
Harrow felt something twist and burn in her chest, threatening to break, but she knew about control by now. She knew how to force the feeling down and into its familiar shape of anger, how to aim its sharp point at its target.
She ground her teeth together and growled at Gideon, "How dare you speak of my parents that way." She burned her emotions in the furnace of her necromancy and raised two new constructs from the bones strewn behind Gideon. "They are the lord and lady of this House. Of your House."
"My House?" Gideon's breathing was ragged. "The Ninth isn't my House!"
"Oh, but it is." Harrow ignored the blood beading on her forehead, and took a step forward. "You are a serf. A vassal. You belong to the Ninth."
Crux's voice echoed in her head. His words had become a part of her, part of her blood and her bones and her heart, but she'd never dared say them to Gideon's face before.
"Don't you know, Griddle?" she asked in mock pity, taking another step forward. "Your body belongs to the Ninth. Your blood belongs to the Ninth. Your bones belong to the Ninth."
She closed the gap between them until she was up in Gideon's face. "You belong to the Ninth. And I am the Ninth. So you belong to me."
And with that, the skeletons she'd raised tangled around Gideon and ripped the sword from her grasp. But instead of going after the sword, Gideon went straight for Harrowhark, grabbing the front of her robes and slamming her to the ground.
"I don't belong to the Ninth! I don't belong to you!" Gideon cried, panting, her face running. "I belong to myself! I'll never be yours!"
Harrow could never remember the next part clearly. It was a blur of tears and blood, of pain and anger, both of them crying and lashing out and trying desperately to hurt each other more than they already had.
What she could remember was standing in front of the Locked Tomb, bruised and bleeding with a sour taste in her mouth, Gideon's blood smeared across her hands and under her fingernails and dripping down her arms, wondering whether any of this was worth it. She remembered steeling herself, reaching out, and laying one red hand across the wards on the Locked Door, gateway to the Tomb that must never be opened.
She remembered the rock rolling away.
Harrow prowled down the decrepit hallway away from Canaan House's cracked atrium, slowly moving from shadow to shadow. She clutched a mug of tea in her right hand and balanced a bowl of porridge in her left, taking pains not to spill either.
Harrowhark Nonagesimus was dedicated to serving her House. She was bound not just to ensure the Ninth House endured into the next myriad, but to meet the physical and spiritual needs of her people in their daily lives.
And herein lay the problem: she took care of the needs of her people, plural.
She was less practiced in taking care of anyone one-on-one.
Especially this person.
She slowed to move up a set of stairs, raising her feet carefully to ensure she would not trip on the hem of her robes. Her arms were beginning to ache with the weight of the bowl and mug, and she gritted her teeth.
At least Griddle's needs were simple. She liked sleep, and she liked food. Harrow had already provided the former, and knew her cavalier would whine and argue if Harrow tried to start their day without the latter.
And Harrow needed Gideon to trust her. Needed it enough to skulk down to the atrium and badger a skeleton servitor into bringing her tea and porridge, standing proud and haughty while she waited, ignoring the prying gaze and whispers of the insipid cavalier and golden princess of the Third.
Finally she reached the entrance of the Ninth quarters and stopped, momentarily perplexed, staring at the door, both hands full.
"Blast it," she muttered, and glared at one of the pieces of bone she'd pressed into the doorframe until it sprouted humerus, radius, and ulna, (Gideon's carpus is for the Ninth, her metacarpus is for the Ninth, her phalanges are for the Ninth -- but the familiar cadence failed to soothe her as it usually did), and the bone arm turned the doorknob to let her into the chambers.
She stepped through to where Nav was sleeping. She was as untidy asleep as she was awake, her limbs long and twisted into the sheets and her mouth hanging open as drool puddled onto a pillow.
Harrow put the bowl and the mug on the floor, took a step back, and knelt. She twisted her fingers together, tugged the front of her hood to pull it further over her face, then set her fingers in her lap.
"Griddle," she said, "wake up."
"Mmmngthpf."
"Wake up," she repeated. "I brought... there's food."
"Nng?"
Gideon pulled her head up, blinking, and stared at Harrow. Her brown cheek was marked in creases on one side from the pillow, and her red hair was thrust up and out to one side in defiance of the laws of physics. She didn't seem to be quite awake yet, and was still looking at Harrow, her eyebrows pulled together in confusion.
