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On the Sixth House, family is less about blood and more about who’s in your year and whose shuck is near yours. And even so, at least by my estimation as a ten-year-old child, who you go to class with is less family and more…alliances that you can leverage to get ahead, or to keep others from beating you to the next grade point.
When I first held Camilla, she was three days old and a perfectly healthy child. I’d said to her fathers that she looked perfectly healthy because I thought that was what everyone was supposed to say about a child that looked perfectly healthy. I was right, but Archivist Juno Zeta started laughing because of how solemn I sounded.
“Her name is Camilla,” her biological father – our shared parent – said. He looked like her, even then: same dark and hooded eyes, same bowed lips, same lines on his face from smiling seldom yet honestly. “Would you like to hold her?”
I did want to hold her. I took her in my arms and her eyes opened, and I will never forget the first time she looked at me. Her eyes were wide and searching, as if she was – even then – calculating the odds of her existence and mine in the world, and I loved her instantly and in ways I wasn’t quite able to comprehend as a child of ten.
“Hello, Camilla,” I said quietly, touching one finger to that soft cheek, to that tiny nose. Camilla kicked a bit and I let out a completely unbecoming giggle before I could stop it.
Somewhere behind me and to the left, Archivist Juno Zeta was bustling around my father’s office, complaining under her breath in the tones of a woman who would rather not be reminded of how much she was taxing her body. “Alright, Zeta?” asked my father.
I turned just in time to watch her wave him off. At the time, I blushed whenever the Archivist paid me any attention, mostly because Juno was really very pretty, for whatever little that matters, and also because I was glad that my genetic composition indicated I would be at least as tall as her one day. “I look forward to the day when I also am not pregnant.” She sighed when papers fell to the ground and she couldn’t bend to pick them up. “Thank the Necrolord Prime that gestation is only nine months.”
I stopped paying attention after that, because Camilla had reached up and flailed out her hand, catching her little fingers into the end of my braid. I disentangled them and smiled when her hand closed around one of my fingers.
“Hi, Camilla,” I said again. “I’m Kiana. Your sister.”
5/15
The day I selected the track that would one day take me to the Oversight Body, I learned Camilla already had a track in mind, too.
“I am going to be the cavalier primary of the Sixth House,” she declared to me at lunch, a smudge of nutrient paste on her face and a little lisp coloring her voice as she sounded out each word in solemn tones. I could tell she was repeating what she’d heard someone else say, but it was adorable nonetheless.
“Oh yeah?” I asked, tapping at my own cheek until Camilla wiped at hers. “Why’s that?”
“Because Palamedes is going to be the Master Warden.”
“He is, is he?” was all I could think of to say, because Camilla had said what she said with such finality that it brought me up short for a brief moment.
The child Juno gave birth to three months after Camilla was born had become something akin to her friend; or, at least, Palamedes was Camilla’s friend in the way all children on the Sixth House have friends. They tore around the dorms together; and sometimes they argued over old books or who got the best spot to watch the skeletal servitors. They were close. It was known by Juno and Camilla’s dads, and also me.
It felt like a natural thing to happen, this grandiose statement made by a child of five. But there was something about how Camilla said I am going to be the cavalier primary of the Sixth House that made something in the back of my mind itch.
It’s nothing, I remember telling myself. I wouldn’t realize how wrong I was for years. This decision, apparently, would become everything.
But in that moment, I comforted myself with the knowledge that at least, while Camilla would be funneled into the physical education track – which I always assumed she would be, given that her genetics were selected for it – she would not be expected to procreate if she was to be the cavalier primary. I had watched Juno and my own biological mother go through pregnancies and it honestly looked like hell; I wanted no part of it and was already in the process of figuring out how to freeze my eggs so I never had to.
Meanwhile, Camilla merely nodded and swallowed another bite of lunch. “I want to go to Swordsman’s Spire and train so when he’s the Warden I can take care of him.” She regarded me solemnly. She was such an oddly quiet child, even back then. “He’s worse than you about remembering to eat, Kiki.”
I extended my foot below the table and nudged at her shin, a light facsimile of a kick. “I eat!”
