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Palamedes: 50 days after
They had hardly stepped off the Ninth shuttle when letters were being pressed into Palamedes and Harrow’s hands.
“These just arrived,” said Kiana, in lieu of a proper greeting. Looking down at the heavy, real paper envelope, its gilded corners winking up at him, the whole thing somehow scented with violets, Palamedes understood why. It was from the Third.
He ripped open the letter, which was mercifully short and to the point. That, however, was the only mercy it contained.
Palamedes, the note read,
Jeannemary and Isaac are dead.
I can only assume their acceptance to the Cohort was expedited after their return from Canaan House. According to the list my father recently received, they were part of the vanguard at Antioch.
I’m terribly sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I thought you’d want to know.
Give my love to Camilla, and to Harrow.
Your friend,
Coronabeth
Palamedes stared at the note, entirely unaware of how to proceed. From half a step behind him, Camilla put a hand on his shoulder.
“We need to warn Pro,” she said softly.
“About what?”
Harrow was looking at them sharply, her own letter still clutched—unopened—in her hands.
“The Fourth are dead,” said Camilla.
Harrow looked at Palamedes, seeking confirmation, and his lip wobbled as he nodded. He held out the letter, and she scanned it quickly.
“Nothing about Gideon,” she said. Palamedes should have expected that. He had barely opened his mouth to offer her some comfort before she was ripping apart the flimsy envelope in her hands.
Palamedes watched her lips move as she read. From what little Palamedes could see, this letter was far longer than Corona’s had been, but one of the paragraphs was blacked out. Harrow scowled.
“They’ve removed anything relevant that might speak to her whereabouts.”
“Can I see?” Palamedes asked, and Harrow mutely handed him the flimsy. He couldn’t help smiling as he read it—the Cohort had clearly not instilled any particular sense of propriety in Gideon—but the blacked out passage did spark a twinge of worry.
“She sounds well,” he offered. “She sounds herself, Harrow. Not tired or afraid or anything we should worry about. The fact we’ve received it at all tells us she must at least have been alive” —he checked the postmark on the envelope— “about two weeks ago.”
He reached over to take her hand, squeezing it lightly.
“She’ll be alright.”
“You don’t know—”
“Based on the existing data, they’re going after the remaining pairs first. That means Cam and I—and you by extension—are next. The further Gideon is from us, the safer she is, okay?”
“Okay,” said Harrow. Her voice was barely audible, and the hand in his trembled. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
Camilla, who had been speaking to her sister in low, hurried tones, coughed pointedly.
“We need to get you both somewhere safe,” she said. “The Spire has an empty dorm.”
At the stern nod of her head, Palamedes set off towards the Spire dormitories, pulling Harrow along with him. Camilla followed—half a step behind—watchful and alert. They walked in silence, and when they finally arrived, Camilla held out an arm to stop them. Palamedes and Harrow hovered awkwardly a few metres from the door, waiting for Camilla to signal the all clear.
She ushered them inside and shut the door behind them before she said,
“Kiki will bring me a list of everyone who has come in and out of the station since we returned. She and I will go through it together, and detain anyone whose presence is unusual or unplanned. It’ll take a while, but—”
“It’s thorough,” Palamedes agreed. “In the meantime?”
“You and Harrow will sleep here tonight. I’ll sweep your room and mine for any tampering.”
It was a good plan, of course, but that didn’t mean Palamedes liked it.
“Does it have to be you?” he asked, and Camilla gave him a hard look.
“Do you trust anyone else?”
Palamedes didn’t need to answer.
“Make sure we get our bags from the Ninth,” Harrow said suddenly. “If we’re going to be cooped up in here, we should use the time for research. If we can crack grand lysis before they find us—”
“That’s a big ‘if’, Harrow,” said Palamedes.
“But it’s possible.” Her black eyes were hard and determined, and they almost made him believe she was right.
“The theorem for gestalt lysis might work,” Camilla said. “We could try—”
“No,” said Palamedes firmly. If a situation desperate enough for the attempt even existed, they had not encountered it yet. He almost wished he’d never even suggested it was possible. “We will have reciprocal lysis, or we will have nothing at all.”
“Well then,” said Camilla, already crossing to the door. “You two had better get to work.”
The dormitory door slammed shut behind her, leaving her last words echoing in Palamedes’s head.
You two, she had said, as if her mind was not as sharp as either of theirs. As if she wasn’t the oil that eased the cogs of his mind. As if he didn’t miss her already.
Harrow: 57 days after
Harrow had never wanted to believe that God was trying to kill them. For all the long, lonely years of her childhood, it was service to Him and to The Tomb that had kept her alive; it would have been sacrilege to end her own life when her life was dedicated to Him (and when it had been bought for so high a price). It had been inconceivable to her, when first presented with the idea, that the Kindly Prince, the King Undying, would ever order the annihilation of his own subjects, the heirs to his Houses.
However, at this point there was no arguing with the evidence. Harrow’s was a god who would ask Lyctorhood of his most devoted subjects; he was a god who refused to hear the pleas of Anastasia when she begged for another way; he was a god who looked upon The Body, and decided to lock her away forever.
The Sixth, it seemed, had come to this conclusion long ago. Palamedes and Camilla seemed completely unbothered by this turn of events (besides the understandable worries regarding their imminent assassination).
“Six for the truth,” was all Palamedes had said when she asked, and Harrow supposed that was answer enough.
The truth, at this point, was that the Empire itself had turned against them, and no matter how fast they worked, there was little that could be done to escape their fate. Harrow did not like to say as much; she knew that Palamedes at least was aware of his chance of survival past the next few weeks, but his cavalier remained staunchly insistent on watching over both of them, as if she alone could take on the might of the Empire if it kept her adept alive.
In Harrow’s opinion, Camilla would do a much more efficient job of protecting him if she slept more than a few stolen hours per night, hunched in the desk chair in the Warden’s quarters, but she was not stupid enough to suggest as much to Camilla.
What she was, apparently, stupid enough to suggest was that they had enough data to begin trials. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them.
The Warden and his hand were both looking at her as though Harrow had suggested they jump untethered from the top of the Spire.
“Just because Anastasia failed to bring it to fruition doesn’t mean that her theory wasn’t sound,” Harrow continued. “We should at least attempt—”
Palamedes held up his hand, as if she were an over-loquacious aspirant.
“I will not subject Camilla to a dangerous and clearly flawed process when there remain other options and other avenues yet to be fully explored,” he said. In any other situation, Harrow would have understood his reluctance, would never have suggested something so risky, but with every passing day, the risk of Imperial agents finding their way through the Sixth’s defences grew greater.
“You would rather wait and see if we all get blown to pieces while eating breakfast?” she snapped, and Palamedes looked at her as if only now did he truly realise what she was.
“You might find it acceptable to submit your cavalier to unethical experiments, but I believe I have made it very clear that I am not,” he said. His words were clipped in a way she’d only ever heard at Canaan House, and never directed at her. “It is a miracle that Gideon survived the avulsion trial at all, let alone completely unscathed. I will not be putting Cam in that kind of danger and I am—disappointed that you would ask it of me.”
In any other moment, Harrow might have argued; she might have pointed out that it was just as irresponsible for Palamedes to leave Camilla mortal while all three of them were being hunted by a power far greater than theirs; she might have asked what become of Magnus and of Jeannemary after their necromancers denied an attempt at lyctorhood. As it was, something in his words gave Harrow pause. A hundred previously unconnected thoughts came together in her mind.
“It wasn’t a miracle,” Harrow said, more to herself than anything else. It still caused Palamedes to turn and say sharply,
“What?”
“Sextus, may I speak with you in private for a moment?” she said, and Palamedes frowned.
“Whatever you have to say to me about this can be said in front of Camilla.”
“No, I—” Harrow screwed her eyes shut, trying to keep her breathing even as her nails cut little half moons into the flesh of her palm. “Palamedes, please.”
His eyebrows twitched up at the use of his first name, and he gave her a long, hard look before he nodded. He did not need to say anything to his cavalier, but he and Camilla had one of their typical wordless exchanges before she slipped out through the door.
“She should have died,” Harrow said, and Palamedes frowned.
“I’m sorry?”
“You were right, about avulsion. No-one but Gideon could have survived that. In the—” she cast a furtive glance around, as though a stray librarian had somehow followed them into the Master Warden’s private quarters, “ —the creche flu, she should have died. She was right by the vents, and only a few months old. She inhaled the same gas that killed children far older and larger than her. It killed two hundred children, but not her. She should have been dead when she arrived,” Harrow continued, as the thought occurred to her. It was galling beyond belief that she was realising her own stupidity in front of Palamedes Sextus, of all people. She supposed it was better than Ianthe Tridentarius, but not by much.
Palamedes seemed unfazed by this revelation, interrupting her only to ask,
“What do you mean, when she arrived?”
“Gideon wasn’t born on the Ninth. Her mother literally dropped out of the sky, already dead. Gideon must have been hours old—her mother had rerouted the oxygen supply to her, but the impact of hitting the planet’s surface…”
She did not have to finish her sentence for Palamedes to understand.
“Good God,” he breathed.
“We know nothing of her origins, nothing of her history. There was little remarkable about her mother, as far as the nuns could tell at the time—but I of course was never able to examine her. I’ve been so stupid, Sextus. I should have put it together years ago, I should have realised she was…” Harrow tried desperately hard to think of a word that wasn’t, “special.”
“We all tend to be blind to that which is closest to us,” said Palamedes. It was a sickening attempt to make her feel better about her own stupidity, and was not to be borne.
“It was in front of my eyes the whole time!” Harrow snapped. “She always healed too quickly. I assumed—like a child—that she was simply the only healthy person on a planet full of elderly people and Ortus. But she shouldn’t even have been healthy in the first place.”
If she were feeling charitable towards herself (it would be a first) Harrow might note that everything about Gideon was so other from the very outset that all the ways she was different blurred together under the banner of her simple Gideon-ness, thus making them easy to miss. If she wanted to compound her mounting self-hatred (much more her style) she would remind herself that Gideon’s vitality—the strength and the size and sheer colour of her against the bleak backdrop of Drearburh—had never occurred to anyone on the Ninth except as something to be crushed underfoot, snuffed out.
The Ninth had never deserved Gideon, but they had her anyway, and instead of cherishing her they had ground her into the dirt. Harrow had dug up the leek fields herself just to bury Gideon in them. The dirt was still under her fingernails, and blood; there had been blood under her fingernails when she’d opened the Tomb, and there was blood under them now.
