Chapter Text
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In the cool depths of Drearburh, the darkest caves lit only dimly by the faint shimmering glow of translucent green, Harrowhark Nonagesimus celebrated her 18th birthday in the way she preferred: cold, dark, and alone.
The caves were quiet, pierced only by the drip-drip-drip of water from the stalactites into the pools below. Harrow diligently scraped the shedded cocoons of glow worms for her great aunts to crush into fine powder suited for paint. To her right, Ortus perched dolefully on a jut of wet rock, placing his soft little paws on the comfort of his tail.
“Harrowhark.”
She pretended not to hear him, catching the corners of her veil to pull it tighter around her hair, in need of a cut. She could imagine Ortus’s reproachful sandy gaze staring her down, and she huffed. She knew what he wanted and she was not ready to talk about it.
“Harrow, Harrow, Harrow.” He chanted in his tiny meow and she whipped around to glare at him.
“What, Ortus.”
“Have you given more thought to…what you’d like to do for your birthday?”
She could barely suppress her eye roll, and turned back to her task. “I suppose it will be much like any other day. Tending to the catacombs after supper and practicing my necromancy. Perhaps I will”— she pretended not to see his hopeful glance— “work on polishing up my broom.”
She could hear his faint purr rumble out from his chest.
Harrow eyed him in annoyance. Her gloved fingers were stained a shimmery white, and the padded inside of her collection basket was brimming with cocoons. She spared a moment to look around the caves, the smell of mineral and oss and wet stone permeating her senses. Ortus may have wanted to leave, to follow the tradition of striking out on their own to develop her magical abilities, but Harrow loved Drearburh: the deep, dark woods marked by evergreen sentinels and mist; the small but elegant cathedral decorated with polished white bone stark against the black stone: the simple homes and stores along the main cobbled road, covering the necessities for the small, aged community.
Most of all she loved the catacombs, lit only by fatty candles along the walls of bone, the lovingly tended skulls, the bowls of oss paint waiting to be wetted and applied. And beyond the catacombs, deep in the center of Drearburh, was the Tomb, and guarding it was her inheritance, along with the source of her power. Her mother and father kept the town tended by walking skeletons, working the fields and attending to the needs of the nonagenarians.
Harrow loved her home, and no amount of pleading from her familiar could have convinced her to leave it. Where better to seek out the tools to better understand her necromancy if not the House of the Dead?
She clicked her tongue to Ortus and he hopped off his ledge, winding between her tight clad legs. He bounded up the bulky rocks leading out of the caves, and Harrow picked her way after him, emerging just as the sunset shifted from orange to purple. A meadow dotted with foxglove and monkshood met her eyes, dark and familiar. Beyond the treeline she could see the spires of Drearburh church and a smattering of black wings against the graying sky. Her heart thudded, swooping.
She greeted the nuns with a nod and a prayer as she and Ortus approached the skeletal arch at the start of town. They whispered shaky prayers back, fingers gnarled but confident on the knuckle bones of their prayer beads. In the onset of dusk, the streets were lit only by dull yellow light behind the stained glass of windows, and Harrow made her way to her ancestral home, Ortus’s eyes glowing in the rapid onset of dark. Harrow did not expect her parents, solemn and pious as they were, to have prepared a birthday celebration. She anticipated snow leek stew, viscous red wine, prayer, and ought else.
Harrow was surprised to see Pella and Priam’s familiars, a thin black cat with ice blue eyes and a wizened raven, perched on the carved rails leading up the stairs. Althenea greeted Ortus with a rustle of whiskers and Alistair blinked balefully at Harrow before flying through the cracked window near the drawing room. Dread pooled, cold and thick, in her abdomen.
She fingered the bone rings adorning her hands, straightening her spine as she stepped over the threshold. The manor had not been touched in what felt like several hundred years, other than to add new portraits to the halls. Black walls, black woven carpet, and intricate bone filigree on the corners, ceilings, and entrances - ancient furniture blanketed in lace, kept in the condition they were due to the dutiful skeletons and the lack of light able to break through the thick glass windows stained with purple, black, and blue. Her childhood was a quiet, contemplative one, most of it spent in prayer and reading. It wasn’t until Ortus had found his way into the manor library as a kitten escaped from a litter from her great aunt’s familiar that Harrow had found her first friend, small fingers still soft and pudgy and her heart eager for companionship. Ortus had refused to leave her side ever since.