It was not long after this that Palamedes Sextus, the boy himself, arrived. He hiked himself up onto the cafeteria bench beside Camilla and shoved his glasses up his nose, then wrapped his arm around Camilla’s shoulder and squeezed. Camilla leaned into it, but only a little.
Palamedes Sextus, I had always thought, was the strangest little kid. He was the kind of boy who looked as if he was really a middle-aged man trapped perpetually in primary school; his face was already pointed and peaked, his glasses were far too thick and wide for his face, and he spoke with the vocabulary of someone who reads dictionaries for fun. But he loved Camilla even then; he followed her dutifully and he was faster to praise her than any of her teachers – which was saying something – and in that, he won my good graces.
“Hi, Kiki,” Palamedes said, waving a bit. “Sorry, I didn’t know if you and Cam – ow! Sorry, Camilla – were just…well, not talking.”
I raised my eyebrow at Camilla and said, “Don’t break his rib with how hard you’re jabbing him with your elbow.” She was doing this because Camilla didn’t like nicknames at the time. Everyone knew this. I was only assigned mine because Camilla couldn’t manage her “n” sounds for a while as a toddler.
“It’s alright,” Palamedes said, rubbing at his side. “I’ll likely get worse from her when I become her necromancer.”
I should have listened to the faint feeling of dread I did my best to stomach along with my long-cold tea.
8/18
“What are you doing right now?”
The only reason I never gave my sister the satisfaction of making me jump is that I had an oddly honed sense of her presence anywhere near me. I never actually articulated that to anyone, as it always sounded strange, but it was the truth.
“I’m working,” I told Camilla, not even looking up. I knew she would make herself at home atop my desk – which she did shortly after I spoke. “Why?”
When she looked at me, she was wearing her I Would Like To Talk About Something Without Making It Weird face. I set my pen down.
“The Duchess of Rhodes wrote back,” Camilla said in an I-told-you-so voice, kicking her legs in the air and ignoring the chair she knocked over in the process. “Palamedes just showed me her letter.”
“What?” This was of significantly more interest to me than analyzing the thirty-five thousand data points surrounding oxygen saturation I was meant to before end of day. “Really ?”
Camilla nodded. Her hair fell in a slash of dark, blunt shadows over her chin. “She enclosed medical documentation too. Palamedes is looking at it.”
There was something about the weight her little, serious voice placed on Palamedes is looking at it that made me really look at her expression. Her eyes – unreadable as always – were fixed on the surface of my desk. “And you’re not helping?” I asked carefully, attempting to see if I was treading the right path before I accidentally stepped too heavily on the wrong stones.
“I will. I am.” She huffed out a sigh. “But he’s supposed to be studying. ”
“He will. You know him.” I folded my arms atop the desk and looked at my sister. I was done growing and Camilla had only barely started, and this meant we were still eye-to-eye when we both sat on surfaces of unequal heights. “Palamedes gets obsessed. That’s why he has you to ground him.”
“I know,” Camilla nearly whispered. Her eyes averted from mine, and I figured whatever was to be said next was the reason why she wanted to talk. “I just…miss him, I guess.” She bit at her lip and said nothing else.
I wasn’t sure what to do about the sudden urge to bully the boy who was making my sister feel so lonely. So I let her help me do my calculations instead, and she felt better. I think, looking back, that was the beginning of her idea that if she failed to become the Warden’s Hand, she’d prefer to work in data.
13/23
“God, we’re good. Cam, you’re brilliant. The greatest future cavalier. My favorite second cousin in a very wide field that you nonetheless dominate.”
I’m still not sure what brought me up short: the use of “Cam” to refer to my sister, or the fact that the two kids were, as they say, losing their shit over the name of the deceased Doctor Donald Sex. I’d gathered from post-dinner gossip outside the office I was borrowing for research purposes that they were to exhume the poor man, which is how I realized that I had missed dinner hour and that Camilla and Palamedes had apparently shown off quite spectacularly.
