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“I live for your forced admissions,” said Ianthe. “It would have been a pain if you’d said no. I’ve already organised everything.”
You both fell silent. The canopy of the four-poster bed obscured the fresco on the overdecorated ceiling, which was a relief to the eye. Her covers were softer than the covers in your room, though you thought the mattress too squashy for real comfort. One sank down into it like a bog. You were not used to so many pillows, nor were you used to the slippery chill of satin on your skin, nor were you used to hearing someone else’s breath, insubstantial, beside you. For a moment you thought Ianthe had fallen asleep.
Then she said, idly: “Coronabeth and I spent three nights apart in all our lives, and the second time she cried so hard that she threw up … I hope she’s sleeping easy now. When she doesn’t, she gets bags under her eyelids you could carry water in.”
It seemed as though a response was expected, but you did not want to speak of dead twins. You simply said, “I have always slept alone.”
“You don’t say.”
You heard the primness in your voice when you said, “I am betrothed to the Locked Tomb, Tridentarius. I slept on a cot in my cell.”
“I always forget you were an honest-to-God nun … and six years old to boot, if you listen to Mercymorn. How old are you, really, Harry?”
“Eighteen, and my tolerance for Harry wears thin.”
“Eighteen,” she said, in the tones of the jaded, fagged-out socialite. “I remember being eighteen.”
“You are twenty-two.”
“It’s a universe away from eighteen.”
You lay in that bed like a marble sculpture, your body remote and faraway. Sleep and safety had blunted your panic, but not arrested it wholesale. If Ianthe reached out to touch your arm, you were afraid you might not understand whose arm she was touching. You were so afraid she might touch you. You were so afraid anyone might touch you. You had always been afraid of anyone touching you, and had not known your longing flinch was so obvious to those who tried it.
But she did not touch you. Instead, sleepily, she asked: “Do you really keep all those letters on you?”
Since you were living in exile from your room, they were now tucked into hollow capsules within your exoskeleton, the location of each of the twenty-two locked into your memory like so many theorems. You’d tried just tucking them into your robes, but you’d rustled. “Yes,” you said, and did not elaborate.
Then she startled you by asking, “Any regrets, Harrowhark?”
“About?”
“About any of this. Going to Canaan House. Becoming a Lyctor. Coming to the Mithraeum.”
You were not at all certain. “No.”
“No, I suppose not,” she said thickly. “You were more farsighted than I was … Me? I’ve never regretted anything, as a rule. Good night.”
For a long time in the darkness you wondered at that, her good night hanging unanswered. You were more farsighted than I was. It was the easiest compliment to you that had ever passed her lips. You did not set store by compliments—it was vanity to accept them, and patronizing to give them—but this one echoed in your head. You were more farsighted than I was.
You looked at Cyrus the First’s cavalier before you closed your eyes, though not to appreciate her details. You were more struck by the idea that she must have died back at Canaan House, when the work was finished—when the Lyctoral theorem had been cracked. Her necromancer had brought these ghoulish remembrances on purpose. He had surrounded himself with pictures he had painted, of him, and of the cavalier whose soul now fuelled the battery of his heart. You were lucky that the memory of your own cavalier did not hurt you—except sometimes in the form of a sick headache in your temples, or in words stuck on repeat in your head.
Some of those words were eating at you now, and you recited them to yourself in the quietude of your brain:
Warrior proud of the Third House! Ride forth now as my sister! Ride we to death, and the proving!
Ride we with heads held high; we shall bloody our blades in the foe’s heart; death shall we bring to the foul ones—
Death shall we win for ourselves, as the prize for our high deeds done on the ash-choked plains of the ravens!
Book Eleven. Matthias Nonius and the cavalier secondary of the Third House would proceed to destroy a whole legion in exhaustive detail, after which the grievously injured daughter of the Third had to be carried over a thanergy-irradiated desert while Nonius mused aloud on the nature of fate all the way into Book Twelve. You fell asleep.
