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