Chapter Text
"This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark." —Herman Melville, Moby Dick
“reblog if you engage in crab bucket mentality (pinch pinch what is going on here)” —breadbird
By the time the third round of canapes had circulated and the string quartet had struck up its next assault on the dignity of human hearing, Harrow had begun to categorise the problems.
The majority of the problems fell into three brackets: Visual, Auditory, and Social. Under Visual, she noted that the electric lights in the ballroom were too bright; that the tapestries strung from the wall were too vivid, the colours too pigmented and electric and clashing, amateurishly; that the people in the lower part of the ampitheatre were moving too fast, too close together, and it was giving her a headache. Under Auditory, she noted the string quartet with especial malice; she noted, too, the scratching of her cavalier’s pencil against his scraps of flimsy when he imagined her attention to be elsewhere; then the chatter, which was everywhere at once, and indecipherable, and surely inane; then behind the chatter, how the usual disturbances brought on by there being another living body in her necromantic presence were amplified by a hundredfold and then some, such that her headached head was filled with every little swell and crest of thanergy from every sack of meat in the room and she could do nothing to halt the sound of over a hundred heartbeats as close as though she had her ear to every chest at once; then the clinking of glass against glass; the clinking of glass against china; the scrape of china on china; the shattering of glass or china, which was happening with a fearsome regularity. Under Social, there was the matter of her dress and its uneven, particolored patching; there was the wide berth that the rest of the attendees had given her and her retainers, which offered no small measure of relief but gave her cause for concern where lay her more diplomatic intentions; there was the ineptitude of her cavalier, the withered acerbity of her captain, both of which were beginning to cause her right eye to twitch.
Those which could not easily be sorted into her three major categories then fell under Miscellaneous. Here, she listed: the food was overseasoned, the food was unfamiliar, the food was either too hot or too cold, the skeletons were poorly made and clumsy, she disliked every outfit she saw, the torc collar was too heavy, the skirts were too heavy, the netting of her veil of office was itching the back of her neck, the face paint was itching under her nose, the shooting pain in the soles of her feet, the twitch in her right eye.
“I believe,” said Harrow, “we ought to retire.”
Her captain sniffed, but elected to give no further response. Ortus said, “Don’t you think it is a little early for that, my lady?” with a cut of meekness just pathetic enough to make Harrow wish that he had taken Aiglamene’s route of curt and impertinent dismissal instead.
She replied: “I do not.”
It was a little after nine o’clock, which Harrow knew because such information was helpfully provided by the overblown clock-face at the other end of the ampitheatre. It was the warm season at Koniortos when the days stretched maliciously to cover almost the whole of one’s waking hours, which meant that the sky outside was still the pleasant indigo of twilight limned with yellow at the edges. It would not get properly dark for another hour or so, and it would not be the comfort of pitch-black which might at last justify the heinously indulgent use of electric lighting until the early hours of the morning.
Harrow had never seen a twilight before. She decided that she did not care for it.
The Fifth House barely saw a sliver of light from Dominicus—there was no reason to go to such lengths to establish the artifice.
When she realised that her attempt to retire had been forced into a dismal surrender, she reshuffled the list. Now she decided to categorise by order of magnitude: Imminent, Urgent, Non-Urgent, Resolvable. Into Imminent she placed: the string quartet; the itch under her nose; the chatter; the clinking; the hundred bodies or more; the ineptitude; the acerbity. Urgent saw the lights; the movement; the pencil-scratching; the food (overseasoned); the food (unfamiliar); the food (temperature); the torc; the pain in her feet; her eye. Non-Urgent was the dress (for nobody was looking at it anyway); the wide and generous berth; the skeletons, which were mostly just pissing her off. Under Resolvable came the itch at the back of her neck; she pulled the veil down over her face instead, and removed the itch from her rankings.
Aiglamene tutted under her breath. In a moment of petulance, Harrow mentally dared her to speak her mind.
Behind her veil, the world was quietened a little. The problems that she had previously filed under Auditory remained just as impregnable, but she found that she could sharpen her focus better when the onslaught of lights/tapestries/movement had been soundly and thoroughly muted. She felt less exposed knowing that nobody could be peering surreptitiously up at the Ninth, trying to catch a glimpse at the Reverend Daughter’s face; though the veil would get her nowhere in inciting friendliness or goodwill, she had to concede that friendliness and goodwill were the least of her priorities in the moment.
