You sat back down on the bed and placed your hand on the sword, which had the effect it always did: your oesophagus gave a little exhausted shiver, your salivary glands jolted, and the nausea rose up behind your eyeballs. “You have wrung a great deal of blood from what seems to be a very little stone,” you said.
“I gave you something you cared about very deeply at the time,” she said, idly swinging one leg to perch over one knee. “I don’t consider my price all that high … and neither did you. What’s more, now we are about to embark on what promises to be a truly beautiful friendship, with me the lone fruitful thing in your salted field, et cetera, so I’ll thank you to not embark on the I have been hard done by act.”
Your fingers pressed down hard on the wide breadth of steel. The thundering in your ears was a patchwork of sound and adrenaline, and your heart was sore. “The pledge did not condone disrespect,” you said. “I will not suckle at your bootheel.” (“Unnecessarily descriptive,” said Ianthe.) “I will not suffer insult. I am the Reverend Daughter. I am a Lyctor. I am in your debt … but I am not here for your amusement.”
“Not in that thing you’re not, certainly,” said Ianthe, whose lip was curling. “You look like a huge peppermint. Take this—and this.”
This—as Ianthe reached suddenly beneath her chair, right arm still strangely flopsome—proved to be a great shiny wadded-up bundle. She tossed it lightly at you—you didn’t even try to catch it—and it landed in a lovely pool on the bed. It was a mass of the same thin and frivolous material that currently shrouded Ianthe: a robe in mother-of-pearl colours, all its wrinkles and creases disappearing as you tentatively shook it out. It had a hood. It had deep sleeves. That was all you needed. The colour was not going to become you, but it was hugely preferable to the turquoise shift. You squirmed inside it with unseemly haste. You pulled the hood deep over your head and did not bother to hide your sigh of relief. You were clad from the arms down to the legs, if not modestly; the whole rest of your face was on show.
And this was a neat stack of flimsy envelopes, the same as the first. The Harrowhark who had addressed them had taken the time to write their labels—apart from the numbers—in neat crypt-script. You flicked through them to count, and could not help scanning the requirements. Some of them were plain and stark. To open in the event of the Emperor’s death. To open in the event of Ianthe’s death. To open if the Ninth House is in mortal danger. Some of them were opaque to the point of madness. To open if your eyes change. If met, to give to Camilla Hect.
You wondered, mystified, if you had ever known the last name of Camilla the Sixth, a woman you could not recall interacting with at any point.
“I will remain in possession of the last two,” said Ianthe, having risen to stand. It was always difficult when she stood: she looked so completely like a shoddy wax cast of some more beautiful sculpture. “I will tell you openly that there’s one I get to open in case you die, which is fun.”
You flipped through. Your eyes fell on: To open if you meet Coronabeth Tridentarius. This was different from the other envelopes in that it was not written in cipher. You were not happy at the idea that Ianthe had spent any time with your code, and thought your past self complacent in the extreme. Ianthe’s eyes fell on it too. “You wrote that one in front of me,” she said. “I can summarise the contents … you are now pledged to me and by extension to Coronabeth, and I tell you for free that one of the riders is that you will never harm a hair on my sister’s head.”
“Your sister is likely no longer alive,” you said, seeing no reason not to say it.
She threw back her pale head and laughed outright. “Corona!” she said, when she was done. “My sweet baby Corona is far too stupid to die—she’d walk backward out of the River swearing blind she was going in the right direction. I will tell you when my sister is dead, thank you, Harrowhark—and that day is not today.”