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1. John Gaius, Emperor of the Nine Houses
There are, in theory, some things that even God cannot do. Sometimes, God is not enough. Sometimes, a girl who means everything is dead, and a girl who has never been worth her cost is somehow inexplicably still alive instead. And sometimes, God looks upon that, and says not that it is good, but that it is, and it always will be.
Other times, Harrowhark Nonagesimus gets her shit together, and fixes the wreckage she has made of everything she's ever loved. Granted, she has never succeeded in doing this before, but some impossible tasks are vital enough to be worth giving another shot nonetheless. God says that it can’t be done, and Harrow digs deep within herself and realizes that, no, it can very likely be done, if she is merely willing to give up everything. And that has never been in question.
She explains it to him, the next time he comes to her rooms to check on her recovery. She lays out the theorems, almost delirious with that most potent drug, hope. She explains the hypothesis, the mechanism, the fallbacks, and she falls to her knees and asks for his blessing and for his assistance. It is not the first time, or even the hundredth time that she has thrown herself on the mercy of the Necromancer Divine. But it is by far her most actionable request, her most blasphemous, her boldest. A transgression of the highest order, higher even than her childhood prayers for impossible absolution.
And yet. She transgresses, and she asks.
“Harrow,” says the Emperor, bemused. He pages through her diagrams, most of which are penned in her blood – writing materials were in short supply, but her blood is plentiful now. The soul of Gideon Nav wells up endlessly in her bone marrow, fuels a hematopoiesis so fervent that she could never run dry again no matter how much she might want to. “You can’t think this will work.”
“I can, and I do, my Lord,” says Harrowhark the First, soon to be dead, with all the courtesy the First Reborn deserves. “I beg forgiveness for the presumption, and for undoing the great work you asked of me. I have dreamed of your service all my unworthy life. But you called for willing Lyctors to make a conscious choice – and this is the choice I am making. I am choosing to say No.”
The Kindly Prince's face is very pitying. He sets her work aside carefully, and joins her on the cold steel floor. His hands find her temple, and she finds herself having to look away from his cthonic eyes.
“You’re not the first,” he says finally. “Well, you are literally of the First now, obviously, but I mean – you’re not the first to have jitters. Second thoughts. Cold feet, after the fact. My second saint started vomiting immediately. But she – adjusted. They all did, in time, and so will you, Harrowhark.”
“If I do,” says Harrow, and it was not a complaint or a condemnation, only a statement of fact: “then I am thrice damned.”
The Emperor sighs deeply.
“It would destroy you,” he warns. "Even if you survive the surgery - the you who exists right now-"
“I am aware,” says Harrowhark, who has almost always wanted to live but has found her priorities shifting as of late.
“It might not even work,” he presses. "You would be sacrificing yourself, undertaking exceptional danger - for what? For a shot in the dark? For an untested methodology that could just as easily kill you?"
"For her life," says Harrow, unmoved. It is, really, the only thing that she is capable of saying.
"For an infinetessimal chance," God repeats. "You would violate your mind, and diminish your Lyctorhood. All for the merest possibility of preserving your cavalier. She's already dead, Harrowhark. I'm sorry, but it's true."
Harrw just looks at him.
“It would leave me in a terribly unfortunate position, you know,” says God, with what could be considered on anyone else to be a note of pleading in his voice. “I had hoped to get eight more Lyctors from these trials, and if you drop out, we’ll barely be breaking even. The enemies of our Houses are far more vast than you can ever know, Harrowhark.”
Harrow shudders. She can not meet his eyes any more, but when she casts her gaze away, the Body is watching her, mouth tight.
It would be so easy to acquiesce. She is unmoved by pleas for her own safety, but for his - She was born to serve him, to steward the Tomb that he built. She has hungered for his approval all her life, for him to see her in her unworthiness and still find use for her. He needs her, now, and she will never be enough to outweigh the sacrifice of her birth, but perhaps for him she could come close to it.
Except that she is no longer just two hundred souls. The two hundred and first soul sticks in her throat, chokes her when she tries to swear her fealty, because Gideon Nav was never loyal to the Houses or the Ninth or the Tomb. Gideon Nav’s loyalty was a terrible thing pointed only at Harrow, in the end, and if she cannot be worthy of that dedication, she can at least return it.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I request release from your service, my Lord, to follow another purpose.”
The Emperor of the Nine Houses regards his Ninth Saint wearily.
