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How long you slept you did not know. You did not know what dawn of which day you woke to. The daytime lights filtered through the hangings of the four-poster bed with a warm whiteness, a lemony warmth limning the naked paintings that festooned the walls. It felt as though you had slept for a hundred years. The satin coverlet was cool against your arms, and you lay in Ianthe’s bed insensate, comfortable.
Gradually you felt a heavy weight in a depression next to you. You rolled onto your side, suddenly and deeply frightened that you might see the bed’s owner; your sword had been laid atop the covers beside your body, on the eiderdown, the bone scabbard gleaming a dull grey in the imitation sunlight. This was in every single way a better thing to wake up to than the face of Ianthe “Love My Twin, Also Murder” Tridentarius.
Then you heard breathing. It was with unexpected clarity of mind and soul that you pushed the eiderdown away and crawled to the end of the bed. And you found Ianthe before you, on the floor.
She was belly-down on one of the cream-and-gold rugs on the deep honey-coloured plush carpet, and all around her was a growing crimson mat of blood. She sprawled in a puddle of red as though it was her shadow. Her long hair tumbled over her face and shoulders like a veil, and she grunted hard through her teeth, breathing in long terrible breaths like a dying animal. As you watched—a silent spectator on her mattress—she propped herself on her elbows and grasped the ruddy crimson blade of her trident knife in both hands, and she thrust it furiously into the intolerable seam of her right arm.
Ianthe struck again and again. The wound kept healing over—the skin sewed itself back up even as she pulled the blade away. Blood coalesced around the seam in a serried row of teeth, of needles, and these she used to try to lever herself apart, but her elbow wobbled beneath her and she collapsed on the sodden carpet. She dropped the knife from nerveless fingers. She slapped that almost-imperceptible seam, then again. Then she gave a low and broken moan, and fell over onto her side, curled foetally inward.
Your mind was clear. Your thoughts were warm and tidy, as though they had been put through the sonic cleaner. It was with very little trepidation that you dropped to your knees beside her. You rolled her onto her back—and she looked at you with terrified eyes, half-blue, part-brown, with fragments of lavender. Her mouth was an ugly twist, contemptuous of herself. You had seen that expression a million times in your mirror, but never on her.
“Harrow,” she said unsteadily. She was trembling.
“You’re a fool,” you said.
“How I crave your honeyed words,” said Ianthe. Her mouth was almost purple from the pain. “How I love your tender compassion.”
This was rank hypocrisy, but you were too focused to care. You said, “It needs to come off all at once.”
“What—”
“Get something to bite down on.”
She looked at you, her eyes a wild confusion of colours; she lay spread before you in her hideous buttercup nightgown, which was now a parti-coloured mix of gold and pink and red like a liver. After a moment, she nodded: she ripped a bloodied swatch of yellow lace from her skirt, and she compressed it into a tight cylinder and pressed it between her teeth. Her teeth were very white, and her tongue was wet and red.
You raised yourself up on your knees, swaying a little, and you pictured her for what she really was: an exquisite conglomeration of bone beneath skin and meat, pocketed in the middle with soft treasures of parenchyma and muscle. When you placed your hands upon her ribs you were able to see her skeleton as though she had shyly undressed herself for you, as though in the orange hues of the daytime light she’d sloughed capillaries and glands off the budding rose of her scapula. You saw the curve of her clavicle, bowed softly as the line of some drooping bellflower.
It was so easy. Now that you had slept, everything was easy. It was as though you had been walking in a lead casing, and now you were free. As before any difficult work, you prayed out loud: prayed for the rock to go unrolled and for the closed eye and the stilled brain; prayed for a woman you loved to assist you in disrobing a woman you did not, but whose bones you would sacramentally adore. You kneeled on her thighs and unsheathed a great shank of bone from your knuckles—Ianthe bucked, just the once—and you sharpened the edge to a translucent, liquid thinness.
With one cut you took the arm: you scythed through the knob of ligament and scapula and removed the humerus. Ianthe screamed through her mouthful of lace. The blood came like a spring tide over your front, and you felt it soak through your clothes and trickle down your navel. You cauterized the meat all at once, pinching the vessels closed, reaching down to press your fingers against where the humeral head had been. Then you covered over the gap with spongiform bone—to give you a platform to work on—and you spun her shoulder beneath your fingers, and it squirmed at your touch. Ianthe’s screams had subsided to ravenous whimpers.
Her arm had to be her own. That was no difficulty. You coaxed fine webby strands of red marrow from the wing of bone that girdled her shoulder, and from that—from minute osteoblastic grit—from the mazelike netting of the bone that swaddled the sponge and the marrow—you remade her. The humerus was child’s play, and you took genuine pleasure in socketing it into the lovely cup of the radius, the forked embrace of the ulna. Her trochlea you sculpted while holding your breath, easing it into its wet white housing.
The hand was almost an indulgence. The skeleton recalled itself. You did not need to know so intimately the lover’s knot of carpal bones—the long tooth of her lunate, the jutting promontory of her trapezium—nor did you need to know the arch of the distal phalange, the shaft, the base. The new bone sprang avidly to meet your fingers, as though you were lovers joining hands after a long time apart. Your role with the bones was more guide than artist. The artistry would come at this point, and you warned her: “This will hurt.”
Ianthe rocked upward.
You knew your limits. You had understood what to do with her body innately, and it was not what she wanted, but you thought it would suffice. You blistered the bone in tendons only where you thought it was necessary for range of motion. You bubbled nerves into that shining periosteum where nerves had never been before. Not a full complement, but just enough. Bone would call to bone, and nerve would call to brain. When you trailed your fingers up that new trunk of electrified humerus, she almost spat out the chunk of lace—when you pressed your palm into her shoulder and plugged her in, she sobbed, rhythmically, beneath you.
What was left at the end was not an arm. It was a construct: a sectioned skeleton, defleshed. When you sat down beside her you were chilly with sweat and pleasantly tired, as though you had run a good distance. You watched as Ianthe took the saliva-sodden wad of nightgown from her teeth, and as, shaking, she raised her new arm up to the light: the warm electric lamplight made her naked arm bones an iridescent gold.
The old arm lay on the carpet, abandoned and dead, looking a little sorry for itself. You said, “I didn’t bother about the meat.”
Ianthe said wonderingly, “But I’ve got some feeling in it.”
“Most of the nervous glands are in your elbow.”
“Why even—”
“You have worked out that the Lyctoral healing process is dependent on your nerve fibres?”
“But you don’t—”
“I lack entirely what you all have,” you said, “and have had to work out a replacement. I watched, and compared. In the beginning I thought maybe I could implant the process in myself … but it’s not just a matter of nerves, even if those signal the reconstruction. I thought if I experienced enough pain, something might kick in to save me. It didn’t.”
She spread her rightmost finger bones wide, then back, experimentally making a fist. You said, “You will still need a mat of tissue or cartilage on the palmar bones, to hold the sword. Think of it as a glove.”