Harrow heard a rustle of bones, and adjusted her veil. Crux rounded the corner, grizzled face twisting into the closest approximation of a smile he could achieve. He always had a soft spot for his Harrowhark, his pupil and Lady and necromantic pride and joy. He bowed, and Harrow waved him up.
“My lady, your mother and father have requested your presence in the dining hall to honor your birthday.”
Harrow felt her eyebrows raise. A trickle of dread crept up her spine, and she willed her face to stay still and solemn, lest she betray her anxieties. “Very well then.”
Crux offered his arm and she placed her gloved hand, still stained and imperfect, on the fabric of his cloak, feeling the thrum of thalergy under his skin. He led her down the dim hall and to the cold, unforgiving presence of her parents.
Pelleamena and Priamhark were striking at first glance. Her mother sat at the helm of the table, elaborate lacy gown draping elegantly against her chair and contrasting against the starched white tablecloth. Althenea had already slunk into the hall and had started to pace at Pella’s feet. Harrow assumed her mother had once been beautiful, but her skin was now sallow and tight, cheeks sunken in and hair limpid and dull, even cropped close to her skull. The skull paint worn in the tradition of the Ninth could only just disguise the impact of age on her mother, and couldn’t quite do the same for her father.
Priam was tall, spindly, and his back hunched as if in perpetual prayer. His skin was papery and paler than Harrow and her mother, and without a veil was hard to look at in the eyes, wet and bloodshot as they were. Harrow often felt one amorphous, hard to name emotion when she saw her parents: a mixture of embarrassment, pride, grief, and fear.
“Harrowhark,” he said, voice like a spider. “Take a seat.”
Harrow handed her basket to Crux, who took it and squeezed her fingers. She sat and removed her gloves, and nodded to her mother before lifting her veil. Before her was the expected meal of snow leek soup and thick red wine. She closed her eyes, brought her clasped hands to the bow of her painted lips, and prayed. When she opened them, her parents were observing her.
Without preamble, her father spoke. “Daughter, we are at a crossroads.”
Many years of training had helped Harrow school her face into a perfect mask. Her heart thudded erratically, and she distracted herself by dipping her spoon into the beige mush of soup, savoring its familiar earthy aroma.
“Now that you have turned eighteen, your mother and I saw fit to disclose to you the nature of Drearburh, that which we have shared with scant other than Marshal Crux and the doors of the Tomb.”
Harrow bowed her head and kept her eyes trained on her plate. “What is it you require from me, Father?”
Pelleamena answered instead. “We need you to leave, Harrowhark, and go seek answers amongst other scholars and witches. We need a cure for the Ninth.”
Her heart hammered in her chest. “I am honored to do whatever is needed to aid the Tomb. I fail to see, however, how leaving would help the citizens of -”
“Without this, Harrowhark,” Pella stated, voice creaky and soft yet determined, “There will be few other citizens of the Ninth either way.”
Harrow’s eyes flickered between her parents, nausea curling into her stomach. “What do you mean.”
“You recall,” Pella stated, “your birth into this world. Troubled, to say the least. You were the elusive heir for the Ninth and gave me a difficult pregnancy. Your father and I - well, we tried very hard to have you, Harrowhark. We prayed to the Tomb and asked for any magic, any at all, to help aid our desire to have you.
“Shortly before you were born, a terrible flu took all of our young ones in the Ninth, and soon after that, all young adults of child bearing age. As we began to raise you, we lost near ninety members to age and illness. Crops began to wither and die, leaving us with little other to produce than rice and snow leeks. The other Houses stopped sending pilgrims and visitors. The debt we asked of the land, the Tomb, our community - it was too great, and now I can feel the depletion of the system.” Her eyes were large and wet like stones, meeting the controlled blankness of her own gaze.
“The Ninth is dying, Harrow. We must find a cure, and it must be you.”
—
Returning to her room, tucked up in one of the spires of the great House of the Ninth, Harrow began to pace.
She could feel Ortus’s eyes on her as she diligently folded and sorted her assortment of belongings into a neat pack. She had often thought that, had she been forced to leave, she might travel to the Sixth House, where she could study in their extensive libraries and spend most of her pilgrimage speaking to books and few others. Yet her parents and Crux had insisted that the city of Canaan made the best sense, what with the great diversity of representatives from all the Houses, the presence of excellent libraries, and the relative anonymity it would afford Harrow due to the influx of visitors and tourists. She had nothing to argue against this with, other than a creeping dread at the prospect of encountering so many people.
