even think Oh shit, she had been pulled to stand as Harrowhark’s knees buckled beneath her. There was a bad moment when she wanted to puke, a good moment when she didn’t, and a bad moment again when she realised that she only hadn’t because she couldn’t.
The lady of the Seventh was saying, “Reverend Daughter … I’m terribly grateful for what you just did. I’m sorry for the cost.”
“Don’t. It was a business decision. You’ll get your key when I’m done.”
“But Gideon—”
“Is not your business.”
Dulcinea’s hands came to rest in her lap, and she tilted her head. “I see,” she said, smiling and somewhat crestfallen.
A barefoot Harrow grunted under her breath as she continued to try to haul Gideon up the short flight of stairs, panting for breath by the top step. Gideon could only watch, willing herself to come to full consciousness, astonished by the unreceptivity of her body. It was all she could do to not deliquesce out of Harrow’s grip. At the top of the stairs they stopped, and the Reverend Daughter looked back searchingly.
She said abruptly, “Why did you want to be a Lyctor?”
Gideon mumbled, “Harrow, you can’t just ask someone why they want to be a Lyctor,” but was roundly ignored.
The older woman was leaning against Protesilaus’s arm. She looked extraordinarily sad, even regretful; when she caught Gideon’s eye, a tiny smile tugged on the corners of her mouth, then drooped again. Eventually, she said: “I didn’t want to die.”
Walking back through the chilly foyer out to the corridor was bad: Gideon had to break away from Harrow and rest her cheek on the cold metal panelling next to the door. Her necromancer waited with uncharacteristic patience for her to regain some semblance of consciousness, and they stumbled onward—Gideon drunken, Harrow flinching her bare feet away from the grille.
“You didn’t have to be a dick,” she found herself saying, thickly. “I like her.”
“I don’t like her,” said Harrowhark. “I don’t like her cavalier.”
“I still don’t get why you’re all up in arms against what is a very basic man hulk. Did you get the key?”
The key appeared in Harrow’s other hand, shining silvery white, austerely plain with a single loop for a head and three simple teeth on the shaft. “Nice,” said Gideon. She rummaged in an inner pocket and removed the ring; the key slid next to the hatch key and red Response key with an untidy musical tinkle. Then she said: “Sorry your clothes melted.”
“Nav,” said Harrow, with the slow deliberation of someone close to screaming, “stay quiet. You’re not—you’re not … entirely well. I underestimated how long it would take me. The field was vicious, much more so than Septimus communicated. It had started to strip the moisture from my eyeballs before I refined on the fly.”
“By which point it had eaten your underwear,” said Gideon.
“Nav.”
“I just had a near-death experience,” she said, “let me have my little moment.”
How they got all the way up the ladder, Gideon later had no idea; it was with strange, dreamlike precision that Harrowhark bullied and bolstered her down the long, winding halls of Canaan House and back to the quarters that the Ninth House occupied, without a flicker of magic, Harrow wearing nothing but a big black overcloak. Every so often she wondered if she had, in fact, kicked the bucket and this was her afterlife: wandering empty halls with a half-naked, chastened Harrowhark Nonagesimus who had no recourse but to be gentle with her, handling her as though at any moment she would explode into wet confetti giblets.
She even let Harrow steer her toward the blankets that constituted her bed. Gideon was too exhausted to do anything but lie down and sneeze three times in quick succession, each sneeze a migraine gong through sinus and skull bone.
“Quit looking at me like that,” she eventually commanded Harrow, wiping bloody muck onto her hanky. “I’m alive.”
“You nearly weren’t,” said Harrow soberly, “and you’re not even aggrieved about it. Don’t price your life so cheaply, Griddle. I have absolutely no interest in you losing your sense of self-preservation. What are these theorems for?” she suddenly exploded. “What did we gain from that? What was the point? I should have walked away, like Sextus—but I don’t have the luxury! I need to become Lyctor now, before—”
She bit off her words like meat from a bone. Gideon waited to know before what, but no more was forthcoming. She closed her eyes and waited, but opened them when she panicked