She reshuffled her list. A few articles previously marked Imminent could now be bumped down merely to Urgent.
She found her tongue again, and she used it to say, “This is inane. How much longer must we stand here, pretending as though our presence is of any interest or importance to anyone in our vicinity?”
Aiglamene said, “Until we get to meet the Prince.”
Had it been Drearburh, she would not have stood the sharpness in her captain’s tone. Nor would she have stood the absenting of her honorific, and for good measure she might have ripped the sheet of flimsy out of Ortus’ hands and crushed it underfoot so as to silence his infernal scratching. Yet Aiglamene was merely the mouthpiece for her mother and her father who had for some reason elected to enroll her in the marriage game that seemed little more than a shimmer of dynastic vanity on the part of Her Holiness, and she had no jurisdiction when she butted up against the wishes of the Ninth House proper. She was a teenaged girl being chaperoned at a party against her will, and it would do her no good to stamp her foot and threaten a tantrum.
She had not come here with any intent to compete. To do so would be a masochistic exercise in humiliation. She was not the most beautiful, nor the most charming, and certainly not the most pliant; her inevitable deficits in such affects would prove fatal when weighed against the affluence of her native House, which was at present relegated to a flat nill. Her parents had harboured some inane desire to shuttle her off to meet the Crown Prince as though she were little more than an ornament plucked from the catacombs for a rather pretty and useless display, and this was a plan to which her captain had been made a malicious accomplice and her cavalier a reluctant participant, but this did not behoove her to play along with it. She could return empty-handed and even affect a little devastation as some princess of the Third or noblewoman of the Fifth hung off the Prince’s holy arm, buxom and bright-eyed and extravagant such that everyone would know such a pairing to have been inevitable all along. It was an inconvenience; it was a waste of a couple of days; it was, perhaps most offensively, a bore; yet she tried to placate herself with the reassurance those were was all it had to be.
She was not reassured. She needed to block out the noise.
She did not want to meet her. She did not want to touch her fingers to the fingers of Prince Kiriona Gaia; she did not want to find out if the Emperor’s daughter opted for a handshake or a kiss on the knuckles. She did not want to prove that she had practiced her curtsey. She did not want to look upon the progeny of the Emperor Undying and confess, in dress and manner and gait and speech, that the Ninth House was lacking—that the Ninth House was shuffling miserably offstage with a sad trail of cobwebs and a few rustling skeletons in its wake.
She had one last card to play. She said, rather primly: “I am going to get some air.”
This was a statement rather than a question, which meant that it disoriented her retainers such that she had just enough time to slip out of Aiglamene's reach. She could not move very fast at all, but this was fine; any movement made by her captain now would risk making a scene.
She tottered as best she could along the back row of the ampitheatre. She passed the big white door to the balcony without supposing to touch it, for she knew that all she would happen upon would be a gaggle of smokers with pursed lips and deftly archable eyebrows, inflicting the very same assault on the senses as that which she was attempting to escape. Instead, she continued on the path that had gotten her to the little pocket that she had stood in like a body in its niche for the last forty-five minutes; down the stairs and past the throng of people, out the side-door and past the other throng of people and the stink of ash, head down and veiled and not a damn to be given to the possibility that her captain had watched her leave or that even now, the throngs in question were murmuring to themselves that the Reverend Daughter was on her way out not even an hour in.
She wasn’t. She would go back. She just needed to breathe. She kept moving until it all fell away—the lights, the noise, the interminable chatter, the press of an apparent determination to force conditions under which she would enjoy herself that was battering up against the fact that she could not, under torture, think of a scenario less conducive to such an aim. There was insult in the suggestion that she would appreciate so abysmal a string quartet and so inappropriate a canape.
