Archive of Our Own ^beta

A spectacularly disorienting rush, like falling and like standing up too fast, both at once—

He’s being pulled in every direction but forward, which of course is the one he needs to move in; well, that’s nothing but what he expected, but it’s still a bit annoying, isn’t it—and for fuck’s sake, it’s so much harder to do this, this time around. He doesn’t know this destination nearly as intimately as the last (well, thank God for that, anyway) and he didn’t have much of a chance to brace himself beforehand. He knew Cam would be throwing open the window but with no eyes on the situation he had no way of knowing when exactly, and now he’s entirely untethered in the storm that’s come abruptly screaming through, wind and water tearing through his hair as he fights his way further into it, following the link—

Nothing like the last time, this body and its mistress very much do not want him visiting, but never mind that; this simply isn’t a time when he can take no for an answer (if she were here, his cavalier would say, name a time when you ever could, and he would say—)

And then—simple as that, with a mild thud of feet on floor—Palamedes blinks open his eyes, and he’s standing upright. 

He takes stock, briefly: two legs (his) beneath him, doing an adequate enough job of supporting his (meta?) physical weight; that’s more than fine. An all-too familiar room around him, not exactly the location he would have chosen nor the location he would have expected Tridentarius to choose to establish any kind of mental base in, but fair enough, he supposes; hopefully they can keep this brief. And, of course, Tridentarius herself before him, frozen halfway through the act of whipping around to face him, a pair of eyes that aren’t hers going surprisingly wide in her pale and narrow face. That part really is a bit less than ideal, but it’s hardly a surprise: he’s the one who came knocking at her door, after all. He came as prepared as he could possibly be to confront the consequences.

He takes a step towards her (legs steady, floor solid, all good) and opens his mouth to speak, but she beats him to it:

“Wait, what?” she says, eyes still wide, mouth twisted indecisively between two different expressions he suspects are probably shock and disdain. “Sextus? Really?” 

And then—without waiting for an answer; inconsiderate of her, but again, nothing he wasn’t expecting—she raises a hand (or the skeleton of one, anyway, plated in gold; interesting; Cam had told him she’d lost one, but Pyrrha had neglected to describe in any detail the shape in which she’d gotten it back ) and performs an elaborate gesture with it, as if trying to ward off an evil. He barely has time to glance around him before the gob of rich yellow fat is hurtling toward him, and he doesn’t have time to step aside before it’s enveloped him from waist to shoulder. It drives him backward with improbable force, and to keep his feet under him so he doesn’t fall he takes a step backward, then two—then, on the third step, one of his flailing arms smacks into the open doorway behind him that she must be trying to force him out through, and he hurriedly seizes the chance to brace himself this go-around before he passes through it, into the dark nothingness on the other side, and—

His feet hit the hardwood again with a bad, jarring thud, and he can’t help wincing a bit before he straightens back up to look Tridentarius in the eye again.

“Well,” he says. “That didn’t go as smoothly as I’d hoped. Let’s try again, shall we?”

She’s still staring at him, but her mouth has gotten mostly over disdain and settled pretty definitively on shock. Fair enough; he does tend to have that effect on people. 

(If she were here, his cavalier would say don’t get overconfident, Warden, and he would say—)

“That’s not possible,” says Tridentarius, her long hair a colorless oil spill across her shoulders as she gives her head a shake. There really is genuine distress on her face, he thinks. Imagine that. “This cannot be happening. This is simply impossible—”

“You know, people are always using that word,” he says, cheerfully. “I don’t think it means what most of them seem to think it means, though. Listen to me for just a moment, won’t you? I promise it’s important. Princess, I’ve come to bargain.”

Now she looks even more like she’s been slapped. “I don’t—but—how are you even here? For fuck’s sake, you’re dead.”

“Do you know, I’ve always thought that death is really more a state of mind than anything—”

She cuts him off with a scoff. “Stop trying to be cute, Sextus. Last I heard, whatever passed for your mind was in pieces all over the sickroom back at Canaan House.”

“True enough,” he agrees. “But Cam picked them up.” He taps one finger to his temple, and then—because he realizes that that clarifies exactly nothing—he adds, “She got a bit of skull off-planet. I… hitched a ride.”

Shock switches back over to disdain on her face, then. “A revenant,” she drawls. Her guard is still up—she has one hand at her hip, where a rapier would hang, although there is no rapier hanging there, not here and now—but it’s a defensive posture and not an aggressive one. He doesn’t think she would strike at him anyway, not right at this moment. Her mouth can say disdain all it likes, but there’s a gleam of interest in her eyes that she’s not hiding as well as she thinks she is. “That’s the decision you made, Sextus? You really live like that? Personally, I think I would rather just die at that point, but I suppose you never did know how to let anything go, you relentless pest … but however did you get in here? I didn’t sense any foreign bone on her—”

“Yes,” he says, and feels a bit of a smile sliding its way across his lips. “Well, you wouldn’t have. I’m not actually a revenant, really. Not anymore, at least, if I ever was. Cam and I got all that sorted a few months ago. We’ve been in a sort of—well, of course it’s not really Lyctorhood, yet, but a step along the way… it’s her skull I’m hitching rides in these days, you see.”

Ianthe Tridentarius blinks, just once, and then her whole face contorts in a way that tells him she does see. 

“Oh, eugh,” she says, with subdued vehemence, before shuddering once, delicately, and tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Well. And I thought Hect’s life was depressing before… Congratulations to you on your perfect willing idiot of a cavalier, I suppose, putting up with ceding headspace to you all this time—although, again, if I were in her situation I think I really would rather just die all at once and get it over with—”

“I am aware—” (Palamedes can’t help but raise his voice slightly, at this point) “—of your feelings on the matter, Princess. I don’t happen to set much stock by them, but—”

“But you never did set much stock by anything other than the contents of your own asshole, did you,” interrupts Tridentarius, casually and moodily flicking dust that isn’t there off one of her richly purple sleeves. “This is one of the many reasons that you and I will never become friends, Sextus, along with the fact that you are, quite frankly, an enormous bore as a person most of the time, and also that you’re too dead even by my standards. Really, I ought to thank you for coming back from beyond the grave to haunt and torment me this one final time—I’ve seen so much shit and so many familiar faces today that I was starting to get something dangerously close to nostalgic for last year’s little oceanside vacation, but thirty seconds of conversation with you has been enough of a reminder about all the awful parts of the whole experience that you’ll never catch me yearning for simpler times again…”

She trails off, as if lost in reverie. Palamedes waits for her.

“Right,” she says, snapping back into motion with another flick of her golden skeletal wrist. “In any event. Well, this certainly has been… something. You’ve given me quite a lot to think about, Sextus. I don’t have time to unpack all of it right now, unfortunately, because I have to get back to the business of putting you and your poor abusèd cavalier out of your common misery and getting the goods off this hell world, but perhaps I will lie awake in my bed late tonight and ponder whatever fucked-up three-legged-race of an existence the two of you have been eking out, taking turns running her body into the ground these past few months… I mean, really—you’re almost worse than Harry ever was. Was that a life, Sextus? Was that worth your life? I know you’re a sentimental man, but you’re not as stupid as all that, really; surely you know enough of mathematics to have realized at some point before coming to face me that one is a greater number than zero. And surely she would have volunteered—why didn’t you just take her up on the offer? Eat her and go for proper Lyctorhood, at least then one of you might have lived out today—”

“I really don’t think,” interrupts Palamedes, “that proper Lyctorhood means what you think it means, either.”

There’s a single beat, a silence stretched just a moment too long, before Ianthe’s face untwists and she laughs. A high, short, derisive laugh; it rings startlingly loud about the airy, high-ceiling room, before ending just as abruptly as it began. 

“Yes, yes, I know,” she says. “Your opinion of my opinion is low, et cetera—I feel as though this conversation is just going in circles at this point. I’ve had enough. I’m busy, Sextus, and to be quite honest I really don’t appreciate unsolicited house calls. As much as I would love to stay here and talk with you,” (and she raises both arms, and this time he’s bracing himself before anything even hits him) “—I’m not going to—”

“Princess, I don’t think you understand,” he says, this time, as soon as he feels solid ground beneath his feet again. “I’m not going anywhere until we work out a deal, here. I’m sorry, but leaving you in control of the body just isn’t an option.”

She’s staring at him now with open frustration and open mouth. The pale sheets of her hair have frizzed, slightly, and her breath is coming harder. So is his, for that matter—dragging himself back along the link through Tridentarius’ subconscious is getting easier each time he has to do it, but it’s never going to be very much fun. He spends a moment letting his pulse drop back to something closer to resting while he waits for her reply. 

“But this is absurd,” is what she comes up with, eventually, which is honestly a little bit disappointing. “Why are you still here? And why are we—” Abandoning words, she completes her sentence with a gesture at the lab around them. 