Harrow grunted impatiently. "Eat, Nav," she said, and gestured at her offerings.
Finally Gideon looked down and saw the tea and the porridge. "Huh," she said, rubbing her hand across her face, then reached for the mug. "Breakfast in bed? Romantic."
Harrowhark set her lips together in a thin line. "There's no time to waste." She stood up and moved towards the bathroom. "I'll get the paint for your face."
Breakfast in bed. Right. Like they were in some twisted, wrong-universe romance novel.
(In her entire life, Harrowhark had read exactly one romance novel. It was called The Necromancer's Theorem, and she'd found the small book bound in plain covers fallen down the back of a shelf when she was twelve. She'd imagined it held long-lost secrets of necromancy -- but when she'd brought it back to her reading desk, she'd realized that none of the "theorems" described in the text would provide the least bit of assistance in her studies. Despite that, she'd shoved the novel under her robes and smuggled it into her rooms, where, safely away from the prying eyes of any nuns or red-headed nuisances, she proceeded to hungrily devour every last word.
It had, at least, been good training for her habit of staying up till all hours with a book, then rising early the next morning to perform her duties as usual. The Reverend Daughter had no time for sleep, or any other needs of the flesh.)
When she returned with the paintbox, Gideon had pulled the porridge bowl into her lap and was crouched over it, chewing glumly. The mug of tea was tucked into the blankets next to her thigh, leaning precariously to one side. When she heard Harrow approach, however, Gideon's eyes flicked from the box in Harrow's hands to her face and she swallowed and sighed. Then she shut her eyes and turned her face up towards Harrow.
For a brief second, Harrow froze. She couldn't look away from the impossible delicacy of Gideon's eyelashes against her cheeks, from the total smoothness of her features as she waited, placidly, patiently, for Harrowhark.
Harrow tightened her fingers around the handle of the paintbox and wrest back control of her body, dropping to her knees beside Gideon's blanket nest on the floor and opening the box. She pulled out the wad of fiber, dipped it in alabaster paint, and smoothed it across Gideon's cheek. The other girl flinched slightly when the cold paint first touched her skin, but otherwise sat without moving while Harrow worked.
When she pulled away to load more paint onto the wadding, Gideon opened her eyes and grabbed another spoonful of porridge and took a gulp of tea, then shut her eyes and turned back to Harrow again.
And so it went, coordinating in silence. Harrow paused as Gideon took a bite or a sip of her breakfast, and then resumed as Gideon swallowed, Gideon waiting between each mouthful for Harrow to finish her daubs.
When she blackened the skin around Gideon's eye sockets, Harrow put her hand around Gideon's jaw to keep her face steady. Though she'd jumped at the feel of the paint, Gideon didn't react to Harrow's touch. Instead, she waited calmly until Harrow moved away before scraping her spoon against the bowl for a last mouthful or porridge, and throwing back the last dregs of the tea. Then she turned back to Harrow for the final touches, angling her face upwards.
This time Gideon hadn't closed her eyes, and her golden gaze was unsettling. All Harrow had left was to make the black slashes of paint that delineated the teeth, so she dropped her eyes to Gideon's mouth, but for some reason that was unsettling, too -- Gideon's lips were slightly parted, the pink of the inside of her mouth visible.
Harrow glared, and said, "Close your mouth, Griddle."
Gideon closed it.
Harrow finished the paint. This was fine. After all, the last time she'd painted Gideon's face, the girl had bitten her. This was clearly an improvement.
***
The air in the hallway tasted stale and metallic. Harrow swallowed it down and stared at Gideon, conscious that Dulcinea and her puppet of a cavalier were waiting on the other side of the door for the decision of the necromancer and cavalier of the Ninth House.
Said necromancer glared at said cavalier. "What do you mean, ‘okay'?"
"I mean okay, I'll do it."
Gideon faced her across the narrow expanse of hallway. She chewed her lip for a moment, then sighed and pulled off her dark glasses, pinning Harrow with those dangerous golden eyes.
There was a moment of expectant silence, then Gideon continued, "I'd rather be your battery than feel you rummaging around in my head. You want my juice? I'll give you juice."
"Under no circumstances will I ever desire your juice," said Harrowhark. But the response to Gideon's disgusting innuendo was automatic, born of years of habit, buying time for her mind to work frantically.