Now alone, she considered for a moment discarding the uncomfortable shoes and perhaps even the heavy brocade that she felt to be dragging the lower half of her body down into the ground, but she acknowledged that that was too much like the behaviour of a Seventh House dilettante who had walked right out of the pages of some inane romance novel in which her homeworld was so unfortunately prolific. Having no sense for where else she ought to go, she began to wander back the way she had first come—through the big glass garden, past the fountains, the statue of some spirit-magician who had been the first to light upon the principle of apopneumatism via the scientific method, as her placard proclaimed; up the stone steps where the path broke off into a drab and lightless concrete, and onto the shuttle-deck.
The shuttle-deck was wide, and open, and empty save for the eight shuttles sat calm and quiet and still like a row of attendants awaiting instruction, which made it everything that Harrow could possibly have asked for. It was a little warmer than she might have liked—balmy, perhaps, by Fifth standards, but she who was so used to the inadequacies of Ninth House heating-ducts felt the urge to shuck her robe and veil and expose her bare skin in a display of flagrant indecency—she felt sweat pricking at the back of her neck, but she ignored it. She briefly entertained a fantasy of commandeering a shuttle right now—gliding primly back to the Ninth House and alighting before either one of her attendants could find a single thing to do about it, making her excuses to her parents and retiring to bed, incurring a wrath that could be dealt with in the morning and that felt, right now, like a welcome familiarity compared to the cold strangeness of Koniortos, the frigid stiffness of a social decorum into whose throes she had only ever been partially and conditionally welcomed in the first place.
Instead, she began to wander between the shuttles. They were large, fearsome tubes—the biggest contraptions she had ever seen, and she recalled how Ortus had shuddered to step inside the thing they had sent to the Ninth—he had recounted from memory the handful of anecdotes he had to hand of times when shuttles had crash-landed, or imploded midair, or rapidly depressurised and induced hypoxia in their occupants, with a grim solemnity that told of how certain he was that he was accounting for his own immediate fate in doing so. It was his spinelessness which had sharpened her own resolve, which had until that moment been more than a little queasy at the prospect of going offworld for the first time in her life; the acerbity that rose to her tongue all too easily at the first sign of her cavalier quivering allowed her to quell her own unease. She had given him a couple of small wads with which to stuff his ears and told him to recite the Noniad backwards as best he could until it was over, choosing what she guessed was a distraction just tedious enough that he would give up on it in good time. It worked; he got midway through the latter half of Book Fifteen before admitting that his nerves were soothed such that no such distraction was needed anymore, and Harrow journeyed to the Fifth House in about the closest to peace and quiet she could hope for.
She couldn’t remember which of the shuttles had been theirs; they were an identical set of eight, seven sent to the other Houses and one for—it must be assumed—the Crown Prince herself. There had been room for a dozen delegates from each House and then some, all replete with retainers flocking at their feet and straightening their skirts; the amount of empty space hovering between herself and her cavalier and her captain on the journey over had felt obscene. It had felt insulting. Back in the ampitheatre, she had not done an exact headcount—she found the process far too depressing—but she had seen the flashes of colour, the communing at the edge and the movement in the centre, and she had gathered that every other House had had a bountiful crop of prospective partners from which they seemed to have selected only the best. What seemed like half the population of the Sixth House had been milling about the edges of the ballroom—it was only to be expected that the Library would send every last delegate with a face at least halfway towards attractive and a plausible claim to an elevated rank, or adjacency thereof, in an effort to diversify their gene pool. It was the same principle as that which kept so many of the dreary grey librarians stationed at Cohort outposts year-round; even if her Serene Highness did not return with a daughter of the Library draped across her (and this was, Harrow thought it fair to say, unlikely), at least one of them was like to engage in some kind of extra-House entanglement or crass and ill-advised hookup. Even one such encounter could mean doubling the genetic diversity of her home planet, if they were lucky.
Similarly predictable was the abundance of Third and Fifth House delegates. The Third did everything in abundance, and the Fifth had agreed to throw over Koniortos for the weekend in exchange for what was undoubtedly a significant cut of honour and prestige, which meant that any prospective Fifth House bride had to go all of about three streets over in order to make herself present. It was not difficult to imagine that the two Houses—those with the greatest cut of the hegemonic pie—were quietly attempting to out-compete one another, or at least that the Third was attempting to compete with the Fifth whilst the Fifth took little to no preventative measures. It had been assumed that the ball would take place on Ida, what with Ida’s reputation—no doubt the Idaean royal family still were smarting at the slight. Skewing the odds in their favour by flooding the pool of potential mates was the kind of tactical warfare that the Third House progenies knew best.
