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Ortus was all muscle and fat; he had the desired enormity of the modern Ninth House cavalier, and she never could have hoped to match it. She had never tried. Harrow realised early in her career that if she could not have the size, nor the weight, nor the sheer breadth, that she would have the speed, the technique, the agility. She had decided this at around five years old.
Denied of weapons, it had been Harrow who had climbed the Anastasian monument and retrieved the chain of Samael, the sacred relic of the long-dead warrior servant of the original tomb-keeper; for that sin she had been forced to strip before the very altar she stood before now as the Reverend Father whipped stripes into her back, until the Daughter had intervened. Now Harrow had the chain, but the Daughter never let her forget the intervention.
“Harrow,” said the skull-faced cavalier of frightful aspect—upon stepping down from his post five years previous, Mortus had scarified the skull into his son, when the adopted necromantic heir had confirmed Ortus for her cavalier primary; the cicatricial lines showed clearly beneath the paint—“they will never let you go. I truly wish they would. I do not long to travel to the First House—I do not dare imagine to serve a Lyctor, let alone stand against one, as in the days of Nonius.”
“Matthias Nonius never stood against a bloody Lyctor.”
“It is clear in the histories—”
“Half the page was gone!”
“A suggestive emendation makes it clear that—”
“I am the daughter of the House of the Ninth,” she said, cutting off whatever he had to say about suggestive emendations. “I am the unfulfilled vow and the bloody teeth of the unkissed skull. I acknowledge myself as a cruel disappointment. I may have been supplanted—I may be no real heir to the mysteries that belong only to the Reverend line—but I will bear the sword! If I am no adept, it is my right to carry the blade instead!”
Ortus Nigenad wiped the sweat off his forehead. The candlelight limned the carved hurts of his face, but his expression did not match their fearsomeness. The panniers of bone at his back rustled pleasantly, in the manner of a child’s sandpit.
“Harrow,” he said. “You do not even really want to carry the blade for her.”
“No,” she said. “I hope she gets boiled alive in oil. I hope she falls into a hole with a crowd watching. I hope someone takes a large pair of secateurs to the muscles at the backs of her heels. I so genuinely and wildly long to see that. I would buy tickets.”
Ortus said tremulously, “But you know she quite—”
“No.”
“And they say she is petitioning for—”
“Continue that sentence,” she said, “and I’ll make it to the pain.”
“Harrow,” he said doggedly, “I would become cavalier secondary in the veriest heartbeat. How honourable still, to be a cavalier secondary of Drearburh! And to stay at home and look faithfully after the family, and not go out into the unkind arms of space, and to foreign houses! But even if I said, Yes, I acknowledge Harrow Nova as my better, your—the Reverend Mother and Father would not accept it. You would have to kill me before they would consider you. And it is the least of my desires, to be killed.”
“You are right,” said Harrow.
His relief was palpable. His shoulders sagged forward, though that was possibly due to the panniers hastening his scoliosis. Aiglamene was always scolding him about posture. Look at Harrow. She stands like a monument, she would say. You stand like a damned fishhook. Ortus leant heavily against the pews with a sigh of relief, and he said: “Thank you. Good. I am glad.”
“And I consider it a salient point,” continued Harrow.
She took the sword from her chest, and slung her chain from over her shoulder, and seized one weighted end between her gloved fingers. The welter of fury inside her resolved into a wet rush, like metal poured into a mould, and as it always had, the sword became an extension of her arm. “Prepare to die, Ortus Nigenad. Commit your soul to the Locked Tomb, and to the rock, and to the chains, and hope it floats high on the River.”
“For God’s sake, Harrow, please.”
Their voices had carried. The little sacristy door flew open; Marshal Crux emerged, hoary, wearing his most formal mouldering leathers, his raddled face aghast and his liver-spotted hands trembling with indignation.
“Swords drawn!” he cried. “Swords drawn in the narthex—before the altar, and before the vesting tables, and with the icons watching! You besmirch us. You sully us. You debase this place.”