"Tell me," he says, "tell me, Harrow, that you actually think this is the best path for you. Convince me, and I'll help you gladly, but Harrowhark, my Saint, my child - I will not be a party to your destruction. I will not be an accessory to your suicide. You are of my flock - I shaped your ancestors with love, and you are my creation as much as they are. I will not help you strike yourself down without meaning. Whom does that serve?"
She knows the answer to that. It would serve Gideon Nav, for once, and it would serve the tattered remains of her own mortal soul. It would serve justice, and it would serve clemency, and Harrow's soul would sink to the bottom of the River swiftly and heavily and mercifully.
He is waiting for her answer. It is the first time Harrow realizes that God does not understand her.
"You shaped our souls," she says, fumbling for the clear truth that he can't seem to see. "We are your divine creations, and our lives are yours. But our deaths - Pardon my heresy, but I don't believe, my Lord, that you are the one to decide which deaths lack meaning."
"I don't mind about the heresy," he says with a careless flourish. "I'm far more concerned about the suicide. I am asking you one more time, Harrowhark, to turn around and leave this path. As your God, and as your Teacher, and as someone who cares for you."
There are stories, on the Ninth, of the trials faced by brave penitents. The illusions thrown up in their paths, the ties that sought to ensnare them away from true faith. The traitorous pitfalls of the flesh, the stomach, the genitals, the eyes, the heart. Harrow is no stranger to temptations, but the lure of being cared for has almost never been bandied in her face so blatantly, and it is no surprise that her mouth waters for it.
She swallows down her saliva. "I understand, my Lord. I withdraw my request for your assistance."
He lets out of a sign of relief. "Oh, thank me."
"I will find someone else," she tells him stolidly, and watches his mouth turn down again. "I still, humbly, request your blessing. But I do not expect to recieve it."
God says a word that she cannot parse. "Damn," he follows it up with, and then: "Very 'Tevye's second daughter.' You're putting me on the spot here, Harrow. On the one hand, on the other hand - you see the bind I'm in."
He rises, paces a moment. Harrow remains on the floor, waiting.
“It would destroy you,” the Emperor repeats, and he no longer seems to be speaking to her. “Memory loss and you might die - hell of an ascenscion party, eh? And memory loss is dying, didn't Humes say that? Which - well - I'm all about harm reduction, so what can you do?" He claps his hands, as if he's come to a decision, and beckons her to her feet. Harrow follows, dreamlike.
God rests his hands benevolently on her shoulders, and his face is very serious when he says, "You are my child, and I can’t let you mutilate yourself. You’ll see, eventually, that this is better.”
And then his hand, which rested on her flesh like a benediction, is a vise, and there is a shooting pain in her temple, and a wash of false calm. Dazed, she watches him gather up her notes, and she doesn’t remember what she’d written, but they were important, weren’t they? For Griddle, she had been willing…
“Just as well, then,” says Abigail Pent ruefully, “that this isn’t how it happened.”
Harrow blinks, readjusts. Remembers, in a miserable rush.
"Yes," she says, thickly. And: "But how are we to understand Tevye?"
2. Mercymorn the First, Saint of Joy, Second Saint to serve the King Undying
The Second Saint to serve the King Undying looks at Harrow like she’s one of the little glowing beetles from the caves beneath Drearburh: impossibly young, impossibly below her attention, best dealt with by stepping on them briskly, and liable to leave some kind of unpleasant-smelling trail wherever she goes. Harrow immediately finds that she dislikes her immensely.
But she does have one attribute that is convenient: her gaze goes shutter-closed when Harrow mentions her cavalier, and in that closing, Harrow grasps desperately at hope. Ianthe Tridentarius gobbled her cavalier as a snack and didn’t spare him a second thought before or afterwards or even during. Cytherea the First, would have burned the Prince Undying and the Nine Houses and eight other cavs to avenge her own cavalier. Mercymorn, she dares to imagine, is at least statistically likely to lie somewhere in the middle, and that middle is truly the only place where the co-conspirator she needs could be found. And, after all, the Second Saint is an expert flesh magician.
In an ideal world, Harrow would have time to ascertain what she is working with. But the gold in her eyes flares up more frequently with every passing hour, and time is exactly what she does not have. All she has ever had is her own stubborn, hubristic resolve, and she gathers it all to lay her request at the feet of Mercymorn the First.
“Towards what purpose, you wretched girl?” Mercy demands, impatient. “This is not Cohort basic training, and I am not some kind of garden-variety pervert. I do not fuck around with children’s brains for fun.”
