Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

Ianthe looked at you; her blue-and-brown eyes were beatific. “Harry,” she said, and she said it tenderly, “have you never read a trashy novel in which the hero gets a life-affirming change of clothes and some makeup, and then goes to the party and everyone says things like, ‘By the Emperor’s bones! But you’re beautiful,’ or, ‘This is the first time I have ever truly seen you,’ and if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral,’ et cetera, et cetera, the word mewled fifteen pages later, the word nipple one page after that?” You said emphatically: “No.” “Then we have no shared point of reference.

“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.”

You lost your patience. It was difficult to say if you’d ever had any; you’d just spackled over the hole with curiosity.

Nonagesimus, I’m sorry. I was averagely good all my life. At least not criminally bad. I did a bunch of shit I’m not proud of—some of it I regret, some of it I don’t. I absolutely regret not kicking Crux down a flight of stairs and watching him go Oof, ow, my bones down each step, which now that I think about it does not help the case I am making here—I wasn’t absolute garbage. Maybe you’d agree.

There would be a goddamn reckoning. Nonagesimus, I was going to reck her. I said: “Do you want your ass kicked now, or do you want your ass kicked later, or both?” “Please, let’s address this like gentlewomen,” said Ianthe, without much hope. “Hell, no! I’m going to pull your whole ass off,” I said. “You want that? You want Harrow to grow you a new bone ass where I pulled off the old one? Let’s dance, Tridentarius.”

I wanted you to use me, you malign, double-crossing, corpse-obsessed bag of bones, you broken, used-up shithead! I wanted you to live and not die, you imaginary-girlfriend-having asshole! 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, because all I ever wanted you to do was eat me. Which is, coincidentally, what your mother said to me last night.

“If you keep acting like you know her—not even like you care about her, but like you know the first thing about her—I will end you here and now. Everything you did to her, you did because she was alone. You thought nobody gave a shit about Harrowhark Nonagesimus. You played with her because you thought it was funny. But she never gave you anything. You never got anywhere.”

“If you think anything I did, I did to make her love me, then you don’t know anything about her and me. I’m her cavalier, dipshit! I’d kill for her! I’d die for her. I did die for her. I’d do anything she needed, anything at all, before she even knew she needed it. I’m her sword, you pasty-faced Coronabeth-looking knock-off.” Always your sword, my umbral sovereign; in life, in death, in anything beyond life or death that they want to throw at thee and me. 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 whole thing happened because you wouldn’t face up to Gideon dying,” he said, which was a stab as precise as any Nonius had managed. “I don’t blame you. But where would you be, right now, if you’d said: She is dead? You’re keeping her things like a lover keeping old notes, but with her death, the stuff that made her Gideon was destroyed. That’s how Lyctorhood works, isn’t it? She died. She can’t come back, even if you keep her stuffed away in a drawer you can’t look at. You’re not waiting for her resurrection; you’ve made yourself her mausoleum.”

“You’re a smart girl, Harrowhark. 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.”

“Call me by my full name, or don’t name me at all. I’ll be damned if I pass up the chance to hear you speak the words.” The Emperor of the Nine Houses sighed. “Commander Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead,” he said. “All of it.” “I can’t believe you feel like you’re in position to demand things of me.” “All of it, Gaius!” There was the preparatory sound of indrawn breath. “Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity,” he recited, all in one breath. “Correct?”

meet Commander Wake Me Up Inside, sincerest apologies if I got that wrong,” said the Emperor.

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.

Harrow, I was not following all of this, because necromantic theory is a lot of hot bullshit even when I’m not busy having Complex Emotions, but that last bit pinged even me as weird.