Thus prompted, Palamedes can’t help following her gaze and scanning the place over again, a non-decision he regrets immediately. God, does he ever hate this place. Things are exactly how he remembers them: floor a brilliantly polished wood, walls a blinding white where they haven’t been decorated with various painted flora and fauna. The large desks and cushions scattered around; the marble worktop with the sharps splayed out across its surface; the rolled-up bedding in the locker; even that huge, impossibly old chest freezer in the corner, yawning open and empty like a forsaken grave. None of it looks like it’s been touched in ten thousand years—except, of course, for the angry words spelled out in fresh black paint on the far wall. 

He tries not to look too closely at the fresh black paint on the far wall. 

“You tell me,” he says. “It’s your mind we’re in right now, not mine.”

Tridentarius gets snappish, at that. “Yes, it is,” she says, “and I did not invite you here, and I’ve now expelled you twice, and yet here you are again. What are you even doing, Sextus—how do you keep coming back? Why can’t I get you out of my head?”

“Ah. Well,” he says. He pauses for a moment. Tridentarius has caught her breath, and her fingers are twitching again—violence likely imminent again, then; best to square up and brace for it. Out of habit, he reaches upwards toward his face—and when his fingers meet with his glasses, slide them up the bridge of his nose in that well-practiced gesture he used to perform so unthinkingly, he can’t help the slightly-startled grin that spreads across his face. To think he would have ever missed that, of all things…

“It’s like you said, isn’t it, Princess,” Palamedes says. “I never did learn how to let anything go.”

“I know the feeling,” said Camilla.

Palamedes very much doubted this. The number of times he had seen Camilla reject food being offered to her could probably be counted on one hand, and had mostly all happened at points when she’d been ill—also not a common occurrence. He, by contrast, was frail and sick all the time, and skipped every meal she’d let him get away with skipping. Maybe not an entirely uncorrelated pair of facts, now that he was thinking about it, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. “No, you don’t,” he replied, not moving a muscle except to flip to the next page in his book. “You think breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

“Not about that,” Camilla said. He didn’t have to look at her to see the expression on her face: eyes not quite rolling but certainly cast upwards in muted exasperation, lips pressed together. “I meant about having your work interrupted.”

“It’s just that this book is so interesting, Cam. I’ll get up later.”

“My lessons in the Spire are also interesting. But that didn’t stop you from interrupting those yesterday.”

Palamedes groaned, closing the book on his finger to mark his place and rolling over onto his side. Camilla was standing over his mattress, hands on hips, shifting her weight restlessly from foot to foot. “So you’re just being petty,” he said. “I had that new letter from Dulcie! I only interrupt you when it’s really important!”

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Come on. We’re going to be late.”

“You could always just go by yourself,” Palamedes pointed out—perfectly reasonably, in his own opinion. “And bring something back to me if you’re that concerned. I promise I’ll eat it, whatever it is. Unless it’s that green paste stuff again, in which case—”

“Food isn’t allowed in the juvie dorms.”

“When has that ever stopped us before?” Palamedes blinked in mild outrage. “You really are being petty on purpose, aren’t you?”

“You cut my lesson twenty minutes short. Get up, I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“Twenty minutes out of three hours. I didn’t even think they let you schedule lessons that long—don’t you get tired? Why do you even need three entire hours, anyway?”

“Because there’s so much to learn, Registrant,” she said. 

Which he guessed was fair enough. “You really love swords, don’t you?” he asked, rocking his head back and forth on the pillow in an approximation of shaking it.

“They’re useful,” she replied.

The sword lessons were a new thing—or, rather, the rapier lessons, specifically, were a new thing; she’d been at weapons-in-general during her elective hours for years at this point. She’d taken them up a few months ago, casually, as if on a whim, were it not for the fact that Camilla had never done things on a whim. 

They hadn’t talked about it yet. But then, they didn’t need to, really. Camilla was ten years old now. His own birthday was up in a few weeks’ time. Also in a few weeks, theoretically, if his instructor would set the date: his Second Circle exams. No one had ever sat for them before eleven before, according to the records (Camilla had checked). At the rate he was going, he was going to qualify for Fifths within four years, maybe sooner. You couldn’t sit Fifth Circle exams without taking on a cavalier first. It was usually an empty formality, as cavalierships tended to be in the Sixth House: pick your favorite non-adept sibling or cousin or friend, who may or may not have swung a sword outside of the compulsory physical education courses ever in their life. Swear the oath, throw a party together, et cetera, go through the motions. 

But Palamedes had never set much stock by just going through the motions. 

Except, that is, for when he was arguing with Cam about breakfast and bedtime, in spite of the fact that it was always a foregone conclusion that she would win. He didn’t set much stock by going down without a fight, either. “Why do I need to spend time on eating, anyway?”

This time Camilla really did roll her eyes. Palamedes watched her do it. She stopped shifting her weight between feet and leaned it instead against the doorframe she was standing in, a mere half-pace away from the bed. You couldn’t even get the door all the way open, in a Sixth House juvie dormitory. It was lucky that Palamedes wasn’t very tall yet, or there would be no way he could sprawl out across the floor of Cam’s—his current favorite study spot. 

“Because you need to take care of your body, Registrant,” she said. “Or one day you’ll lose it somehow and you’ll wish you’d listened to me.”

“Define ‘lose it’.”

“You could die. Of starvation. Or dehydration.”

So many dumb ways to die. The physical form seemed vastly overrated. “I think I could live without a body, actually,” Palamedes decided. “Probably easier to focus that way anyway.” He was actually getting quite hungry, now that Camilla had come in here and made him think about it.

“No, you couldn’t, Registrant. No one can.”

“Yes, I could,” Palamedes insisted, propping himself up on one elbow. “I’m built different. The average revenant can last for at least a few months if they have unfinished business, and the average revenant didn’t sit for Second Circle exams when he was ten years old. I could stick around for years, I reckon. Think how much I could accomplish if I didn’t have to do things like go eat breakfast all the time.”

“Maybe,” Camilla said, looking unjustly skeptical. “But I don’t think you’d like it very much. Come on—” (and she yanked his covers off the bed, right from overtop of him, scattering the bits of flimsy with his notes on them all over the floor and ignoring his very dignified yelp as he scrambled upwards after them) “—the dining hall closes in half an hour.”

Of course he’d followed her then—still in his pajamas, complaining all the way down the halls, but a half step behind her the whole way. She’d been right, in the end, as he’d had to admit to himself later on. She always was.

“Princess, I’ve come to bargain.”

“Sextus, if I hear you say that one more time, I will personally end the lives of every member of your precious Oversight Body, and I will not make it quick.”

Palamedes can’t hold back the breathless pant of a laugh that escapes him. “That’s an empty threat if I’ve ever heard one. The way you’re going, you’ll never get anywhere near them. Fine, I’ll stop offering, if you like—but remember the option’s always on the table. We can stop this exercise in futility at any time, on mutually agreeable—”

“Yes, thank you for the offer, I’d love to take you up on it,” Tridentarius says, “except that you simply don’t have anything I could possibly want, as you are a pathetic dead man and I am the right hand of the Emperor Undying, and I find myself relatively uninterested in the prospect of offering you whatever it is you want in return for a hot load of nothing in return… Mutually agreeable, my ass. Here’s my counter-proposal, Sextus: I banish you and go about my day, and if on your way out you somehow manage to anchor yourself to some new host in the room like the revolting parasite you are—your cavalier’s sad little knife, perhaps?—then I will magnanimously ignore your presence, and you can enjoy a few last hours of existence alongside your Oversight Body before I rain shells down on this planet and you all die in a fire.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” Palamedes counters. “You assume I have nothing of worth to offer you here, before you even listen to anything I have to say… and—” (he holds up a hand, cutting off her objection before it gets started) “—you assume you’ll be able to kick me out as easy as you like, which is starting to get untenable as a position, as you ought to know by this point. Come on, Princess, it’s been—what? Four times, now? You have to have realized, you won’t be able to just force me out that door and expect it to stick, it’s not going to get you anywhere. I know your training is mostly in flesh magic, not spirit, but you told me you were a liminalist—you must grasp at least some of the principles behind it, right? The link’s been firmly established, back out in the physical world, thanks to Cam. You can’t break it from in here, and no matter how many times you try to shove me out I’ll always be able to grab onto it and pull my way back along—as many times as I like, in theory—”

“Oh, in theory, is it,” says Tridentarius, with a blatant roll of her eyes. “That’s one more thing about the Sixth House I never could stand. In theory! Well, Sextus, this isn’t theory, it’s practice, and you’re really not half so unassailable as you think you are. If I can just kick you hard enough that you lose your grip on that link—”

“Go on, then,” says Palamedes. Probably he shouldn’t be encouraging her. Already they’ve lost what feels like a frustrating amount of time to these whims of hers. Five minutes, perhaps. Or five seconds. Maybe even five hours. That’s the problem, actually: he knows he’s got no real way of knowing for certain exactly how long it’s been on the outside. Nine fucking months of his (after?) life pissed away in a bubble in the River have taught him something about temporal relativity, after all. All he can do now is hope that his attempts to ensure that the time imbalance is in his favor instead of against it have actually worked, and that they haven’t been gone so long that everything ends before it can even start… 

But what is there for it, anyway—Tridentarius is apparently a learn-by-doing sort of individual, and maybe doing a few more times will get the futility of the whole thing through her head faster so they can move on to something that’s actually productive. “Try it,” he finishes, with a nod in her direction.