“It is private,” Harrow says, with all the dignity she has left, and Mercymorn huffs in audible disappointment that surely must be exaggerated, as it seems unlikely that a Lyctor would have something so catastrophically wrong with her sinuses.
“Try again,” says Mercymorn. “I am not a vending machine for favors! I do not perform necromantic miracles on demand!”
“I would offer you-”
“You have nothing to offer me,” says Mercymorn flatly. “You are nothing. You are twelve years old, and have only just experienced the kind of heartbreak that can destroy even seasoned necromancers centuries older than you, and you are coping poorly. If our Lord’s domestic charade has misled you to believe that we are in any way equals, little sister, please recalibrate your internal hierarchy immediately! We are not the same, and I need nothing from you. Thank you!”
It stings. Of course it stings. Harrowhark Nonagesimus was the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, hallowed by her congregation, while Harrowhark the First crouches miserably below this unpleasant woman in the pecking order. It is, frankly, intolerable, and she has never loved to share her business with even her most devoted retainers. Nevertheless – she does not possess an abundance of options. “My cavalier,” she reveals, haltingly, to keep anything so humiliating as emotions at bay. “I did not exactly choose this path – if I could just wall off those memories of her- “
“Oh,” says Mercymorn the First, repulsed. “Oh, yeugh. Please stop talking.”
“It is of vital importance-” Harrow insists, determined.
“Oh, I’m sure it is!” Quite out of nowhere, Harrow finds that she is not able to move her upper body. Mercymorn’s hurricane eyes are blazing and passionate and glorious as she takes Harrow by the shoulders and leans her face in very close and says, “You ate her, didn’t you? Took the sacrifice, and choked her down? That was your choice, you mewling fetus. That was the moment where you could have stopped. You have already done the damned thing, and forgetting won’t clear your soul.”
“I know,” Harrow says, pathetically. She knows. It is the constant drumbeat in her ears, the constant pounding of her heart. Ever breath she pulls is bought by the death of Gideon Nav, and no tweak of the memory will change that fundamental fact.
She has eaten her only friend, and there can be no forgiveness. She does not, truly, deserve to forget. If she could imagine another way, one that would not offer her the fig leaf of this relief-
“You know nothing,” says Mercymorn, disgusted. "How many days have you been living without her, now? Grief is a process, child. Grief is a process that spans millenia, and you have not even begun to think about grieving. Come back to me when you can't remember her smile, but the taste of her blood is still fresh on your tongue. Come back to me when you have any sense of what she bought you, and how much it is worth. I still won't do it, of course, but maybe by then you'll have suffered enough that I won't need to tear your throat out with my bare hands for even suggesting it. Forgetting her? The absolute gall-"
But Harrow does not have millenia. Harrow has, perhaps, hours. She wills her to understand. “My eyes haven’t changed yet, eldest sister. If I do not know her, then perhaps the process can still yet be apprehended.”
And that does something terrible. Mercymorn has been speaking as if piloted from remote distance at great expense, as if reading out a script written a myriad ago. She has been speaking as if Harrow is a child, but she looks at Harrow now as if she is beholding something quite a bit more substantial. Something heretical. Something abominable. Harrow, who has always transparently been something abominable, finds it almost comforting, to be seen in her wretchedness by the Second Saint, and by the eyes of her long-dead cavalier.
"That," says Mercymorn, with disgust etched hard into her oval face, "is impossible. Don't you think that if it were that simple, we would have already-"
She breaks off, voice tight. Harrow waits, breathless, for the guillotine blade to fall. It is possible that she will be destroyed where she stands now, and it is even more possible that she will deserve it.
“Just because it has never been done before,” Harrow says after a moment, because she is not dead yet and can see no reason why not to, “does not mean that it can’t be done now. If I act quickly, perhaps she can still be saved.”
Mercymorn's face curdles, and then hardens, and then simply shatters. "Categorically wrong!" she declares, stabbing a finger into Harrow's chest - but not literally, not penetrating her ever-regrowing skin, not gouging her flesh quite yet. "She cannot, and you are fooling yourself. And! And! It's obscene, frankly, that you would try to unmake it. It was a sacrifice for you, and it was a sacrifice for our Lord. Do you think that you are more important than her and God put together, you miserable, puffed-up little toddler? Do you think anyone here gives a single, solitary fig for your grief and your happiness and your loneliness?"