Surely Gideon didn't understand what she was agreeing to. Harrow had asked for trust, but this was far beyond what she had earned with 8 hours of sleep and a bowl of lukewarm porridge.
"Nav, you don't know precisely what this is asking. I will be draining you dry in order to get to the other side." Harrow chewed at the inside of her mouth, the reality of the situation a sick stone in her stomach. "If at any point you throw me off -- if you fail to submit -- I die. I have never done this before. The process will be imperfect. You will be in... pain."
She tasted blood on her tongue. She needed the key from this trial -- needed to conquer the necromantic challenge set by the Emperor, to face what the Sixth would not -- but for that she needed Gideon. And there was no way Gideon would --
"I'll still do it."
Harrow found she couldn't breathe. She pressed her fingers, then her eyelids together, struggling for control. When she finally found her voice, she kept it as level and calm as possible when she asked, "Why?"
"Probably because you asked."
Gideon's words stabbed her through the heart, and she snapped her eyes open as emotion churned through her chest and up and out through her throat.
"That's all it takes, Griddle? That's all you demand? This is the complex mystery that lies in the pit of your psyche?"
Finally Gideon blinked, and looked away, pulling her tinted glasses out of her pocket and sliding them back on. As she did she muttered, "That's all I ever demanded. You asswipe."
Harrow froze. That's all? That's all?
Gideon had spent her entire life trying to escape the Ninth -- to escape Harrowhark. And Harrow had raced to keep one step ahead of her. Even so, Gideon had nearly succeeded, so many times, with Harrow catching on to her last attempt only through pure chance, by the grace of the Emperor's message.
The exhaustion had soaked through her as she broke her fingernails digging into skull-hard dirt, burying knucklebones and shards of tibia in regularly spaced intervals across an eternity of shuttle landing field. Her worn out brain, strung tight with fatigue and vibrating with adrenaline, had faced off against Gideon's determination to leave, scrambling to manipulate her into staying just long enough for Harrow to trap her again.
Harrowhark had thrown everything she had into preventing Gideon from leaving, and it had only barely been enough.
But now -- when she needed Gideon to not just stay, but give, to open herself up for Harrow to take -- Gideon had said yes almost before Harrow could ask.
What else could Harrow have had?
Harrow clenched her fists and fought to refocus herself on the trial, on the challenge ahead.
What else had Harrow missed over the years? She'd spent her whole life demanding, insisting, venting every burst of fear or anger or frustration on Gideon, the one person who'd always been next to her, an eternal constant that she was eternally scared to lose.
What could she have had if she had... asked?
Would Gideon have stopped her escape attempts? Would she have stayed, if only Harrow had admitted she wanted her to stay?
She couldn't breathe. Gideon had turned away and was walking down the hallway. Gideon, who'd come with her to this deathtrap of a planet, who had let Harrow slide into her brain, who was offering up her soul to siphon, because Harrow had asked.
Harrow forced herself to take a step, then another, stumbling down the hall in the wake of her cavalier.
Back in the long trial chamber Dulcinea waited, draped across the steps as her dead cavalier stood stiffly behind her.
"And?" the Seventh adept asked, raising her eyebrows.
Harrow nodded sharply, then turned to Gideon.
Her cavalier was waiting patiently, her face calm the same way it had been this morning while Harrow had been painting it. Steady. Trusting.
Harrow took a sharp breath, then let it out slowly. "All right," she said quietly, and reached out to put two fingers on Gideon's neck.
She felt Gideon's pulse jump under her touch, then smooth out. In the space between one of Gideon's heartbeats and the next, it occurred to Harrow that all Gideon would have to do is resist once -- have one millisecond of regret and pull back from her connection with Harrow -- and it would all be over. Harrow would be dead. Gideon would be free.
But then she felt Gideon's next heartbeat, and she knew, rock-solid confident in the spongy marrow of her bones, sure as she was of her own necromancy, that Gideon wouldn't resist.
For all her protests -- Gideon was for the Ninth. Gideon's life was for the Ninth. Gideon's will -- every stubborn, obstinate drop of it -- was for the Ninth.
She closed her eyes briefly, hooked into Gideon's lifeforce, and stepped back. Looked at Gideon -- for just a moment, looked and admitted to herself how much she needed this ox-hearted girl -- and then turned and flung herself across the yellow-and-black caution line and into the senescence / entropy field.
The effect was immediate. Powerful necromancy wrapped around her body, licking hungrily across her skin, trying to drag the energy from her.
