no trace of idle Ianthe in the parry and the thrust. Instead you saw a cavalier who had known from the cradle what life intended for him, and had a rapier placed in his hands not long after.
You might have changed your clothes, or washed the blood from your body. All your sister Lyctor did was throw her nacreous white robe over her shoulders, where it settled like snow under an aurora—all she did was belt her rapier to her waist, and slide the trident knife into the special scabbard across the hip, and point at you, and say: “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Do not leave the room.”
You were still weary and frightened, and Ianthe leaving reminded you how vulnerable you really were. But Ianthe did not heed your protests. Nor did she take fifteen minutes. You sat yourself back on the bed and pulled the covers up around your shoulders, and very slowly and surely your heart rate returned to normal.
It was fully twenty-five minutes before the door opened again. You coiled for flight, but it was, after all, just Ianthe—an Ianthe who had changed. She was a sorry sight. You had an artist’s fondness for the right arm, but recognised the shocking juxtaposition of it, of the bloodless flesh and then the bloodless bone, that unexpected and violent nudity. Her yellow lace nightgown had dried to a crust of brown, and her hair had dried in patches of much the same colour: a sort of carroty stain at the temples and the ends.
But the expression on her face was that of undressed release. It was the expression of an awed child watching their raised skeleton totter forward for the first time without falling. She was incandescent, softly luminous in a way that gave her bleached skin a creamy colour, and which made the death-mask lines of her blank face animated and alive. Her eyes were blue again, with those mountainous flecks of sea-parted brown, and for the first time you thought how much she resembled her twin.
She was still grasping her lovely Third rapier in her skeleton hand, the blade naked to you, and she said, not bothering to hide her excitement: “It’s shit. It’s going to break.”
“Not in a hurry, Tridentarius. That’s regenerating ash.”
“There wasn’t the same weight behind my thrust.”
“He didn’t compensate?”
She swung her sword in a slow, glittering arc, revolving her wrist. Ianthe said, not unhumourously: “Naberius always compensated.”
You asked, “What did Augustine the First say?”
“Nothing,” she said, and she started to laugh, peals of bell-like laughter. She dropped to sit on the bed, and exulted: “Nothing much. He dropped me into the River, went two rounds against my body—it worked, Nonagesimus. It worked. He says it’s hideous and he’ll gild it for me—” (“Tacky,” you said.) “—but I can fight the same way I fought after I became a Lyctor, before I lost the arm. I’m real, I work. Harry, I am a Lyctor.”
Her jubilance was infectious. It did not hurt you. You were not a Lyctor.
You said, “You may feel free to thank me anytime you so choose.”
Ianthe was suddenly beside you on the bed. She had dropped her rapier among the bedclothes and for the very first time brushed the dry distal tip of her new pointer finger against your cheek. You were vulnerable, but you did not pull away. She tapped you on the cheekbone, and once on the tip of your nose, and then lastly pressed her naked finger to your bottom lip.
“Thank you?” she said. “Harrow, you loved that.”
The smooth claw of the finger joint felt cool against your mouth. Her head was quite close to yours. The lace nightgown gapped, somewhat, at the front. The Princess of Ida said, “I already know how I’m going to thank you,” and you were bemused. You absolute idiot baby, you were mystified. You were tired, and you were embarrassed, and you were riding high from the satisfaction of doing one half-perfect thing—of having committed a low miracle of your own devising—of, for a handful of minutes, being Harrowhark Nonagesimus again, the greatest necromancer produced by your dark and sacred Drearburh.
Ianthe took her finger from your lips, looked at you, and smiled a phosphorescent and confidential smile.
She said, “I’m going to help you kill the Saint of Duty.”
28
DAYS LATER, THE ENDLESS rain and lubricious fog turned suddenly to ice. Harrowhark woke up in the unfamiliar annex where she now slept, red and chapped with cold. The Second’s chambers had been