Mercymorn’s fingers tighten on Harrow’s upper arms. There is so much revulsion in her face that Harrow cannot bring herself to respond, in the affirmative or the negative. When she leaves the room in a whirl of opalescent robes, Harrow cannot tell if she is stalking out in disgust or fleeing.
She looks up at the other woman who has been watching, the one who she isn’t in love with, and who isn’t ten thousand years old.
“She seems a real peach,” says Abigail Pent. “And maybe she would have done it. But, Harrow, she wasn’t even there, was she? You didn’t meet her until weeks afterward.”
“Right,” Harrow says numbly. “Of course.”
"If it makes you feel any better," says Abigail bracingly, with the air of someone who knows it won't but is determined to try anyway, "I really don't think all that was about you."
"She was not entirely wrong," says Harrow, letting the scene dissolve. "It was a selfishness, on my part. I deserve her condemnation."
"Don't be too hard on yourself, Harrow," says Abigail, which is foolishness of the highest degree, so Harrow does her the kindness of ignoring it.
3. The necromancer who warded John’s shuttle
In the end, Harrow don’t ask the girl for help because she is a subordinate, or because her eyes seem kind, or even because she is the only person Harrow has spoken to besides the Necrolord Prime himself. She doesn’t ask Corporal Aurelia Zevende because she is Seventh and knows what it means to preserve despite the cost, or because she is a necromancer and has the necessary skills. She certainly doesn’t ask Zevende because she knows or trusts her – God knows neither of those apply. Zevende is just one more soldier on a ship of seven hundred and eight, one who stumbled into Harrow’s room by accident and kept coming back because she was afflicted with the delusion that Harrow’s Lyctorhood made her somehow sacred, rather than abhorently profane.
Harrow can't blame her for that delusion, even as it rankles. She, too, once desperately hoped against hope that Lyctorhood would wash away even a fragment of her sins. She too, once thought Lyctors holy, even as she rooted avariciously through the mundane and irreverant marginalia that littered their labs and proved them to be only deeply fallible people. In the end, it took meeting a Lyctor and becoming one to fully shatter her illusions on that particular front. She knows, now, the travesty that has fueled every Saint of the Nine Houses, and she is made sick by the woman's trusting eyes.
Her new pilgrim, delusional as she is, does not know this, and therefore remains at her side. Her misunderstanding, in retrospect, was probably nurtured by Harrow’s utter lack of gestures towards getting rid of her. This is not ego, but another form of penance: the adept's puppylike gaze hurts, but not more than she deserves. It is clarifying and instructive, to see her own past mistakes in another's eyes. And, in truth, she is so very tired, despite the soul that fuels her with fervent warmth, and the woman seems like she'd make a whole fuss if Harrow asked her to leave. But Harrow's fatigue at the daunting prospect of kicking her out must have seemed, to the severely untrained eye, like grace or mercy or sympathy.
Harrow should have guessed that, in retrospect. Her congregation, after all, was always keen to see patience and wisdom where in truth there was only desperation. There is only one person in this rotten world who has ever seen Harrow for who and what she really is, and she is currently indisposed, to put it lightly.
Accordingly, the soldier is completely ignorant, and so she follows the practice of all the Ninth’s most feeble congregants, albeit with more functional joints. She confesses to Harrow, and Harrow lies there dispassionately and takes it, as is her lot in life. The Reverend Daughter is well-practiced in the ways of consolation, or at least of not screaming at the endless lines of petty penitents droning out their mundane, tired little sins that pale in comparison to her own. She has spent long hours manipulating her parents' stiff forms to crouch at bedsides, to gently lay hands on the upturned foreheads of the desperate. She has long mastered the art of becoming a void that confessions fall into, how to swallow them down in silence and maybe, just maybe, make the teller feel better.
Zevende does not feel better after confessing. Harrow, privately, doubts anything would change that, really. She is heartbroken at the recent loss of her cavalier, and mutinously furious at the Cohort for refusing to let her back to the front lines in the aftermath, and for some nonsense about the funeral.
“Callista didn’t want to be embalmed,” she insists, too far into her grief to register Harrow’s disinterest. “She hated those ghastly memorials. She never even – she baked, you know that? Not those dainty little cakes with the fondant sculptures and the edible sugared flowers and the hidden flimsy and puffed rice supports under all the frosting. She always hated those things, said they tasted like – well, said they were really only good for making a painting of, and real food should be eaten. She made cookies, and pies, and big ugly cakes, and she said that when we finished our tour of duty, she’d bake for me.” Her face crumples, presumably with the realization that she will never come to taste her deceased cav’s baking.