Harrow jumped when a cool hand touched her own. Blinking hard, she tried to dispel the vision of ripped skin and red beneath her fingernails, but it wouldn’t go. It was only when Palamedes put his other cool hand over the spot on her arm that she’d scratched bloody in anxiety that Harrow realised it wasn’t a vision at all.
“When all this is over, I really think you ought to see a therapist, Harrow,” he said softly as her tissue knitted itself back together beneath his fingers.
“A what? I don’t have time for jokes, Sextus. We need to bring Gideon back now. We were so stupid ever to think she was safe there. Regardless of any targeted attempt on her life, if the Cohort realises what they have, they will rip her apart just to see if she goes back together.”
They would do worse before they reached that point, too. Who knew what experiments they might run on her, what weapons they might use her to power; as far as the Cohort were concerned, Gideon was nothing but an undetonated bomb that might be put to better use.
“Harrow, look at me.” Palamedes’s voice was urgent, but grounding. “We’ll get her back.”
“How?”
“Firstly we ask the Second to release her back to us,” he said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “They might not like it, but she’s your cavalier and you have the right to call her home. Then you write to Gideon, ask her to meet us here.”
Harrow shook her head.
“She’ll hate me.”
“I don’t think she could ever hate you,” said Palamedes, which proved how much he knew.
Interlude: 58 days after
Lt. Gideon Nav,
℅ Eighteenth Battalion
The Nemesis
Nav,
Your presence is required in the Nine Houses. I will not command you, but I request your presence, for the sake of the vow we made to one another, as soon as you can be released.
Meet me on the Sixth.
Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Gideon: 69 days after (nice)
It was the fourth time in as many weeks that Gideon had staggered back to her quarters to find the Saint of Duty there. If she was being honest, Gideon wasn’t sure if she considered him a pest or a weird sort of friend.
“This came for you,” he said, in lieu of, hello Gideon, sorry to barge in like this.
The flimsy he held out did indeed have her name on it, and in Harrow’s familiar chicken scratch hand. Gideon’s stomach did an unwilling little flip.
“Isn’t it a bit above your pay grade to be playing postie?” she said as she took the note.
The Saint of Duty gave a pfft of derision.
“John doesn’t pay us.”
“Sounds like you shouldn’t be doing any more than your job, then,” Gideon said, and the Saint of Duty looked at her with something that should have been annoyance, but nonetheless came with a smile.
“Smartass.”
“Isn’t there, like, a Lyctor’s union?” continued Gideon, because she was nothing if not committed to the bit.
“How the fuck do you know what a union is?” said the Saint of Duty.
Gideon shrugged.
“Porn.”
He sighed.
“Obviously. Aren’t you gonna open it?”
Gideon did want to open it, but to be quite honest, Duty was being deeply sus about this whole thing, and even if it was completely innocuous on his part, Gideon sort of wanted to get emotional about her stupid little letter from Harrow on her own, thank you very much.
“In front of you?” she said, clutching the letter dramatically to her chest. “What if it’s tasteful nudes from my paramour?”
The Saint of Duty gave her a pitying look.
“It’s not, though.”
“You don’t know that,” said Gideon defensively.
“I absolutely do, kiddo. Go on.” He nodded at the flimsy, and Gideon hesitated for another long moment before she opened the letter with hands that were only slightly trembling. Her own letter to Harrow hadn’t contained much, but Gideon wasn’t certain that Harrow would reply at all.
As it transpired, she hadn’t. The missive was short and to the point; Harrow did not answer anything from Gideon’s letter, only ordered her home without so much as an explanation.
“You should go,” said the Saint of Duty from behind her. Either he was sneaky as shit, or Gideon had been too frozen in shock to notice his approach.
Either way, she said nothing. Harrow had asked, and so Gideon would go. She was absolutely going to drag her heels about it, though. How dare Harrow call her back now? Gideon was really trying out here; she was making friends (sort of) and earning respect (to a degree) and some nights she didn’t even dream about Harrow anymore, and all that was progress! Did Harrow really expect her to come running back now? She really expected Gideon to leave behind everything she’d ever wanted so she could go back to Harrow’s side and watch her cosy up with her shiny new husband. Who the fuck did Harrow think she was?
“She’s your necromancer, and she needs you.” The Saint of Duty was looking at her with that disturbing intensity again, and Gideon came to the absolutely mortifying conclusion that she had, in fact, said a decent portion of that out loud.
“Is that what you told your cavalier before you killed and ate them?” Gideon snapped back, and if she’d been slightly less angry, she might even have regretted it.
The Saint of Duty went rigid.
“You don’t know anything about us,” he growled.
“And you don’t know anything about me and Harrow,” countered Gideon. No-one knew anything about her and Harrow, least of all some ancient arsehole who’d scarcely even met them. Hell, Gideon herself could barely comprehend her-and-Harrow; just when she thought everything was looking up between them—when she’d dared to hope that maybe Harrow had the same discomfiting thoughts about Gideon that Gideon had begun to have about Harrow—Harrow had decided to get married and send Gideon away forever.
“I know she would rather risk the destruction of her House than hurt you,” said the Saint of Duty, who was really doubling down on his inability to read the vibe.
Gideon almost laughed.
“Like I said: you don’t know shit.”
“I know she’s in as much danger as you are right now. Maybe more.” That got Gideon’s attention. “I’ve been able to—I’ve had the situation under control for a while, but I can’t hold him off much longer. He meant to kill you once before, Gideon, and I’m not sure he wouldn’t do it again. He certainly wouldn’t hesitate to dispose of Harrow, or the Sixth pair.”
“What?” she asked. Then, “Who?”
It would only occur to Gideon later that the Saint of Duty never answered that question.
“You really think they were just going to let you all go home?” he said, his voice low and urgent. “Knowing what you know? Come on, kid.”
If she was being honest, Gideon hadn’t really thought about it; her brain had been rather too taken up with teen angst to consider how the Emperor might view the heirs’ refusal of his “gift”.
“I need to get back there,” said Gideon. “I need to warn them.”
The Saint of Duty let out a decisive breath and tapped the flimsy in Gideon’s hand.
“Sounds like they already know,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “Tell them—tell them they just need to get off the Sixth, and tell no-one where they’re going. Or—tell the Warden it’s time for the Break Clause.”
Again, Gideon could say nothing but,
“What?”
“Just do it, Gideon. Get back there, get them out, and do it fast, okay?”
“Okay.”
The next thing Gideon knew, a strong, scarred pair of arms had engulfed her in a surprisingly pleasant hug. The Saint of Duty smelled of woodsy aftershave, but Gideon still felt the rasp of his stubble against her forehead as he placed a kiss there.
“There’s a shuttle going back to Trentham from bay six in three hours,” he whispered. “Make sure you’re on it.”
Then he was gone.
Camilla: 78 days after
The world was hazy.
Camilla knew, objectively, that this was a bad sign. She knew, objectively, that sleep deprivation was unhealthy, and that it had a negative effect on her body’s ability to do what it was designed to do: keep her necromancer safe. Nevertheless, she could not abide the thought of someone else watching over him, no matter how much it ached to watch him chivvy Harrow into bed and curl up next to her.
Twenty-eight nights. Almost a month, Camilla had slept (if you could call it that) in the desk chair in Palamedes’s quarters. She’d used to think of the rooms as their quarters, for all that Camilla technically had a bunk in a decently sized room next door. Next door was too far away, now. In the precious seconds it would take for her to get from her room to his, he might have been poisoned or asphyxiated or stabbed (if God was feeling old fashioned). Even tired to the bone, Camilla would not let that happen.
Palamedes, it seemed, had other ideas.
“Cam, you can’t go on like this,” he said. It was late in the afternoon, and Harrow had begrudgingly gone off (accompanied by an Alexandrite home on leave, of course) to the fifth floor to scavenge some volumes of spirit magic. Camilla was ensconced in the desk chair, as usual, and Palamedes had pulled up another to sit beside her. “You need to rest, dearest.”
He never called her "dearest" anymore. She understood why—of course she did—but she hated being unable to do the same, to show him she understood. Camilla had never been one for pet names; she had been pointedly calling him by his title since they were thirteen and Monatague Shest had called him child in a meeting of the Oversight Body. The problem was—the problem had always been—that she had yet to discover a way of saying Warden that didn't sound like beloved.
It was a mark of how tired she was that Camilla could not suppress her desire to crawl into his lap, to wind her arms around him and press her face against his neck, to bask in the familiar scent of his skin. Nothing smelled like him anymore; not her clothes or her sheets or the skin of her wrists where he liked to trace the blue-green veins.
He gave a little hum of surprise as he received a lapful of cavalier, but his hands came up around her waist without hesitation. Camilla had not done this since they were children, when she would return exhausted from the Spire and collapse into his shuck, but he clearly remembered the old routine as well as she did.
With her face turned as it was into his neck, and her eyes shut so she could concentrate on the warmth of his skin and the beat of his heart, Camilla no longer had a view of the door, or of the window. She consoled herself that—in the event of imminent violence—her body in its current position would shield him from any significant organ damage.
Perhaps if Camilla kept her eyes shut just a little longer, if she stayed in the warmth of the Warden’s embrace and let him rub soothing circles into her back, if she just let herself sleep, she would wake in the Seventh’s chambers at Canaan House. She would wake with Dulcinea in her lap and say, “I dreamed that Harrow and the Warden got married; I dreamed you died; I dreamed God tried to kill us all;” and Dulcie would laugh until she coughed and say something bittersweet and true and when Palamedes came in to check on them Dulcie would tell him too and he would smile so beautifully before he said, “you’ve been reading too many of Dulcie’s awful books,” and Dulcie would say, “you love my awful books,” and none of them would ever think about it again.
“What do you need, Cam?” Palamedes said softly, his breath tickling the shell of her ear. “Tell me what I can do.”
“Nothing,” she muttered, her voice muffled by the material of his robes.
“Camilla, please.”
It was unfair of him to bring out that tone, so perfectly concerned and plaintive that she could see the crease between his eyebrows without needing to raise her head. She was so used to telling him everything—she was used to not needing to tell him, to him simply knowing—but if she couldn’t tell him, then—
“I want Dulcie,” she said. “Nothing’s right without her.”