Then again, all of this was speculation. The Third probably sent an abundance of delegates because they were the type to do so; the Fifth probably did the same for the same reason. Harrow was so far out of the loop of inter-House politics that the loop was coming back around the other way to rope her in by force of idle interest and a wandering mind.
She had been wandering vaguely around the perimeter of the shuttle-deck, and it was beginning to cross her mind that she ought to collect her bearings and be on her way before her absence spun out into what Ortus would term Incident when she was pulled up short by a vague sort of scuffling sound. It was coming from somewhere to her right. She stopped, and stood completely still, and listened.
No doubt—there was movement on the other side of the deck. There was a little shudder of thanergy, a warmth that could only be coming from a body other than her own.
It was one body, and not two, and whoever it was did not seem to be looking for her. Even if one or the other of her retainers had come searching for her alone, leaving the second to hold their measly excuse for a fort, there was no reason that Harrow could see for them to be vaguely shuffling around in the same spot. No—her interlocutor was someone new.
Her whole body tensed. There was really no reason why she ought not to be here—she was unchaperoned, which depending on her assailant perhaps might present a problem, but it was easy to say that she had come to get some air and allow herself to be chivvied back to the ballroom in good enough time. It was not ideal, and nor was it an especially good look for the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh to be alone in what was probably the only part of the immediately accessible Court not currently flooded with people, but it was not disastrous. It probably made for a definite curtailing of whatever ambitions she might ever have had with Her Divine Highness, but no such ambitions had ever existed in the first place. It was mild embarrassment.
Anyway, all this was assuming she was about to get caught.
The long row of shuttles obscured her body from that of the intruder. The most sensible course of action would be to stay put until they went away—to not make any movement of the kind that might alert them to her presence. The steady, vigorous heartbeat told her that this could not be a necromancer, which was one small mercy; whatever they were doing, it seemed to be absorbing every last jot of their attention, which was another.
She chanced a slight movement—just enough to poke her head around the side of the shuttle. Sure enough, there was a shadow moving around at the far end of the shuttle-deck—though to whom that shadow was attached, and to which House they were affiliated, she had no way of telling.
What was certain was that they were busy with something that had nothing to do with her. The shadow was fiddling around with something on the shuttle—its arms were reaching up above its head, and its hands were moving in a manner that the shadow of the shuttle itself managed to obscure, but that seemed to demand an intricacy undermined by the intruder’s freneticism. All the same, the intruder was incredibly, singularly focused, and clearly believed themselves to be alone with an arrogance that had precluded even checking that nobody else was sharing the shuttle-deck.
Harrow, throwing over prudence in the advent of an unwholesome curiosity, shuffled out from behind her own shuttle and chanced to shift forward such that she could conceal herself behind the next. From this new vantage point, she could see a single boot—a lovely, fashionable boot of pure white, bright even as the light in the sky was fading, that looked to be made from leather of a kind that cost more than the Ninth House vaults and coffers could wheeze and sputter up—and the toe of that boot was rapidly becoming generously gloved in a layer of mud as its occupant repeatedly dug it into the dirt in what could only be frustration.
The leg to which the boot was an appendage was concealed from her until she ventured out on her next advancement. As she hid herself behind shuttle number three, she saw that the leg, too, was generously swathed in white—a bright matte hide that stung Harrow’s eyes. Inching ever closer—for it was clear now that this new individual was not paying even the slightest bit of attention to their surroundings, and Harrow’s caution was growing ever more eclipsed by a reckless need to confirm that which she had begun hypothesising as soon as she had seen the leg—she saw the filigreed back of an off-white waistcoat out of which billowed exposed shirtsleeves, with a jacket laying unceremoniously discarded on the dirty ground; a broad, muscular build, taller than her own by at least a head’s worth, and hands that were intimately involved with the exposed inner wiring of the shuttle.