So she tries it. She kicks him right back out the door four more times in a row, with almost no break in between: globs of viscous yellow fat around the legs, around the torso; once even a vaguely-skeletal construct of bone that he raises an eyebrow at—perhaps out of desperation, perhaps just for variety. He lets her do it. He doesn’t even really put up that much resistance, except for when she flings fat at his face and he has to redirect it back at her lest it envelop his head. He’s died one spectacularly unpleasant death already; he has no desire to go out again suffocating on this stuff. 

By the third time she tries he’s starting to feel a bit dizzy, but each time he picks his way quickly back along the link and pops right back to existence in the middle of the lab without much issue, although he does end up a bit out of breath again. Tridentarius is out of breath too, though, staring at him—and she’s worn some of the candles around her down to stubs, stripping all the tallow off them to keep flinging it at him.

He says, mildly, “Isn’t it the Emperor himself who’s been quoted saying that thing about insanity and repetition?”

“Oh, stop talking,” says Tridentarius, and appears to be ready to try for round five, but the golden fingers of her right hand hesitate for a moment, and Palamedes presses his advantage.

“You’re doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting it’ll somehow turn out different this time around just because you want it to badly enough… We could do this as many times as you liked, and it would still never get you anywhere. You see, Princess, that’s your problem: you never learn from your mistakes. You underestimate the Sixth, over and over again… you let your guard down. You let Cam inside it, to set up the link—and now you’ve let me in, too, and you’re going to have to deal with the consequences. I’m not leaving, not without getting what I want first… so you can either take me up on that bargain offer, or—”

“And why did you even come here in the first place?” Tridentarius snaps, which is how he knows he’s won. “Whatever do you even want?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I want Naberius Tern’s body.”

That brings Tridentarius up short. She blinks the blue-brown eyes that he still can’t look at in her face without a nagging feeling of something-is-terribly-wrong crawling its way up his spine (if she were here, his cavalier would say something about the shock of recognition, and he would say—) 

But Tridentarius rapidly regains her composure, and gives a rude laugh that’s almost a snort. “Do you know,” she says, “you might well be the first person to ever say that… obvious, as if. Well, I don’t care to dwell on your reasons, but whatever they are, you can’t have him. Like I’ve said, Sextus, I’m simply not interested in bargaining with people who nothing to offer me—and you can prattle on however you like about your plans to hold me hostage in here until I’m forced to cave to your demands, but all I need to do to put an end to this whole farce is find any way to get you out of here… and even if just kicking you out the door really won’t ever work, which I am still not at all convinced about, it’s not as if I haven’t any other options. I could always kill you. That ought to do just fine.”

So it’s going to be like this after all, then. Palamedes sighs—well, he did try, harder than Tridentarius deserved, and therefore no one should criticize him. “I thought you might say that,” he admits, and takes off his glasses, gathering up a corner of his robe to polish them clean with. “If it’s going to be a fight, then I’m prepared to fight you. I do wish it hadn’t come to this, though. If you change your mind later—”

Tridentarius interrupts him with another laugh—a genuine one by the sound of it, long and loud, vaguely hysterical. “You want to fight me?” she gasps out, one hand fluttering in the air before her. “You really think you’re prepared to fight me? Let me tell you something for free, Sextus: I’ve spent the last six months on the frontlines of a war that you don’t even understand. I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned… and every time, I have sat back up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the plating. Sextus, I am an immortal. You can’t fight me. You haven’t got a hope against me.”

Palamedes laughs, too, then: just once. “It’s funny,” he says. “That’s exactly what Cam said Harrow told her, once.”

Tridentarius’ skeletal hand twitches at the mention of Harrow’s name (interesting, thinks Palamedes) and makes another grab at her hip, where her rapier isn’t, and then she makes a frustrated noise and thrusts herself up off the cushion she was half-leaning against. “Don’t act as though you have any claim on Nonagesimus—”

“Of course I haven’t, nobody who’s ever lived has ever had any claim on Nonagesimus,” says Palamedes, and then has to amend: “Well, except Gideon, of course.” Tridentarius’ expression sours further, and she looks like she’s going to say something, but then she doesn’t—just folds her arms across her chest, like a petulant child. Palamedes continues: “But in the one week we had together I was a better friend to her than you ever were in months, by the sound of it. And I’m not going to let you stand in the way of me doing as right by her as I possibly can right now.”

And with that, Tridentarius is on her feet and snarling, shoving hair out of her face. He knows he’s only got a moment left before she hits him with something—he replaces his glasses, savoring the familiar weight of them, a weight that the borrowed sunglasses on his borrowed nose never quite matched—and, in Harrow’s honor, he twitched his fingers and reaches for the chips of bone scattered about in the wake of Tridentarius’ melting candles.

“And I used to think you were work,” said Camilla.

“I am work,” Palamedes agreed, absently, running a hand through his hair as he paces back and forth across the floor of their quarters, kicking flimsy out of the way with each step. “I’m a great deal of work that you do very capably, for which I’m incredibly grateful. But yes, I take your point. Good God. Lucky we ran across the cavalier when we did. We’ve been here all of, what, a week? Too early to start losing people in the facility already.”

Camilla, rolling a pencil back and forth between the fingers of her right hand as she taps out an irregular rhythm on the table with her left, replied, “Ten days, Warden.”

“That’s not any better,” said Palamedes crossly. Camilla was not reproached: the hollow-sounding rap of her fingernails on the real wooden surface of their rooms’ table continued without faltering. “God, I hope they listen to sense and stop splitting up. Setting aside the fact that you can’t even do half these challenges without a cav and necro both, which Nonagesimus has to have realized by now… they keep this up and I really don’t know how the pair of them are going to manage just to survive to the end of this—whatever this is.” Challenge felt like the wrong word; trial not any better. He liked puzzle, maybe: the past few days had felt more than anything else like an exercise in trying to fit together pieces, locked separately away each in its own laboratory space. Or scavenger hunt: scrounging for clues all over the basement of this great House they’d all been shut away in together. Nothing about this whole experience had been anything like what Palamedes went into it expecting, and he couldn’t necessarily say he was much pleased by the surprise.

“So much for ‘our biggest competition’,” said Camilla.

“No, I’ll stand by that, actually, I still think the Ninth is the House to watch out for,” Palamedes said, half surprising himself with the force of his belief in the words as he speaks them. Insofar as the term competition could legitimately be applied to their current situation—which he was not even sure sure, because absolutely everything about their end goal here had been left so frustratingly vague—the Reverend Daughter concerns him more as a potential rival now than ever, even after finding her semi-conscious within the construct she’d raised from a frankly insanely small amount of source material. Under her own power only. While suffering from moderate-to-severe dehydration. God have mercy. “Even if she does want for self-preservation, Nonagesimus is clearly a genius—”

“Geniuses,” interrupted Camilla, “only get so far alone.”

Which Palamedes was forced to acknowledge as a fair point. “I suppose you’d know,” he conceded. “But I was never arguing with that anyway. Didn’t I just say I hope they get their act together as a partnership?”

“You did,” said Camilla. “We’ll see if they do.”

Palamedes had gotten the distinct impression, during their dealings with Gideon the Ninth earlier that day, that Camilla had taken a disliking towards her. This impression had not much abated in the time since. “Oh, come on, now, don’t you think she’s learned her lesson?” he asked, and the ambiguity of the pronoun saved him from having to decide which one of the pair he was talking about: Gideon, for failing to perform her cavalierly duty up to Camilla’s standards, letting her necromancer slip out of her sight and off into harm’s way? Or Nonagesimus, for deciding to go off to work past her limits on her own in the first place?

Camilla, never much for ambiguity as a rule, apparently latched onto the second option. “She would be a quicker study than you if she has,” she said, her fingers halting in their one-by-one tapping across the table surface before abruptly switching directions. “ Want for self-preservation—I couldn’t count the number of times you’ve promised me you’d put the theorems away by halfway through the night cycle, and then two days later I was back to hiding the lightbulb from your desk lamp.”

“You know, I did wonder where those were always getting to.”

“No,” Camilla said, “you didn’t.”

Also true; of course he’d known. “You can hardly blame me,” he said. “Time being of the essence, and all that.”

She didn’t say anything, but he knew what she was thinking. Ten days. Ten days, and not a word beyond the blandest of pleasantries from the woman he and Camilla had been exchanging letters with for over twelve years. The woman who was, in large part, the reason he’d worked hard enough over the past twelve years to have even made it here to meet her in person before her time ran out in spite of everything he’d done to try to extend it. Not fair of him, he knew, to think this way. She’d never asked him for anything; he’d done it all for free. She’d never made him any promises. She’d stopped him, when he’d tried to make promises himself, with more gentleness and kindness than he’d probably deserved. 

But the fact that she hadn’t even looked Camilla in the eyes, that first time they’d spoken…

“I don’t blame you,” Camilla replied, finally. “But I won’t apologize either. Not for doing my job.”