She is not much older than Harrow, and in a small mercy that Harrow certaintly does not deserve, she does not look overly much like Cytherea Loveday. Her hair is somewhat of the same brown, but she wears it pulled back, a soldier rather than a dilletante, and her eyes are hazel instead of piercing blue - though, perhaps Cytherea's were once hazel too. She is a Seventh adept who has not yet been trapped in resin, her rose still unblown, and it is hateful to see, but Harrow endures.
Oh, and Zevende wants to die – that much is obvious. Harrow can read it in every sluggish beat of her heart, in the worn lines of her face and the tentative, dull smile she always casts towards her Saint. And, well, like recognizes like. She is significantly older than Harrow was the first time she resolved to die, but she knows the signs. Also, the girl practically admits it.
“I wasn’t supposed to outlive her,” she keeps saying, as if that matters even a little bit. “All the doctors say I’ll wind down around forty, and she was supposed to be there, holy Saint. She was supposed to carry me to a soft bed with an open window to smell the flowers, and hold my hand and kiss me on the cheek and tell me it was okay.” Her face twists up. “And now she’s-”
That, in the end, is why Harrow condescends to ask for her assistance. She is starved for company, to be sure, but more importantly, she is starved for company experiencing this particular misery. It is not unusual, for a necromancer to outlive their cavalier. It is, perhaps, not even unusual for the necromancer to be unhappy about it. And yet.
Harrow would never have deserved to die in a soft bed, with Gideon Nav's unpainted lips gracing her forehead. It is a foolishness to even imagine it. But it is also beautiful, in a horribly Seventh way, to watch Zevende mourn that she can't have it either.
She is awed when Harrow speaks, a living Saint. She is slightly less awed when she hears what Harrow asks of her, and the barest suggestion of why.
“You’re staring,” Harrow snaps, irritated. “Consent to assist me, or turn me away so that I might find another path. I have no time for equivocating.”
“It’s worth equivocating over,” she says doubtfully. “Holy Saint, if I am responsible for your destruction-”
The gall. As if she could. As if anyone but a fellow Lyctor, or Gideon Nav, could leave even a scratch upon her heart now.
She has not moved in days, but it’s not difficult to conjure new arms of bone to snare the woman and turn her head to face Harrow.
“Do I look,” says Harrow frostily, “like I am concerned about my own destruction?”
The soldier looks at her, hazel meeting (blessedly, still) black. Harrow is far too disgnified, far too weary to squirm under her gaze.
She shouldn't have asked her. The Seventh does not care for kindness, for justice. The Seventh knows that all things will end, and only seeks that they be beautiful before they go. The Seventh preserves, and the Seventh eats, and the Seventh would have her turn Gideon Nav into a reverently rendered oil painting to be cooed at over the millenia, rather than spoil a martyrdom so poignant with an ungainly epilogue. The Seventh accept death, and welcome it, and they therefore have nothing of the mettle needed for this task.
But Callista the cavalier, last name unknown, never did like confections made only for looking. Callista, if reports are to be believed, had never much wanted to be embalmed.
“And they put me on suicide watch,” says her widowed adept finally. And when Harrow opens her mouth, outraged – “Yes. Alright.”
“Yes,” Harrow repeats, unbelieving, testing the waters. Struggling with the unexpected sympathy and humanity, so rare and undeserved in this new universe without Gideon Nav. “You’ll do it?”
Zevende’s hand finds hers, and Harrow, who has aways hated to be touched, who desrves nothing more than to be destroyed – is painfully grateful for the human contact. For someone who looks at her, and knows even a fraction of the pain, and says, “If there were even a chance I could bring back Callista, I would do anything. No one should have to go through it. Holy Saint, I’m so very-”
It is a tenderness that cannot be borne. Harrow breaks away from the moment and meets Abigail Pent’s gaze. The Lady of the Fifth is smiling with terrible sadness. “Oh, my dear,” says Abigail Pent. “I truly am sorry. But this isn’t how it happened.”
"Naturally," says Harrow stiffly. "I don't believe I ever knew her real name."
"Yes, I don't think that was it," Abigail agrees. "But something doesn't have to have happened to be true, if you'll forgive my forwardness."
"I don't," says Harrow, and closes her eyes.
4. Captain Aiglamene of the Ninth House Guard
The Captain of the Ninth Guard comes to the Erebos personally. Harrow does not recall approving this expense, or even requesting her presence, but she rallies for her audience nonetheless. Her congregation on the Ninth has always deserved the best of her, the most stable and comforting presence that she is capable of being. Even Aiglamene, who knows far more of the truth about her parents than she should, is no exception.