Her first instinct ought to have been one of falling to her knees. This was the child of God—this was the most immediate extension of God’s will and dominion, bestowed with a representational authority even more direct than that of his Holy Saints—she had grown up with her tongue forming around the name of the Crown Prince in prayer, blessing her, venerating her, wishing upon her a long life of health and prosperity and comfort. She had kissed more times than she could possibly hope to count the little gold icon in the form of Kiriona that sat in the chapel at home; she had tangled the girl in her prayer beads, imagined her as holy artefact, lit candles in her name even as it seemed plain to her, ridiculously plain, that the daughter of the Emperor around whom the light of Dominicus must collate had no need of a paltry flame in Drearburh.
But the girl in front of her was so transparently ridiculous—so lacking in dignity, or formality, or deference to custom—that Harrow forgot herself entirely. By way of greeting Her Divine Highness, she said: "What are you doing?". She did not even demonstrate her curtsy.
Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia, heir to the First House and sole progeny of the King Undying, started violently. Harrow was sure that she heard a yelp from where the Prince's back was facing her. Then she turned around.
Harrow knew the face well enough. Who didn’t? It was on the coinage, for a start; an amalgam of angles, all nose and jawline. Then there were the portraits, the lithographs; sparse on the Ninth House because everything was sparse on the Ninth House, but passing through as keepsakes from pilgrims, the occasional perfunctory gift from a House delegate, items in the Lost and Found. This admixture had cast the impression of an imposing, impressive figure, as much warrior as girl; where her father was benevolent and beatific, all kindly eyes in a kindly face, she was a body always set to burst out of the frame that held her, a kind of primal being cut from the cloth of the Cohort. She was a holy terror. White and gold and red.
In the portraits, she never smiled. You hardly noticed her face at all. She was all meat.
She was no less imposing in the flesh, but the dignity with which her portraiture had been so highly invested was undercut somewhat by the fact that she had been caught in the act of attempting to commandeer a shuttle and could not quite wipe her face of the look of a child anticipating a scolding. She was dynamic, moreso than the portraits lent credit to, and not merely by way of her athleticism but as much as though she were an anxious and incapacitated child expending an excess of kinetic energy in any way she could; she was shifting from foot to foot, and her hands were twitching, and her teeth were tugging on the corner of her lower lip. She was a little shorter and a little fleshier than where Harrow’s preliminary impression had lain, but nonetheless had the girth and gait of a warrior—albeit one who was presently dressed for an evening of cocktails and canapés.
She looked as though she had been perfectly groomed about three hours ago, and had in the interim been raked through a hedge backwards. She wore a stiff white shirt with waistcoat and jacket in the formal Cohort fashion, having swapped out the standard scarlet cravat for one in a pale gold; the top of the shirt was unbuttoned and the hem was half-untucked, the jacket was sat sadly in the dirt, and the cravat was a strip of loose fabric draped around her neck. In the portraits, she was always seen with a crown of fingerbones gracing her holy head—identical to her father’s, save for the fact that hers interwove between the bones a smattering of small white flowers. This now sat askew just above her left ear. Her hair was in the process of uncurling from what had presumably been a thorough and vigorous slicking-back, and was springing back to fall in her face in thick and slightly greasy strands.
The Crown Prince said: “Um.”
Harrow remembered herself. She dropped her legs in a curtsey. It was perfunctory and awkward, and it hurt her knees, but it demonstrated a deference to decorum about which surely even Aiglamene could not find cause for complaint. She expected the Prince to fold her body in a bow, or at least to incline her head in gesture towards one, but Kiriona Gaia merely continued to stand and look gormless. She shifted her body in such a way that, if Harrow was not mistaken, served as a feeble attempt to place herself between her interlocutor and the half-hotwired shuttle behind her.
Harrow cleared her throat and began again.
“Your Holiness,” she said—she realised that she wasn’t entirely clear on whether Holiness was the appropriate honorific for the Emperor’s daughter, who just now looked as far from holiness as was Ortus, but she ploughed ahead anyway—and, stumbling around for anything close to appropriate, she found the clipped and ironised voice of her father bubbling in her throat: “I believe you are expected elsewhere right now.”
Kiriona Gaia said, “Speak for yourself.”