“Which is?”

“Keeping you alive. At whatever cost necessary.”

Palamedes for his own part couldn’t count the number of times Camilla had said something of the sort to him, dating back to years before they had even sworn the oath to each other—and yet there was a part of him that would apparently never cease feeling stupidly, adolescently flustered each time anyway. He stood back up from the table and set himself about tidying the sheets of flimsy scattered across it in every direction into a single stack. “Yes, well. On your head be it then, when Supply sees how many bulbs I’ve been requisitioning and comes after me for an audit. I’ll be making that one our problem to deal with, not just mine.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

A beat. A gust of wind outside, rolling off the endless water spread at the foot of the tower they’d been placed in, rattled the window, and Palamedes jumped slightly, scattering flimsy all over again. He waited for Camilla to comment—on his clumsiness, on his embarrassingly keen startle reflexes—but she was only quiet for another moment, before, suddenly:

“I don’t know about the Reverend Daughter, but I do think Nav understands now,” she said. “How dangerous it is here. How splitting up might actually mean dying. I don’t think she’ll be so easily parted from her necromancer going forward.”

That was the last they’d said about it, the conversation turning at that point to their own plans for the next day. But as Palamedes lay in bed that night, trying to humor Camilla with an acceptable number of hours of sleep, the words came back to him, weighted with a certain ominousness he couldn’t shake.

Rightly so, as it turned out.

He tries to rip the gilded bones that make up Ianthe’s right arm from her control and shut the construct down, but she swats him away before he even gets started. Fair enough; he hadn’t really expected that one to get anywhere. She shoves him out the door. He tries to shut down her respiratory system for long enough to drop her out of consciousness (he’s very good with lungs; lots of experience) but she laughs him off with apparent ease. She shoves him out the door. She tries exploiting thalergetic resonance to blow his chest apart using his own heartbeat for power (and fair play to her, that’s creative; he wonders where she got the idea from) but her attempts to lay hands on the heart aren’t particularly difficult to counter. She shoves him out the door. He wrests her own theorem from her grasp on his way back in before she has a chance to complete it and turns the construct on her; she says, “Oh, Sextus, I get all tingly when you take control like that,” and shuts it down, and shoves him out the door before he can decide whether he ought to reply to that in some way, which is probably for the best. They both push thanergetic barriers at each other in a bid to gain territory in the center of the room, but neither of them get very far and both of them get worn down in the process.

That’s one of the things that’s working in his favor, actually—along with the fact that she keeps reaching for a sword that isn’t there. He’s spent the past six months afraid to do much more than the absolute bare minimum of necromancy required to keep everyone in his life alive and try to get somewhere useful with Nona, lest he push something too far and cross a line he’s never known for sure doesn’t exist into damaging Camilla’s body. Or get them caught and burnt to death by a zombie-hunting mob, for that matter. Being here, back in his own body (well, in a manner of speaking, anyway) feels almost like a luxury to him on this front. 

Tridentarius, meanwhile, has spent the past year and a half adapting to life with a virtually unlimited energy well at her disposal, and it shows. He may be out of practice, painfully so, but she’s running out of gas. 

She’s not at all pleased about it. “This is beneath me,” she complains breathlessly, as their thanergy fields fight for dominance between them—arms extended, sweat starting to stick her hair to the sides of her head. “I will give you this, Sextus, very grudgingly—it must be clever, whatever you’ve done to cut off my power supply. I’d even respect you for it, except for the fact that it’s making getting rid of you so much more annoying than it needs to be.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Palamedes pants back in response. He’s honestly not feeling at his finest either right now. Ianthe may have gotten too used to Lyctoral power for her own good, but for his part he’s gotten too used to operating with Cam’s muscles rather than his own, and as it turns out, necromantic battles that one doesn’t kill oneself to end on one’s own terms before they really get started actually require a lot more in the way of physical endurance than he ever would have guessed. 

Well, he supposes, perhaps it’s all for the better that it won’t be his body they have to use for things like this in the future, then. 

He continues: “But it is quite interesting. Like I said earlier, it’s your mind we’re in right now—my consciousness is embedded fully within yours, thanks to that thalergetic link we established when you let Cam in to touch you. That meant you were always going to get to build the playing field, for better or worse—and I was expecting worse…” (He sees her eyes flick around the ancient lab in a rapidly haphazard manner that almost suggests discomfort, and takes a small amount of vindictive pleasure in the fact that he’s apparently not alone even as he wonders at it again.) “But I did take steps to try to establish a few limits on it.”

She grunts, and the barrier Palamedes is fighting against shudders with power; he’s forced to take several steps backward in response and catch his breath before he can continue speaking. At this rate, he’s going to be out the door again in minutes’ time. 

“My main concern was the energy well, of course. I had to do something about the subconscious aspects of the soul, where the raw power you absorbed from Naberius Tern rests… so I’ve put large pieces of both of our souls beyond the conscious mind in a sort of stasis on the outside for the time being. Which also, hopefully, is having the secondary effect of decelerating the relative passage of time for us out there as compared to in here, because, quite frankly, there isn’t anybody who has time for this… It’s really a very fascinating piece of magic, actually—very abstract, very layered. I wasn’t certain ahead of time that I’d be even able to make it work, but Cam and I have spent a lot of hours on soul theory lately and she said she was willing to flip the coin—”

Tridentarius shoves him out the door.

“And the gamble seems to have paid off,” he says, once his feet hit the floor again. “Here we are, and all that.”

“My God, do you ever shut up?” Tridentarius asks in response. “Has anyone ever gotten you to stop talking?”

“Many have tried. All have failed,” he admits, with good cheer. “I doubt very much that you’ll be the first to succeed.”

But he does have to give Ianthe Tridentarius this, if nothing else, he reflects, as he finds himself struggling right back through the welter of her subconscious all over again minutes later: she certainly isn’t one to back away from a challenge.

“I did mean it,” he says, after some indeterminate period, some indeterminate number of exits and re-entries, his head well and truly starting to spin with the stop-start-repeat nature of it all. There’s blood between his teeth now, which is annoying: he has to swallow it down before continuing. For her part, on the other side of the room, Tridentarius spits on the shine-polished floor. “When I said the bargain’s still on the table. It’s not too late, Princess—we can stop this senseless fighting whenever you’re ready.”

“You do know, Sextus,” she says, with a sneer, “that that’s not my title anymore, don’t you?”

Palamedes pauses, for just a second, and then recalls: yes, she had identified herself with a new one, during the broadcast. He really oughtn’t to have forgotten that. In his defense, there’d been quite a lot to think about buried in that broadcast—Gideon’s face, right where he’d least expected to see it; the physical form of the messenger and the implications thereof; and, of course, the ground-breaking contents of the message itself. Not that he ought to be making excuses— if she were here, his cavalier would say, “You’re getting sloppy, Warden,” and he wouldn’t have much to say in response to defend himself, except— God, it’s been a long couple of days, hasn’t it? “Of course, my apologies,” he says, with a nod to Tridentarius. Or—not Tridentarius. “Prince Ianthe… Naberius.”

“I’m sensing a bit of hesitation,” Prince Ianthe Naberius drawls, as her artless hulking construct of melded bone and fatty tissues smashes its way through Palamedes’ own artless hastily-constructed defensive skeleton army. (In a way, he must admit here, it’s possible that there were actually some benefits to his being forced to spend all those months alone in the River with naught but a deplorable romance novel and his own thoughts for company, because one of the things he did in there was spend a little while obsessing over all of Harrowhark’s various genuinely mind-blowing tricks that he’d never had the time back in the Canaan House frenzy to sit down with and think about, just in an attempt to entertain himself by trying to reverse-engineer the theory behind some of it. Theory which he really had never thought he’d put into practice, but it turns out he’s going to need just about every tool in his kit and then some to deal with the force of nature that is Ianthe doing her absolute best to put him out of commission for good.) “What’s the matter, Sextus?”

“You’ve claimed Naberius’ name as a part of your own title,” he says, having to raise his voice a bit above the clatter of bone-on-bone echoing through the lab. “I accept that, but I can’t pretend I endorse it. I don’t think you have any right to it, personally—no more right than you have to make use of his body as a puppet, or his murdered soul as—”

Tridentarius cuts him off with a laugh. It’s an almost-startled sound, genuinely mirthful, high and loud but, he notes, not as long or uncontrolled this time as it had been when he’d first declared his intention to fight her for dominance if necessary. “What an interesting opinion. And yet here you are, squabbling with me for control over him anyway—you, who’ve been squatting in your cavalier’s body for… how many months now? Your cavalier, who is in all likelihood bleeding out on my floor so that she could deliver you here in the first place? You may say whatever you like about my low moral standards, Sextus, and I probably won’t even argue with most of it, but I will say this for myself: I’ve never loved a hypocrite.”

A beat passes. “I don’t love one, either,” Palamedes says, heavily. 