I ended up procuring dinner from one of the nice young women from Archaeo – Julia, who had been in my class, and who had been consternated to realize I was not an adept and thus my skill with my hands and discernment both came totally on my own power – and loitering in the hall with them. Their biscuits were dry and their banter was also, but one was much more pleasant than the other. Julia told me about the discovery in the study, though not in any great detail, until I reminded them that I was semi-attached to the Archivist, and then they were a bit more forthcoming.
When Camilla emerged from the cafeteria, she was alone. “Palamedes went back to see about something he found,” she told me with a cursory nod to Julia. “I assume you heard.”
“Yes. Did you also assume I was waiting for you?”
Camilla’s mouth quirked up a bit. “Obviously.”
I bid Julia farewell – Camilla watched with interest – and then the two of us fell into step on the way back to the dorms. “I heard him call you ‘Cam’,” I said after a moment, which was likely not the way to start off that conversation – a conversation that I didn’t really know how to have, but one whose substance had been chewing at the back of my brain since I’d finished listening outside the door.
“Yes, he does that.” Camilla’s voice was already curiously low at that age, and her face was so impassive I may as well have been talking to concrete. “I allow it.”
“What, and I can’t?”
“No, you can call me Cam.” Camilla tucked the hair on both sides of her head behind her ears in one brisk dual-handed gesture. I saw the calluses on her hands and thought to myself: Swordsman Spire doesn’t know what they have in her. Not yet.
I had long since finished grappling with the internal conflict over not being a necromancer, yet having aspirations of the Oversight Body and a research appointment. When I was a child, I enrolled in the physical education track more out of an interest in personal fitness and staving off boredom; I was exposed to the best of the best, and had been relieved when I was told not to waste my time in physical pursuits. But Camilla? She dwarfed the best of the best at only age thirteen – and the rumors among my friends who were teachers at the Spire suggested she was only getting better.
I never sought out the rumor mill. But what are sisters for if not spying on one another?
“Well, Cam, how was it then?”
“The study?”
“Mmhm.”
“He solved a puzzle box.”
“We solved a puzzle box,” Palamedes corrected, running up behind us, clearly very winded. Camilla gave me a look around his body that clearly said How Embarrassing For Him. “Cam, do you have flimsy?”
Camilla did; she produced a little pad of it from her pocket and a tiny pen, and Palamedes held up traffic in the corridor as he scribbled. I ended up stepping forward and crowding both kids into the wall so Collections could pass through, hands laden with artifacts from the office, no doubt.
“You can’t tell anyone we have this,” Palamedes said to me, eyes grave behind glasses that got thicker every year.
“I won’t,” I promised, though my voice lilted up as if asking a question instead. Camilla took the flimsy and squinted, and I read over her shoulder.
Darling girl,
Tomorrow you will become a Lyctor and finally go where I can’t follow. I want you to keep this letter when you are far away and think of me and want me and can’t have me, and know that no matter how far you travel, nor how long the years feel, the one thing that never stays entombed is
“It’s a suicide note,” Camilla said.
“It’s a love letter,” Palamedes countered.
“Source?”
“‘My darling girl’,” Palamedes read and pointed. “Dulcinea always calls me-”
He cut himself off and blinked owlishly up at me. At that time, the boy was only just shorter than me. I remember thinking, idly, that it was a tragedy that he would likely grow tall before I had the chance to properly intimidate him.
“Would you prefer if I excused myself?” I asked him, a bit drily. He looked so much like his mother when he attempted to keep secrets. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Camilla angle her body toward him the same way Julia angled their body toward me. Unconscious mirroring. A sign of attraction. Interesting.
“If you would,” Palamedes said graciously. I ruffled Camilla’s hair, clapped her on the shoulder, and departed back to my pigeonhole. While I was there, I stole a copy of the report and found that Camilla had gone crawling through a vent, that she and Scholar Sextus had both received accolades, and that Palamedes was to present his findings at the next Oversight meeting.
I know this wasn’t fair, but I felt a bit of secondhand jealousy on behalf of my sister. She did the work. She deserved to have her name ascribed to this. But Camilla and I have always differed here; I was viciously pursuing an Oversight chair, while Camilla cared nothing for recognition and, in fact, seemed uncomfortable in situations where it applied.