She found herself staring at herself in the small, dusty mirror above her desk, where she had spent so many days contorting bone fragments into tibia, femurs, metacarpals, mandibles - where she had tasted the tempting rush of thanergy. She fingered the bones in her ears, finding them a comfort. The idea that the Ninth might one day wither and die - might be lost to dust and history, to be absorbed by the greater, wealthier Houses of the Third or the Fifth - it was too much to bear.
She furrowed her brows. Her face was small, pinched, unremarkable - pallid brown skin, dark eyes, a pronounced philtrum. There was no use for beauty or vanity on the Ninth, and she could hardly imagine what it might be like to encounter others her own age. Her heart seized, irregular. She grabbed her beloved paints, the ornate urn of grave dirt, her extra veil, and folded them gently into her pack, after slipping a handful of grave dirt into each pocket. She often suffered from air sickness on short flights, let alone the multi day journey she would have to make it to Canaan.
Last for her to do was pull her broom out of its narrow box under her bed, and inspect it closely for errors like she had done hundreds of times before. It was tradition in Drearburh for the heirs of the Ninth to bind the bone of their nearest passed grandparent into the handle, to carve protective ruins and the mark of the Ninth into the grips near her hands. She thought, with a hint of pride, of how fine and well balanced her broom was, how sleek and thrumming with magic it felt when running one’s fingers over it.
She imagined flying it into the great city of the First, darting along the streets, impressing all those who witnessed her with the mysterious presence of the Ninth. She imagined the fear, or awe, or admiration it might inspire in those who thought of her home as little more than a tiny death cult at the end of the Empire. She imagined finding a cure for the dwindling power of her home, and felt a thrill go up her spine for the first time. Harrowhark Nonagesimus was determined to be the one who saved her House, and to be as quick, discrete, and imposing as she could possibly be while doing so.
—
The field she had thought so little of this morning outside of the caves loomed dark as she and her parents, flanked by Crux and her great aunts, climbed up the path leading to her best point for take-off. Her meager belongings were tied up into a neat pack: other than clothing and hygiene materials, she brought only paint, knucklebones, grave dirt, and a book of prayer. Crux had packed an assemblage of food suitable to get them to Canaan, though Harrow aimed to give most of it to Ortus, whose love for meat outshone only his love for sun puddles.
They all stood under the night sky at last, the velvety blue-black stretching out before them, dotted with twinkling stars. The moon was full and she felt its energy twitch along her skin, raising the hairs on her arms. She nodded to her parents and mounted the broom, the bone shining in the dark.
Pella said nothing, her eyes trained on Harrow. She stretched out her arm and brushed Harrow’s shoulder with the force of dry grass. Priamhark cleared his throat.
“You understand, Harrowhark, the gravity of what we are asking of you. We understand this isn’t what you wanted.”
Harrow dipped her head in acquiescence, curtly, unsure how to explain the ballooning ache in her chest, the desire to stay warring with her desire to save her home. “I will do my best by the Tomb.”
Her parents nodded, sharp edges seemingly melting back into the night until they appeared little more than shadows. Crux plucked Ortus up from the ground and placed him behind Harrow. “Be well, my Lady.”
She turned to the bright of the moon, took a short, ragged breath, and pushed off.
Harrow was not partial to flying. Her stomach often got queasy and when she didn’t have time to crop her hair close to her head, the wind would whip it into a tangled mess that she spent hours brushing out. It was always nippy in the sky and Ortus, while he loved the thrill of adventure and the night sky, was fussy and impatient on the broom, pressing his large furry body up against Harrow’s bony spine for balance. Flying was so…pedestrian, and Pella had drilled into her for years that her necromancy was a treasure, a gift, a rarity.
It didn’t help, as she and Ortus soared above the trees, that her parents' words weighed heavy in her gut. She had never even ventured beyond the dark ridge of the tree line, skulking in the caves and tunnels and relying on Crux to bring basic items in from the nearest House, the Eighth. Yet as she and Ortus cruised into the sky, she couldn’t help but feel a thrill alongside the nausea and fear and anger. Out in the greater world, in the city of Canaan far off in the First House, there were others who might be able to give her what her parents, and great aunts, and Crux, and even Ortus never were: friendship, with someone her own age, living and worldly and made of human flesh and blood.