The moment the words escaped her, Camilla was blinded by the truth of them. She had known she missed Dulcie, of course she had, but with everything else that was going on, she’d failed to notice the sheer size of the gaping hole that the Duchess had left in their lives.
She expected Palamedes to offer some kind of platitude, to say he missed her too, but he didn’t. He was only silent for a few long moments before finally saying,
“She—um—before she died, she asked me to give you something.”
Camilla raised her head at that.
“You never said.” It wasn’t an accusation, but Palamedes cast his eyes down, ashamed.
“I—I was angry that she’d asked it of me, at the time.”
Camilla frowned.
“Why?”
“Because she knew how I—it doesn’t matter.”
It absolutely did matter.
“Are you still angry?” Camilla pressed, and Palamedes’s lips disappeared into a thin white scar across his face. She hated that he hesitated, that he had hidden this from her. It made her a raging hypocrite, but Camilla was willing to accept that.
“No,” he said, finally. Then, “Yes, a little. Do you want it?”
“Yes,” she said, because there was no use lying.
Almost immediately, his eyes flashed like steel in sunlight and the line of his jaw hardened minutely. Camilla knew the signs of his determination well, and she was surprised to find them paired with a gentle hand cupping her cheek.
“Would you close your eyes for me?” he asked, and Camilla did. Briefly, she wondered why he hadn’t shuffled her gently out of his lap, why he hadn’t made any move to fetch whatever it was from his desk. Before she could give too much thought to it, his lips were brushing gently against hers.
Camilla.exe stopped working. Utterly stunned—and not insignificantly sleep deprived—it took her a moment to process what was happening. As he teased her mouth open, she wanted to clutch at him, to draw him closer, euphoric; at the first hot flash of his tongue her stomach turned because he was married, he was married, and she never thought he could be so cruel; when he took her upper lip between his own and sucked it tenderly, she remembered this was a gift, and she melted.
Her hands fluttered up to his hair; really, his curls weren’t all that much shorter than Dulcie’s. If she concentrated very hard, Camilla could fool herself that she smelled roses and antiseptic instead of ink and soap. The delicate fingers on her face could be Dulcie’s, if she ignored their length and the strength in them; if she blocked out the slight rasp of stubble against her chin, Camilla could fool herself that she was kissing someone who wanted her.
For a few moments, everything went soft and warm and dreamlike. Camilla smiled into Dulcie’s kiss, and was rewarded with the nip of teeth on her bottom lip. A little hum escaped her, and the hands on her face stilled. Camilla’s heart dropped into her stomach.
Palamedes pushed her gently away. Scrambling out of his lap and across the room, Camilla straightened her shirt and her jacket, she checked the wards on the doors again. They looked solid. Her head swam. There was a distinct chance that she was going to throw up. She took a measured breath—not too deep, not too noticeable—and tried to remain still.
Palamedes had, in his turn, frozen where she left him, hand still outstretched. Silence filled up every square inch of space in the room.
Camilla had always found silence comforting. It was the quiet of an archive, the anticipation before a bought, the warmth of simply being together. There had never been silence like this between them: both hollow and heavy at once.
“You never told me what you thought,” he said. His voice—a little strangled—seemed to echo in the space between them.
“About what?” Camilla asked. There was absolutely no way she was convincing him that she was unaffected, and she hated that she was trying.
“On the day of the first wedding,” he said. “When I asked you what you thought about—about—”
Other areas of interest. As kind as the intention was—he would never humiliate her by saying bluntly that he knew the true and horrifying extent of her feelings—Camilla still felt the knife of it twist in her gut. She couldn't say it out loud, even veiled in euphemism.
“Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice trembling. If Camilla looked over at him now, there would be tears in his eyes. “I’m so sorry, Cam.”
There were so many things he could be sorry for, and no apologies he could give that she would accept. He didn’t need to be sorry for not wanting her the way she wanted him. He didn’t need to be sorry for wanting Harrow instead. He didn’t really need to be sorry for moving on from Dulcie, not when they had known for years that one day they would have to move on, that she wanted them to.
“Don’t be,” she said. “You’ve got nothing to apologise for.”
“That’s very generous of you,” he said. At least they were not so far gone that he felt the need to hide his tears from her. The sight of them tugged something in her abdomen, as if there was a wire between their bodies urging her close enough to wipe them away.
She didn’t realise she’d followed the pull until she was standing in front of him again, her thumbs brushing the wetness from his cheeks.
“You don’t have to—” he started, but she cut him off.
“I want to.”
“Darling—” This time, Palamedes cut himself off. “Is it still alright if I—”
“Of course,” said Camilla quickly. “I know you don’t—you don’t mean anything by it.”
His eyes grew misty again, and Camilla would never forgive herself for doing this to him. She had done a perfectly good job of concealing her feelings for half a decade; why did he have to look beyond the curtain now? The fresh welling of tears only made his grey eyes brighter, and his lips were parted as he looked up at her, and now that she had kissed him once, she could not help imaging what it would feel like to kiss the stricken expression from his face.
Instead of following that impossible urge, Camilla crumbled back into his lap, pressing her face against his shoulder. His arms came up around her immediately, holding her close.
“It’ll be alright, dear one,” he whispered. It was a valiant effort, and she might have believed him if she didn’t feel a tear drip onto the back of her neck.
“Yes, it’ll be alright,” she said. They both knew she didn’t mean it, but there was comfort—if only for the moment—in pretending she did.
Gideon: 82 days after
The journey from Trentham to the Library seemed to take forever. Objectively, Gideon knew it was far shorter than her journey from the Nemesis to Trentham—which had taken over a week—but those last few hours in that tiny shuttle with a bunch of weirdly hot Sixth Cohort officers had stretched on for years.
When she finally stepped off the shuttle, her first thought was that the Sixth was not how she left it. When the four of them had returned from Canaan House, the shuttle bay had been bustling with life, chaotic and loud. Now, there was a line of grim-faced scholars standing next to each bay, taking names as the passengers disembarked. Some were allowed through, while others were led sternly away by armed figures.
“Name?” said the attendant for her shuttle. He didn’t look up at her, eyes trained on the list in front of him.
“Gideon Nav?” she said, and he nodded.
“You’re expected. Go through.”
Letting out a sigh of relief, she picked up her bag and made for the entrance.
“Gideon!”
She’d barely stepped through the gate when a pair of noodly arms were around her, and she patted Palamedes on the back.
“Good to see you too, Sex Pal.”
He pulled away only far enough to beam at her, but any further greeting was interrupted by stern orders from his cavalier.
“Step back, please, Warden.” Camilla sounded markedly less excited to see her, and—wow—once Gideon got a good look at her, it was clear that something was up. “Hello, Gideon, good to see you,” said Camilla. “If you wouldn’t mind spreading your legs.”
“Buy me a drink first, Cam,” said Gideon, but Camilla paid her no heed, tapping the outside of Gideon’s left thigh until she cooperated.
Camilla patted Gideon down so brusquely that she was honestly a little bit offended; her biceps had grown considerably over the last few months, what with all the proper nutrition in the Cohort. Once she was satisfied that Gideon didn’t have any more weapons on her than usual, Camilla gave her a short nod before moving to the small bag she’d brought with her, kneeling to unzip the main compartment.
“If you wanted to borrow my skin mags, you could have just asked,” joked Gideon. No-one laughed, not even Palamedes, which was a bad sign.
“Is anyone going to tell me what’s going on?” she asked, and Camilla looked up from rifling through her things to say,
“Later, when we’re in private.”
Palamedes only shrugged apologetically at her, and Harrow was still point blank refusing to meet her gaze, which was fun. Gideon couldn’t help feeling as though she’d somehow committed a capital crime while she’d been away doing training drills and receiving unasked for visits from the Saint of Duty.
Eventually, Camilla was satisfied, zipping up Gideon’s bag and throwing it to her. Because Gideon had actually slept some time in the last century, she caught it without issue.
“Great!” said Palamedes, as though his cavalier was behaving completely normally and not at all like a paranoid weirdo. “If you’ll come with us, Gideon, we’ve got a lot to catch you up on.”
“No shit,” said Gideon, falling into position a half-step behind Harrow.
Gideon felt she had a half-decent sense of direction, but navigating the winding corridors of the Sixth took some kind of supernatural ability. When they finally arrived in front of two heavily warded doors, Gideon had absolutely no idea where they were.
Palamedes hovered for a while in front of the doors, carefully undoing the wards with an apologetic look towards Gideon. (“We couldn’t include your blood in the set-up, sorry.”) Camilla looked itchy about it, as if she would much prefer that she, Harrow, and Palamedes simply gave Gideon a walkie-talkie and left her out here while the three of them retreated into the warded room. Gideon tried not to be offended.
Finally, the last of the wards melted away, and Palamedes gave a triumphant little, “aha!” before he flung the doors open. Gideon had only been inside the Warden’s quarters a handful of times, but she recognised the space well enough. The only difference she could see were the few scattered possessions indicating that Palamedes was no longer the sole occupant of those rooms. She recognised a set of Harrow’s black robes flung over a chair in the corner, and much of the flimsy that littered every flat surface was covered with Harrow’s spiky, untidy handwriting.
The sight of it made something ugly and awful twist in her gut; it was so… domestic. How did Camilla cope with it all? (That was a rhetorical question: the ten-ton bags beneath Camilla’s eyes very clearly said, “not well”.)
“So,” said Gideon, just to escape her own train of thought, “what’s all the fuss about?”
“You might want to sit down, actually,” said Palamedes. He glanced around for somewhere appropriate, but every chair in the room was covered with books and stacks of loose flimsy. He gestured to the bed, which was the last place in the world Gideon wanted to sit, and she tried not to wince as she perched on its edge. The moment her arse made contact with the sheets, Camilla said,
“The Fourth and the Fifth are dead.”
Gideon blinked.
“What?”
“Abigail and Magnus were killed in a shuttle explosion,” Palamedes explained, “and Jeannemary and Isaac were shipped out to the Cohort. No-one from their unit made it out of their first deployment: somewhere called Antioch?”
Gideon was aware that, somewhere, she was grieving. Mugnus was the first person who had been nice to her at Canaan House (maybe the first person who had been nice to her ever) and Abigail was warm and smart and she’d had a really dirty sense of humour once you got her going. The teens were terrible but—fuck—they were just kids.
As it was, though, she didn’t have space to think about that, because her mind was racing with too many other thoughts.