Palamedes came to find me later that night, in his pajamas and with mussed hair like he’d been trying to sleep and hadn’t succeeded. “I apologize if I was rude,” was the first thing he said, hovering in my doorway.
“You weren’t.”
He shrugged. “You’re a lot like Cam, you know. She wouldn’t have taken offense either.”
“She doesn’t take offense to much when it comes to you.” It came out harsher than I intended.
Palamedes, to his credit, just blinked. “May I?” he asked, gesturing to a chair opposite me. When I nodded, he sat, crossing his legs at the ankles. “Cam seems to think you don’t approve of me being her necromancer.”
I could have said a hundred things:
It’s not that I don’t approve, it’s that she dislocated her shoulder and the only thing she said about it was that if you found out, you’d fuss, so she was going to hide it until you found out anyway.
and
You want a balanced friendship, one of equals, and you are never going to have that if you step out of friendship.
and
I don’t want her to be your cavalier because she already is too accustomed to giving up everything of herself for you.
But all I said was, “I never said that.”
16/26
It was three months after Palamedes’s sixteenth birthday that I caught him kissing my sister in the library.
They were holed up in the stacks, in a dusty old corner that no one used. I was only there because I wanted to avoid Archivist Zeta, and because I really should have been cramming for my Oversight interview. This was my one shot at junior membership.
I rounded the corner to see his hand on her leg, her body braced beside him, and his hand cupping her jaw so tenderly I knew this wasn’t a crime of teenage hormones but rather one of real passion. That was the only reason I didn’t clear my throat and interrupt them.
It was also why I lurked in the shadows to pull Sextus into them the moment he emerged, hair mussed and clothing rumpled.
“Kiki!” he yelped, staggering into a metal bookcase.
“No,” I said, jabbing my finger into his chest. “Kiana.”
“I- What?”
“I saw you kissing my sister.” That shut him up. “I don’t care what you two do, personally, because Camilla is an independent human being with her own free will. But if you hurt her, if you make her cry, if you break her heart, I will ensure that not even your status as the Master Warden can save you.”
I said those things without thinking, which is how I know I meant them. I had long harbored concerns that Camilla’s single-minded dedication to her station was to her detriment, to the point where someone from a Fifth House delegation asked her who she was – expecting to learn her name – and was taken aback when she said “The Warden’s Hand” instead.
I had been taken aback too. It worried me, if I’m honest.
“Kiana.” Palamedes was looking at me, eyes grave and solemn. “Camilla is my flesh. My end. She is my best friend, and frankly the only reason I even have and maintain my post as Master Warden. I would sooner break myself into a thousand miserable pieces than hurt or harm her.”
You are sixteen, I should have told him, and you do not know what breaking feels like.
You are a child and you know that this is wrong, but here you are.
Please take care of her.
I let him go. I told him, “I won’t tell anyone, but please be more discreet, and don’t get fluids on the books or the carpeting, you know everything in here pre-dates you by several hundred years at least,” and let his mortification soothe my spirit.
18/28
I tried very hard not to think about the relationship between my sister and Sextus, and succeeded. It wasn’t my business and Camilla didn’t make it so, save for a conversation when she was about to turn seventeen wherein she had told me, “There is nothing going on between me and the Warden, because he is in love with Dulcinea Septimus,” and I had determined that her heart must have been broken, because why else would she have divulged the Warden’s secret?
But then, two days after Palamedes’s eighteenth birthday, I realized that something had happened to set Camilla completely off her axis. We were to spend the day together cataloging sources for a project surrounding Heptanary blood cancer, which held interest for her on the Warden’s behalf and interest for me because I found the concept odd…and because it was my day off.
(Who selects for lethal cancer? Maybe it’s because I’m from a House with well-documented population issues, but I could never understand that.)
I could tell Camilla wanted to talk about something by the shift of her stance every so often and the weight behind her eyes, but she passed the entire day demanding I Do Not Ask with her gaze, so I made a point of Carefully Not Asking.
