told her that I didn’t think we’d get Master Octakiseron first time round … She won’t tell me what he said to her, just that he ‘was horrid.’”
“Cheeky little so-and-so,” said Magnus. “If he were my son, I’d give him something to think about. I’m not surprised he’s gone to ground.”
“I would hope your son might be of different character,” said his wife, half-smiling.
“Protesilaus should have biffed him.”
“It’s strange,” said Abigail, ignoring her husband’s exhortations to biffing. “The Eighth are not generally the type to hide.”
Harrow came to an internal decision to tell the truth. It was not particularly difficult. She had only been holding on to the knowledge because a woman whose tongue wagged did not love the silence of the Tomb. Also, she was frankly uncertain that what she had seen had been real: but now it was nearly a week later, and she was tired of what Magnus Quinn’s eyebrows did when he uttered the word biff.
“Silas Octakiseron is not hiding,” she said. “He’s dead.”
Both of them looked at her. The Fifth necromancer’s glasses were misting up with the cold, so that her tranquil brown gaze was seen as though through a filmy cataract. “Pardon?” she said.
“So is Coronabeth Tridentarius,” Harrow added. “I cannot confirm the fates of the rest of the Third House.”
“Both of them—” began Magnus, and his wife cut in quickly, “The Sleeper—”
Harrowhark said, “No.”
She told the Fifth House the story of what she had seen; though she left out the blood in the fog.
Magnus and Abigail shared what seemed a very long glance. Magnus looked troubled, and his wife looked set, and strangely resigned. After the awkward length of what passed between them, the cavalier meekly slurped at his coffee cup.
“We should have made him a greater priority,” said Lady Pent.
Magnus said, “I’m not certain.”
“And now he is gone,” she said, and added: “To say nothing of the Third … Reverend Daughter, you say this was nearly a week ago? A week, and you didn’t think to tell us?”
There was a slight accusatory note in Pent’s tone. Harrowhark did not feel great about it, but neither did she feel particularly bad; she just felt small and empty and hard, like the hail battering itself so fiercely on the window outside. The heater produced another helpless splurt of dust-smelling heat. “I had to be sure,” she said.
“Of what?” said Magnus.
This did not require an answer, so Harrowhark did not give one. She merely held her hot coffee between her hands and stared with what she knew to be a slightly smeared but still discomposing painted face, with all the white and black of Ninth House sacrament. It was not difficult to win a staring match against Magnus Quinn; he wilted in about five seconds, and stared out the window, and sighed very heavily.
“We didn’t need him,” he said bracingly.
Abigail said, “We need everyone.”
“I never thought he was quite the thing.”
“Tridentarius’s loss is the greater here,” said Harrowhark repressively, and she thought Abigail sounded somewhat distracted when she said, “Yes—yes, I do think so. I just hadn’t expected … If she’s gone, then perhaps that means … Reverend Daughter, will you do me a very great favour?”
“That depends on what the favour is.”
“I would like you to read this for me,” said Lady Pent.
She set down an empty cup of coffee on the frigid windowsill, and she took a little flimsy bag from her pocket. She unzipped the plex tab on the top and removed, delicately, a piece of yellowing paper. The Fifth adept used the very edges of her fingernails to unfold it, carefully and tenderly. Harrow stood up at once, but the cavalier was somehow between her and the door. The sweat beaded behind her knees and prickled behind her ears as she glanced down at the paper.
Harrow said, “I would like to bring my cavalier into this conversa—”
“You need Ortus the Ninth to read a piece of paper with you?” said Magnus Quinn, with broad good humour, the type that was as resolute and inflexible and polite as a summons. She had been stitched up. She was a fool. She had lost her fear of the Fifth House, and now she had been boxed in as only the Fifth House might box you: smiling the whole time, and acting as though the whole thing might be a bit of a joke. Harrow made her face imperturbable, and swallowed slowly, so that her throat did not so obviously gulp.