Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

You were only half a Lyctor, and half a Lyctor was worse than not a Lyctor at all.

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

“Who’s some in this instance, and does their name rhyme with Nercynorn—”

I fucking love these idiots. I love when important characters are this unserious

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.

Your relationship with it was becoming increasingly complex: you hated its presence, but the world without it would be unimaginable.

A normal Lyctor’s body could look after itself. But it had become obvious to everyone: you were not a normal Lyctor.

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

“And miss out on the chance to die? I’ve been wandering these halls at three o’clock in the morning, saying at the top of my voice, ‘It would be terrible to be shot,’ and the Sleeper still does not come … It is dreadful to be shown a monster’s pity.”

So I’m shut in here—walled in, really—to prevent the Nine Houses becoming none House, with left grief.”

WE STAN A GOD THAT MEMES

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

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

“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.”

“Alive, bitch,” I said.

YASSSSSSSSSSSSSS

“She’s not even into you, okay? It’s just the bones. She’s into bones.”

Love—don’t make that face, child, I have loved plenty—true love is acquisitive. You keep anything … strands of hair … an envelope they might’ve licked … a note saying, Good morning, simply because they wrote it to you.

“She wants the D,” I said. And: “The D stands for dead.” And: “Sorry.”

LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

why am I talking in meter?”

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

She had not said goodbye. Harrow so rarely got to say goodbye.

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.

um...let's go?

“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.”

LITERALLY ICONIC AND WILL NEVER NOT BE FUCKING HILARIOUS

I was absolutely fucking out of my mind Ninth House big pissed off.