And then, just as I was about to turn in for the night, Camilla slipped in, slammed the door behind her, and leaned against it. Her hair was neat, her eyes were wild, and the shirt she was wearing wasn’t hers.
“Camilla, wh-”
“I just had sex,” Camilla blurted out, low and breathless.
“What?” The fact that Camilla was sexually active wasn’t news to me; we had discussed Camilla’s first time with another partner last year. She had come to me confused and irritated as to why he had come and she had not, and we had complained about our luck with inexperienced lovers.
But this, however, appeared to be a completely different conversation. Camilla’s eyes were sparkling, her hands balled into fists at her sides, and she appeared to struggle to meet my eyes.
“I just had sex,” Camilla repeated, “with Palamedes.”
“WHAT ?!”
“Shh!” Camilla shook her hands at me. “Stop that.”
“You slept with your- with Sextus?!”
Camilla gave me the look that told me I Need A Sister Not a Scolding – a look she deployed more and more often the older she got – and said, “Yes.”
“It was his new glasses, wasn’t it?” I asked, because I am always committed to the bit, and right then the bit was being an older sister. “They’re one of the sluttiest things a man can wear.”
Camilla nodded sagely. “I mean, no, it wasn’t that, but yes.”
“Then what was it?” I perched up on my desk and watched as, one by one, her shoulders dropped and her eyes cast downward. “Camilla?” I asked, still in the tone of someone who would Not Scold.
“He loves Dulcinea,” she repeated, her voice the most fragile I’d ever heard it. Even when she’d been delirious with fever at age fourteen, she had sounded more in control than this. That had been frightening – Palamedes was certain it was a version of the creche flu that was rumored to have swept the Ninth – but this, somehow, was more so. This was Camilla, unsure and unsteady and…
And sad.
“He loves Dulcinea,” she repeated, voice rough. “And I’m…I’m his cavalier. I’m his-”
“You’re his,” I interrupted. “And you slept with him because you wanted to, right?”
She nodded vigorously. When she did so, her hair moved aside and I caught a glimpse of a purpling bruise below her ear. King Undying, I support the human right of being able to go to work with hickeys and bite marks on your neck, but I don’t want to see it on my sister.
“He- We both did.” She colored a bit then, and I could only imagine how that exchange went down. Though, truthfully, I didn’t want to.
What I thought about saying was that Palamedes Sextus was in love with an unattainable woman because she was the safe choice. What I thought about saying was that it was my discerning, non-necromantic opinion that he was the stupidest man alive for not realizing at age 13 that Camilla Hect was the best thing to ever happen to him and that he should have married her and not taken her as his Hand.
What I thought about saying was: I told him not to hurt you or break your heart, and he is doing both of those things.
What I said was, “If you liked sleeping with him, that’s one thing. If you love him, that’s another.”
Then: “Do you love him, Camilla?”
She nodded a fraction of a second before she burst into tears. I shot off the desk and cradled her to me – I was taller than her, and so she could bury her face in my chest – and I rocked her side to side until she shook her head at being coddled. Then I stroked her hair and said, “You never cry, Camilla, what’s this about?”
“I don’t know,” she said wetly, and I realized it may be a combination of post-coital hormones and repression doing its work. But, more likely, it was that Camilla was newly beset by one of the most pedestrian, and yet most unavoidable teenage experiences: heartbreak. “I don’t know.”
I didn’t either. I wouldn’t know until years later.
19/29
I had just made Oversight as a junior member when everything started to go tits up.
It all started when Camilla – clearly in a hurry and on her way somewhere – stuck her head into her office and told me that Palamedes had sent a letter without her editorial input, and that she was concerned Senior Oversight would have his hide. I thought it had something to do with his ongoing beef with a Fifth House scholar who – were it not for the considerable distance between our Houses – likely would have found a way to have the Warden shot.
“No, worse,” Camilla said. It was hard to tell if she was joking, but I assumed not given the context. “He asked the Duchess Septimus to marry him.”
I choked on my tea. “He- Why?!”