“Fuck,” said Gideon, eventually. “I need to send Duty a fruit basket.”
Palamedes frowned.
“What?”
“I was on track for Antioch,” Gideon explained, “but there was word from on high that I should be held back.” Harrow made a strangled sound, acknowledging Gideon’s existence for the first time since she’d stepped foot on the Sixth. “It was in the letter I sent, but I know they black that kind of shit out.”
Palamedes and Harrow exchanged a significant look, and Palamedes nodded.
“They did.” Then, “Forgive me, Gideon, but you don’t seem as surprised as I expected.”
“No, I— fuck, I hoped we were gonna be the first targets, that we’d be able to warn the others.”
Now Harrow and Palamedes both looked blank, and Camilla was eyeing her suspiciously from her perch against the desk.
“You knew about this?” Palamedes said, and Gideon rushed to explain.
“Only the day I left the Cohort, after I got your letter. Duty said he was—he was holding someone back from us.”
“Who’s Duty?” prompted Camilla.
“As in, the Saint of. Big guy who picked us up from Canaan.”
Palamedes frowned.
“Why would he want to help us?”
That was a question Gideon had asked herself hundreds of times during the lonely shuttle rides from the Nemesis to Trentham, Trentham to the Sixth. She could only come up with one answer:
“I think he might be my Dad.”
There was an excruciatingly long pause. Harrow looked at Palamedes. Palamedes looked at Camilla. Camilla looked at Harrow. All three of them looked back at Gideon.
“Okay,” said Palamedes. “Walk us through your hypothesis.”
That was a decent start. She had not, at the very least, been immediately dismissed out of hand. Even Harrow looked as though she was listening. Maybe Palamedes had been a good influence on her.
“So, he mentioned something about this other person, the one who’s out to get us all now, trying to kill me before,” Gideon began. “And like, the only person I ever remember trying to kill me is Harrow, so I figured maybe that explains what happened to my mum. You guys know what happened to my mum, right?”
“Fell out the sky above the Ninth, you were less than a day old,” said Palamedes, and Gideon nodded.
“Yeah, pretty much. So if Duty knows the guy who killed my mum and tried to kill me, then it’s not so hard to imagine he knew my mum.”
“A reasonable logistical leap,” agreed Palamedes.
“And I don’t know if you guys remember—you probably don’t—but that day he came to pick us up from Canaan, he looked at me weird. Really intense, you know? Like he recognised me.”
Understandably, both of the Sixth looked completely blank. They’d been a bit distracted at the time, having been newly dragged from their quarters and still deep in mourning.
“I remember,” said Harrow. “I didn’t like it.”
“Right. And once I started considering it, I thought it makes sense,” Gideon continued, growing in confidence the more she voiced. It had all seemed so far-fetched in her head, but now that she laid the evidence out, it really sounded—plausible. “Because how else would I have survived the fall, and the creche flu, and all those times Harrow tried to murder me—”
“It wasn’t that many times,” grumbled Harrow.
“—and avulsion and all that? If my Dad was a Lyctor, then maybe I’d have a bit of that immortal mojo. Plus it answers the question of why he would want to help us, and…”
Gideon looked down at her hands, suddenly embarrassed by this last point: both her most compelling and her least supportable. Perhaps she really was just getting carried away with the idea of having a parent, and all this was nonsense.
“Go on, Gideon,” said Palamedes gently.
“His name is Gideon,” she said. “Like, his real name, not his title.”
There were a few long moments of silence, during which Gideon thoroughly convinced herself that she was about to be laughed off the Sixth. She could mention the kiss he’d given her, right where her hair met the skin of her temple, but something held her back. For all the tension and the anxiety of the moment, that tiny moment of affection was hers.
As it transpired, she needn’t have worried, because Palamedes said,
“Worse theories have been peer reviewed and published. Still, we can’t take it as fact, nor can we trust him absolutely.”
Gideon nodded.
“Sure.” Then, “He gave me a message for you, by the way.”
Palamedes’s eyebrows shot up, and Gideon found that Camilla was suddenly looking at her very intensely.
“What was the message?” she asked.
“He told me to tell you that it might be time for the Break Clause.”
If it was possible, Palamedes’s eyebrows shot up even further. He locked eyes with his cavalier, who looked mildly surprised.
“What’s the Break Clause?” asked Harrow.
“It’s a Sixth thing,” said Palamedes absently, and Harrow glared at him.
“Am I not now a ‘Sixth thing’ too?”
It might have been Gideon’s least favourite thing that Harrow had ever said, which was incredibly impressive considering all the awful things Harrow had said to Gideon every day of their lives. She didn’t have time to dwell on it, though (Gideon was going to have way too much to dwell on when this was all over) because Palamedes was speaking.
“Sorry,” he said. “Of course. The Break Clause is… a failsafe, I suppose. In the case that the situation in the Nine Houses becomes too dangerous—for whatever reason—the Sixth House has the capacity to move this entire station to another location outside the system.”
“Wow,” said Gideon. It felt like the only appropriate thing to say.
“Quite,” agreed Palamedes. “It’s designed to be used only in the most dire of the circumstances, or…”
“Or what?” prompted Harrow.
“Or if the Sixth House no longer has faith in the Emperor,” Camilla said, her face set and expressionless.
Palamedes shook his head.
“It needs to be a unanimous agreement by the Oversight Body. I can’t just declare that we’re invoking it. I don’t even know if I want to.”
Camilla looked at him as though he’d lost his mind. It was a familiar look on her: she’d trained it on both the Tridentarii more than once when they were at Canaan, and at the Eighth, and Deuteros, even at Gideon herself one or twice. Gideon had never seen her look at Palamedes that way, and she doubted if Camilla had ever looked at him that way before.
“We’re being hunted, Warden,” she said. “How long can our defences hold against the Emperor himself? How many members of our House will he decide is an acceptable amount of collateral damage to protect the secret of Lyctorhood?”
“I know, Cam.” He sighed. “It’s late. I’ll sleep on it.”
She looked at him, bloodshot eyes dark and burning, for a few long seconds before she said,
“Alright.”
In the grand scheme of things—and compared with the fights Gideon and Harrow had on an almost daily basis—this disagreement was nothing, yet it left Gideon feeling as though she’d just witnessed something very private. She cleared her throat.
“Why don’t you and Harrow talk it through a little bit, Pal,” she suggested, “and I’ll see if I can’t get Camilla to take a little nap.”
“I don’t need a little nap,” said Camilla sharply.
Harrow rolled her eyes at the same time Gideon said, “Nice try,” and Palamedes said, “Please, Cam.”
It was the “please” that did it, Gideon imagined, but she still counted it a personal win when she took Cam by the hand (and it was a mark of how tired she must be that she even allowed Gideon to do that) and led her over to the bed.
Camilla stopped dead at the edge of it, looking as though the rumpled sheets might gain sentience and bite her at any moment.
“I know,” Gideon whispered, low enough that Harrow and Palamedes wouldn’t hear, already engrossed in their work. “Do it for him, though.”
“No. No, I have to keep him safe,” Cam muttered, and Gideon squeezed the hand she was still holding.
“I’m here now. You don’t have to stay awake; I’ll watch over them for a while.”
Cam shook her head, the movement jagged and blurred, and Gideon couldn’t tell if it was refusal or an attempt to shake the sleep from her eyes. Probably both.
“You won’t be able to protect him if you’re this tired,” Gideon said softly. “Lack of sleep absolutely fucks your reaction time.”
“I know that,” Camilla snapped.
“Well then,” said Gideon, sitting back against the headboard of the bed and patting her thigh. “Just a few minutes, hmm?”
Camilla looked down at Gideon’s lap, then over at where Harrow and Palamedes were huddled together over the desk, conversing in quiet, tight whispers.
“Just a few minutes,” she agreed. She sank onto the bed and shuffled until she was lying horizontally across it, her head cushioned on the pillow of Gideon’s thigh. Gideon let her hand fall onto Camilla’s head, her fingers slipping through soft dark strands, and Camilla gave an almost inaudible little whimper.
In a matter of minutes, her breathing had evened out, and her hand had fallen limply away from the hilt of her knife.
When Gideon looked up, Palamedes was turned towards them, watching with an unreadable expression. Gideon gave him a thumbs up, and he smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
Palamedes: 83 days after
Palamedes was absolutely wretched. It ought to have been enough, really, that the Emperor himself was attempting to end not only his life, but the lives of Camilla, Harrow, and Gideon as well. However, Palamedes had decided, in his own infinite wisdom, to make it worse by finally carrying out Dulcie’s final request and inadvertently revealing the whole mortifying truth of his feelings to Camilla, who had quite rightly asked him never to speak of them again.
The problem was that now he knew what her lips tasted like; he knew what strangled little noises she made when she liked something; he knew what her fingers felt like tangled in his hair, and his brain insisted on reliving the experience at the most inopportune moments possible. Not that any moments were necessarily opportune; the memory was one that ought to disgust him, and in many ways it did. He had deceived her—at least by omission—and he had taken advantage of her; so caught up had he been in the elation of her touch, that he allowed the kiss to go on for several disastrous seconds longer than the one Dulcie had tasked him to deliver. Camilla had not wanted his kiss, she had wanted Dulcie’s, but he had forced himself on her regardless. After so many long, careful years of refusing to abuse his position with regard to his cavalier, his resolve had crumbled all too easily the moment he felt her breath against his lips. Every step they took through the winding corridors of the Library was torture—that half step of distance feeling like a mile, like a chasm, filled with the weight of his power over her.
All this to say that Palamedes was less focused that he should have been on all the murder—both attempted and successful—that was going on. He was less focused than he should have been on the future of his house and the absolutely monumental decision that the Oversight Body would be making that very afternoon; namely, whether to risk remaining in the Dominicus system, knowing that it was only a matter of time before someone or something came for them, or to flee the system entirely, forsaking it all for planets and people unknown, with nothing but a prayer to a god they no longer had faith in.
As far as Palamedes was concerned, he would happily take personal annihilation if it meant he didn’t have to bear another minute of Camilla’s careful distance. What he couldn’t stomach was the idea of Harrow and Gideon being taken out alongside him, his whole house burning for his sake. He simply did not think about Camilla being hurt, because he did not have time for that.
(He did not think about how he had hurt Camilla, because he definitely didn’t have time for that.)
He must have been standing in front of the doors to Meeting Room 12 for several seconds too long, because Camilla put a hand on his arm.