Their constructs are fizzling out, having ground each other down nearly to dust on the floor in the center of the room—as much as he’s borrowed from Harrowhark, he’s several years of intensive study away from being able to fully tackle the regenerating ash she’s mastered, and it looks like Ianthe is no further along—but neither of them has made a move to launch a direct attack on the other. Palamedes wipes a sheen of sweat off his forearm with the fraying gray sleeve of his robe, and is unsurprised to see that the wet it comes away with is slightly pinkish in color. There’s blood on Ianthe’s face as well, staining the roots of her colorless hair where she’s wiped it upward. 

“Self-hatred really is an attractive look on you, Sextus. I bet that cavalier of yours goes absolutely wild for it, when you whip out the sad little I don’t deserve—”

That’s what it takes, it turns out. That’s the first thing she says that makes him genuinely, specifically angry with her, the angriest he’s been since he learned what was done to suspected ‘necromancers’ on New Rho, or since he found out about Pyrrha drinking the bottle of bleach that, fortunately, didn’t take. Or since he looked Cytherea in the eyes, right at the very end, and understood what she was and what she had done.

“You have no right,” he says, and he punctuates it with a forward push; one of his shambling skeletons gets its awkward hand around her right arm, and there’s a terrible, discordant scrape of bone on bone before she manages to dislodge herself, panting, and sweep the construct off its feet with a kick outward at its ankles. Her eyes have widened slightly. She isn’t prepared for his sudden fury. So few people ever are. Cytherea hadn’t been, and it had been her downfall as well as his own. The next of his constructs to reach her forces her backward a step, towards the far corner of the room. He continues, as she struggles again to fend it off. “No right to go making comments like that about Camilla and me. You don’t know anything about—” His voice gives out, half from exhaustion and half from rage. 

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what hell the past sixth months have been for him, trying desperately not to consume Camilla’s soul as she’s been chewing on Tern’s, as Cytherea had swallowed her own long-dead cavalier and countless others in all the time since. Knowing every second he so much as spent conscious in her body was inherently another step on the way there, staring at his cobbled-together knowledge of soul theory and trying to put the final pieces together as quickly as possible before the time ran out for both of them. It really hadn’t been his decision to live like that, stealing his entire existence away from her. It had barely even been Cam’s, though she’d made it willingly. He would never have asked this of her, and he does hate himself for being grateful that she gave it to him anyway, but if their hands hadn’t been forced—if there’d been literally any other way— 

And there is another way, he’s finally convinced of it, and he’s so close to reaching it now, despite everything they’ve had to fucking deal with the past six months. So close he can almost see the finish line—a matter of hours now, if that, and the only thing standing in their way is Ianthe Tridentarius herself. The last, and possibly the most formidable, of all the obstacles in their path.

“Anything about what, Sextus?” She is haughty, proud, recovered entirely from her stumble the moment before, dismantling his constructs with ease. “About your special bond? Your affection for her that’s beyond my comprehension entirely?” Even at half the room’s distance, Palamedes can see her roll her eyes. “You know, I must ask, because I’m genuinely curious—does everyone really think I have never loved anyone before? Is it easier for all of you, to think of me as some kind of heartless maniac, incapable of—”

“No,” interrupts Palamedes, surprising her again. 

Because it’s true, isn’t it. He noticed that tremor in her hand when he mentioned Harrowhark, and he sees the clumsy skeletons embedded within her fatty, otherwise shapeless constructs as they clash with his, supporting and strengthening them—earlier he said that he didn’t believe she was a good friend to Harrow, in those months the two of them spent together after Canaan, and he’d stand by that still. He hasn’t stopped being appalled by the letter Harrow wrote to Camilla explaining the situation, not since the moment Cam told him about it. Any good friend wouldn’t have extracted promises of everlasting debt from a vulnerable, grieving girl before laying her out on the table to perform a surgery bound to make her more vulnerable still in exchange for an uncertain benefit. But anyone who didn’t care about Harrow at all wouldn’t be going to as many lengths as Ianthe is in the hopes of getting her back alive; Ianthe’s affections may be twisted and possessive, but there’s a core of something real to them nonetheless. 

And then of course there is Coronabeth. 

Just as Ianthe has no right to speak on his and Cam’s relationship, he feels he doesn’t fully understand hers with Corona, but he can see— anyone could see—just how deep the ties run. He thinks he understands, secondhand, the dependence Coronabeth and Ianthe have upon each other; their mutual obsession; the effect that separation has had on each of them. Camilla won’t talk much to him about her months in BOE captivity before Harrow made contact with him, or what her relationship with Coronabeth had been in that time before they’d been separated and driven apart by external forces, but he has gathered that there was a closeness there rooted in the shared force of their grief—that Coronabeth, for her part, truly was a wreck of a person in her earliest days apart from Ianthe. Regarding Ianthe herself he is lacking in firsthand accounts, of course. But in his own experience that sort of relationship can never develop one-sided, without full commitment from each member; no whole-hearted devotion from the cavalier, without the necromancer’s equal affections in return. 

Clearly, there are some people that Ianthe cares for, in whatever way is hers, as much as she gloats about her lack of care; she’s not as far gone as all that. “No,” Palamedes says again. “I know perfectly well you’ve loved like anyone else. Which is why you ought to know better than to do the kinds of things you’ve been doing.”

“Know better? Certainly I know better than you do, Sextus. I’d rather preserve the things I truly love than devour it.”

“Well,” Palamedes shoots back. “How fortunate it is for you, then, that you came to Canaan House with a spare person you didn’t care about and could murder and cannibalize with a clear conscience.”

He doesn’t get to see the expression on her face at that, because he’s too busy clawing his way back along the link and through the door after two of her constructs send him flying out of the lab again. A pity, he thinks. It might have been informative. More informative, at least, than her latest attempt at a set of parting words, tone perfectly flippant: “Yes, I’ve always been luckier than I’ve deserved, haven’t I?”

They don’t talk much, for a while after that. Ianthe devotes herself wholly and entirely to the act of trying to rip him apart, and he’s honestly quite happy to return the favor. 

A while—he wishes, after the fact, that he could be more specific, but it’s impossible. Divorced this completely from the real world, he has no real concept of how long he’s been at this, except for the number of times Ianthe manages to get him out of her conscious mind and he has to do the struggle back upward through the subconscious again, and he loses count of that at some point between thirty and forty. That’s uncharacteristic, and maybe cause for concern—but he doesn’t have the bandwidth for concern, because Prince Ianthe Naberius really is a fighter like few he’s ever encountered before. She has stamina beyond what feels like it should be possible—and he hadn’t even considered her seriously as a competitor back at Canaan House; how, he wonders, did he miss this? Coronabeth had been distracting, certainly, but he ought to have known better. It's always the quiet ones, Camilla would have said, if she'd been here and he'd been venting his frustrations to her instead of upon the metaphysical person of Prince Ianthe Naberius, and, by extension, on the floor and the once-pristine white walls of the laboratory, slicked and splattered now with copious amounts of sweat, and blood, and other, even less savory biological byproducts—his own as well as hers, and the remnants of the increasingly brutish necromantic weapons they're flinging at each other. And Palamedes supposes Camilla, of all people, would know.

He’d thought earlier on that Ianthe had been wearing down, and perhaps she is, but she’s also getting angrier, there’s a sheer force of personality that seems to be keeping her going. Every time he claws himself back into the fight feels like starting from scratch against her; any constructs he raises dissolve and scatter during his time away, and he barely has the chance to blink back into existence within the bounds of the arena before he’s obligated to bring them right back up to fend off her latest attempt to pounce on him. He’s meeting with some success in his own attempts at forcing her backward, step by step, into the corner of the room, but half of the time, in the brief moments he’s out of commission following a successful strike on her part, she’s managed to gain the ground right back.

As they thus struggle, more-or-less fruitlessly on both sides, the wordless tension between them stretches thinner and tighter until Palamedes feels he almost can’t bear it anymore—but as it turns out, to his surprise, it’s Ianthe who breaks first. It’s apropos of nothing, seemingly; or, rather, it’s apropos of one more petty strike he makes against her, nothing he hasn’t done before. Except that this time, when he inverts her theorem and twists her own construct back on her as it forms, it’s the right one—the skeletal one—that he happens to envelop within the blob and pin at the elbow and wrist to the side of her body. Her eyes go wide for a moment, and her other hand flies to it. She tugs physically at the stuck arm three times in rapid succession, which tells him she’s not thinking—if she were thinking, she’d simply have dissolved the fat rather than trying to force it. She does get there a moment later, before he has the chance to press his advantage as far as he would have liked—fight’s not over quite yet, then—but it takes her enough time that he understands: the arm is a weak point. 

Good to know.

Ianthe has melted the construct completely now; she flings the resulting tallow at the back wall of the room where it splatters over the letters marked in black paint. The wet, squelching sound of it is terrible enough that he can’t help but wince slightly, but she doesn’t take advantage of it because she doesn’t notice, because she’s too busy launching herself into a rant:

“Why, Sextus,” she says, “why are we still in this room? Nothing about this is remotely cute or funny anymore. I want out, post-fucking-haste.”