Instead, Harrow fed it -- Gideon.
It was terrifying, but Harrow soared on it, pushing through fear into a strange sort of elation. She felt the necromancy begin to strip away everything that wasn't Harrow. Her robes whispered away like a spray of dust into the deep darkness of Drearburh. Her clothes were stripped from her, as was her paint, the ends of her hair, the tips of her eyelashes. The fields were ravenous, hungry for everything she gave it, but she was moving forward.
But by the Emperor -- she was feeding it Gideon.
The knowledge kept her going as fast as she could -- deeper and deeper into the chamber. She fought back, spun her own theorems, refining them on the fly when she noticed a flickering in her vision and realized the room was sucking the moisture out of her eyeballs.
She was more exposed than she had ever been, but she couldn't think of that.
She pushed forward.
She was thirty meters in -- forty -- fifty. Halfway there.
Even stripped to her narrowest self, she wasn't alone. She could feel Gideon with her.
Gideon's indomitable spirit is for the Ninth, she thought, giddy with terror and success. Gideon's indefatigable energy is for the Ninth.
Sixty meters.
Her bare feet were numb on the harsh metal of the floor. Her skin frissioned with a cold beyond temperature, as she spun Gideon's life into a coat of armor, firelight on a cold winter's night keeping the wolves from the door.
Wolves?
She was going mad as well as naked.
Seventy meters.
And Gideon started screaming.
For a whisper of a moment Harrow paused. But the longer she took, the longer Gideon would hurt, and she leaned forward.
Eighty meters.
Ninety.
One hundred.
She'd arrived.
The plinth was in front of her -- she grabbed for it blindly, rushing with victory, then gasped in frustration when she realized the top of the platform was a box, and the box was locked.
Harrowhark ran her hands across the edges, Gideon's scream scraping against her bones. She had to get the key out, had to figure it out, had to think --
And then Gideon's voice cut out.
Harrow's blood ran cold and her heart stopped. She felt something eating through her -- the field, devouring her flesh at last -- but no. A quick glance at her hands confirmed she was still whole, and the only thing consuming her was fear. She was still alive, and that meant Gideon was alive, which meant she had to get the key and get back to her cavalier.
She threw herself at the box. There was a trick to it, and had she time she would've paused to appreciate it, to examine each lovely little fold of power that kept it shut tight, but there was no time for that now. Harrow slammed her necromancy into it like a hammer and, for her reward, pulled out a key whiter than fresh bone.
Key firmly in her hand, she turned back and ran.
The journey back seemed much longer than the walk out. One hundred meters was an unending, infinite distance.
The fields were as hungry as they had been before, but she felt Gideon's life starting to run dry. It was like taking a long pull of nutrient paste through a straw and getting a mouth full of bubbles, hearing the burbling of air and knowing the end is near.
She wasn't sure when Gideon had started screaming again, but she noticed when the sounds dissolved into keening wails, then sobs, then a gasping silence.
The fear that Nav was coming to her end -- that she would die -- that they would both die -- made her stumble. And as she did, she felt the energy stutter.
This is it, she thought grimly, and pulled her head up for one last look at the warm, golden red of Gideon's hair.
But then, like a generator shuddering back to life, she felt a push, and more energy surged through her, and she was moving forward again.
It was Nav.
Stupid, stubborn, incredible, vibrant Gideon Nav. Who was dying, and instead of cutting off Harrow and protecting herself, was pushing the last dregs of herself into Harrow --
Harrow stumbled across the painted black and yellow line on the floor and fell to her knees, gasping. Gideon lay in the arms of the wretched Seventh necromancer, eyes shut, deathly still.
No. Absolutely not. Harrow refused -- she grabbed Gideon's shoulders and shook her. "Gideon? ...Gideon!"
Her cavalier opened her eyes, croaked, "Ha-ha, first time you didn't call me Griddle," and fainted.
Not died, Harrow told herself firmly. Fainted. She was the finest necromancer of her generation, and she could tell the difference.
Numbly, she sat sprawled on the floor and watched Gideon's chest rise and fall. She was alive. Her cavalier was alive. They'd both survived.
Something was wrong with her hand. It cramped where she'd braced it against the cold floor. She opened it and stared at the key in her palm.
She'd almost forgotten about it. This was what it had all been for.
Was it worth it?
The sound of a throat clearing interrupted her thoughts.