“I failed,” Harrow tells her, in case no one else has informed her yet. “I promised you I would be true in my dealings with her, and I have failed, completely and utterly. Destroy me as you will.”
“That would prove difficult, as I understand it,” says the only other woman who has ever even remotely cared for Gideon Nav. “I hear you are now one of His holy Saints and Gestures.”
This is, unfortunately, true. It takes more than one angry woman with a longsword to kill a Lyctor. Harrow knows exactly how much more it takes to kill a Lyctor.
“She was worth a thousand of me,” she tells Aiglamene, in a welter of self-pity. “I never should have brought her to the First.”
Aiglamene looked very tired. She says, “It was my suggestion, Reverend Daughter. I bear the blame.”
Harrow shakes her head, disgusted. “I bear the blame,” she insists, and it is vitally important suddenly that Aiglamene understand. “I chose to go – I failed to see the signs –" her breath is coming raggedly. “I broke her. The only person who wouldn’t have died for me, who has ambitions outside our walls, and I ate her anyway. She was better than that, and you know it as well as me.”
“You have fulfilled our greatest hope for you,” says Aiglamene woodenly. “You have done everything that we asked of you, and more. The Emperor has already sent word that he will be reviving our house.”
Harrow does not remember a time when her head was not shaking. “I never should have brought her,” she says again, finally, unable to move past it. “Captain, I have sinned more thoroughly than I ever knew was possible.”
Aiglamene is not her congregational leader. Aiglamene’s role is to protect, and to preserve, and not to bear Harrow’s multitude of transgressions. The relationship has always gone the other way, ever since Harrow became the Reverend Lady in all but name. It is perverse for her to lay her failures at the feet of the Captain of her Guard, to the woman to whom she swore a promise and utterly, irrevocably failed to deliver.
It is with this debt in mind that she asks a smaller boon. Not one to sooth her unworthy conscience, but one to, hopefully, make up for even a fraction of the hurt she has caused. Aiglamene is the right person to ask, really. Who else would ever put Gideon Nav ahead of the Reverend Daughter, or Harrowhark the First? Not God, and not Crux, and not even Gideon herself. Only Aiglamene, who gave her her sword, and Harrow, who carries it now.
Aiglamene listens to the tale, to the plan, and her melty face is sober. “I never thought she would learn loyalty to the Ninth,” she says finally.
“And you cared for her despite it,” Harrow reminds her, to keep her on track. “You fought for her, and I hold you blessed among our flock for it. For her sake, I ask you to conspire with me.”
Aiglamene does not go to her knee and pledge her service. Aiglamene does not begin asking technical questions with a soldier’s gruffness, or laying out surgical knives with tactical efficiency. Aiglamene closes her eyes and breathes through her nose.
“Speak, damn you,” says Harrow, infuriated.
“Freely?” says the old soldier.
Harrow attempts to marshal her temper. “You may say what you like, so long as your answer is ultimately yes.”
“You are asking me,” says Aiglamene slowly, “to unravel a miracle bought with her life. To risk reversing the resurrection of our House, and incurring the wrath of the Lord Across the River. To wipe away your own sanctification, and expose you to unthinkable harm.”
It is not unthinkable. Harrow is thinking of it right now, and doing so with relief and anticipation. But she says, unblinking, “Yes.”
Aiglamene’s face is heavy. “If you are asking me as a retainer, my answer is no. I am truly sorry, my Lady. But even if you order me – even if you threaten me on pain of death – there are some oaths I cannot break. I have failed you in many ways, but I will not fail you in this one."
“And if I am asking you as her – in another capacity?” Harrow presses. There is hope in her chest, but she can feel it, even before Aiglamene speaks. The heavy blade falling.
“Still no,” says her Captain of the Guard of the Ninth, and severs her hope with ruthless precision. Harrow holds herself stiff, does not let herself jolt with the blow.
"I would know why," she presses, teeth gritted tight. "Your oaths entitle me to that much, do they not?"
Aiglamene looks uncomfortable, which is how she should look. The idea that anyone could be comfortable while Gideon Nav's corpse lies unmoving and cold is abhorent to Harrow. The idea that Aiglamene, whom Gideon chased after with a naked and embarassing devotion, could live placidly in a universe without Gideon Nav, is a betrayal of the highest caliber, on par only with Harrow's own. She always knew that Gideon was a fool to have trusted Harrow. It boils in her blood, the suspicion that Gideon erred in judgement twice over.
