“If you come to my room, I will make you the potato dish you liked,” he read aloud, with gravity. And: “How must we understand potato?”
“As your closest vegetable relative,” said Harrowhark, who’d never seen one in real life.
“You are a ready wit,” her cavalier said, with no apparent rancour and every sign of appreciation. “I have always admired your facility for repartee, my lady. Oftentimes someone will say something to me, and later I will think up the perfect riposte—so perfect the hearer could not help but wilt, and be ashamed that they had set themselves up to receive it—but by that point it is often hours after the fact and I am lying in my bed. And in any case, I hate conflict, all kinds.”
Harrowhark rounded on him.
“The Tomb have mercy, Nigenad, you should be ashamed to advertise as much,” she snarled, and did not even understand her incandescence. “A cavalier’s life is conflict. She is a warrior, not a human-sized sponge. If only duels took the form of competitive passive-aggression, I’d probably be a Lyctor already. And you have the temerity to call yourself a son of Drearburh? Don’t answer that; I know you barely have the temerity to call yourself anything at all. For the love of God, Ortus, I need a cavalier with backbone.”
“You always did,” said Ortus. “And I am glad, I think, that I never became that cavalier.”
Hours after the fact, when she was lying in her bed, Harrow’s brain let the response roll up to the surface: What the hell do you mean by that? Which was not a comeback.
11
SOMEONE TOOK YOU TO BED—at the time you had no idea whose bed, or where, or how; you did not wake up for it. Later that night, or perhaps early that morning, you were found by the Lord your God in the little chapel.
You were leaning over the corpse, your arms stretched high above your head, clutched around the hilt. Your two-handed sword was thrust through Cytherea’s breast for the second time. The rosebuds were scattered and stained with drops of old, sour blood. You could never recall how you got there.
That was how you passed your first night in the Mithraeum, apparently.
ACT TWO
12
SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
ON LAST COUNT YOU’D killed twelve planets, but you still found that first quick slice to the jugular the hardest. You felt your own breath wet on your face in your crinkly hazard suit; worn to keep the dust off; needless, at least for the moment. You judged the angle. You hesitated.
Your unwilling tutor mistook your hesitation for anticipation, sitting opposite you in her own rustling orange suit, the triple light of the three-star sunset dyeing her face orange through the soft plex stuff of the hood. A light hail of sand and dust particles pattered over the fabric and went plinkety, plinkety, plink.
“Don’t bother waiting for the timer, Harrowhark,” she said, muffled behind layers of amalgam plastic and thermal fibre. She was already sitting in the posture of submergence: knees high, back a soft curve, hands light over the fronts of the shins. “I’m confident you don’t need a timer anymore, and it’ll drop to flash-freezing out here in half an hour, so hurry up—it won’t be me they’ll be emptying out of the dustpan for the funeral.”
Mercy added this with no small relish. Your brain said: Fuck you for choosing this particular climate, you bursting organ, you wretched, self-regarding hypochondriac and half-fermented corpse with the nails still on, but your mouth said, “Necessarily, eldest sister.”
Mercymorn watched as you extracted your sword. Not the rapier that hung from your hip, which God had asked you to wear and which you wore as a sop to his extreme optimism; the great sword that you carried on your back. Your exoskeleton came into play here: the plates you wore in long overlapping scales running from back to ribs to elbow to forearm, the rudimentary apodemes that helped you heave a blade far too heavy for your body. Not for you the light ripple of muscle that now showed on Ianthe’s back and shoulders, especially if she was wet with sweat: for you the socket, the bone, the external ridge.
All the Saint of Joy said was, “I never needed the dramatics, but go on, and try not to do anything tectonic.”
As you had never done anything tectonic in the past, it was with an edge of resentful fury that you lifted the hilt high