“Excuse me?”
“Aren’t you—expected elsewhere right now?”
This insolence so disarmed Harrow that the Crown Prince had a chance to look her up and down; torc, brocade, overheavy skirt, overstimulation that she had only managed in part to temper. “Ninth House?”
“Harrowhark Nonagesimus,” said Harrowhark Nonagesimus. “Reverend Daughter of Drearburh and Keeper of the Locked Tomb.” It was the introduction she gave to pilgrims and visitors to her homeworld. It rolled off her tongue with ease. An inane animal instinct briefly possessed the lower half of her body and she found herself sinking into a second curtsey, one that caused her to wince a little as she stood back upright.
“Oh. Sick.” The Prince nodded. “I’m from there. Technically.”
Harrow said, “I am aware.”
It was an absurd and nonsensical statement on behalf of both parties. Nobody who had shot so much as a glance towards the Prince would believe that she was of any progeny other than that of the First; perhaps the Third, at a stretch, but certainly not the Ninth. She hadn’t a scrap of nun to her; she was as far from the pale and peaky progeny of the Ninth House as any living being could get. Harrow, however, knew exactly to what she was referring.
*
It had all happened before Harrow was born, and had come to her as something like a fable, a distant story that might as well have taken place in Anastasia’s time for all that it had to offer to her present predicaments. Looking at the Prince now, she for the first time found herself realising that it was not a story of Anastasia’s time, nor even that of Nonius; that she and the girl in front of her were close enough in age that she could no longer relegate to the halls of Ninth annals the incident that indeed had taken place within the living memory of everyone she had ever known. Around a year and a half before her own birth, and around ten months before the atrocity, a woman and a baby had crash-landed on the Ninth. The woman was pronounced dead on arrival and the sum total of Ninth House spirit-summoners had been called to her side, which was all of about three nuns with passable capabilities if you didn’t look too closely. (Having seen the state of Fifth House skeletons, Harrow did not feel so much as a twitch of shame about this fact.) The woman’s revenant would not for love nor money be called back to account for herself properly; she, whipped up into a furor, had merely cried out Gideon! Gideon! Gideon! before departing this mortal coil, leaving a handful of anchorites baffled and perturbed and thus then tasked with deciphering what she could possibly have meant.
They did not have to decipher for very long. The baby had survived. It was, apparently, the picture of health, not at all the worse for wear for having fallen down a drillshaft appendaged to its own dead mother—all in the Ninth House agreed that it was a beautiful baby, round and healthy, a sure sign of prosperity to come. She had only been there a few days, but as Harrow had heard it, she was roundly adored.
When those few blessed days had withered up and died, there had arrived a delegation from the Emperor, and the baby was gone. The next they heard of her, she was Kiriona Gaia.
Having been the mother of the Emperor's very own daughter, the unknown woman had become herself an object of veneration. A crypt in Drearburh housed her death-mask and her bones, regarded as far too sacred to be set to work in the leek-fields. Candles were lit about her niche and ash was scattered, and passing pilgrims said their prayers looking into that congealment of waxy fat preserving in perpetuity her final facial expression, which was akin to a vicious snarl. They asked for hope, for prosperity, for the bestowment of a sacred blessing upon them just as such a blessing had been bestowed upon the Ninth House. When God had not deigned to explain himself at all and thus her own name remained a mystery, she had come to be referred to simply as the Mother; the Holy Mother, the Sainted Mother, Mother to all of those prosperous generations to come.
In the short eighteen years since, the story had transformed into a mythology. The baby had become a symbol of rejuvenation, a sure sign that the Emperor had bestowed upon his furthest House a blessing as they weathered desperate times that, in the months and years to follow, would become more desperate still. No matter. All believed that the Ninth House would be on the ascent any day now—any moment—for why else would the Emperor’s own daughter appear on its doorstep?
*
The Emperor’s own daughter was stood in front of Harrow now, smiling a little awkwardly. Probably she had no memory of it at all.
Harrow said, “It was before my time. But it was a great blessing upon our House, and remembered well.”
“I’ll bet,” said the Prince, with a puffed-up arrogance that made Harrow bristle blasphemously. This was softened somewhat when she added: “I always meant to visit. See what the whole deal was. My dad would never give me leave, though.”
