Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

The past is dead, and they’re both dead, but you and I are alive.

But your idiot dying mouth rounded out three totally different syllables, and they were three syllables you did not even understand.

“This isn’t how it happens,” said the Body.

sick with a fury you kept forgetting existed and were corrupted by possessing.

“Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing,” he said. As he spoke, his mouth looked strange.

THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF THIS BOOK IS JUST FUCKING INSANE

Nonetheless, understand that I envy you more than I have ever envied anyone,

i've been shot

you hated its presence, but the world without it would be unimaginable.

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.”

Dyas was saying, low and fast, and this time to Harrowhark herself: “Is this really how it happens?

And you said: “But why does Ortus the First want me dead?” “Who?” said Mercymorn, indifferently.

this fucking book

“Is this how it happens, Lady Pent?”

You tried hard, in a way that would have broken the heart of any actual swordswoman.

Ianthe looked at you, and in the paleness of her skin and in the shadows of her lips was her death, and yours.

And Silas said, “Is this how it happens, then?”

It was the animal yearning for the familiar that undid you.

“I know you’re there,” he rasped. “Kill me all you like. I would know you in the blindness of my eyes … in the deafness of my ears … as a shadow smudged against the wall, annihilated by light … stop. Not here. Not now. Let it go, love. I just want the truth … after all this time.” Ortus dropped his hand and said, with intent: “Just tell me—back then—why you brought along the ba—”

And yet—there, in the alien slather of forest, among the ferns, and fronds, and greenery arching against a skyline that was a more reticent verdancy paling into navy blue—you could almost believe that you had the capacity to be happy again.

“Long time no see, Reverend Daughter.” Then he did a very terrible thing. He stepped forward, and he pulled you into a wild embrace—the

But you were always too quick to mourn your own ignorance. You never could have guessed that he had seen me.

genuinely just had to lie face down on my bed for a moment. screaming crying throwing up does not begin to describe it.

Nothing added to your resolution to live so much as someone else suggesting that you die.

And you were angry. You were always such a little bitch when you were angry.

i am crashing out no exaggeration there are tears in my eyes and i just had to put my kindle down

She stared at her own heterochromatic, night-and-day gaze, at those celestially mismatched irises. One black. One gold.

kms

“This isn’t how it happens,” said Abigail.

Screaming.

Harrow found that she was not shocked, after all. She was consumed. She was the kindling for the arson taking place in her heart, her brain dry wadding for the flames, her soul so much incandescent gas. She could not do this. She absolutely and fundamentally could not do this. “Harrow?” said someone close by—someone familiar; her vision swam. “If I forget you, let my right hand be forgotten,” her mouth was saying. “Add more also, if aught but death part me and thee.” And, unsteadily: “Griddle.”

im gonna do something drastic i need to walk around the block or something

She dug her hands into the mattress and she cried for Gideon Nav.

And you’d gone and left me behind.

Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it.

I tried to get you back through sheer force of hope, and sheer force of want.

“Whenever you’re ready,” I said. “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll keep the home fires burning.”

So many months had passed: and yet, at the same time, she had only lost Gideon Nav three days ago. It was the morning of the third day in a universe without her cavalier: it was the morning of the third day—and all the back of her brain could say, in exquisite agonies of amazement, was: She is dead. I will never see her again.

i am incoherent

If the second—an ugly death at her own devising—who, then, would be left for me to hate? Who does the poet judge? The eternal problem.” “Ortus, this is not a poem,” she said.

None of that humiliated her so viscerally as her strangled, bellowing, unchecked shriek now, a child’s cry that whipped every head in that busied room round in her direction: “She died because I let her! You don’t understand!”

tamsyn muir answer for your crimes

I should have died for you. Gideon should still be alive.

The problem was that she had never been a child; she and Gideon had become women before their time, and watched each other’s childhood crumble away like so much dust.

Gideon had touched her in truth; Gideon had floundered toward her in the saltwater with that set, unsheathed expression she wore before a fight, her mouth colourless from the cold. Harrow had welcomed her end, but suffered a different death blow altogether—and she had become, for the second time, herself.

You’d touched that letter, and I—you know it was killing me twice that you weren’t there, right?

you’d kept my sunglasses.

kms :)

Fuck one flesh, one end, Harrow. I already gave my flesh to you, and I already gave you my end. I gave you my sword. I gave you myself. I did it while knowing I’d do it all again, without hesitation,

I died knowing you’d hate me for dying; but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.

this fucking book

Harrow so rarely got to say goodbye.

It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon.

that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall.

Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him. She could...

you’ve made yourself her mausoleum.”

insane sentence to write

You might turn some of that brain to the toughest lesson: that of grief.”

“If it were me,” Magnus said, “I’d go home, and live, and live for her.”

Harrow looked at the stricken faces before her: at the now-sombre lines of the cavalier of the Fifth, his jolly face achieving a certain supernatural dignity; his historian wife, a woman whom she now knew could never be properly avenged. The tragedy of the genius and the useless death. The irreparable loss to the universe.

You clawed my face so bad that my blood ran down your hands; my face was under your fucking fingernails. When I let you go you couldn’t even stand, you just crawled away and threw up. Were you ten, Harrow? Was I eleven? Was that the day you decided you wanted to die?

“Is that the truth, or the truth you tell yourself?” asked Augustine. “What is the difference?” said God.

Let me tell you a secret: it was easy to die thinking I wouldn’t have to see you go.