wasted smile that was the only thing that Cytherea had come close to parodying with any accuracy. She said, “Pal always said I’d be the death of him. And I was … He and I never even got to meet. I never even really got off Rhodes. It seems like such a bastard. You did kill the Lyctor, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Harrowhark.
“Was it quick?”
“Quicker than she deserved,” said Harrow.
“She stabbed Protesilaus before he’d finished taking his sword out the scabbard,” she said, and scratched a flourish into her ward. “Then she started asking me questions. Who were my friends? Was I well enough to go out in public? Was I married? I told her a lot of hot bullshit,” finished Dulcie. “I knew she was going to take my place—thought maybe Camilla, at least, would figure out something was up … no such luck. I don’t even remember dying—I suppose that was nice of her.”
There was no resentment in that face, worn out before its time, heavily lined with the marks of pain and care. With her close-cropped curls and soft eyes, Dulcie Septimus in some lights looked like a child; in others, older than Magnus. She had a tip-tilted grin that showed little white teeth, and nowhere in that smile was a hint of pity, nor of condescension.
“I don’t understand why you’re here,” said Harrow, throwing her House’s caution to the wind. She said honestly: “I do not know you. I barely avenged you. You owe me no allegiance, and nor does your cavalier.”
“Oh, Protesilaus is here because he wouldn’t be able to help it,” Dulcie said dismissively, putting one of the candles down and, with a total lack of shame, wriggling her hands up into her shirt so that she could warm them on her abdomen. “I love him, but he’s such a pest. I wish he hadn’t even come with me to Canaan House. I feel horrible. He should’ve stayed home with his wife and his sons—his wife does tapestries and he breeds flowers for a hobby. I stayed on their farm right after my pneumonia because they thought the sitting temperature would be better for me, and if I ever see another rose I shall scream … No chance of that now. Don’t worry about Protesilaus. He can’t help being so fantastically, dorkily noble.”
“But you—”
Dulcie’s smile became ferocious; her lips curled to show that some of the very white teeth were a little pointed, and her pallid eyes seemed to turn up at the corners. She was no longer languid, but breathless, alive, and resembling nothing quite so much as a malign fairy. Harrow remembered that Palamedes Sextus had made a war of his whole life in order to prosecute his desire to marry this woman.
“The only thing that ever stopped me being exactly who I wanted,” she said, “was the worry that I would soon be dead … and now I am dead, Reverend Daughter, and I am sick of roses, and I am horny for revenge.”
Then she took her hands away from her middle and went back to happily fixing the ward.
It did not take long to complete the circle. They worked swiftly and quietly. When they finished the coffin was cocooned in an enormous circle of enmeshed ward and candle anchorage, although Abigail looked discontented. “I hate doing anything to spirits without something to feed them,” she said, “and there’s no real blood here … there’s nothing to tempt it. I wish we knew what it was anchoring itself to—what’s the thanergetic link, and why has it been able to follow it to you? Harrowhark, you really don’t have any insight into who might be haunting you? Do any of its signifiers mean anything? The suit? The blood? The gun?”
Harrow’s brain, though still a jumble, was no longer a mess in a darkened room. Memory had gifted her a small torch she could light the disarray with. She remembered the clipped Cohort accents:
A standard-issue infantry sword. A two-hander.
“The sword,” she said. “It’s Gideon’s. But none of the other signifiers match.”
“Did the sword belong to anyone before her?”
“Not that I know of. Aiglamene petitioned to give it to Griddle from the Drearburh stock. I signed the order. The box was still wrapped.” The light was not proving helpful enough: she was, in desperation, kicking over piles of the rubble in her own brain. “I hated that damned sword for years. I don’t know why; it just felt strange—rancorous. I cannot deny that I often