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There’s a new kind of quiet between them, after Gideon inveigles her into the oath. Muffled and close, like sitting in her bed at home with the curtains drawn all round, even as they traverse the twisted hallways of Canaan House. Like everything outside of them, outside the sphere of space encompassing their bodies walking abreast, exists in some other reality to the one where Gideon’s lips touched her glabella. Where Gideon’s robes brush hers now as they move. Where Gideon’s hand, still chilled from the water, finds Harrowhark’s just long enough to tug her off course.
“Our rooms are this way,” Harrow protests.
Gideon tugs again, lightly, before releasing her. “I’m hungry.”
“You’re a hog, Nav, and we’re both dripping wet.”
“Come with me to the kitchen.”
It’s not a choice, really. Harrowhark’s cavalier did not even take the opportunity for a coarse joke; she is immovable as stone when she doesn’t wish to be moved, and walking away from her now is out of the question.
She follows Gideon to the kitchen, and watches from the doorway as she opens cabinets and lifts lids of containers and generally snoops, stuffing what edibles appeal into her pockets.
Then Gideon pauses, consternation in the line of her shoulders, peering under the cover of a chipped soup tureen. Frozen for seconds that bloat with tension the longer the moment drags on. Unwilling to raise her voice across the feet of space between them, Harrow crosses to her side instead.
It’s the dregs of cooked grain, that once sparkled with wet red jewels of fruit. Something called a seed apple, she recalls; Pent and Quinn were absurdly excited about it. At the time, the juicy seeds looked to Harrowhark like bloodied teeth and the whole dish smelled too much. Now, the uncovered tureen releases a kind of sickroom aroma, rot and fermentation.
“It’s gone off,” she says, because Griddle has been known to eat first and check for mold later, and blame it—not without precedent—on Harrowhark’s scheming.
“Yeah,” croaks her cavalier, and for one terrible moment, her eyes flutter closed.
In the dining room they walked through to reach the kitchen, two discomfitingly friendly adults had served them warm grains and fruits of the Emperor’s House, had slid Gideon a third dessert and then a fourth. Two foolishly awestruck children had measured Gideon’s biceps (bulbous, obscene) with the spans of their fingers.
In the cold storage room on the opposite side of the kitchen, their mangled bodies lay on tables, far from their homes, the stuff of their flesh and bones going to waste and improperly mourned.
If there is anything Harrowhark Nonagesimus understands, it is the rituals of death.
She begins her own search haphazardly, with the weight of Gideon’s gaze on the back of her neck. In a drawer beside the ovens she locates matches. A corner cabinet yields candles, too high for her to reach without shedding what dignity remains to her. As she considers her options, the familiar shadow of her cavalier falls over her—an arm reaches above her head and brings one down.
Harrow takes it. “Three more.”
One by one they’re retrieved. Gideon’s solid bulk crowds close against her back, passing each candle into her hands. They’ve touched each other more tonight, without violence, than…ever, perhaps, in their entire lives.
When Gideon steps back, Harrow turns to look up at her. That boyish, square-jawed face, her paint mostly melted off. Her expression is open. Curious. Tired, and so terribly, plainly sad, as if she can’t be bothered to disguise it any longer.
“Come on, Griddle,” murmurs Harrowhark, and leads the way back to their rooms.
***
It’s a relief to pass under her own undisturbed wards into a space of relative safety, and relative comfort, and an assurance of privacy that Harrow doesn’t have to actively maintain. She’s still damp down to her underthings, and Gideon continues to look so damnably mournful even though she chatted to Harrow all the way back to their rooms, quiet reminiscences about the Fifth’s dinner, useless tidbits of gossip— “Crazy that Coronabeth’s the older one.” “Obviously she’s the older one, she’s the Crown Princess.” “Okay, sure, but I mean…why did they even keep Ianthe then?” —and she carries on even as she ducks into their bathroom and returns with two threadbare towels, holding one out to Harrow.
“D’you think these are 9,000 years old?”
“Synthetic fabrics break down after half a millennium, Griddle. Even the oldest surviving textile relics in the catacombs were only a few centuries old, at most.”
“Huh.” Gideon scrubs her own towel over her head. They haven’t bothered to turn on any lights—even the darkest nights here are brighter than Drearburh—and in the dim Gideon’s wet hair is the color of old blood. Then she turns away again, disappears into the room where she’s made her absurd sleep nest. She doesn’t close the door behind her, and from out of sight her voice carries back. “Hey, Palamedes said something I didn’t get.”
“I’m sure the same could be said of almost everyone here,” Harrow sighed without heat, growing tired now and befuddled by the dry and tempting comfort of her bed in which her nightgown is tangled, and the wet state of her clothes, and the candles she fumbles onto the bedside table.
“Fuck right off. No, at the dinner, he asked what the insides of a lock are called, and then didn’t answer it, like everybody already knew.”
“Wards. The obstructions inside of a lock, they’re called wards.”
“Oh! And he’s the Warden. Huh.” Then, “What do they lock shit up in the Library for? It’s just books.” Then, inexplicably—”I’m coming in.”
She reappears in dry clothes, just trousers and an undershirt with the sleeves cut off, rolled up and fraying a little around the armpits. Her weapons are unbelted from her waist; she hooks them on the corner of the sagging cavalier cot, and flops down onto the mattress with enough force to risk breaking the thing into pieces. It holds, though whether that’s fortunate or not, Harrow can’t decide.
Propped up on her elbows, Gideon scrutinizes her. Harrow is suddenly very aware that bare skin is likely showing through her paint as much as Gideon’s is, and that she’s still soaked under her open robe, her shirt sticking to the bony prominences of her shoulders and chest.
“You should put on something dry,” says her cavalier. And then keeps looking at her, strangely stern.
Harrow flounders, and pulls her robe closed. “Avert your eyes.”
A flash across Gideon’s face: comprehension-embarassment-horror, settling finally on opportunistic glee. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”
“Avert your eyes!”
“Fine, fine.” She slumps backward and curls onto her side, blithely giving Harrow her back.
Hurriedly, Harrow strips down to her skin and hustles her nightgown over her head; touches up her paint in a hand mirror. It’s not the proper skull for what she has planned—but she’s never conducted funeral rites in pajamas, either. “All right.” She arranges four candles in a row across the tabletop. Hears Gideon shifting on the hideous cot, and feels anew the weight of those eyes, yellow as ancient bone.
Harrowhark strikes a match, and lights the first candle.
“Let us pray for Sir Magnus Quinn. In his oath he died for Our Resurrector; may he be judged in mercy on the last day, and may all of us, the living and the dead, rise as the River rises in glory and grace on that great day. Let it be so.
“The Undying King is full of mercy and compassion. May He forgive Magnus any sins he committed through human frailty. Let it be so.
“Prince of all consolation, help us to comfort one another in our grief. May the mortal body of the departed bring light, and heat, and succor to all of those who mourn him. Let it be so.
“May the King Undying hear the prayers we hold in our hearts, our hopes united with Him, the ransomer of death, scourge of death, vindicator of death, and His most holy Saints. Let it be so.
“We pray the Tomb is shut forever; we pray the rock is never rolled away. We pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate, in perpetual rest with closed eye and stilled brain. We pray it lives, we pray it sleeps, as our brother Magnus now sleeps, and lives on in hope of the End of Death. Let it be so.”
A pause. A breath. Into the silence, Gideon rasps, “Let it be so.”
The Reverend Daughter strikes a match, and lights the next candle.
“Let us pray for Lady Abigail Pent.”