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At your face. He looked at my eyes in your face in the same way the other Lyctor had, and any colour in his own drained straight away.
I’ve seen a lot of things in my time—swords, pictures of ladies who lost their clothes in an accident, a bunch of corpses—eclectic, maybe, though now I think about it maybe not the widest variety—but I have never seen anyone look at anything the way those Lyctors looked at us. Mercymorn looked at us like we were the picture in the dictionary next to unhappiness. Augustine looked at us like we were the last thing he’d ever see.
“John,” he breathed. And: “Joy.” And then—he fucking legged it.
When I turned us around to look at her, Ianthe was watching us with cautious, half-suspicious curiosity. She never did show all her cards. It was pretty shitty the way she towered over you—over a head above your height, a bleached and charmless reed of a human. She’d never seemed that tall back at Canaan House, but I wasn’t used to your eyeline.
“Mystery on mystery,” was all she said. And then: “How I hate seeing you in her face.”
“You’ve got two short minutes left before I punch you right in the butthole,” I said.
“Follow me. We haven’t got much time—quite apart from your hurtful threats of sexual violence,” she said. “Why, your fist is so big, and my butthole is so small.”
“Just move, Tridentarius! I’m not ready to laugh at your goddamn jokes!”
She took us—gagging every time we got too close to an oozing, sagging space bee corpse, which was a much more comfortable way to laugh at her than watching her mocking mouth form the word butthole—to her amazing gold-and-white room. I was almost too stressed and distracted to appreciate that awe-inspiring painting of the bangin’ cavalier holding a melon, with her necromancer friend standing on a plinth while the wind blew leaves to hide his junk. That was art. Completely worth dying for, just to see for myself.
“Hurry up. I have a letter for you,” said Ianthe.
Harrow, it was in your handwriting. She handed me a fat, bulging envelope with your handwriting, and it said To be given to Gideon Nav, and I felt—strange. Time softened as I held it, and I didn’t even care about the barely repressed mirthful scorn on the other girl’s face. It was your curt, aggravated handwriting, curter and more aggravated than ever, like you’d written it in a hurry. I’d gotten so many letters in that handwriting, calling me names or bossing me around. You’d touched that letter, and I—you know it was killing me twice that you weren’t there, right? You must know it was destroying me to be there in your body, trying to keep your thumbs on, and I couldn’t even hear your damn voice?
I peeled open the envelope—you’d sealed it up tight, though I was pretty sure that Tridentarius had busted it open in between, she was just that type—and found a little piece of flimsy with the edges still ragged from where you’d torn it. The letter was wrapped around a black, folded-up bunch of angles: smoked glass, thin black frames, mirrored lenses. A little bend in one arm, but otherwise—you’d kept my sunglasses.
I slid them on your face immediately. They were a little too big for you. They kept sliding down your nose. I had to bend the hooks behind your ears to make them stay. With my eyes safely hidden, I opened the paper, and it just said one thing—four stupid goddamn words. No dry Nonagesimus explanation. No instructions. No commandments. In a way, I would’ve killed for one of your lists of rules about exactly how to treat your body, how I was going to have to take showers with all your clothes on, which, by the way, I’d already planned on doing.
But I almost knew what you’d written already, so I don’t know why I was surprised.
ONE FLESH, ONE END.
Which did not make me happy, Harrow. It did not fill my heart with soft and sentimental yearning. You set me up. You set all of it up. I gave you one damn job. And instead you rolled a rock over me and turned your back. I spent all that time drowning and surfacing in you, over and over and over, and all because in the end you could not bear to do the one thing I asked you to do.
I wanted you to use me, you malign, double-crossing, corpse-obsessed bag of bones, you broken, used-up shithead! I wanted you to live and not die, you imaginary-girlfriend-having asshole! Fuck one flesh, one end, Harrow. I already gave my flesh to you, and I already gave you my end. I gave you my sword. I gave you myself. I did it while knowing I’d do it all again, without hesitation, because all I ever wanted you to do was eat me.
Which is, coincidentally, what your mother said to me last night.
“She is such a romantic,” drawled Ianthe.
I crumpled the flimsy and crammed it in your pocket.
“Tridentarius,” I said, and I had to take a breath to stop myself from hewing her in half. Then I said:
“If you keep acting like you know her—not even like you care about her, but like you know the first thing about her—I will end you here and now. Everything you did to her, you did because she was alone. You thought nobody gave a shit about Harrowhark Nonagesimus. You played with her because you thought it was funny. But she never gave you anything. You never got anywhere.”
Naberius’s eyes narrowed. I hated those eyes in that face; I kept expecting to smell hair gel. Ianthe sat down on the bed with her long skinny legs crossed at the knee, that waxen face just one more memorial on this goddamned floating funeral, and she remarked: “Did you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I am talking about forgetting, you big-mouthed warrior nunlet,” she said, and examined her fingernails, and levered a glob of dried-up green from her thumb with a brief flash of nausea. “Good God! Try taking Coronabeth’s memories from me … I’d kill you myself. Love—don’t make that face, child, I have loved plenty—true love is acquisitive. You keep anything … strands of hair … an envelope they might’ve licked … a note saying, Good morning, simply because they wrote it to you. Love is a revenant, Gideon Nav, and it accumulates love-stuff to itself, because it is homeless otherwise. I’m not saying she didn’t care about you. One does care about one’s cavalier, it can’t be helped … but I watched Harry rearrange her brain so that she could empty herself of you.”
I laughed right in her face.
“Oh, shit,” I said, once I’d stopped, because it was weird to hear you giggle that much. Sorry. It was pretty funny. “You think you can make me jealous? You think anything I did has been to make her love me? You don’t know. She didn’t even tell you.”
Her face didn’t flicker. The wan features were schooled into a look bright and interested, but those oily brown-pebbled eyes were like a snake’s.
“Enlighten me,” she said.
“Hang on, I don’t want to let this pass by—Harry?”
“I thought it was cute. Elucidate, Gideon, we really don’t have all day.”
“Like I said before. She’s just not into you. She’s into bones. She gave her heart to a corpse when she was ten years old,” I said. “She’s in love with the refrigerated museum piece in the Locked Tomb. You should’ve seen the look she had on when she told me about this ice-lolly bimbo. I knew the moment I saw it. I never made her look like that … She can’t love me, even if I’d wanted her to. She can’t love you. She can’t even try.”
She said, way too carefully: “Oh, please, as though—” but I cut her off.
“Don’t start the I was toying with her, mwah ha ha noise, because I won’t believe it. Your plan backfired, Tridentarius. You’ve got the sickness. I know the signs of Nonagesimitis. You were all lined up for a big hot injection of Vitamin H.”
Ianthe scrubbed at her forehead briefly with her bone hand.
“Really a corpse?” she said, with not totally believable carelessness.
“She wants the D,” I said. And: “The D stands for dead.” And: “Sorry.”
“I think I need a drink,” said Ianthe, and she murmured to herself: “All that fuss about the Saint of Duty. What a little hypocrite.”
“Don’t think this means you get more than the teeny-weeniest smidge of pity from me,” I added. “If you think anything I did, I did to make her love me, then you don’t know anything about her and me. I’m her cavalier, dipshit! I’d kill for her! I’d die for her. I did die for her. I’d do anything she needed, anything at all, before she even knew she needed it. I’m her sword, you pasty-faced Coronabeth-looking knock-off.”
Always your sword, my umbral sovereign; in life, in death, in anything beyond life or death that they want to throw at thee and me. I died knowing you’d hate me for dying; but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.