"You might want to put that on," said Septimus. When Harrow looked up, she nodded at Gideon's overcloak, lying in a messy heap on the floor.
Much as she hated to admit it, the other necromancer was right. Harrow dragged herself over to the cloak. It smelled like Gideon and like the Ninth, and Harrow heard the comforting clack of bones knocking together in the pockets as she pulled it over her shoulders.
Behind her, Gideon made a small grumbling noise, as she sometimes did when waking up. Harrow turned to look, and saw her cavalier looking up into the Seventh's eyes like a lovelorn idiot.
"You big baby," said Dulcinea, and shamelessly kissed Gideon on the forehead.
Harrow dragged herself to her feet, clutching the cloak around herself, and glared daggers at Septimus.
"Unhand my cavalier."
How dare that deceptious Seventh house adept put hands on Harrow's Gideon. How dare she judge, with that simpering smile, with her corpse of a cavalier.
Septimus could have no idea what it was like to be of the Ninth.
She could never know what it was to be lost and alone and desperate, with nothing and no one to rely on except yourself, with no companion but a surly, recalcitrant girl as unlike you as the Ninth House was from Domincus.
No -- Dulcinea could never know, and she didn't deserve to touch the only other person in the world who did.
"I will not ask again."
Gideon was not her business. Gideon was Harrow's, and no one else's.
Gideon Nav was for the Ninth.
She pulled Gideon's arm over her own shoulders and staggered with the weight, then forced herself to stand upright. Gideon offered no protest beyond a slight wheeze.
Gideon was hers, and Harrow would carry her.
They walked down the hallway, Harrow pausing for a breath every few feet. The whole time she kept the fingertips of her necromancy on Gideon's soul, reassuring herself her cavalier's heart still beat.
The third time they stopped, Gideon gave a short painful cough, and Harrow looked at her, still not quite convinced her cavalier was still there.
"Quit looking at me like that," Gideon said thickly. "I'm alive."
"You nearly weren't," Harrow said, and the words sounded too soft, too vulnerable, but standing in the basement of the tomb they were trapped in together, bare of facepaint and her own clothing and a good two inches of hair, she lacked the resources to put up any kind of wall. "You nearly weren't, and you're not even aggrieved about it. Don't price your life so cheaply, Griddle. I have absolutely no interest in you losing your sense of self preservation."
Gideon stared at her, and after a minute, Harrow decided she wasn't going to respond and resumed the process of dragging them both through the mouldering halls of Canaan House.
Finally they stumbled in under the reassuring arch of Harrow's bone wards, and she tugged and pushed Gideon's unresistant body back into her blanket nest under the window, where just that morning Harrow had brought her breakfast.
Gideon just sat there, staring, her eyes half-open and glassy, as though she wasn't quite ready to let go of consciousness. As though she didn't want to leave.
Harrow huffed out a breath. "Get some rest," she said shortly.
Obeying her command -- Devoted Emperor, how was Gideon still so obedient -- her cavalier finally shut her eyes, lay back into her mess of blankets, and was asleep.
She hadn't even taken off her sword.
Harrowhark should have left then. She should have put her hand into the pocket of Gideon's robe still around her shoulders, drawn out the key, and continued the work. She should have returned to her priority as the Reverend Daughter: becoming a Lyctor and saving her House.
But she didn't.
She stayed, standing in the doorway, for a minute.
Five minutes.
Ten minutes.
She watched Gideon's chest rise and fall, her lips parted slightly, drawing in breath after breath, reassuring Harrow that she was alive.
She shouldn't be. It made no sense that Gideon had survived -- Harrow had siphoned out what had felt like the last drops of Gideon's soul, and then some -- but yet she was here. Breathing.
Gideon's lungs, breathing strong and true for the Ninth.
In those last moments of the trial Harrow had had a glimpse of a world without Gideon.
Gideon, alive, for the Ninth.
Gideon was her balance, her ballast, her anchor.
And Harrow was the Ninth.
Gideon. Who did what Harrow wanted, because Harrow had asked.
That meant, in a way, that Gideon belonged to Harrow.
But what Harrow wanted didn't matter. All that mattered was what the Reverend Daughter needed to do to save her house.
Harrow allowed herself one more moment of indulgence -- one more rise and fall of Gideon's chest -- then tightened her fingers around the key in her pocket, turned, and walked away.