briefly, like a dirty white bird, and disappeared.
She pushed through her skeletal crowd to stand at the edge—they held her arms back, for safety—and stared down into the virginal and unbroken bank of salty, reeking fog. There was no sign of either adept. From far below, the ocean howled. Harrow thought she perceived a tatter of something penetrate the cloud. Her heart pounded rhythmically in her ears, and she thought she saw, absurdly, a sudden gush of watery blood, as though the fog itself had been knifed; but it was gone almost as soon as she had seen it.
27
YOU LOST A GREAT INTERSTICE OF TIME. The next thing you knew, you were staring at the shadowy bowels of a room, lit only by a soft yellow puddle of light—a bedside table–lamp—sheets slippery and cool over you. For the first time in your life, when you tried to let yourself panic and generate an adrenaline spike, it did not work. That trigger had broken. After too many days of generating cortisol, your pituitary gland was taking an unsanctioned holiday somewhere far away from you, and all you could do was lie, bewildered, in these unfamiliar surrounds.
Not so unfamiliar. After many long and stupid moments, you realised that you had been laid to rest in the white-and-gold confection of Ianthe’s bed, with its chilly satin coverlet and the lilac flowers embroidered in silk floss on almost every inch of the bedclothes. You willed yourself into panic again, flailing against the mattress, and sputtered out dolefully.
“Lie back down,” said the Princess of Ida.
She was standing before the windows. The amethysts dripping from her rapier’s basket hilt flashed and glittered in the darkness: she had her left arm tucked behind her, and her feet arranged a hip’s width apart, and her right arm extended before her, holding her sword. She was moving the sword into mechanical attitudes: blade pointed high, blade pointed low, wrist twisted to sweep the blade into position.
You struggled to sit up. Your head felt as though someone had studded your skull with fine little spikes that stroked your brain with hooked barbs whenever you moved.
“I said, lie down,” said Ianthe. “You absolute madwoman,” she added, without any particular emotion. “Can’t believe I ate a whole bowl of nun … I should’ve made myself throw up.”
The Princess of Ida sounded unlike herself: this was a more detached Ianthe—Ianthe as an arm pulled from the socket; Ianthe as a tooth torn from the root. Your head was so heavy. For a moment it was as though you were back on the Erebos again, when you had been made of cotton wool and black fog.
She changed form. The rapier came down low over her left side—swung slowly to cover the right—flicked up in a steel shimmer so that the tip of the sword pointed at the ceiling, on guard. Then to the left again, then swinging high to absorb an imagined blow to the head and shoulders. Parry positions, which you should have known but didn’t. Ianthe was training in her nightgown—a grisly floor-length concoction of pale golden lace that made her long, limber body look like a green-veined mummy—and even you could tell that her movements were ungainly and belaboured.
It took you a long time to say, “Augustine,” and she answered, immediate, impatient: “Are you still awake? Yes. One might’ve hoped that your light dinnertime entertainment would have given me an extension, but not so much.”
You said feebly, “The Saint of Duty—Ortus can suck wards.”
Ianthe said something very coarse in response. Then she said, “So that’s why you stopped sleeping. Well, if he wants to attack you while you are here, I tell you truthfully that I welcome that inferno.”
“But—”
“Sleep, Harry.”
You were very weak. You felt an exhaustion beyond tiredness; a drugged, unstable fatigue. When you laid your head back against Ianthe’s pillow, you smelled the thin putrefying off-apple smell from her bedside table, and you smelled her, and that scent was now familiar. It was the animal yearning for the familiar that undid you. You closed your eyes, and you were asleep.
* * *
How long you slept you did not know. You did not know what dawn of which day you woke to. The daytime lights filtered through the hangings of the four-poster bed with a warm whiteness, a lemony warmth limning the naked paintings that festooned the walls. It felt as though you had slept for a hundred years. The satin coverlet was cool against your arms, and you lay