own, with a solid black jaw to represent the Mouthless Skull. This was not because she had any especial love for the Mouthless Skull, as paint sacrament went. It was merely because any jawéd skull he affected became a wide white skull with depression.
After a moment, he said abruptly: “Lady, I cannot help you become a Lyctor.”
She was only surprised that he dared to offer an opinion. “That’s as may be.”
“You agree with me. Good. I thank you for your mercy, Your Grace. I cannot represent you in a formal duel, not with the sword, nor the short sword, nor the chain. I cannot stand in a row of cavaliers primary and call myself their peer. The falsehood would crush me. I cannot begin to conceive of it. I will not be able to fight for you, my Lady Harrowhark.”
“Ortus,” she said, “I have known you my entire life. Did you really think I entertained any delusions that you could be mistaken, in the dark, by a dementia-ridden dog raised with no knowledge of bladed objects, for a swordsman?”
“Lady, it is only to honour my father that I call myself a cavalier,” said Ortus. “It is for my mother’s pride and my House’s scarcity that I call myself a cavalier. I have none of a cavalier’s virtues.”
“I am not sure how many times I must relay to you how truly I am aware of that,” said Harrowhark, picking a tiny fragment of jet thread from her fingernail. “Given that it has constituted one hundred percent of our exchanges over the years, I can only assume you are coming to some new point, and begin to feel excitement.”
Ortus leant forward on the edge of his chair, his restive, long-fingered hands locking together. His hands were big and soft—all of Ortus was big and soft, like a squashy black pillow—and he spread them open, beseeching. She was intrigued, despite herself. This was more than he had heretofore dared.
“Lady,” ventured Ortus, voice deepening with timidity, “I would not venture it—but if a cavalier’s duty is to hold the sword—if a cavalier’s duty is to protect with the sword—if a cavalier’s duty is to die by the sword—have you never considered ORTUS NIGENAD?”
“What?” said Harrow.
“Lady, it is only to honour my father that I call myself a cavalier,” said Ortus. “It is for my mother’s pride and my House’s scarcity that I call myself a cavalier. I have none of a cavalier’s virtues.”
“I feel as though we have had this conversation before,” said Harrowhark, pressing her thumbs together, testing with risky pleasure how malleable she might make her distal phalange. One misstep, and her nerves might split. It was an old exercise her parents had set her. “Each time, the news that you have not spent your life in acquiring martial virtues comes as a little less of a shock to me. But have a go. Surprise me. My body is ready.”
“I wish that our House had produced some swordsman more worthy of our glory days,” said Ortus meditatively, who always found enthusiasm for alternate histories where he was not pressed into service or asked to do anything he found difficult. “I wish that our House had not been diminished to ‘those who are fit but to hold their blade in the scabbard.’”
Harrowhark congratulated herself on not pointing out how this lack of production was directly due to three things: his mother, himself, and The Noniad, his ongoing verse epic devoted to Matthias Nonius. She had a vile suspicion that the quotation, around which he had somehow contrived to pronounce quotation marks, was from that very same verse epic, which she knew was already on its eighteenth book and showed no signs of slowing down. If anything it seemed to be gaining momentum, like a very boring avalanche. She was composing a rejoinder when she noticed that a serving sister had arrived in her father’s library.
Harrow had not noticed her knocking, or her passage in; this wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the sister’s ashen paint was decorating the lovely dead face of the Body.
Her palms felt wet. In this scenario, either the sister was real and her face was not, or the sister was herself unreal. One couldn’t simply gauge all the osseous mass in the room and do a best guess; bones in meat generated so much deceptive soft thalergy, only a fool would try. She flicked her eyes over to Ortus in the faint hope that he would betray her