An opportunity to sit back down at the bargaining table? Palamedes just about jumps at it. “Well,” he says. “Like I said earlier. You can always take me up on my offer—”

“Fuck your offer, and fuck you, and fuck you most especially for choosing here of all places to have this pointless eternal fight with me. Are you having fun? Is this some nostalgia thing for you? I would have thought you’d have even more cause to hate this room than I do.”

Palamedes blinks. “But I told you already—I didn’t drop us in here. Or—not here, specifically,” he clarifies, sparing one arm for a broad gesture at the room around them, and immediately having to snap it back into defensive posture as she pounces on him. “I didn’t build this field, Prince. You did.”

The Prince scoffs, but Palamedes doesn't miss the way her eyes dart around the room, sweeping from floor to high ceiling and wall to wall. There’s a hint of uncertainty there, or at least of distraction, but it doesn’t do him any good: she rebuffs his next foray just as easily as any of the ones before it even as she’s visibly drawing herself together into a scoff.

“Come now, Sextus—if I was the one making choices about the battle ground, I’d have at the very least have brought my rapier along to it, wouldn’t I?”

“But I didn’t say,” said Palamedes, “that you were making choices.”

“And now you’re just contradicting yourself.” It’s supposed to be another drawl, clearly, her favorite method of verbal delivery, but her voice is too tight, with exhaustion or frustration or both; it snaps like a wound-tight string. 

“Not consciously, anyway,” he clarifies, though in truth he doesn’t think she needs it; he’s fairly sure she knows what he’s getting at already even if she doesn’t want to acknowledge it. “But there’s clearly some reason your subconscious dropped us here. I’d imagine because this is a location of some psychological significance for you. Or,” he amends mildly, “for the cavalier whose soul you’ve attempted to absorb with your own.”

Or both, he doesn’t add. Again, he watches her eyes; they don’t sweep the whole of the space uncertainly, as a few moments before, but flick right down to a certain spot on the floor. The same spot, more-or-less exactly, where he remembers the bled-out corpse of her cavalier lying when he walked into this lab on the day everything went all the way to shit. 

But of course there’s nothing there now.

“Babs is dead,” she says. “His soul doesn’t exist anymore. He’s not making any decisions.”

“Except that his soul very much does still exist,” Palamedes counters. “I’ve even seen it. I told you, didn’t I, about how I did some work to cut off your energy well? All that power comes from somewhere. Naberius Tern’s soul is still present, within yours—stripped for parts, sure, but certainly not as thoroughly dissolved as you believe, I would say. Why else would you hate this room as viscerally as you claim to, if not for his influence? It was the site of your moment of triumph.”

“Things weren’t exactly uncomplicated for me that day,” says Ianthe, crossly. “I had to fight a literal demon from hell in here, if you recall—though perhaps you don’t recall; I believe you were off killing yourself for no good reason by then. And then I had to fight another one afterwards, because you couldn’t even be assed to take her all the way with you. And I lost an arm. And Corona—”

She stops. Palamedes watches her carefully. 

“You seem to have gotten it back,” he offers, nodding towards the gilded construct hanging from her right shoulder. “That’s Harrowhark’s doing, isn’t it?”

“ Stellar detective work, Sextus. They ought to give you a medal. Did she really not tell you? What have the pair of you even been talking about these last six months?”

“Nothing,” says Palamedes, surprising Ianthe almost as much as he surprises himself. But he’s certain, now, when he says: “It’s not her in there.”

Revulsion in Ianthe’s face. But not surprise, entirely. “I knew she was too quiet. Number Seven, sure, but even batshit insane Harry would find her way to a comeback or two—after all, she managed just fine before. What the hell is in there, then? Why not kick it out and take over the place, if you need a body so badly you’re willing to put us both through this absolute shitshow over Babs of all things?”

Palamedes elects not to dignify her questions with an answer.

“Look,” he says instead. “If you’ve had enough of the shitshow—if you really hate this room so much—I’d be happy to stop at any time. Like you said, I’m not fond of the place either. Just drop the constructs for a moment and hear out my terms. I really do think you’d benefit from a bargain as much as we would.”

Ianthe tosses her hair over her shoulder with a carelessness he doesn’t believe. “The day I lower myself to accepting terms from you is the day the Emperor dies, and all Nine Houses with him.”

“Well,” Palamedes says. “One can only hope so.”

Clack. “Does it feel to you,” said Camilla’s voice into Camilla’s ear, a little too loudly for comfort—he pulled the recorder a hand’s breadth further away—“like we must be nearing some kind of ending?”

She was right, Palamedes thought, like she was always right; it very much did feel that way, and it made little sense to him. Blood of Eden had given them a year, after all, and it had only been five and a half months. And yes, the Beast up in the sky was certainly complicating things these days, but it had been sitting there doing nothing two months now already and they had no reason to believe any change in its condition would take place in the near future. And yes, BOE were being a pain in their asses, but when had that ever not been the case. And yes, Pyrrha had been acting out again, but when had that ever not been the case, also, and it wasn’t as if they had any right to stop her doing whatever the hell it was she wanted to do with her spare time, as long as she brought the grocery money home once a week. 

Not that he hadn’t made a go at trying, the once, after the bleach: he’d tried telling her she had no right to do things like that, especially not with Nona depending so much on her, and she’d just told him that he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. That he had no business, et cetera; that she’d known it wouldn’t even take anyway, as she had known from thousands of years more experience than he had. “I’ve done a lot of suicides, Sextus,” she said. “So many. I know what I’m about. You want to lecture me, you try getting on my level first.”

He hadn’t reminded her about the circumstances surrounding his final moments in Cytherea’s sickroom. Instead he’d asked her why she’d felt the need to waste their cleaning products, then, if she hadn’t even really been serious about it—the bleach had been expensive—and she’d fired back, “Just to feel something; it’s been too fucking long,” and they hadn’t spoken again for two days, which he didn’t think she was any prouder of than he was.

They hadn’t told Camilla what they’d been fighting about, either. Or even that they’d had a fight in the first place. But of course she’d known anyway. Somehow she managed to know these things about him—even now, when she couldn’t possibly hear anything he didn’t want her to hear, because everything she heard from him was played back from a recording, because despite the fact that he was now living inside her skin Palamedes had somehow never felt further from her in his life.

Sometimes Palamedes almost thought that he had preferred it back in the River when he’d been truly alone, and didn’t have to feel this so-close-yet-so-far agony all the time when he listened to Camilla’s voice crackle over the recording at him. He’d thought at first he’d be able to adjust to life like this, for however long it was necessary for them to live it—Pyrrha had told him she’d gotten used to it without much issue, once she’d stopped banging her Gideon’s head on doorframes and figured out how to shave his face. But then again, Pyrrha had done a lot of suicides.

Palamedes had apologized to Pyrrha first, in the end. Because Camilla had clearly wanted him to, and because he thought he understood. Four months in, then, and existence in this state had only been growing more unbearable every day. 

Clack. “Yes, as a matter of fact, it does,” Palamedes agreed, in Camilla’s voice. “I think one way or another, we’re going to have to end this soon.”

He left it at that. She’d know what he was thinking, after all. She always did.

In the end, things shudder to a halt so abruptly and anticlimactically that Palamedes, in spite of it all, can’t help feeling a bit let down by his own victory.

They’re both running on fumes by then, both of them making stupid mistakes, and the Prince just happens to make one more than he does at a crucial moment—she turns right to dodge where she should have turned left, favoring her skeletal arm again, and one of her heels bangs against the corner of the chest freezer that he’s been gradually backing her towards. She hisses in pain and lurches to the side, off-balance, and before he can even fully think it through Palamedes is moving to take advantage. He shackles her ankle to the freezer with a bracelet of bone, and before she’s managed to free herself he’s physically crossed the distance between them—he reaches out, making contact with her shoulders, above the center of gravity, and shoves, and just like that she’s falling, arms pinwheeling, eyes almost comically wide as she topples over the lip of the chest and tumbles in a spill of limbs into the space within.

Then, hurriedly, he slams the lid shut above her and sits down on top of it to wait.

There is a great deal of shouting and banging underneath him. The shouting he pays very little mind to at this point. The banging, though, is at first of some concern. The lid vibrates alarmingly underneath him, and a time or two Ianthe even manages to push it upwards with enough force to open it a crack. Palamedes clings to the lid, kicks her fingers back into the chest when she tries to get a hand around his calf to work some mischief, and wills himself to be heavier. This body never was very substantial, was it? In spite of all of Camilla’s efforts to get him to eat more, he’d never done enough. It had never seemed important then. He regrets—Cytherea, he thinks, shaking his head again. She’d forced his hand; he’d thought he would have more time—but in the end it had come down to the wire and he’d had to make the decision to dispose of his body before he was ready. Before he’d had the chance to do everything he’d wanted to do—should have done—with it.

But it’s enough, now, to serve him one last time. Ianthe is a necromancer, too, hardly a physical specimen even in spite of a year or so’s work with the rapier, and eventually she tires of trying to shift him. The shouting tapers off first, and then the banging, until there are only half-hearted knocks on the bottom of the drawer. By this point, Palamedes has recovered his breath and felt his heart rate slow. The fight seems to be officially over—the adrenaline is leaving him.

