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