* * *
By the next afternoon, an envelope had been slipped under Ianthe’s door. It was paper of a deep, creamy brown, and sealed with wax. When Ianthe broke it open, you peered over her elbow at the contents. A single page—also real paper, also dyed a creamy tan colour, lettered artistically in flawless handwriting and deep blue ink:
AUGUSTINE THE FIRST, LYCTOR OF THE GREAT RESURRECTION, FOUNDER OF THE COURT OF KONIORTOS, FIRST SAINT TO SERVE THE KING UNDYING
REQUESTS THE HONOUR OF THE PRESENCE OF HIS YOUNGEST SISTERS
IANTHE THE FIRST, EIGHTH SAINT TO SERVE THE KING UNDYING
&
HARROWHARK THE FIRST, NINTH SAINT TO SERVE THE KING UNDYING
DINNER WILL BE SERVED AT HALF AN HOUR PAST EVENING COMMENCEMENT
ATTIRE: FORMAL OR CEREMONIAL DRESS
Your head pounded with a tedious recognition.
“No,” you said.
Ianthe tapped your shoulder with the invitation in her usual parody of playfulness, which was a little like being batted around by a predator while still alive. “This is the plan, Harrowhark. Just sit back and watch my teacher work.”
You said, “I do not understand the faith you place in that man.”
It was no good. You would have preferred a time that was not hours hence; you would have preferred a plan that did not involve a formal invitation, a dress code, or dinner. The last dinner you had attended had not gone exactly to plan, and you thought another dinner in poor taste. But you had not reckoned on your roommate, who—as a princess of the Third House—thought of dinners the way you thought of morning orison.
“I still have my robes of office,” you said as she tore apart her wardrobe, fingering each article therein before tossing it aside.
“It’s no longer your office. No—no.”
“It’s technically correct.”
“Not this time, my child. I’m sick of being associated with a half-snapped stick of liquorice, dressed in a tent— No—hideous—not even Corona would wear that. No—no.”
“My shirt and trousers will suffice, then. Beneath my Canaanite whites.”
“Even worse,” said Ianthe, and wrestled from its housing what appeared to be a full tulle skirt in midnight purple; skirt and woman scuffled momentarily before she heaved it across the room. “No—yes, for a different and much better party—no—no. Sometimes I think the Emperor of the Nine Houses favours you because you’ve got the same taste in clothes. God, what’s this? That’s a bit risqué—”
You grew desperate. “Let me pick.”
Ianthe looked at you; her blue-and-brown eyes were beatific. “Harry,” she said, and she said it tenderly, “have you never read a trashy novel in which the hero gets a life-affirming change of clothes and some makeup, and then goes to the party and everyone says things like, ‘By the Emperor’s bones! But you’re beautiful,’ or, ‘This is the first time I have ever truly seen you,’ and if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral,’ et cetera, et cetera, the word mewled fifteen pages later, the word nipple one page after that?”
You said emphatically: “No.”
“Then we have no shared point of reference. Thankfully, however, this is not that part,” she said. “Not even one of the Emperor’s fists and gestures could give Harrowhark Nonagesimus a sexy makeover. Sometimes I think you look like a twig’s funeral. In the right light though— Oh, this might do, it’s even your colour. Come here.”
She was holding a mass of black fabric, but no black such as ever existed in the House of the Locked Tomb. You approached with naked horror. Ianthe shook out a long piece of starry sable stuff and held it against you; it appeared to be some sort of—enormous handkerchief. It was not a dress.
When you pointed this out she said, with some asperity: “Valancy Trinit was my height, weighed more than both of us put together, and—judging by her portraits—had a body that did not quit. Your body, by comparison, gave up at the starting line. Take off your clothes.”
Take off your clothes was an imperative you never thought you would obey. You did not take off all your clothes, but you consented to strip down to your shirtsleeves, because the shirt was long. The exoskeleton provided some coverage, though not remotely enough for comfort. You stood there with your chin thrust out, expecting a steady flow of crude japery, but all she said was: “Will you take off that grotesque skeleton corset?”
“No.”
“What about your face paint?”
“No.”