Harrow was determined to become the greatest necromancer her House had ever seen, and its absolution.
—
She flew through the darkest parts of the night, due southwest, until the dawn began to break over the horizon. She could feel Ortus start behind her, his fitful waking chirps melting the frost over her heart. They had made good time, and she was pleased with their progress, though she was unsure how far they still were from their destination. She was beginning to flag, and Ortus let out a mournful cry from behind her, his clear plea for breakfast.
She inhaled, and felt a sharp change in the air. It had become fragrant, even in the crisp cool breeze of early morning. The air began to warm, faster than she expected, and she thought she smelled roses, a smell so unfamiliar to her she was astonished she had a name for it.
In the distance, she thought she might catch the shimmer of light on brown, and sure enough, another witch came into view, despite Harrow's best efforts to fly in the opposite direction. The witch on the broom was clearly a few years older, porcelain skin nearly translucent, her sky blue eyes matching the veins under her skin and the bruise like circles under her eyes. Her hair was brown, and curly, and cascaded around her exposed collarbones, tossing against the filmy seafoam green fabric of her dress. Her boots and hat were jaunty and stylish, and despite her wilting appearance she was breathtakingly pretty.
Harrow hated her immediately.
“Hello there!!”
Harrow did her best to shrink into herself, pulling her veil tighter. She was both grateful for the protection of her face paint and mortified at what it revealed of her. The Ninth prided itself on its secrets and she was screaming vulnerability having left the comfort of her home.
“Why, a little bone witch! I’ll be!” She was so near that Harrow caught a stronger whiff of the perfume permeating the air. Her cat was soft and gray and huge, even larger than Ortus, eyes unblinking. Ortus tucked his nose in against the folds of her black cloak and hid.
Seventh. She was ashamed it took her as long as it did to know just off the greenery below, and the land peppered with cottages and grassy meadows. The Seventh was known for its potion makers and love spells, though she’d heard whispers of a curse of perpetual sickness from the occasional visitor to the Ninth and from the books in her parents’ library that didn’t focus on the Tomb.
“Hello,” she said stiffly.
The other witch didn’t seem to notice or mind her discomfort, as she tossed her lovely long curls over one shoulder. “My name is Dulcinea Septimus, and this is Loveday here.” She gave her familiar a pat on the head. “I’m on pilgrimage at Mithraeum, you know. Just here for a little visit home.” Her smile was coy.
Harrow, whose small life had contained very little to be jealous over, and very few exposures to those she could be jealous of, felt a pang of that very emotion in her chest. The Mithraeum was little other than a pipe dream for most Houses, a far off mystery of magic and technology and the elite. “I see.”
Something hardened in the older woman’s gaze. “I’ve even had the pleasure to meet the venerable John Gaius himself. He’s making genius progress at the intersection of magic and invention…I’d offer to introduce you, I do love taking young witches under my wing - but he’s quite particular about those he lets in his circle, you know.”
Harrow nodded, feeling a twinge of ire settling in her throat. “That’s generous of you. I expect to find my needs sufficiently satisfied at Canaan.” She was loath to admit how eager she’d be to meet John Gaius.
A flicker of emotions crossed Dulcinea’s face. “Canaan…it’s a beautiful city, perfect for meeting new people, getting some of those basics down. You’ll fit right in, dear.”
Harrow bristled. “I intend to study, that is all. Now if you excuse me, my familiar and I are in need of rest on our journey.”
The woman’s smile was sharp and satisfied, much like Althenea’s after she caught a large rat in the catacombs. “Head south, and once you’ve passed the copse of oaks you’ll see a station, with regular trains to Canaan and the rest of the Houses. Good luck, young ….?”
Harrow stared at her, and refused to answer. Dulcinea pouted dramatically, and affectionately scratched her cat’s ears. “You’re no fun! Good luck regardless, little bone witch. I really do hope the best for you.”
Harrow watched as the other woman began to sail west, until all that was left of her was a glimmer of pale green and brown. She reached back, absently, and ran her thin fingers down the ridge of Ortus’s back.
“I didn’t like her very much,” he informed her, and Harrow let out a dry cough that could be mistaken for a laugh.
“For once we are in agreement,” she replied. “Now let’s see if we can find the train station and get you something to eat.”