Harrow said, “It would be an honour to receive you, Your Highness.”
“Yeah, well.” She kicked at the ground a little. “Are you—here for the—?” She jerked her head back towards the direction of the ampitheatre.
Harrow flushed. She felt once again the presumptuousness of her presence; the obvious nonsensity of the Ninth House presuming to have any sort of skin in the marriage game. She would be lucky if she wound up wedded to Ortus. “Yes, my Lord,” she said crisply. “I believe the presence of an—an unwedded House scion is customary.”
Here she felt a little strange. Something had shifted in Kiriona Gaia’s demeanour—it were as though Harrow were being sized up, as though, it having dawned on her that Harrow was here for the same reason as anybody else, the Prince was conducting a reassessment of her character in light of such a revelation. She felt hideously exposed. She felt the shame of her poor dress and her ancient jewellery against the Prince’s brilliant First House whites, but such a deference to materialism alone was inadequate in accounting for whatever was pooling at the bottom of her stomach in that moment. She—quite suddenly, and only for a second—rather hated Kiriona; hated the flash of lechery behind her lambent golden eyes, hated the sudden suggestion of sex.
It lasted for a second, and then it went away. Kiriona said: “Cool. Enjoy it. I heard the catering’s great.”
Harrow said, “I did not come here with designs on your Highness.”
“Never said you did.” Without giving her the chance to respond, Kiriona went on: “So, what’s the pull? The food? The dancing? I heard the views from the third-floor balcony are great.”
“I don’t—” Harrow paused. “I am not a socialite, my Lord, and I am not a prospective bride. I am here out of—”
“Obligation?”
“Duty.”
“Duty. Right. Very noble of you.” Something odd was playing at the corner of Kiriona’s lips; something spiteful and a little mocking.
Harrow, having no response that she could fairly call upon, inclined her head in terse acknowledgement. Kiriona shifted from foot to foot; she raised her right hand (calloused at the joints and webbed with scarring, Harrow noticed, the hand of a swordswoman or a soldier) to scratch at the back of her neck awkwardly. Then she said: “Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll be on my way.”
Kiriona Gaia turned back to her shuttle, and this was at the last the slight which so infuriated Harrow that the chips of bone had been pulled from her earlobes and thrown to the ground to spring into four fully-formed skeletons before she had quite had a chance to register her own actions. The skeletons crowded the shuttle and blocked the Prince’s path; they advanced on her menacingly, even as she took a wary step back and said, “Whoa.”
Harrow realised too late the gravity of her mistake. The Crown Prince had nothing with which to defend herself; no rapier, no offhand, no necromancer nearby who might serve to match Harrow's own capabilities. Yet she did not call the skeletons to heel. She felt them closing in on the Prince almost as though they were not her own; as though they were responding to some base instinct over which she had no dominion that she could yet tap into.
She said: “You can’t leave.”
Kiriona Gaia said, “What the literal fuck,”—to which her assailant repeated, louder, “You can’t leave.”
It seemed a gross injustice that the Prince could just walk out; that she could turn around and decide to abscond from an event for which she was undeniably the locus, when Harrow as the appendage to an appendage had mentally castigated herself so viciously merely for desiring some air in the midst of a mixer to which she might as well have been a statue for all the use she was providing. Her own fantasies of hitting the bricks on the whole night played before her, weak and insubstantial; she was whipped into a fury by the sight of someone who seemed capable not only of wishing to be somewhere other than here even when custom and duty dictated her presence, but was ready and willing to act on that wish.
Kiriona Gaia had been caught off-guard, but Kiriona Gaia was a warrior. She was defenseless—she was dressed for a party, not a sparring-match—but she had rolled her sleeves up to the elbow and kicked a skeleton in the sternum before Harrow had even had time to think.
The skeleton crumbled sadly to the floor, but Harrow had three more. One took aim at Kiriona’s head—she blocked this blow with ease, but left space for a second to lunge at her exposed abdomen. Having only the latter half of a musculoskeletal system to speak of, the skeletons had little by way of weight to throw behind their punches; but they were hard, and sharp, and painful, and skeletons could not get tired.
