you tried to do,” he said, and he took the flimsy away and put it in his pocket. “If you are culpable … you are culpable only of giving the marshal the means to murder me. Marshal Crux was not a good man … and yet, perhaps, he did what he saw was fit. Perhaps if I had said, ‘No, I must stay and do my duty, and aid the Reverend Daughter whatever her will,’ then I would have lived. But I was a coward, and I let my mother overrule me. My mother was strong … so strong, I hear, that her spirit lasted beyond death. I was weak. I always was weak, my Lady Harrowhark.”
She said tightly, “Don’t call me that.”
“My apologies, Reverend Daughter.”
“Don’t call me your lady,” she said. “You owe me nothing. You don’t owe me fealty. You don’t owe me duty. Though the way I treated Gideon Nav defies description, I treated you in a manner that rejects any claim I had to your loyalty. You don’t have to stay, Nigenad—tell Pent to get you through the barrier and back into the River.” As though the River was the better option. She said, “In the River, you’ll be relatively safe.”
Ortus laid his pen on the arm of the beaten-up chair. He settled his hands over his body awkwardly—there was always so much of Ortus, too much of him for his own comfort: he did not know what to do with his fingers, he did not know how to settle himself into the chair he filled or accept that he occupied space. He asked, “How did Gideon die?”
She closed her eyes and lost herself in that dizzy unreality of blackness: of swaying minutely, of lost balance. So many months had passed: and yet, at the same time, she had only lost Gideon Nav three days ago. It was the morning of the third day in a universe without her cavalier: it was the morning of the third day—and all the back of her brain could say, in exquisite agonies of amazement, was: She is dead. I will never see her again.
Harrow said, “Murder.”
Ortus said, “I thought—”
“We were pinned down by a Lyctor, our backs to a wall,” she said. “I was utterly spent. Camilla Hect, our companion, had suffered multiple injuries.” It was a blow to her dignity all over again, her unconscious gracelessness to Camilla Hect; a girl whom, in reality, she should have taken by the hands and thanked profusely for every time she tried to save her cavalier. “Nav had a fractured kneecap and a broken humerus. She pierced her heart on a railing because she thought I would use her to become a Lyctor. I will spit in the face of the first person who tells me she committed suicide; she was in an impossible situation, and she died trying to escape it. She was murdered, but she manoeuvred her murder to let me live.”
His face was very sad: a wistful, light sadness, not the ponderous sadness that he wore like his sacramental paint.
“What is better?” he asked. “An ignoble death by someone else’s hands, or a heroic death by one’s own? How should it be written? If the first—that she was cut down by an enemy—I would feel such hate for the enemy … If the second—an ugly death at her own devising—who, then, would be left for me to hate? Who does the poet judge? The eternal problem.”
“Ortus, this is not a poem,” she said.
“I think you must hate her,” he said, and she thought she knew what he meant, until he said: “Don’t. If there is anything I know about young Gideon … if there was anything in her that I too understood … it is that she did everything deliberately.”
Very little in Harrowhark’s life had embarrassed her up until that moment. She had been caught naked in front of a stranger. She had been kissed by a half-drunk Ianthe the First. She had admitted to God her apocalyptic transgressions, and been gently told that she did not know herself. She had been outplayed by Palamedes Sextus, outgunned by Cytherea the First, undone by Gideon Nav.
None of that humiliated her so viscerally as her strangled, bellowing, unchecked shriek now, a child’s cry that whipped every head in that busied room round in her direction: “She died because I let her! You don’t understand!”
Ortus dropped his book. He rose from the chair. He put his arms about her. The dead