“Warden?”
“I—”
“I know.”
For the first time in his life, Palamedes wondered if she really did. No matter the outcome of this meeting, wheels would begin to turn at speed beyond his control, and he had far too much to say to her in these last few precious minutes. Recent history, however, suggested that he was better off keeping his mouth shut, so he only reached for her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze before he pushed open the doors.
Unsurprisingly, there was only one person who had beaten them to Meeting Room 12. Juno Zeta sat on the left hand of Palamedes’s usual chair, her silver hair swept back into its usual knot, straight backed and expectant.
“Master Warden,” she said.
“Mum.”
Her eyebrows twitched up in surprise. He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d called her mum since his appointment to office at the age of thirteen.
“What’s going on?” her voice was lower, softer than he was used to, and he hated it. Better that she fix him with her usual sharp, analytic gaze and tell him she had a meeting with Cooling and Ventilation in forty-five minutes, so he needed to make it quick.
“The Emperor is trying to kill us,” Palamedes said, without preamble. It hadn’t become easier to say.
Juno’s eyebrows twitched almost imperceptibly, and Palamedes was indescribably glad for his mother’s unbreakable implacability. Another parent might be given to fretting in such a situation (Camilla’s fathers doubtless would, if she decided to tell them) but Juno only asked,
“For what reason?”
“We discovered the secret of Lyctorhood, and we rejected it,” Palamedes explained. “He cannot have us alive in the universe, knowing what he asks of his Saints, and the atrocity they have committed in his name.”
Juno nodded, as if this was not only reasonable, but expected.
“That was why the Fifth lost their lives, then. And the Fourth.” These were not questions, but Palamedes answered them anyway.
“Yes. It can only be assumed that we will be next.”
“Naturally,” Juno agreed. “What are you proposing we do about it?”
That was the sticking point, wasn’t it? There were any number of things that Palamedes might say—hundreds of alternative plans he had turned over in his mind the previous night, pacing his room like a caged animal—but in the end, all he could say was,
“I propose initiating the Break Clause.”
Juno leaned back in her chair, pushing a long, slow exhale through pursed lips. She looked from Palamedes to Camilla and back again.
“You think that’s the best course of action, Scholar?”
Camilla straightened ever so slightly, and nodded.
“We received intel from—a source with inside knowledge.”
“What source?” Juno’s gaze turned sharp, piercing. Camilla didn’t answer, leaving Palamedes to say,
“A Lyctor.”
Juno said nothing.
“I did initially argue that to invoke the Break Clause for the sake of my own safety,” Palamedes continued, “for the safety of my cavalier and of my wife, would be an abuse of my authority, however—”
“You are not being pursued by a disgruntled scion of another house, or by any person or organisation from outside the Dominicus system,” Juno said, impatient. “If the Emperor would rather spill the blood of his own people than have his secrets exposed to them, well—Six for the truth, Master Warden. This is no longer an Emperor we wish to serve.”
Palamedes blinked at his mother, who leaned forward in her chair, folding her hands over each other on the hard plex table before her.
“Well, yes,” he said.
“Don’t look so relieved,” Juno said, as the door creaked open, and grey-robed figures began filing in. “You still need to convince the rest of them.”
Harrow: 83 days after
In Palamedes and Camilla’s absence, Harrow was left with little to do but sit in hers and Palamedes’s room, attempting to avoid Gideon’s scrutiny. Rather than reading one of Palamedes’s pulp romances or doing eight hundred push ups—as she usually did when there was no other activity to be had—Gideon was simply sitting on a desk chair, twiddling her thumbs, trying and failing to look as though she wasn’t staring at Harrow.
Harrow, in her turn, had little to do other than be watched. There was work that needed doing, theorems that needed fine-tuning—if the Warden could not convince the Oversight Body, then grand lysis was their only chance of survival—but Harrow could not make sense of her own scribbled research. Every idea that came to her felt thin without Palamedes or Camilla to point out a weak spot or add something to support it. She had grown indefensibly soft in the past months.
“So,” Gideon said eventually. “How’s things?”
“How’s things?” Harrow repeated.
“Yeah. How’s—y’know. Married life?” Gideon refrained from utilising jazz hands as she said the words, but Harrow could hear them nonetheless.
“I imagine it would be more pleasant without the constant threat of annihilation,” she said, and Gideon nodded.
“Yope. That tracks.”
There were several more unbearable minutes of stretched out, tense and trembling silence before Harrow said,
“Griddle.”
“Tenebrous overlord.”
“Why are you attempting to make small talk with me?”
For a moment, Gideon looked as though she would attempt denial, before she raised her hands in surrender.
“I don’t know! It’s just—weird,” she said.
“What’s weird? Being targets of the Emperor’s ire?”
“No—I mean, that’s not really worse than Canaan. Plus, Ianthe was there.”
Harrow huffed in agreement.
“What, then?” she pressed, and Gideon wrung her hands in her lap.
“Just—everything! It’s weird not to know what you’ve been doing, to have to ask about it. It’s weird that you’re all, y’know, domestic with Sex Pal now. How am I supposed to ask you about that?”
“You don’t have to ask about it; it’s hardly noteworthy,” said Harrow. “We get along well enough.” It was true—though Harrow could do without finding herself so frequently in the middle of whatever intricate dance her husband was doing with his cavalier—but the statement appeared to confuse Gideon.
“Out of the honeymoon stage, then?” she said, nonsensically.
“I believe I made it more than clear that this was a business arrangement,” Harrow replied, at a loss for anything else to say. Perhaps Gideon was making a poor attempt at humour. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“I mean, yeah, at the beginning,” said Gideon, and Harrow froze.
“What?”
“You know, before you dragged yourself out of the marital bed to tell us all what a well spent night the two of you had,” Gideon spat, and Harrow could only stare back at her. The alternative implication of her own words dawned on her, sudden and too bright, and Harrow could only say,
“Well, it was well spent.”
“I really don’t want to hear about it, Harrow,” said Gideon. Her left leg began to bounce in agitation, though why that idea should agitate Gideon, Harrow dared not speculate.
“Well spent in research and philosophical discussion,” she insisted, and Gideon scoffed.
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
“Griddle!” Harrow snapped. “Have you ever known me to speak in euphemism?”
That gave Gideon pause.
“No,” she admitted, her face set and sulky.
“Then will you please accept that you badly misunderstood the situation?” Harrow said.
Gideon considered this for a few long moments—Harrow could almost hear the gears turning in her brain—and must have come to the conclusion that Harrow had no reason whatsoever to lie.
“Okay, but, so did everyone else,” she said eventually. “I think you’ve got to take the heat for that one, Night Boss.”
Harrow did not have time to consider the absolutely disastrous prospect of everyone she knew believing that she and Palamedes had been intimate, because she was too angry.
“I appreciate that others might have… misinterpreted me, but even I did not think you enough of a dunce to believe I would—that Palamedes and I—” the thought was so preposterous that she could barely give it voice, but Gideon didn’t need her to.
“Why the hell shouldn’t I, Harrow? Because you’re too devoted to your corpsicle girlfriend?”
That took Harrow aback. Gideon had not brought up The Body since Harrow’s confession at Canaan House. Harrow—she was ashamed to admit it—had barely thought about the Body since that moment. She had, after all, been a little preoccupied with saving Gideon’s life, and worrying about Gideon, and missing Gideon’s stupid lop-sided smile.
“Because I did all this for you!” The words came out wretched and strangled, as if her very body was reluctant to release them. Gideon only stared back at her, golden eyes wide.
“What?”
“The price of Lyctorhood– the price of the Ninth’s rejuvenation was your life, and I refused to pay it,” Harrow said, unaware that the situation apparently required spelling out. “You knew that.”
“I knew you didn’t want to owe me the Ninth.” Gideon shrugged, and it was Harrow’s turn to say,
“What?”
“I know you, Harrow,” said Gideon, preposterously. “You couldn’t stand to be beholden to anyone, let alone me.”
“I couldn’t stand to see you die, no matter how many souls it bought me,” Harrow hissed. Her blood boiled beneath her skin that Gideon was forcing her to say any of this out loud. She surely knew; she had to know how Harrow felt. If she didn’t—if she didn’t she was a fool, but Harrow was more of a fool for spitting out the too-obvious truth now.
“Harrow, in what universe do you care more about my life than the future of the Ninth?”
“In every universe, you moron.”
Gideon lurched forward, and Harrow was briefly convinced that she was about to get punched before Gideon’s lips landed hard on hers. Strong arms were around her waist, and Harrow was lifted up onto her tiptoes, hands flying to those ridiculous, overworked biceps and letting her bony fingers dig into the soft fat and hard muscle there. Gideon was so warm, and her mouth was scorching against Harrow’s, and then suddenly she was gone.
“Shit—shit, fuck, sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
Gideon’s hand flew to her mouth, as if she could wipe the kiss away, and Harrow was utterly transfixed by the strong length of her fingers and the red flush of her lips beneath them. Her entire body was shaking, but Harrow pulled herself together just enough to manage an imperious glare; Gideon shrank beneath it for a moment before Harrow said,
“You shouldn’t have stopped.”
Gideon’s eyes went wide, iris disappearing into the finest golden band around her black pupil.
“Just, um—just repeat that for me?” she said.
Harrow could not. She could barely string two words together, but she would have to if she wanted Gideon to touch her again.
“Come here,” she managed, and it was a small miracle that her voice stayed steady.
Gideon took a tentative step forward, and Harrow reached up to curl her fingers around the lapels of that infuriating uniform, dragging Gideon down until her mouth was low enough for Harrow to kiss again. She dared not steal one yet, for fear she would not stop once she did.
“In every universe,” she whispered against Gideon’s lips, “I would choose you: the only bright thing in the darkness, the only living thing I ever loved.”
Gideon whined and caught her mouth again, lips soft and hot and perfect against Harrow’s. Those strong arms were back around her middle, and she felt the breath driven out of her as Gideon crushed her tight against her chest. Harrow’s hands had migrated, quite of their own accord, to the thick, bright curls of Gideon’s hair, and she luxuriated in the softness of it against her fingers. Instinctively, she fisted her hand, pulling hard, and Gideon rewarded her with a moan.