I ignored the pain in Camilla’s eyes when she said, “He wants her to be here, where she can be cared for and where someone will see her for more than her impending death. At least, that’s what he said. King Undying knows what he wrote; I can’t believe he didn’t let me edit his proposal. He probably totally fucked it up.”
I could tell by Camilla’s swearing and her choice of words that she had committed herself fully to her duty as cavalier primary, and so was not thinking about anything but her wants for what the Warden wanted. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about her crying in my arms not two years prior.
I still had yet to exact my vengeance upon the Warden for making my sister cry.
“Anyway, I worry somehow word of this will come from the Seventh to Senior Oversight and make insinuations about the Warden's intentions, and I really don’t want that on my hands,” Camilla barreled on, all business and halfway out the door. “So I’m going to put myself on the agenda, barring your interference, so don’t, and I’m going to tell them it was a matter of personal correspondence and thus immaterial to sanctions.”
I was out of my chair and into the hall before Camilla had a chance to vanish. “Cam! You can’t just march into the committee meeting and say that!”
Camilla turned on her heel and stared, hard. “Then buy my silence, Kiana. For eight thousand grade points, I will stop.”
“I don’t have the power to give you grade points.”
Camilla blinked. “Exactly.” And then, she was gone.
I never did find out if Dulcinea Septimus received the Warden’s letter. I never learned if she said yes, though I suppose she didn’t. All I knew was that the Warden and his Hand accepted a summons a year later to compete for the prize of Lyctorhood and, in the process, attempt to meet their childhood correspondent.
And then, I knew even less every day after Dominicus blinked off, and then on again.
21/31
Before you burned yourself alive, Cam, I saw you.
I saw you, your face twisted in pain, your body aching, your lips parted and chapped and swollen. I saw the blood on your clothes and the tears in your eyes, and I thought to myself, This is how it looked the last time he made her cry.
The Warden was in that other body, that oddly-coiffed and impractical meat suit, and you were leaning into him, and I saw how desperate you were for it to stop. I knew that’s what it was because I’d been hearing it in your voice every time they would bring a recording of it to Archivist Zeta as proof of life.
(That proof was really for me, by the way. Zeta requested it, but I was the catalyst.)
And then there you were, and there he was, and it wasn’t until you cried in front of all of us that I knew things were bad and you weren’t getting better, and this time I couldn’t cradle you to my chest. He had to do it. He had to hold you while you burned and then that body was gone, kicked away in your one last act of strength, and then he was with you, and then he made you stop burning.
I suppose that’s oddly fitting, the passing of the torch. He practically married you there, you know. And you him. One flesh, one end.
Oh, Cam. I know you asked me to bear witness because you knew I loved you enough not to stop you. I know you knew I would witness your act of necromantic insanity – because that’s what that was, who the FUCK is Paul, by the way, if you ever come back, I want that explained – and I’m sorry I cried when you burned yourself alive, but Camilla…
Camilla, I’ve been watching you love him for years, and I didn’t even realize what I had been seeing until it was too late. One flesh, one end, until death do you never part again, it’s all the same. And I never knew. I never fully understood.
You loved him. You’ve always loved him, and he always loved you, and I think he knew you were unattainable because he could never deserve you, and I think you never knew how to tell him that he always had you even though – or maybe because – he never asked.
If you both return from wherever you’ve gone, if Paul is something that’s half of both of you, if the person you talk about finding in the River is who I think it is, then I’m going to need you both to get your asses back here so he can write an absurd report on the theorems in play that made all of this happen, and so you can tell me how the hell he ended up in a body belonging to – if I’m getting this right – the Third House’s formerly dead cavalier’s body once puppeted by a Lyctor.
Your friend Pyrrha is interesting, by the way. She looked at me and said, “So you’re the older model,” which I take to mean that she found you attractive, but too young. The thought of her attempting to seduce you is laughable. You have only ever had eyes for Palamedes. I just didn’t realize until upon intense reflection.
I could still kill him. He hurt you and he made you cry and he broke your heart.
But I won’t.
I won’t.
What if I armed you with tools, gave you the heads-up on a room you’re about to enter?
What if I told you about the thing that I don’t see, the thing that is necessary to make it better?
Would you be angry?