Aiglamene says, slowly, "Nav chose to die for you."
"Yes," says Harrow, in agony. "She shouldn't have. She owed me nothing, and I owed her everything."
"And yet," says Aiglamene. And, when Harrow narrows her eyes and spreads her hands to invite more: "She did. She finally found something worth swinging that sword for. That speaks volumes."
Her head, somehow is back to shaking. Aiglamene sways, blurs, and Harrow marshalls her breathing.
"So-"
"I will not unmake her dying act," says the one person who should, and Harrow breaks, all at once.
“You are faithless, then,” she seethes. “I broke my oath to do right by her, and I will burn for that, but you - you will not even swear a new one to ransom her a chance to live? I brand you heretic – I brand you negligent – I brand you sniveling, traitorous worm. You swore that you would vouchsafe her – I betrayed her, and you, and my mother, but you betray us all. I banish you from the Ninth – I cut you off from the Tomb-”
And so on. Aiglamene does not stop her, even as spittle flies from her parched lips, as her hands shake from the effort of not summoning a vengeful construct to rend limb from limb the other unworthy recipient of Gideon Nav's devotion. Harrow has always known that her House despises Gideon. She has always been intimately aware that she is a parasite, selfishly devouring Gideon Nav for her own gain. It should not sting quite so fiercely to find her mirror in Aiglamene, and yet -
“You were supposed to stand for her,” Harrow says finally, expended, and hates that she sounds like a child. “You were supposed to care for her.”
Aiglamene does not defend herself, or deny it. She does not claim that she was merely Gideon’s teacher and commanding officer, and that Gideon was merely an indenture with a severe surfeit of loyalty or piety. She doesn’t look away either, even as Harrow’s eyes flare golden again.
It is Abigail Pent who steps in, finally, breaking the standoff. She clears her throat, almost embarrassed. “Harrow,” she says. “Do I need to say it?”
"You do not," says Harrow. "I would like to be alone now, please."
5. Just a kindly nurse
She has very few options. No one interacts with her. The Emperor bequeathed her fate to her, and then left her to it. The only person who visits her rooms is a nurse, an adept tasked with monitoring her condition. Harrow considers this fundamentally pointless, since she is now categorically incapable of doing anything so merciful as passing away, but the orderly bustles around nonetheless. She checks Harrow’s pulse several times a day, hand cool and soft against Harrow’s feverishly burning wrist and throat.
Harrow, by contrast, can feel the woman's pulse from across the room. She can feel it from across the ship. And yet, this mundane adept is the one looking after her, and fetching her meals, and writing down little observations in fussy little notepads.
“Do you know?” she asks, one day, when it all feels particularly pointless. “Do you know what I did? What I am?”
Her attendant’s brown eyes are intolerably kind and sad. “I know,” she says. “I am very sorry for what you suffered.”
“You don’t,” Harrow decides, infuriated. “Or you wouldn’t say that.”
The nurse adjusts her spectacles. “You are very young,” she says finally. “An adept twice your age would struggle or break under the choice you faced. I can’t say I would have done better in your shoes, if I'd had the chance.”
“I think you can,” says Harrow, bitterly.
The woman holds her gaze, considering.
“If my cavalier had done that to me,” she says finally, straigtening her brown-trimmed cardigan, “I never would have forgiven him. I am lucky, that it never came to that.”
Perhaps that is why Harrow asks her for help. She has a plan, she thinks. She only needs someone to deliver the letters, and assist in a procedure, and the woman at least has the discretion and general necromantic competency for that.
“Will you do it?” Harrow asks her dully, when her plan has been unspooled, gleaming and fresh for the vultures. Openness pangs her, accustomed to her secrets as she is, but there is no choice: a surgery requires an incision, and recruiting an accomplice requires some degree of candidness.
“I wish you could have asked me,” the woman says regretfully. “I wish you had had options, Harrow – in how you responded to it, and in whether it happened at all. You’re not so much older than my children, really, and I wish I’d realized that when there was still time.”
Harrow furrows her brow – at the words, at the condescension latent in them. “There is still time,” she insists, hating that her voice sounds like that of a petulant child. “Though you thieve it from me with platitudes – there is still time, if we act quickly.”
“Oh, Harrowhark,” says the nurse with terrible kindness, and she lays her hand on Harrow’s feverish forehead. Her skin is very cool and dry. “This isn’t how it happened. Though you must know – if there was anything I could have done-”
Oh.