Gideon’s retaliation was swift, as it always had been, and Harrow’s feet left the floor entirely. Strong, sure hands were on the undersides of her thighs, fingers brushing close to to where she wanted them—had wanted them for longer than she cared to admit. She only had a moment to adjust to this, however, before her back was against the wall, and the gorgeous wet heat of Gideon’s mouth had migrated to her neck, nipping and sucking at the exposed skin there. The scrape of teeth made little sparks of electricity dance beneath her skin, tracing a thousand bright paths from the places Gideon’s mouth met her skin.
Letting out a strangled breath, Harrow’s back arched like the pull of a longbow, pressing as much of her body to as much of Gideon’s as she could manage. This drew a surprisingly high whine from Gideon, and Harrow wriggled in satisfaction.
“Fuck, Harrow,” Gideon breathed, turning her face into Harrow’s neck as if she could burrow beneath the delicate skin there. Squirming at the sudden lack of stimulation, Harrow let out a whine of her own.
Suddenly, everything shifted: Harrow was pulled tight to Gideon’s body, and the hand holding up her right thigh was gone. Then one of Gideon’s strong arms was around her waist, and Harrow shuddered as a muscled thigh pushed up between her legs. So distracted was she by the new and delicious pressure sending shudders down to her toes, that Harrow had not considered Gideon’s newly freed hand until it was fumbling with the buttons on the front of her outer robe. Releasing Gideon’s hair with an impatient huff, Harrow joined her in pulling at the infuriating buttons—why did she have so many of them?—until the robe fell open and Harrow could claim Gideon’s mouth impatiently again.
Gideon submitted happily for a few moments before she pulled away to whisper,
“Can I?”
Fingers hovered at the bottom of Harrow’s undershirt and huge, hungry eyes met hers, their pupils blown and dark and rimmed by molten gold. Harrow nodded.
It was with something like reverence that Gideon pushed the coarse material of Harrow’s shirt up her body, caressing every inch of revealed skin as she did so. The skin of Gideon’s palm was warm and calloused and Harrow trembled in her embrace, unsure if it was nerves or her sudden nakedness or the still maddening pressure of Gideon’s thigh between her legs. Gideon’s breath was hot on her neck, and growing heavier as her hand skimmed over Harrow’s ribs, tracing a thumb along the underside of Harrow’s negligible breast. The skin there was delicate, and more tender than Harrow ever realised; she gasped sharply, and felt Gideon’s grin against the skin of her shoulder. The hand ventured still further, until Gideon held all of Harrow’s breast in the palm of her hand.
Harrow felt a sudden and sharp certainty that Gideon must be disappointed; if she had imagined her first experience to be with someone who could provide more than a meagre handful—or worse, if this was not her first experience at all, then Harrow surely could not measure up to the Cohort girls who had doubtless thrown themselves tit-first at Gideon the moment she stepped onto the Nemesis.
Thinking became all together more difficult when Gideon swiped a thumb across her nipple and whispered,
“Holy shit.”
Holy shit was about right. Harrow whined, arching her back as electricity sparked through her, settling hot and urgent between her legs. She ground down onto Gideon’s thigh, desperate to spark that feeling again.
“More,” she breathed against Gideon’s neck, and Gideon obliged. This time, she pinched Harrow’s pebbled nipple hard between her thumb and forefinger, and Harrow wailed. Her hips were rocking frantically, and she could not spare the energy to feel ashamed of the ease with which she slid against Gideon’s tensed muscle. She wondered if Gideon could feel it, and the thought sent another full body shudder through her. Dragging her lips up the taut lines of Gideon’s neck, Harrow searched for her mouth, sighing as she found it again. She nipped lightly on Gideon’s bottom lip, and squirmed in pleasure as Gideon’s grip tightened around her.
“You’re perfect,” Gideon choked against her lips. “Fuck, Harrow, you’re so perfect.”
In its addled state, Harrow’s mind was utterly incapable of forming a reply to that. Instead, she grasped Gideon’s wrist and pulled her hand back up to Harrow’s chest, pushing her undershirt back up out of the way. Gideon took the hint, squeezing her just on the edge of too hard. Before Harrow could reward her with a kiss, Gideon ducked her head to place her mouth over Harrow’s nipple. The soft, wet heat was too much, far too much, and Harrow wanted more of it.
A litany of whimpers and mewls spilled from Harrow’s lips, unchecked, as Gideon sucked gently, then again, then with enough force to send another, stronger crackle of electricity to the throbbing heat between Harrow’s legs. She ground down again, desperate for a release from the all-consuming, maddening pressure that was building there. Gideon released her with a scrape of teeth, and Harrow whined petulantly until Gideon turned her attention to her other breast, lavishing it with soft bites and kisses while her hand came up to play with Harrow’s now wet and swollen right nipple.
Between the soft suction of Gideon’s mouth and the slick slide of her fingers and the unrelenting pressure of her thigh between Harrow’s jerking, desperate hips, Harrow came completely undone.
Biting down on the meat of Gideon’s shoulder to muffle her scream, she could half-hear Gideon whispering, “Oh my god, oh my god,” as Harrow shuddered and shook in her arms.
When she finally came down from her high, little twinges of pleasure still sparking through her, Harrow found that her head was cradled by a large hand, stopping her from hitting it against the wall behind her. She was breathing hard, her robes undone and her undershirt pushed up beneath her arms, her chest and stomach bare, legs spread and clinging to Gideon, wanton and exposed. Her eyes screwed tightly shut, and she whined in shame.
To her surprise, the next thing she felt was Gideon’s mouth, soft now rather than hungry, pressing a kiss to her clavicle.
“You’re alright, sweetheart. I’ve got you,” she said. “Can you stand?”
Harrow nodded weakly, and Gideon peeled her away from the wall to set her feet back on the floor, her arm not moving from around Harrow’s waist. Her legs shook, but they held her up.
“Let’s get you to bed,” said Gideon, and Harrow nodded again, allowing Gideon to guide her towards the grey-sheeted bed in the centre of the room. Before she could collapse onto it, Gideon reached for the shoulders of her outer robe.
“Can I take this off?”
Harrow held out her arms in reply, letting Gideon slide the robe off her. Then Gideon hesitated, her voice low and cracked when she continued,
“And this?” She tugged at Harrow’s shirt, and Harrow raised her arms above her head, shivering as Gideon’s strong hands skimmed up her sides. Naked from the waist up, Harrow was surprised to discover that she barely felt ashamed; how could she, with Gideon’s eyes blown black, staring at Harrow as though she was a visiting angel.
Feeling braver than she ever had in her life, Harrow hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her trousers, and dropped them to the floor. She stepped out of the pool of black fabric in nothing but her underwear, heart hammering. Gideon was frozen before her—all previous confidence apparently disintegrated in the face of Harrow’s nakedness—so Harrow reached out to take her by the wrist.
She guided Gideon’s hand between her thighs, to where the material of her black underwear was heavy and wet. Gideon gave a choked little gasp, and Harrow pulled the crotch aside so Gideon’s strong fingers could part her lips; they groaned in tandem when Gideon’s hand met Harrow’s soaked and scorching flesh.
“You did this to me,” Harrow breathed, pressing herself forward, her sensitive nipples brushing against the coarse fabric of Gideon’s shirt. “Now, and every time you’ve fought me since I was fifteen.”
That seemed to turn something on (pun, regrettably, intended) within Gideon, and Harrow found her feet once again swept out from beneath her. This time, though, her back met the softness of the bed, and Gideon was crawling up her body, leaving featherlight kisses in her wake. Harrow shivered at the sensation of soft lips on her exposed skin, and she mewled as Gideon found her nipples with her mouth again.
Gideon was whispering something into Harrow’s skin, but she couldn’t quite hear the words. It was distracting. Grabbing a fistful of soft red curls, Harrow tugged Gideon’s face up to kiss her again. She couldn’t imagine ever getting bored of the taste of Gideon’s mouth, the soft pressure of her lips and the hot lick of her tongue.
With what seemed like considerable effort, Gideon tore her mouth away from Harrow’s (if Harrow whined at the loss, no she didn’t). Her face was flushed and her lips shiny as she said,
“Um—I just wanted to—uh—I love you, too.”
Despite the worship that Gideon had been kissing into Harrow’s skin, the admission still shocked her. Gideon couldn’t love Harrow, not the way Harrow loved her. Not that same relentless itch for her touch, for the sight of her uneven smile, for the sounds of her voice and her horrible, awful jokes. Harrow was hardly worth Gideon’s attention, let alone her love.
Gideon’s eyes were so wide, her expression so vulnerable, that all Harrow’s objections stuck in her throat. Despite the old urge to drive something sharp into Gideon’s exposed underbelly, Harrow found that her refusal stuck in her throat.
“Shut up,” she said instead, unable to keep the smile from her face.
Gideon’s answering grin was blinding, and the next kiss that landed on Harrow’s lips was inelegant with joy. She sighed into it, and let Gideon get back to work.
Palamedes: 83 days after
It didn’t feel like a victory. Usually, when Palamedes dragged himself out of the meeting room with a dehydration-tension migraine, his back and neck in open revolt, his stomach growling from lack of attention, it was with the satisfied exhaustion of an argument well won. Today, he only had the beginnings of pain behind his left eye, but his step was heavy with loss.
It had taken the Oversight Body a surprisingly short amount of time to reach an agreement: if the Emperor of the Nine Houses (the Kindly Prince of Death) was systematically hunting down the surviving Canaan House heirs and their cavaliers, uncaring how many of his own citizens became collateral damage, then their options were limited. There had been protests, of course, and valid ones. How were they to continue running the station without imperial support? What were the currently deployed Alexandrites, Epeids, and Nireids supposed to do; to where would they return? How were they to maintain acceptable levels of consanguinity without Cohort deployments? Palamedes didn’t have answers to those questions.
What he did have was the key code for the highest security archive, and his mother’s permission to view the material within. She had, of course, insisted on coming with them. He could have told her no, of course, but that would only have delayed matters, and—if Palamedes was being painfully, embarrassingly honest—he was not yet so old that he didn’t want his mother with him as they descended into the deepest, darkest, coolest corners of the Library. With every step came a fresh doubt: what if, despite his House’s best efforts, the records he needed had succumbed to age? What if the Break Clause involved horrors on part with Lyctorhood, and Palamedes found himself stuck between two unthinkable options? What if the Break Clause had never really existed at all, and it was all just an elaborate ploy by the Emperor to catch out any disloyal Master Wardens? He supposed that in that last scenario, it couldn’t make the situation significantly worse than it already was.