So that’s it, in the end: two of the greatest necromancers of their generation, and it comes down to this. Palamedes feels pathetic, like a small child squabbling with another small child. Shoving one another over with a complete lack of grace, winner sitting atop loser to pin her down to the playroom floor. He’d just as soon have this over with as quickly as possible, not keen to savor his moment of petty triumph, but Ianthe can’t resist a few parting words, muffled through the lid of the chest freezer but still audible. 

“Oh, fuck you, Sextus,” she says, the affected drawl finally gone entirely from her voice, overwritten by frustration and exhaustion. “Have it your way, then! A load of good it’ll do you. The Cohort—”

“Won’t be a problem,” Palamedes cuts her off, still panting. He leans backward until his back hits the lid of the chest and he’s properly lying atop it, staring up at the ceiling. Its vaulted height, the lovely, hideous wood paneling—he’ll be glad to never see it again. “Not for me and Cam, not anymore.”

Another bang on the lid somewhere near his head; he feels his teeth rattle. But she’s growing weak—it won’t be long now. “I still don’t understand what you actually think you’re doing here,” Ianthe complains. “I don’t know what you need Babs for now when you’ve been managing perfectly fine doing… whatever it is you’ve been doing with her for the last six months.” She bangs the lid again. “What is your plan going forward, Sextus? Surely you can’t be planning to live in Babs’ corpse forever. I don’t know what you’re expecting, but I can assure you, firsthand, that it’s not very comfortable in there.”

He knows. He knows perfectly well that trying to puppet Naberius’ body is going to be an exercise in unpleasantness. Particularly, he thinks, now, fresh out of the comfort he’s enjoyed, these last few stolen hours or days or however long it’s been for the two of them in here, back in the closest thing to his own body he’s ever going to experience again. 

But he’s not going to have to do the puppeting for very long.

“My plan,” says Palamedes, “is to clean up your mess here on New Rho, to start out with. Then?” He shrugs, remembers she can’t see it, and sighs audibly for her benefit instead. “Then Lyctorhood, ultimately. Assuming I do have it right now. I’m fairly confident, though there really are so many variables—and I haven’t had the time to work them all out as thoroughly as I’d have liked.” The time, or the manpower. So needlessly difficult, staring down at the pencil in Camilla’s hand as it scrawled out all of his guesswork-calculations until his eyes crossed or the timer went off, whichever came first. A strangely profound loneliness, when he thought about it, so he generally tried not to: nothing and no one to check his work against, not when he was the only sane necromancer on this entire planet. How many collected hours had he spent staring at Nona, guiltily wishing he had Harrow back to help him out with this? He would even have settled for Ianthe, he thinks. She is a genius, whatever else she is. And perhaps—maybe if she’d seen his work, she might have understood—

“Lyctorhood?” She laughs, cruelly, but he can tell it’s covering surprise. “And all this time you had me fooled you were still opposed—”

“I am,” he says. “To your way. To the wrong way. But the wrong way’s not the only way.” 

He’s been counting—the last pound on the lid of the chest came over thirty seconds ago. Either she’s becoming genuinely interested in what he’s saying, or she’s almost done for. Maybe both. He takes her silence for an invitation and continues. “We’re going to do it right this time,” he says. “Me and Cam. We’re going to do it like it should be done. And you could too, I think—even now—”

“Define right in this context,” says Ianthe, voice sounding just as bored as he’d expected it to, but the fact that she’s asked at all betrays her. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you the importance of specificity back in that little one-room schoolhouse you call a home planet?”

“Fair enough,” concedes Palamedes. He’s really not at the top of his game at the moment. God, it’s been a long day. Or week. Or year. He struggles just a moment for words, and comes up with:

“It’s not devouring,” he says. 

“What?”

“You called what I’m doing to Camilla devouring, earlier,” he says. “I don’t like it, and I don’t necessarily agree, but—I suppose it’s a fair description of the situation, in its way. I’ve taken weeks of her life from her, cumulatively. I’ve taken maybe more than that, though we tried to be careful to limit the time I spent conscious and prevent my soul taking hers over. I wish I’d never had to do it—but I’ve had to do things I would never have chosen to do, if Cytherea hadn’t—”

The lid resounds three times in rapid succession with a series of bangs, fast and hard and loud enough that he jumps. “Don’t say that name to me,” Ianthe snarls. “I’m tired of hearing it. Bad enough that Teacher can’t get it through his head that he needs to move the fuck on from all of his messy fucking breakups—if I have to listen to you talk about Cytherea now after you’ve just forced me through a veritable eternity in a reconstruction of a room where everything reminds me of her, I will take a page from your book and blow myself up, and unlike you I’ll make sure I manage to take you down with me.”

The banging annoys him, but—Palamedes gets it. He gets her anger. He’s felt it himself, too. He still does, when he thinks too much about what Cytherea had done to him, to Camilla, to Dulcie most of all—what she’d taken from them. All of his life for the past year and a half has been lived in the shadow of her attempts to take everything he loved away from him. But—he’s ready now, he thinks, to let it go. To let it all go. He’ll never forgive Cytherea, but he thinks that finally he understands her—her grief, her rage, at having been lied to about what true Lyctorhood could be—just as he understands Ianthe now.

“What you’ve been doing to Naberius Tern up to now,” he continues, picking up his line of thought from earlier. “ That’s true devouring, on a whole different level than anything I’ve ever done to Camilla even on accident. You’ve used him—you’ve taken his soul and swallowed it up, to try to serve your own purposes. But what you don’t understand, Prince, is that proper Lycthorhood isn’t a consumptive process, it’s a creative one. Taking two souls and mixing them equally—the true consummation of the necromancer-cavalier relationship. Merging, to become something new, and far greater than the half-dead shell you seem to think is at full power. I can teach you how to do that, if you’d like. I promised a you bargain—that’s what I’m offering, on my half. For you—and for Naberius Tern. If you’ll leave me and Cam alone in return.”

A beat of silence, and then: “Sorry,” she says, “are you seriously suggesting that I—what? Follow your instructions and stir myself and Babs together? Babs? ”

“Or someone else, I suppose,” Palamedes agrees, knowing full-well who it is they’re both thinking of. “You’d have a job separating yourself enough from what’s left of him to do it properly with anyone else, though, since you’ve tried it the old way with him already. What you get for being overhasty, I’m afraid.”

Silence again, not long. Just long enough that he knows she’s thinking it over.

“You do realize,” she says, finally, “that even if I did trust you, or trust your calculations, or have any interest in your proposition—you do realize that what you’re talking about, if I understand it correctly, is still death for your cavalier? In fact, it’s worse—it’s death for the both of you. Mathematics hasn’t changed since we’ve been fighting, Sextus: one survivor is still better than zero. Half-dead this, half-dead that—I don’t know why you think a better Lyctorhood is one which neither party survives. Don’t do this to yourself, Sextus—not that I care one way or another, really, but it genuinely embarrasses me to see you be this stupid. Just do it the right way, and she’ll thank you for it, because—this obsession you have with trying to save her? The way you two keep sacrificing yourselves for each other? Nothing good will come of it, if it even works. Just blood and pain. It’s going to be the death of you. Sometimes you have to let people go. Particularly if they fucking want to—and don’t tell me that Camilla Hect hasn’t been waiting for an opportunity all her life to fall on a sword for you, as I have literally seen her do it myself.”

Palamedes thinks about the snatches of the dramatics in the throne room which he’d seen, in the seconds he’d stolen on-and-off from Cam before the fighting started so that he could assess the situation. The image of Coronabeth with a gun to her head. Ianthe agreeing to a duel she knew would have a catch, to stop her from pulling the trigger.

“I thought,” he murmurs, “that you hated hypocrites.”

Ianthe bangs the lid again. “What’s that?” she asks. “I couldn’t hear you. Come on, Sextus, stop moping about it. If it makes it any easier, I should tell you that I know where I put that sword through her abdomen, and she’s not surviving that one long anyway… Look, you had a good run of it. You did your best. But it is what it is. Sometimes people just have to die.”

Not today, he thinks. Though he supposes that’s technically wrong. But—not death only, not death truly. Not just an ending, for Camilla, and him as well, but a new beginning: together. 

“Well,” says Palamedes. “I suppose you always did underestimate the Sixth House, and you never did learn.” He oughtn’t really have held at much hope that he’d be able to change her mind during this time they’ve spent fighting together. But still, he feels a sort of regret at the opportunity he knows he’s missing. Ianthe Naberius truly is a great necromancer, if not quite on par with himself and perhaps Harrowhark, and it really is a shame that he hasn’t been able to win her over, in this time they’ve had together. He had hopes—not high ones, but not baseless ones either, he thinks. 

Never baseless, really, the hope of forgiveness earned—or forgiveness given, in spite of earning; forgiveness accepted. Amends made. Minds changed. Even now, he believes, it may still not be entirely too late for her to come to what’s right. They’ll have to keep an eye out for another chance, in the future—because Palamedes is quite sure that, while this may be the last interaction he ever has with Ianthe Naberius as himself-entirely, their paths will be crossing again, and likely sooner rather than later.

