away all her substance. The more substantial child before her was saying in a piercing voice: “I heard they actually had to exhume a book as to how your lot work, because we haven’t had a black friar for fifty years.”
“Then I will take my leave—Lieutenant. Lieutenant—”
“Excuse her, please, she sucks,” said her necromancer briefly.
(“Thanks?”
“You do though?) Look—I wanted to introduce myself. You obviously know who I am. But we’ll be going through training together—we’re the only House heirs entering on the same footing—I don’t think it would be stupid to keep together. And you’re here without a cavalier. Nobody knows why the Reverend Daughter’s signed up for action. But I can’t judge—I’m the Baron of Tisis, and they’re probably going to haze us all until we’re half dead. Now we’re all together, I’d like to be friends. Pax?”
Harrowhark stared down at the gloved hand proffered, then at the hand’s owner. He had recently taken out quite a lot of earrings, and his ears were riddled with little empty punch holes, as though he were the recent victim of some guerrilla sewing. Both faces were, in fact, turned to her with none of the disgust she had initially fancied; their enthusiasm, she had to admit, was sincere. She did not shake the hand, but she reached out to briefly touch the fingertips with her own, and she said, “I would advise you against this. The Cohort were … opposed to my inclusion.”
“Oh, you have to get over that,” said the cavalier dismissively. “We could’ve papered the walls in strongly worded Cohort letters. It’s not like you’re the only one. The Cohort hates it when the actual heir joins up. They legitimately tried to give us mumps—”
(“They did not legitimately try to give us mumps. My little brother gave us mumps.”)
“—there’s a whole bushel of rules about asking permission to engage, and if there’s a war on we’ll get packed off to the back, so if you’re smart the first thing you have to say to your commanding officer is, ‘Excuse me, I don’t want my rank to get between myself and the troops,’ and then she can ‘forget’ to follow the safety missive, and you can get put on the post-thanergy front, where it’s interesting— Do you want to go to the cafeteria?”
Harrowhark did not want to go to the cafeteria. Lieutenants Tettares and Chatur accompanied her to the cafeteria anyway, a place she had contrived never to visit unless absolutely necessary. She felt acutely visible standing in the queue in full view of all the other officers-in-training; the massed necromancers and sword-handling men and women of the Nine Houses who had passed examinations, or paid money, or whatever it was they did in the other Houses, to acquire an officer’s rank. She was the only one with a black-enamelled lieutenant’s pip; she was the only one with black slashes at her sleeves. All the while, the Fourth pair kept up a stream of meaningless chatter, like two human waterfalls. Crux would have said that their tongues were hung in the middle. If, Emperor forbid, she had been a flesh magician, she would have been very sorely tempted to hang their tongues in the middle herself.
Harrow tuned back in to the cavalier-enlisted saying, enthusiastically: “—tried the coffee yet?”
The coffee had, in truth, been a long way down Harrow’s list of priorities. In the face of Lieutenant Chatur’s bewildering ardour, she could only muster a chilly: “No.”
A strange ripple passed over the younger girl’s face, as though she were trying very badly not to laugh. But she said, “It’s not like anything you get back at home. It’s got extra stimulants and things—like, acids—for space exposure. Bio-adaptive … Can you tell me what it is, Isaac?”
He screwed up his narrow eyes, sighed a little, and then supplied: “Bio-adaptive reuptake inhibitors.”
“And what do we call it?”
“BARI,” he said.
“Yeah, BARI! It makes the coffee taste weird, but if you make it the right way, with like spices and stuff, it’s actually great. The Cohort wouldn’t run without the on-duty coffee adepts. We wanted to try this deck’s cafeteria, because they’ve got a hotshot new BARI star.”
Harrowhark found herself at the front of the queue beyond which this BARI star apparent waited; and she found herself looking down at the counter, her tongue tied.
“Let me guess,” said a voice. “You take it black.”
She reached out for the cup. The server pushed it toward her in the same instant—their fingers brushed awkwardly in the act