Every staircase seemed to go on forever, and then they would turn a corner and descend another, down and down and down until Palamedes felt lightheaded from it. Or perhaps it was the anxiety. It was immaterial. It seemed an age—and must have genuinely been at least forty minutes—before Juno laid a hand on his elbow, and he stopped in front of a nondescript door. It was so similar to all the other doors they had passed that Palamedes doubted—for a split second—his mother’s directions, before asking himself what it really was that he’d expected. Unlike the Ninth, the Sixth had never been given to melodrama, and knew better than to give any malicious party a clue as to the Clause’s whereabouts by surrounding it with pomp and circumstance.
Mercifully, neither Camilla nor Juno felt it was necessary to comment upon their arrival, nor on the enormity of what they were now facing. As if this were any other door, on any other day, Palamedes punched in the code, and waited with bated breath as the first set of doors slid slowly open, revealing a tiny, bare chamber. This was standard fitting for archives that held truly ancient and important artefacts, but that didn’t make the atmosphere stabilisation process any more pleasant. As soon as the doors closed behind them, the moisture was sucked from the air, and the temperature around them dropped dramatically enough that Palamedes couldn't hold back a full body shudder. Camilla frowned at him, frustrated that neither of them had thought to bring him a coat.
Thankfully, it didn’t take long for the atmosphere to stabilise, and the light above the door in front of them flicked from red to green. Palamedes didn’t hesitate to press the release—if he stopped, if he thought about the implications of his actions for more than a few seconds at a time, he might stop dead in his tracks and never move again—and the door hissed open.
Palamedes didn’t know what he expected from the archive they stepped into, but it certainly wasn’t a small, barely lit room with a single table in the centre. On the table were two items: an unadorned black box and a slightly battered tape recorder. Briefly, Palamedes wondered if he was being pranked. He looked to his right, to see that Camilla’s face was covered in a blank expression of surprise, and he didn’t need to look at his mother to know that she was practically vibrating with excitement. Juno loved nothing more than a puzzle, no matter the implications of its solving.
A cursory examination of the box—first by Camilla, then Palamedes, then Juno—revealed that there was no visible way to open it, only a keypad on the side showing the numbers zero to nine. They left it in place, hoping that the contents of the tape recorder would shed some light on its meaning. The device was so old that Palamedes was afraid to touch it, for fear that it would crumble in his hand, and all his hopes along with it. He hesitated only for a second, but it was enough for Camilla to brush the back of her hand against his thigh, a reminder of her solid presence, and Palamedes took a deep breath before reaching forward to press play.
The tape recorder whirred and clunked, and then a voice—clipped, authoritative, and lightly accented in a way Palamedes did not recognise—began to speak.
Hello. Is this on? Yes? Alright. I’m going to try not to say anything terrible and cliché like, “if you’re listening to this, I’m dead,” or, “I can only hope this tape has landed in the right people’s hands”, but both of those statements do apply to this situation. If you are listening to this, then I am indeed dead. Don’t be sad about that, whoever you are, I’ve lived long enough already.
My name is Cassiopeia Shodash, Lyctor and Founder of the Sixth House. It is my hope that I am addressing a future Warden of that house: one who has taken to heart our motto. I do not know which truth it is that has sent you to me, but any one of so many might be reason enough.
The Break Clause is not something I engineered lightly, and nor should it be executed so. Whatever your reasoning, know that the moment you begin this, you will become a traitor to the Empire. Though, if you’re listening to this in the first place, that shouldn’t bother you too much.
I should warn you that this is not a quick solution—if you are looking to get the hell out of dodge in the next few hours then I cannot help you; it is too late. However, if you haven’t left the fate of your House to the last minute, like a first year Aspirant with a formative, then listen carefully.
Palamedes listened with all his might as the captured voice of Cassiopeia listed out coordinates, passcodes, and theorems that ought to have been impossible. He could hear the scratch of Camilla’s pencil as she diligently noted down every word, and if this wasn’t so world-endingly important, he would have spent a good many minutes studying the little furrow of her brow and the graceful movements of her fingers.
And with that, I leave you, said the long-dead Lyctor of the Sixth. Good luck, and don’t fuck it up.
The tape recorder whirred, clicked, and fell silent.
Camilla: 84 days after
Camilla had not slept that night. How could she, when such a task stood ahead of them all? There was a sense of unreality to their packing, to loading their belongings into the shuttle, that felt reminiscent of hers and Palamedes’s initial preparations to depart for Canaan House. They had known then, too, that this might be a journey from which they would never return.
The initial stages of the plan sounded simple enough. They would take the black box they had found alongside Cassiopeia’s recording, put it in the shuttle, drive the shuttle out to the stated coordinates, enter the given code into the box, and wait for someone to make contact. After that, things were going to get a lot more difficult, but Camilla had decided to cross that bridge when they came to it. There was no use in planning for every one of the hundred possibilities that came after, as much as she longed to do just that.
With Harrow and Gideon already loaded into the shuttle—looking suspiciously serene, considering the circumstances—Camilla could feel her leg bouncing as Palamedes gave final orders to his mother and a few other members of the Oversight Body.
It was an awful, unmoored feeling, to be on such high alert while simultaneously seeing the world through a haze of exhaustion and unreality. She barely even registered Kiana and her fathers folding her into hugs before Palamedes touched her arm—sending a shock of static through her numb limbs—to draw her away and into the shuttle.
Had she checked this shuttle? Yes. Yes, she’d finished her final once-over early that morning, before the others were awake. Everything was in place. Everything was ready—or, as ready as it could be. Camilla took a deep, steadying breath as she followed her necromancer onto the shuttle, not risking a final look back as the door slid shut behind them.
“You ready?” he asked, softly.
“Are you?” she replied. The small, wry smile he gave her in return made her heart ache. It was the kind of intimacy he had avoided in the past few days; it was an attempt at kindness, and Camilla hated herself for making him think it was necessary.
Harrow and Gideon were waiting for them in the cockpit, standing guard by the black box they had brought up from Cassiopeia’s archive.
“Ready?” Harrow asked. It was a very different question than the one Palamedes had asked Camilla only a few moments ago, and it begged a different answer.
“As ready as we’ll ever be,” said Palamedes, with a thin attempt at cheer.
With the coordinates already programmed into the shuttle, there was distressingly little to do once they had received the okay for take off and initiated the auto-pilot. Camilla did not want to watch the Sixth grow smaller and smaller behind them, and so she kept her gaze fixed outwards, facing their uncertain future head on. The others seemed to agree, and for the next few hours there was very little conversation.
So quiet was the shuttle, in fact, that Camilla found herself beginning to slip, unwilling, into sleep. It would be hours more until they reached the set coordinates, and once they cleared the Dominicus system, Camilla felt a strange wash of calm come over her. It would be short lived, she knew, but she might as well make the most of it: she would need to be alert for whatever awaited them when they reached their first destination.
As the word grew fuzzy around her, and her head began to droop, Camilla imagined the sensation of a warm arm coming around her, her head barely pillowed on a skinny thigh, the smell of ink and soap.
When she woke, it was to quiet voices.
“Just a quick one.”
“They are right over there.”
“They’re asleep, Harrow. I miss you.”
“I am right here.”
“You know what I mean.”
Camilla blinked awake to the sight of Harrow smiling indulgently up at her cavalier, who was playing with the hem of Harrow’s robe, their bodies close, foreheads almost touching.
“You’re incorrigible,” Harrow was saying.
“You love it.”
Rolling her eyes, Harrow tugged Gideon down to plant a quick but passionate kiss on her lips, and Camilla’s stomach turned. It was almost funny: that this whole debacle would end as it had begun, with Camilla feigning sleep because she was too paralysed by cowardice to do anything else.
She started at the sensation of long fingers combing gently through her hair.
“Warden,” she said. “You’re awake.”
“As are you.”
Gideon and Harrow both whipped around to look at them, wide-eyed and surprised at being caught out. Ignoring the stars that winked into her vision, and the temporary dizziness they brought with them, Camilla pushed herself to standing, ready for whatever her necromancer asked of her. She didn’t really want to fight Gideon—both for the sake of their current mission, and because Camilla did like her—but she would do it, if he asked her to. He wouldn’t, but that was not the point.
“Yes, Cam,” was all he said. “I think it’s time we found somewhere more comfortable to rest. Harrow and Gideon can keep an eye on things for a few more hours.”
Then he was chivvying her away and into one of the berths, closing the door behind them. Camilla stood in the tiny room, a little dumbstruck, waiting for—something. For anger? For tears? For an attempt at cheerful resignation, the same as when they’d received Dulcie’s refusal?
Instead of any of these, Palamedes took off his glasses, wiping them absently on his tunic.
“That was quick,” he said. “I hate to say it, but I wasn’t sure they had it in them.”
He gave her a conspiratorial little smile, as if this were a joke they had both been in on from the start, and Camilla.exe stopped working.
“You’re not upset,” she said. Stating the obvious was beneath her, as a rule, but he did her the courtesy of not pointing that out.
“Why should I be?” he said.
“You—the two of you—she’s your wife.” Even as she said it, it sounded ridiculous. Palamedes had, after all, been perfectly accepting—supportive, even—of Camilla and Dulcinea’s relationship. Camilla had merely been arrogant enough to believe that she was a special case, that they were one flesh and one end and so what did it matter if they loved the same woman? Sword marriages existed for a reason. Now she was faced with the reality that he was merely generous with his love, that he was just as willing to share Harrow with Gideon as he had been to share Dulcinea with her. Palamedes and Harrow did, after all, have conversations without her quite regularly; they might have discussed the possibility of Gideon before, and it wouldn’t have been any of Camilla’s business.
Camilla was pulled from the mortifying spiral of her realisation by Palamedes saying, flatly,
“Am I to assume that you believe I have feelings for Harrow?”
Flustered and embarrassed with her own stupidity, Camilla snapped,
“You never used to keep things from me.”
“I’m not keeping anything from you now,” said Palamedes.
“You never used to lie to me either.”
That brought him up short, and his mouth twitched. It was a rare sight: the Warden caught out.
“I—Camilla, it’s not what you think, I promise,” he said. “The night before the wedding Harrow told me—she told me the Ninth’s secrets because she felt it was deceitful to marry me, to tie me politically to her and to her House, when I was in ignorance. She specifically asked me not to tell you, because she couldn’t stand a single other soul to know. It’s been torture to keep it from you, but I couldn’t betray her confidence.”