(Necromancers could—but not yet. Harrow had never been in a real fight before. A small and shameful part of her had itched for one for some time now.)
Kiriona grimly took the blows to her midsection without crumbling, but it was clear that she was in an amount of pain that could not be ignored forever. Irate, she kicked at the second skeleton; it tottered out of range, because Harrow had learnt her lesson. The third one then began to close in—first and second flanking her, third advancing through the middle, a battle formation that was surely inchoate and amateurish to this Cohort progeny but would serve perfectly adequately for Harrow's designs.
Kiriona attempted to wrestle with the first skeleton, and this was where things started to go badly wrong on her end. The skeleton, thrice as nimble as her and then some, was barely immobilised in her grip; it scratched at her face until rivulets of blood appeared and she was forced to squeeze her eyes shut. The second skeleton clawed at her side, and the third lunged for her knee. Kiriona kicked it the way you might kick a misbehaving dog, which was the worst possible thing to do; it yanked on her leg and sent her crumbling to the ground, landing on her knee at an angle that almost caused Harrow to wince.
It was no use. Every time she tried to get close to the shuttle, Harrow's skeletons would advance again. Every time she tried to start on them, she swiftly remembered why doing so was a stupendously bad idea. Harrow herself was barely breaking a sweat.
“Fuck,” said the Prince, winded. “Fuck.” Blood was running down her face in little red trickles; she was doubled over in pain, and her leg looked dangerously close to giving way. “God. Fuck. I surrender, okay?” She did not sound at all thrilled about it.
Harrow recalled herself, and the skeletons collapsed.
“What,” said Kiriona Gaia, “the fuck—was that about?”
Harrow was cognizant of very little. She had just assaulted the daughter of the Emperor Undying; she had set her skeletons upon an object of her childhood veneration, who just now was heaving and wheezing from a pain that she had caused. There was holy blood on the ground, and she with her skeletal assailants had spilled it. Ought she to fall to her knees, and attempt anointment? She could only repeat: “You can’t leave.”
“Fucking hell. Yeah, cool, I got that one.” Kiriona attempted to straighten up, which went badly. She looked up at Harrow, and whatever flicker of eroticism Harrow had read into her expression before was now wholly absent; she was angry, and hateful, and rapidly forming an opinion of the Ninth that would likely follow Harrow to her grave.
Now was not the time for her to retreat into herself like a frightened child. She glared right back; cold and imperious, the gaze of the slighted Reverend Daughter drawn up to her full height (one which might perhaps impress a prepubescent child) who might as well be looking upon a particularly unpleasant slug as the daughter of the Emperor Undying. Blasphemy rose far easier to her tongue than she might ever have imagined.
“The heir to the First House is expected to be in attendance tonight,” she said. She knew the words. They belonged to her mother. “It behooves the heir to the First House to attend. To make an appearance. To, at the very least, put on a pretense of interest towards her prospective brides. To—behave as befits the child of the King Undying.” Her hands were trembling, so she hid them behind her back.
Kiriona said, “You wanna fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid.”
“You are an insufferable lout and a fool,” said Harrow, “and I will not have my time on this wretched installation wasted because you decided on—on truancy.”
Kiriona huffed. She screwed up her face until her mouth puckered and her eyebrows met in the middle; she wiped her forehead, and seemed surprised when her hand came away wet with her own blood. She said, “You’re a fucking nutjob, Ninth,”; then, “s’not like I can go inside looking like this anyway.”
“Get changed.”
“Fucking hell. Fine.” The Crown Prince stood to her full height again; it was not without significant effort. “Just because I know you’re going to stand here all goddamn night if you have to and I’m not wasting my energy on getting any of the Cohort lot to get you to buzz off.” She picked her jacket up and shook the dirt off with distaste. “I’ll go in there. I’ll dance. I’ll play the good suitor. I’ll let a cabal of hot women hang off my arm for as long as they want. After that, I’m doing whatever I goddamn please up to and including hotwiring this shuttle and you can mind your fucking business about it.”
Harrow said, “Done.”
The Prince limped a little as she walked away, but Harrow knew who her father was, and knew that she would be fine.