But for now—

“If you’ll excuse me,” he says, and even as he says it, he feels some of the adrenaline that had left him so abruptly at the end of the fight begin to flood back into his system, in anticipation of what’s coming next. Palamedes stands, though not before he dredges those adrenaline scraps into fuel for one more construct: dense, heavy bone in the approximate shape of a pair of too-large arms, wound with strands of primitive musculature. He anchors the shoulders to the wooden floor on either side of the chest—like a pair of gruesome tree trunks out of some illustrated book of nightmare tales, half-remembered from his childhood—and winds the forearm-sized fingers of each hand through each other, latching overtop the lid and binding it closed. It’s sort of hideous, he thinks, considering it from above. Harrowhark would probably love it. It won’t hold Ianthe forever, but it’ll do the trick for long enough.

Then he stretches upward, letting his eyes run one more time over the lovely high rafters of the ceiling and the delicate brightly-colored plants painted on the wall. It really is a lovely room, this one, in spite of everything. And there’s a lot of everything to be in spite of. Once before he’d resolved to die within this room, before setting out alone in search of Cytherea. Leaving Cam behind in here—perhaps the biggest mistake he’s ever made in his life, he thinks, sometimes; perhaps he might have lived if she’d been present in that moment. But then, perhaps she might not have. He doesn’t regret it, in the end; he’d do the exact same thing again, over and over again, if given the chance. Anyone who wants to can call it insanity, but they’d be wrong: he doesn’t mind if the outcome for him is the same every time. As long as it’s the same for her, too. 

The letters that Cytherea had painted still stand out in black on the wall, fresh paint: but spattered over, now, with his blood and Ianthe’s tissue. His blood—he feels it coursing through his veins. He steals one more minute in this body he never thought he’d miss to savor the sensation, breathing in time with his heartbeat.

But only one more minute, because—

“I’ve got people to be seeing on the other side.”

And he crosses the room unharassed, at a leisurely pace, to the gaping open door on the other side, knowing that this time when he chooses to step over the threshold, he won’t be coming back.

A spectacularly disorienting rush, like falling and like standing up too fast, both at once, and Palamedes feels himself being pulled forward—

When he blinks open his eyes he can’t immediately resolve most of the space around him. He’s too out of it still, he supposes, and it’s strange in this new body besides: limbs stiff, eyes too dry. Nearly unbearable, after the illusory comfort of being back in his own skin these past several—well, not hours, it can’t have been longer than minutes out here. Extra time, stolen time, time that’s at an end now—all of his time, nearly over now at last.

But he doesn’t need to see the entire room, anyway. What he’s looking for is—as she always is—right beside him. 

Even with his vision still blurry and his thoughts still scrambled, he can see that she looks like hell. Hair mussed, skin too pale, the blood down her shirt a startling red against it: no one gets off easy in a fight with the Prince Ianthe Naberius, it seems. The blood is hers, and it’s still coming—oh, she’s bleeding profusely, wherever the wound is it must be deep, he’d told her to be careful, how long has it been on this side and has anyone thought to see about a bandage yet? 

But, looking like hell or not, she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, and he’s seeing her—not his own pale imitation in the mirror, but really her, here before him, for the first time in over a year, and the moment he lays eyes on her—even looking like hell!—he knows: they’re going to be okay, now. They can figure it all out—Nona, and Harrow, and Gideon, and the whole of the Sixth House; there’s no problem that they can’t solve, given the chance to work on it together. Properly together. The endless, hellish cycle of the last six months—the brief periods of wakefulness punctuated by timers blaring, die all over again, wake back up and face whatever fresh hell accompanies the monotony of yet another day—is over. They’re only inches, now, from making it out once and for all.

The body is all wrong, on the inside as well as the outside—he tries to rise gracefully and shoots straight upward at top speed, awkward and overeager. The voice, when he speaks, is foreign, rasping, wrong as well. But when he speaks, he gets the words right at least.

Camilla’s eyes on his, when they meet, aren’t the ones he remembers, of course. Too pale, too clear—his eyes. The shock of recognition, he thinks. But it’s not an unpleasant shock, this time. Not like looking at Naberius Tern’s stolen eyes in Ianthe’s face. 

“Yes, Warden,” Camilla replies. “I will always know you.”

The room empties soon after that. Pyrrha takes Nona off in search of the ward they’d come to break. Coronabeth snaps herself out of a state of shock and busies herself about fretting noisily over Captain Deuteros, which isn’t particularly helpful for anyone involved—Deuteros isn’t getting any worse—until Camilla, lying prone under Naberius’ hands as Palamedes winds bandages about her middle, manages to grit out something about the shuttle, and Coronabeth hastens off to go look for it. And then it’s just the two of them, alone. Together. Properly together, for the first time in a year and a half.

Camilla is too quiet, even for her. They can’t rendezvous with the rest of Blood of Eden soon enough, for Palamedes; surely someone among them will have some fucking pain reliever. He wishes he could take care of it himself, but in this borrowed body, this wrong body—only a little while longer, he reminds himself. They’re almost at the end of the line.

It’s as if she’s read his mind. Again, as always. Even the small effort of turning her head is effort for her now; he can hear the catch in her breathing, as her eyes meet his. “Warden,” she says, voice tight with the pain. “You’re sure you’re ready to go ahead with this? With the end we’ve planned?”

Too quiet, even for her, but he hears the unsaid words anyway. No one’s ever done what the pair of them are going to attempt before. There’s a risk inherent with the unknowns. Ianthe was right about one thing, if nothing else: it is possible he and Camilla both die for good in the attempt, and the math does check out—one is a greater number of survivors than zero. This isn’t even the first time Camilla’s brought this up and offered him that chance at one, one more time: the chance to take the more certain way out with her blessing. To call that enough, and go on alone.

He’s had about enough of being alone for one lifetime already. And he’d told Ianthe that he’d found her actions abhorrent, and he didn’t care for hypocrites. 

“You know I’d never do that to you.”

Camilla absorbs the vehemence of his words without flinching. “Had to offer anyway,” she says. “Won’t apologize for doing my job.”

“Wouldn’t have asked you to.” He’d have no right. Him, who died for her once already and to this day isn’t sorry about it. But: “Is it really a job, though?” he asks, half to her and half to himself. “Cavalierhood? A-cavalier’s-necromancer-hood, for that matter? The bond between us, Cam—can it ever really be a job, to love another person?”

Camilla takes her time considering that one. “Ordinarily not, I suppose,” she says, finally. “But you’ve always been a great deal of work.”

The sound of Naberius Tern’s laugh is just as wrong as the sound of his voice, but Palamedes almost doesn’t care: to laugh together with Camilla now, the sounds of their breaths mingling, the feeling of her taut, smooth abdomen flexing under his fingers as he winds the bandage around her, the scent of her sweat and blood filling his nose, is an unsulliable pleasure. Having a physical form, he decides, is underrated. 

He says, “We both agreed we’re ready to flip the coin on the other way. What happens, happens—it’s out of our hands, at this point.”

“‘What happens, happens?’ A shockingly cavalier attitude on your part, Warden.”

“I’m not going to dignify that pun with a response,” he says. (“You just did,” she replies; he ignores it and continues.) “Look, obviously, I hope that blowing ourselves up together works.” (“Suppose it did go alright for you the first time, in the end,” she murmurs, sotto voce; he takes enough time to make an inarticulate and slightly-offended noise with the back of Naberius Tern’s throat before he continues.) “And I’m more certain than I’ve any right to be, under the circumstances, that it will. But honestly—at this point it's really irrelevant to me, as long as I'm with you. And if it does kill us.. well, I'd rather die with you than live in this world without you. Simply the way it is, I’m afraid.”

Camilla’s face, so rigid and stoic through all the pain she must have been experiencing these last several minutes, does something funny then. It’s enough to still his hands on the bandages for a moment, so he can check whether he’s winding them too tightly. But then her expression clears, and in her eyes he reads not pain but only the same hard-set determination he’s seen in them for all their lives.

“That’s too many words, Warden,” she says gruffly. 

“Do you know, shockingly enough,” he says, “you’re not the first person to say that to me.”

“But do I get to be the last?”

The door at the end of the hall they’re in is creaking loudly open: probably Coronabeth, back to report on the status of the shuttle. Their way out. Palamedes doesn’t bother looking over: let her come over to them; he’ll deal with whatever news she brings then. Until she arrives, he keeps his eyes on Camilla. He looks at Camilla like he’s trying to get a lifetime’s worth of her all at once, like he’ll never have another chance, which in a way he supposes is true—today marks an ending to the distance between them across which he’s looking in the first place. A distance they’ve spent the last year and a half trying to imperfectly bridge with words on a tape recorder and second-hand gestures passed through Nona as an intermediary. A distance which they’re finally both about to set out across, in the hopes that they meet in the middle.  

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I imagine that you will be.”