“Forgive me, Marshal,” said Harrow.
“I do not speak to you,” croaked Crux, with solemn dignities. Crux was the only reliable source of sympathy in Harrow’s life; sympathy always delivered in such a way as to be horribly unfair to everyone else, but sympathy all the same, and as unpopular as it made her she would not have swapped it for—anyone else’s tenderness. “I speak to the cavalier primary. Ortus the Ninth, fool that you are, you ought to know better.”
“Forgive me, Marshal,” said Ortus humbly, as was his wont, as though he had any part in it. Sometimes Harrow hated him for that.
“I will not,” said Crux indignantly. “Go rush to your cuckoo’s side. They are nearly done with the arrangements.”
The cavalier primary stiffened, and with the faintest note of reproach he murmured something. The tone of his murmur did not quite make it to defensive; Ortus, even being well over thirty, could not do anything but mumble before the marshal.
Crux barked out a noise that was too old to be a laugh.
“What’s that? What’s that, you egg? I oughtn’t to call her such? Choke yourself—burn yourself—bury yourself. If you have the bottle to tell that cockerel what I name her, I will think the better of you for it.”
True to form, and with no more self-defence than a huge and aggravated sigh, Ortus set off in the direction of the sacristy. As he left, Crux was muttering, “Rueful day when we send flotsam to be our champion … rueful day when we send jetsam to be its sword. Harrowhark”—only Crux added on -hark; it was carefully elided by everyone else, for what it reminded people she was—“be gentle with your weapon, and do not make it naked before the altar.”
He lumbered closer to her, coughed wetly, and added in a hoarse and patently audible whisper: “There are pilgrims here, even now. It would be pretty to apologise.”
There were pilgrims; she was embarrassed not to have noticed. They must have come in without her perceiving them. Two visitors kneeled toward the back of the pews, on the kneeling rail, their black church robes taped with brown around the right shoulders to show their House affiliation. She sheathed the rapier in its ragged scabbard, and reshouldered the chain she had polished so carefully, and performed a rather half-hearted bob in the direction of the altar as she made her way down the aisle.
At her approach, one of the pilgrims shook her hood back. She wore spectacles, and her thick brown hair was neatly bound back in a black fillet, as was customary; the man next to her had shaved his head and kept running a hand over it surreptitiously, like a child at its first cropping. Harrow was surprised to see the first pilgrim give her a weary, troubled smile, as though the woman knew her. It was a smile that was sorry you had missed the mark in your exams, but thought you had not quite studied hard enough. Harrow had never set eyes upon her in her life. She did not know her. She did not know her husband.
Except—how had she known that the man was the woman’s husband?
“This isn’t how it happens,” said Abigail.
41
??? BEFORE???
THE MUSIC WAS RAUCOUS to Harrowhark’s ears. The stringed instruments—viols—a piano—all played in carefully tasteful modulation, but to her affrighted senses it seemed as though they were blasting full bore directly into her tympanic chambers. It was very warm inside the amphitheatre, and despite the kindness of the candlelight—despite the electric lights being dimmed to an attractive submission, playing out over the assorted massacre of the crowd in its eye-hurting panoply of colour—her eyes still felt like they were bleeding. The Reverend Daughter’s veil of office had been pinned back upon her head, precisely where it was no use to her.
The crowd at least thinned out considerably near their delegation: no matter the bewilderment of the occasion, no matter the crush in the room, nobody really wanted to get close to the House of the Ninth. Harrowhark was glad for this on two levels. One, because she hated the press of people; two, because in the dimness, and with distance, there was less chance for other guests to notice the shabbiness of their finery. The lacework of her robes had been patched with thread as close to the original black as possible, but not quite matching, as was the perpetual trouble with blacks. The brocade of her skirts was stiff from bad storage. She was not ashamed of the ancient diadem and torc collar she wore. Both had been taken gently from the corpse of an ancestor, before that ancestor had sighed into powder under the beam of the torchlight. But she did not like what their patches of rust signified of their poverty.
