Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

“Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing,” he said. As he spoke, his mouth looked strange. A hot whistle of pain ran down your temporal bone. Your body was numb to grief; perhaps you had felt it once, but you did not feel it anymore. “Ortus Nigenad died thinking it was the only gift he was capable of giving,” you said, “and I have wasted it—like—air.”

pink - gideon / griddlehark yellow - important blue - funny

Crux told her that her parents had been different, once. This must have been before they committed a little light child massacre.

But Harrowhark—Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years—Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.

There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow—but she had died before Harrow was born.

A rubber-bodied toddler with a painted face and very red hair lay dead beside your knee and for some reason it was this that destroyed you, it was this that kindled within you something you had no hope of defending against. You howled in a purity of fright.

He made a hand gesture for get the juice flowing, which made your head hurt.

And the Saint of Duty lifted his lit cigarette to you in an unmistakable salute.

“Dios apate, minor.”

Should we drink to Commander Wake?”

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

He had formed a violent passion against the heroic knight of the Seventh House; she thought it was nice that he had a hobby.

“Harrow, who the hell’s been tampering with your temporal lobe?”

And you walked to your death like a lover.

The other officer smiled a firm-jawed, long, crooked smile at her; Harrow was electrified by the fact that beneath the hastily brushed crop of red hair those eyes were—

“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.”

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

Gideon. Blood. A broken rail.

I took the part of my brain that remembered her … that understood her soul … and I disconnected it.

reality went through me. Kind of like a big iron railing, now that I think about it.

You sawed open your skull rather than be beholden to someone.

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

and I was proud of you.

saw me, in you—still not saying anything

This was your shell, but it was all filled up with me. God, the double entendres were hard to resist.

like Silas Octakiseron got into the glitter drawer

“Don’t worry, honey. I’ll keep the home fires burning.”

She is dead. I will never see her again.

undone by Gideon Nav.

“She died because I let her! You don’t understand!”

When she had first sat by the tomb in shivering awe, she had fancied that the Body’s ice-ridden fingers had shifted for hers, minutely. Gideon had touched her in truth;

I’d touched your intestines, which is usually what, fourth date, but you were fine.

“The only thing that ever stopped me being exactly who I wanted,” she said, “was the worry that I would soon be dead … and now I am dead, Reverend Daughter, and I am sick of roses, and I am horny for revenge.”

“Harry, you’re—” I moved closer and totally fucking ruined her day. “Alive, bitch,” I said.

Harrow, it was in your handwriting.

I never made her look like that

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.

Nav, if you persist in making jack-off motions when I am talking, I will show you what Harrow’s kidneys look like.

If all of her cavaliers were this excited for death, she was definitely the problem.

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

You’re not waiting for her resurrection; you’ve made yourself her mausoleum.

The woman I was pretty sure was actually my mother—wearing the body of a woman I’d had a crush on, who in turn had been wearing the identity of a woman she’d murdered, until I fell on a spike so that my boss could kill her—craned her head around in her bonds.

“I’m not fucking dead,” I said, which wasn’t even true, and I was choking up; everything I’d ever done, everything I’d ever been through, and I was choking up. And the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, stood from his chair to look at you—at me; looked at my face, looked at your face, looked at my eyes in your face. It took, maybe, a million myriads. The static in your ears resolved into wordless screaming. His expression was just—gently quizzical; mildly awed. “Hi, Not Fucking Dead,” he said. “I’m Dad.”

Were you ten, Harrow? Was I eleven? Was that the day you decided you wanted to die?

just like you and your girl

it was easy to die thinking I wouldn’t have to see you go.

“Your mother would’ve picked the bullet.” “Yes, well, jail for Mother,” I said.

Melted steel. Mingled blood. Harrowhark-and-Gideon, Gideon-and-Harrowhark at last.

and back then to die in Gideon’s arms had seemed entirely correct. She could feel Gideon’s fingers digging into the small of her back, could feel her shirt billowing in the pool as they sank to the bottom in a tangle.

that final resting place of Harrowhark’s one true love, lay a sword.