She had not said goodbye. Harrow so rarely got to say goodbye.
* * *
The lights flickered again. A fine haze was rising from the grille beneath their feet, carrying a thin suggestion of smoke. The candles had gone out entirely, and their thin satiny souls were rising to heaven in the metal rafters. There was a pervasive, clinging smell of burning dust, and the continuous rumbling of softly piling rock and bending metal. They stared at each other with a left-behind, exhausted bemusement: Harrowhark and the ghosts of Dulcinea Septimus, Magnus Quinn, and Abigail Pent.
With rising agitation that she could not quite quell, Harrow found herself asking curtly: “What’s my role in this exodus, Pent?”
“If you stay, there’s no question of you absorbing yourself or expelling yourself,” said Abigail, and there was something quite careful in the way she said it. “You’re the host soul, and can only be displaced willingly—or with the kind of violence the Sleeper attempted. Spirits always wish to return to their bodies, and pine without them. The only exits for you now are the River, leaving your body completely—or you can simply go home, and wake up.”
Gideon.
It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon. For one brief and beautiful space of time, she had welcomed it: that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall. Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.
She could let herself go, or she could go back to her body, and let her go.
Nav had made it her decision, when it came to imminent death either way. The free will to say Harrow dies or Harrow lives. And she had said, albeit fuck her for saying it: Harrow lives, which required its opposite balance: Gideon dies. Now here she was back again with what she had always wanted—the choice to say Yes, and the choice to say No, with the needle of No sliding fatally back toward Yes.
She said: “If I go back, it will finally destroy her soul.”
It was Magnus who stepped forward and looked at Harrow face-to-face. And perhaps she felt that more keenly: that he was the man who had, in Gideon’s own words a lifetime ago, been nice to her cavalier. His mouth was hard now, but his eyes were as kind as they had ever been. And kindness was a knife.
“This whole thing happened because you wouldn’t face up to Gideon dying,” he said, which was a stab as precise as any Nonius had managed. “I don’t blame you. But where would you be, right now, if you’d said: She is dead? You’re keeping her things like a lover keeping old notes, but with her death, the stuff that made her Gideon was destroyed. That’s how Lyctorhood works, isn’t it? She died. She can’t come back, even if you keep her stuffed away in a drawer you can’t look at. You’re not waiting for her resurrection; you’ve made yourself her mausoleum.”
His wife looked at Harrow’s face and murmured, “Magnus, you’ve made your point,” but he uncharacteristically ignored her.
“D’you know, Abigail broke up with me when we were seventeen? I kept a ripped-up corner of her dance card for three years. It didn’t even have any writing on it, or her initials, or mine. Just a ripped-up corner of card.”
One of the lights detached from the ceiling above them with a trailing shower of sparks and shattered on the grille beneath. To Harrow, it sounded like a tolling bell.
“This is your ripped-up corner of card,” said Magnus. “You’re a smart girl, Harrowhark. You might turn some of that brain to the toughest lesson: that of grief.”
The drizzling dust had become a blizzard, and something buckled against the whiteboard wall. If the destruction of Canaan House kept progressing at this rate, even if it was some kind of metaphorical shift, it would, in a very unmetaphorical sense, squash everyone flat. Rules were rules. If a chunk of her psychological landscape fell on Abigail, or Dulcie, or Magnus, it would be a second death. Their spirits would be erased from existence, never able even to enter the River. They clustered closer toward her, like plants sensing sunlight: as though she were