by everyone else, for what it reminded people she was—“be gentle with your weapon, and do not make it naked before the altar.”
He lumbered closer to her, coughed wetly, and added in a hoarse and patently audible whisper: “There are pilgrims here, even now. It would be pretty to apologise.”
There were pilgrims; she was embarrassed not to have noticed. They must have come in without her perceiving them. Two visitors kneeled toward the back of the pews, on the kneeling rail, their black church robes taped with brown around the right shoulders to show their House affiliation. She sheathed the rapier in its ragged scabbard, and reshouldered the chain she had polished so carefully, and performed a rather half-hearted bob in the direction of the altar as she made her way down the aisle.
At her approach, one of the pilgrims shook her hood back. She wore spectacles, and her thick brown hair was neatly bound back in a black fillet, as was customary; the man next to her had shaved his head and kept running a hand over it surreptitiously, like a child at its first cropping. Harrow was surprised to see the first pilgrim give her a weary, troubled smile, as though the woman knew her. It was a smile that was sorry you had missed the mark in your exams, but thought you had not quite studied hard enough. Harrow had never set eyes upon her in her life. She did not know her. She did not know her husband.
Except—how had she known that the man was the woman’s husband?
“This isn’t how it happens,” said Abigail.
41
??? BEFORE???
THE MUSIC WAS RAUCOUS to Harrowhark’s ears. The stringed instruments—viols—a piano—all played in carefully tasteful modulation, but to her affrighted senses it seemed as though they were blasting full bore directly into her tympanic chambers. It was very warm inside the amphitheatre, and despite the kindness of the candlelight—despite the electric lights being dimmed to an attractive submission, playing out over the assorted massacre of the crowd in its eye-hurting panoply of colour—her eyes still felt like they were bleeding. The Reverend Daughter’s veil of office had been pinned back upon her head, precisely where it was no use to her.
The crowd at least thinned out considerably near their delegation: no matter the bewilderment of the occasion, no matter the crush in the room, nobody really wanted to get close to the House of the Ninth. Harrowhark was glad for this on two levels. One, because she hated the press of people; two, because in the dimness, and with distance, there was less chance for other guests to notice the shabbiness of their finery. The lacework of her robes had been patched with thread as close to the original black as possible, but not quite matching, as was the perpetual trouble with blacks. The brocade of her skirts was stiff from bad storage. She was not ashamed of the ancient diadem and torc collar she wore. Both had been taken gently from the corpse of an ancestor, before that ancestor had sighed into powder under the beam of the torchlight. But she did not like what their patches of rust signified of their poverty.
Harrowhark fretted with the edges of her veil. “It’s no use the damn thing being down,” said her captain, sotto voce.
“I do not intend to compete,” said Harrowhark—not moving her lips but inclining her face very slightly toward the woman next to her. “If I did, I would never compete with my face.”
“Yes, but you might as well have one,” said the older woman calmly. “That’s the first thing Her Divine Highness will look for in a bride: presence of a face. It’s a precondition of attraction.”
“That is not why we are here. Unlike every other House scion present, I will not—flaunt my goods in the shop window.”
“Emperor knows what we’d even flaunt,” grunted Aiglamene.
The other seven Houses present were flaunting as though they were birds in a particularly baroque mating season. Her so-called cavalier primary took great interest; he jotted verses on a scrap of flimsy that he palmed discreetly into his pocket every time her gaze fell on him. The other Houses had mingled into a spectrum of colours, interweaving in the dances like a living drift of spangles. Clean Cohort whites with coloured ribands vaunting colour on the pips or wrist; long dresses in iridescent white, a simpering tactic, with hued wreaths on the head to denote the House; necromancers in robes of all kinds, none