Gradually you felt a heavy weight in a depression next to you. You rolled onto your side, suddenly and deeply frightened that you might see the bed’s owner; your sword had been laid atop the covers beside your body, on the eiderdown, the bone scabbard gleaming a dull grey in the imitation sunlight. This was in every single way a better thing to wake up to than the face of Ianthe “Love My Twin, Also Murder” Tridentarius.
Then you heard breathing. It was with unexpected clarity of mind and soul that you pushed the eiderdown away and crawled to the end of the bed. And you found Ianthe before you, on the floor.
She was belly-down on one of the cream-and-gold rugs on the deep honey-coloured plush carpet, and all around her was a growing crimson mat of blood. She sprawled in a puddle of red as though it was her shadow. Her long hair tumbled over her face and shoulders like a veil, and she grunted hard through her teeth, breathing in long terrible breaths like a dying animal. As you watched—a silent spectator on her mattress—she propped herself on her elbows and grasped the ruddy crimson blade of her trident knife in both hands, and she thrust it furiously into the intolerable seam of her right arm.
Ianthe struck again and again. The wound kept healing over—the skin sewed itself back up even as she pulled the blade away. Blood coalesced around the seam in a serried row of teeth, of needles, and these she used to try to lever herself apart, but her elbow wobbled beneath her and she collapsed on the sodden carpet. She dropped the knife from nerveless fingers. She slapped that almost-imperceptible seam, then again. Then she gave a low and broken moan, and fell over onto her side, curled foetally inward.
Your mind was clear. Your thoughts were warm and tidy, as though they had been put through the sonic cleaner. It was with very little trepidation that you dropped to your knees beside her. You rolled her onto her back—and she looked at you with terrified eyes, half-blue, part-brown, with fragments of lavender. Her mouth was an ugly twist, contemptuous of herself. You had seen that expression a million times in your mirror, but never on her.
“Harrow,” she said unsteadily. She was trembling.
“You’re a fool,” you said.
“How I crave your honeyed words,” said Ianthe. Her mouth was almost purple from the pain. “How I love your tender compassion.”
This was rank hypocrisy, but you were too focused to care. You said, “It needs to come off all at once.”
“What—”
“Get something to bite down on.”
She looked at you, her eyes a wild confusion of colours; she lay spread before you in her hideous buttercup nightgown, which was now a parti-coloured mix of gold and pink and red like a liver. After a moment, she nodded: she ripped a bloodied swatch of yellow lace from her skirt, and she compressed it into a tight cylinder and pressed it between her teeth. Her teeth were very white, and her tongue was wet and red.
You raised yourself up on your knees, swaying a little, and you pictured her for what she really was: an exquisite conglomeration of bone beneath skin and meat, pocketed in the middle with soft treasures of parenchyma and muscle. When you placed your hands upon her ribs you were able to see her skeleton as though she had shyly undressed herself for you, as though in the orange hues of the daytime light she’d sloughed capillaries and glands off the budding rose of her scapula. You saw the curve of her clavicle, bowed softly as the line of some drooping bellflower.
It was so easy. Now that you had slept, everything was easy. It was as though you had been walking in a lead casing, and now you were free. As before any difficult work, you prayed out loud: prayed for the rock to go unrolled and for the closed eye and the stilled brain; prayed for a woman you loved to assist you in disrobing a woman you did not, but whose bones you would sacramentally adore. You kneeled on her thighs and unsheathed a great shank of bone from your knuckles—Ianthe bucked, just the once—and you sharpened the edge to a translucent, liquid thinness.
With one cut you took the arm: you scythed through the knob of ligament and scapula and removed the humerus. Ianthe screamed through her mouthful of lace. The blood