I lined up your front foot with your back ankle, thumb wrapped low around the hilt of your sword, which proves that you can put the swordfighter into the necromancer but you can’t, wait, hang on.
And I said, “Goddamn it, I told you to lift weights.”
The creature skittered toward us at an incredible speed. What followed was an absolute shitshow.
For us. Not it. It was fine and dandy. Turned out that when it approached, its wings lifted it high enough to expose a fat, savage stinger on the end of that abdomen—the sawlike mouth shot a high-pressure squirt of transparent liquid directly into our eyes, which I narrowly dodged by swinging your blood-sodden arm across your face—fun times, because the liquid turned out to be insane monster acid. I heard the robe sizzling away on contact, then I heard your skin sizzle too—felt the strips fall away from your arm, first of cloth and then of actual dermal layer—and I took a couple of steps back and I bit about three holes through your tongue, but our pain receptors were still all fucked up. I’m not saying it didn’t hurt like a top-notch bitch, because it did, but when I shook the worst of the unholy insect spit off our mess of an arm I found your skin growing back as I watched. Hell of a party trick, Nonagesimus, I mean, damn.
I parried a smashing overhead blow from the stinger, which was beading more clear fluid from a tip that could’ve jerked our heart out, and my borrowed arm clanged my borrowed sword into the saw mouth. I kicked the stinger with your booted foot, which was like hitting a wall with a feather duster, ducked under another stream of acid, and then, sorry, turned and ran for your goddamn life.
I burst into the nearest room. The bedroom. I kind of knew the layout, but I’d never really been able to use your eyes. Living inside you—if I start I’ll never stop, so we have to move on—was like living in a well, and every time I bobbed to the surface I kind of got clotheslined back down to the bottom. I’m not complaining, I just want you to know. Even so, I knew enough to bust through your foyer and to the remnants of that ash barricade you were an idiot to make, heading for the thing I knew I would find right where you left it, with its thick white scabbard cracked into pieces all around.
The creature squirmed through after me, made that shitty bleating half-curdled chirrup, and spat another stream of evil saliva at us. I hit the floor, ditched the rapier, and grasped the hilt of my two-handed sword.
Which was, by the way, in fucking abominable condition. There is so much I should have told you. I just didn’t have time. I didn’t know. I didn’t know I’d have to say: A sword doesn’t hold an edge on its own, you sack of Ninth House garbage. I didn’t know I’d have to say, If you dip a sword into melty bone, the metal gets more pitted than an iron mine, you cross-patched necromantic shit.
I think the main thing I should have said was, You sawed open your skull rather than be beholden to someone. You turned your brain into soup to escape anything less than 100 percent freedom. You put me in a box and buried me rather than give up your own goddamned agenda.
Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it.
Actually, scratch that, the main thing I should have said was, SQUATS ARE A START, OR A COUPLE OF STAR JUMPS, THEY’RE NOT DIFFICULT.
As I stood with that sword grasped between your hands, the hilt of the two-hander bit our skin, but not fatally. There were a couple of callouses now on those soft necromancer’s palms, and I was proud of you.
When I met the first strike of that poison-dripping stinger, our limits became obvious—the first strike ripped your extensors to shit, clanged down your forearms and up into your feeble upper arms like a miniature strike team had entered the tendons and set the whole thing to blow. The pain came in waves. But some ancient engine had revved to life for me in a way it never had done for you, probably because I am a good girl and you are an evil nun, and it tore through us almost simultaneously: renewed those