“I know,” says Harrow stiffly. “You have been a great help in other ways, Lady Pent.”
“I’m not sure I have been,” says Abigail. “It is unfair, what you had to shoulder.”
“Well,” says Harrow dryly. She is not sure she can disagree, and the prospect of trying to do so exhausts her. “It all turned out alright in the end, didn’t it?”
(+1) Ianthe the First, whilom Tridentarius, Eighth Saint to serve the King Undying and former Princess of Ida
She considers whom she might confide in, and runs through her pathetic list in a laughably short amount of time. There has never been anyone who Harrowhark Nonagesimus could entrust herself to. Since she was ten years old, she has been on her own, whether she fully understood it or not.
The Emperor, perhaps. He cares for her, despite the obvious futility of it. That, she supposes, is what it means to be the Necromancer Divine, to hold every soul in the Nine Houses in his hands, to cradle every being in their species and know their every sin and still bestow upon them new life. Even one so wretched as Harrowhark, to his exalted gaze, is still one of his flock.
But the Body, stock still against the porthole, fixes her with a blindingly golden gaze and shakes her leaden head. Her face, usually so emotionless, is beseeching, and there is another emotion lurking beneath the surface, too. It takes Harrow a moment to recognize it as fear. The Body has never been afraid before.
“You think I shouldn’t?” Harrow repeats, baffled, and the Body nods vehemently. Her lovely limbs slacken in some deathly parody of relief.
All her life, she has prayed to the Emperor of the Nine Houses with the fervor of the damned. All her life, despite her traitor heart, she has prayed for the Body to remain insensate. The contradiction has always been obviously laid out in doctrine, but she has never felt its weight bearing down on her as much as she does in that moment.
In the end, it is shockingly easy to turn away from the Kindly Prince of Death, and towards damnation. The Body watches her with Gideon Nav’s eyes, and Harrow – Harrow, born for the sole purpose of worshiping this corpse, who has lived her life in anticipation of seeing one perfect, insensate girl wake and now has added another to the tally – Harrow cannot say no to her. Her faith in the Necrolord Prime, so load-bearing, crumbles under the soft touch of a woman’s hand, the gentle urging of a tall, golden-eyed woman with a longsword who was never again meant to see the light of day.
It is, at least, a mercy that she will likely not remember this conversation soon. Her splintered faith will remain, like the memory of Gideon Nav, far enough away that she will not be able to use it to rend her own flesh.
“Then who, Beloved?” she pleads, and the holy corpse cocks her head as if thinking. She drifts to the hall – Harrow does not see her feet move, but she is unmistakably in another place now, and Harrow follows her like a magnet, like a planetoid in orbit, like a base animal on a leash. She surrenders herself to the gravity well of her beloved and follows the Body out the door of her room, heedless for a moment of her uncovered face and legs, of the garish ugliness of her atrocious medical gown. Her Lady points, with ancient gravitas, at the door just adjacent to Harrow’s, and Harrow, for her sins, feels a moment of doubt.
“Her?” she says, almost contemptuous, before she can stop herself. And then: “I’m sorry, Beloved. I should not question you. But…”
Ianthe the First’s door has been shut for days. There have been surgeons in there, reattaching her arm or some such undertakings. The Emperor held an audience with her at one point. There has, occasionally, been ragged sobs and the sound of dishware being thrown against the wall very hard. Harrow has not gotten the impression that her sister in Lyctorhood is adjusting particularly better than she is.
Harrow has not had any desire to enter this particular room. But the Body nods benevolently, and Harrowhark Nonagesimus is nothing if not obedient, when there is a clear and compelling purpose in front of her.
She steels herself. Clenches oss in her hand, though Ianthe is unlikely to attack her – she nonetheless feels significantly less naked with a few molars tucked between her knuckles.
“Tridentarius,” she says, without preamble. “How would you like for me to owe you a favor?”
Ianthe the First looks up at her from the hospital bed on which she lounges bonelessly, and despite her studied languidness, Harrow can sense the bright and sudden spark of her interest. Her eyes are shot through with at least three colors, and her hair is greasier than ever, but she focuses on Harrow with keen and ruthless intent. “I thought you’d never ask,” she says.
Harrow closes the door behind her. The Body remains in the hall, but her eyes are approving, as Harrow turns her back on Lyctorhood and turns towards the last of her cavalier – and under the circumstances, that’s really the most Harrow could ask for.