“About her parents being beguiling corpses?” Camilla asked, and he nodded.
“Among other things.”
Camilla could only say,
“Oh.”
That particular assumption had been hasty, now that Camilla thought about it. Hurt by Palamedes’s locked door that night, assuming that he had chosen Harrow’s company over hers, her jealousy had made her stupid. Palamedes clearly agreed, because a triumphant little smile was beginning to tug at the edges of his mouth when he said,
“Is that the entire basis of your hypothesis, Scholar? A little weak, I must say.”
“No,” Camilla said, affronted. “You look after her.”
“Yes,” agreed Palamedes. “I fail to see why this has to equate to romantic interest.”
“You looked after Dulcinea.”
“I did, but I know you know better than to draw conclusions from such a limited sample size.” There was something like chastisement in his voice, and it was infuriating. “Besides,” he continued, “the manner in which I look after Harrowhark is markedly different, is it not? I encourage her to get some measure of sleep and remind her that her body requires food to function, because she’s my friend and I care about her. I only do for her what you have always done for me.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed nervously, as though the full meaning of his words only occurred to him now that it was too late, and they were hanging heavy in the air. He looked as though he was dreading her answer just as much as she was dreading to give it. Perhaps skirting around the subject would bring them both relief, even if just for a moment, but this whole affair had already resulted in too many misunderstandings between them.
It was going to hurt, but Camilla had always favoured a clean cut over a ragged graze.
“That does not affect my material point,” she said. For the first time in her life, she wanted to avoid his eyes, but she refused to have come this far only to flinch at the finish. She held his lovely grey gaze as a crinkle of disbelief appeared between his eyebrows, and she jutted out her chin, daring him to ignore the implication they both knew was there.
“Camilla,” was all he said, his voice low and hoarse.
“Palamedes.”
He closed the gap between them, taking her face impossibly gently into his hands. He ran his thumb tenderly over her cheekbone and she fell into his embrace. Wretched as she felt, it was too easy to allow him to hold her close, to feel his own familiar bones beneath her grip; she counted his ribs as her hands brushed down his back, clutching handfuls of his robe in her fist. He was shushing gently in her ear, raking her hair with his long fingers, and Camilla screwed up her face as she buried it against his neck, her nose falling into the hollow of his clavicle. She inhaled deeply, filling herself up with the scent of him. Another deep breath, filling right up until her lungs ached with it, was not enough. Camilla’s nose brushed up the line of his neck, leaving her space to open her mouth and taste the salt of his skin. Her teeth scraped the cords of his muscle and Palamedes shuddered beneath her.
Camilla froze, terrified and ashamed of her own awful, pathetic, consuming wanting. His hands were guiding her face up and away from his neck—how did he expect her to look him in the eye?—and her hands were still fisted in the back of his robes, her mouth still open and desperate.
She waited, eyes still screwed shut like a coward, but he said nothing. Then she felt the tension and weight of his body moving forward ever so slightly, until she felt his breath against her lips.
“Cam,” he whispered, and she knew what was coming, should never have expected any other result from this stupid, reckless confession. He already knew how she felt, and she knew he knew how she felt. What had been the point of dragging the truth back out, unwilling, into the light? Too wretched to pull away, she could only say,
“Don’t.”
“Why not?” He stepped back, dropping his hands immediately. She missed the cool of his skin against her burning cheeks.
“Don’t pity me,” she said. “Don’t feel—as though you are beholden to me.”
“I would never, darling.” His voice was so low and so earnest, and he probably really thought it was the truth. Camilla let out a low, wounded animal noise so embarrassing she had to pull him back to her so she could bury her face in his chest. His hand came to rest on the back of her head, fingers raking gently over the shaved hair at the base of her skull. “I only—I’ve been so unforgivably stupid, Cam. Can you ever forgive me?”
“Of course. Always,” she said, without thinking. She felt his relieved exhale against the side of her neck.
“I don’t deserve you. Just tell me what you want—whatever you want, dear one.”
It was absolutely the worst thing he could have said, and Camilla understood it entirely. Her own need to ensure his happiness was written into her bones, and she could read that equal and opposite need in him. Camilla had never really been afraid of rejection: since the first time his smile sent tingles down her spine, she had been terrified that if she asked it of him—asked him to kiss her, to touch her, to fuck her—he would do it without hesitation, just because she had asked it of him.
“Please don’t ask me that,” she said.
“Alright. Why?”
“Because I don’t want you to—to do anything just because I want it. I want you to do it because you want it, or don’t do it at all.”
He frowned at that, and Camilla tensed in readiness for him to pull away. He didn’t pull away, though; raising a hand to her face, he skimmed the arch of her orbital ridge, the line of her cheek bone, the curve of her lower lip.
“I want,” he said, his voice low and impossibly earnest. “I have wanted. I am wanting.”
His gaze flickered down to her lips, and his grip on her tightened, as if he were holding himself back from—it was impossible that Camilla had really been that wrong. Confused and panic-stricken, all she could say was,
“You’re conjugating.”
He smiled, then, the kind of smile that started as a wicked twinkle in his grey eyes, that Camilla knew preceded an absolutely terrible joke.
“Yes, I would like to,” he said. It was such a ridiculous thing to say, ridiculous and earnest and—she realised in a heady, stomach-flipping rush—true, that Camilla grinned despite herself.
“Insufferable, Warden.”
It was impossible, then, not to kiss him. Her heart thundered—louder than it ever had in the training room—as sensation washed over her. His hands were trembling where they held her jaw and her waist, his lips warm against her own, and the thrill of it, the joy of it, seized her limbs so entirely that for a long moment she could only hover on her tiptoes, lips pressed gently against his, her fingers digging into the negligible meat of his upper arms.
When they broke away, it was only because they were both smiling too irrepressibly to continue. His smile had always been one of her favourite things about him—along with the gentleness of his hands and his bad jokes and the colour of his eyes—and she always wanted to look at him, but right then he was—
“So beautiful,” he said, cradling her face in his hands as though she were made of glass. He pressed a soft kiss to her left cheekbone, then her forehead, then the tip of her nose. “God, Cam. I should have told you every day.”
Camilla did not know how to respond to that. He’d never been shy with his compliments, especially towards her, but they had always been easy, matter of fact. His voice had never trembled, he had never held her with such reverence, and Camilla was half-convinced she must be dreaming; any second now she would wake up cold and aching in the desk chair in the Warden’s quarters, have a discreet cry, and then get on with her day.
Then again, if she was dreaming, she might as well make the most of it.
Her hand slid up from his arms to his neck, and he inclined his head to meet her—as he always did—halfway. This time, their joy was tinged with desperation, and she felt him whine against her lips until she opened them to run her tongue lightly along the seam of his mouth. She felt him shudder at that, and a sharp thrill went through her from the tips of her fingers to her core; she fisted her hand in the curls on the back of his head.
It was a surprise, but not an unwelcome one, when his arms tightened around her waist, pulling her against him with more strength than she’d ever given him credit for. Sure, she could still get away with ease if she wanted to, but she didn’t. If anything, she wanted to be closer, and she stepped forward, slipping one of her knees between his.
His hands on her body were hardly tentative, but they were not enough, not hard enough, not close enough. With a huff of impatience, Camilla took his wrist in one hand (gently, so as not to crack his little bird bones) and untucked her shirt with the other, shoving his hand unceremoniously beneath the fabric to find the warmth of her skin. His hand wrapped around the side of her ribcage, and she shuddered pleasantly at the sensation of skin against skin, but it wasn’t enough. She nudged him further up, until his fingers brushed the material of her sports bra. She felt the hesitation in his touch, and broke their kiss only far enough to whisper,
“Please, Warden—Palamedes, please.”
He looked up at her, dazed.
“Cam,” was all he could gasp out. It sent a hot, triumphant shiver through her body, and she pushed him back so that his knees buckled as they hit the edge of the tiny bunk and he sat down heavily, never taking his eyes off her. Camilla stripped off her shirt before she settled into his lap, and Palamedes’s hands gripped her hips as she ground purposefully against him, shuddering at the sensation of him hardening beneath her.
“Cam,” he gasped again. “We have to—” he kissed the newly exposed skin at the junction of her shoulder and neck, “—we have to stop.”
Camilla froze.
“No—no, darling, that’s not what I mean.” He dropped another kiss onto her shoulder, and Camilla relaxed fractionally. “I only meant that I want—I want to take my time with you. I want a proper bed and the time it takes to kiss every inch of you. You deserve that. I want to study all the ways you fall apart.”
“Oh yeah?” said Camilla, breathless. “Will there be notes?”
“There will be theses,” he promised. “There will be tomes.”
Camilla desperately wanted to indulge him; she wanted to put her shirt back on and climb fully clothed back into his lap, relishing his closeness and the strange euphoria of knowing they belonged so completely to each other. Instead, she asked,
“And when will you write them?”
He blinked up at her for a few moments before her meaning dawned, and he frowned.
“Oh. Yes, I suppose—”
“I suppose,” she said, “that we will have to make the most of now, won’t we?”
She smiled down at him, not wanting to waste the joy that still bubbled happily in her stomach. This would not be a goodbye, only a first, fleeting taste of what was to come. Leaning down, she kissed him softly, and felt him smile against her lips. It wasn’t long before her hands were tight in his hair again, her mouth open for his tongue, and she could feel the pressure of his fingertips making little round bruises on her hips.
When he pulled away, it was to say,
“You’re right—darling girl—you’re always right.”
Gideon: 84 days after
When the comms buzzed to life, Gideon really considered not answering. It wasn’t that she was afraid of the vast unknown, of what she would be stepping blindly into when she picked up the comms radio and confirmed that they were the scouting party from the Sixth. It was mostly that her mouth was currently attached to Harrow’s mouth, and she was reluctant to disengage.
Tragically, Harrow was more concerned with inter-planetary politics than Gideon, and pushed her (more gently than she had pushed Gideon in the past, but still not exactly carefully) away so she could scramble over to the comms radio. Once she got there, however, she only stared at the vibrating radio handset, seemingly frozen with the enormity of the moment. Gideon wished Cam was there; she would have answered it without a second thought, curt and businesslike. Cam was busy at the moment, though—sleeping, Gideon hoped—and so it was her job to be the Big Strong Cavalier, and pick up the comms radio.
“Yello,” she said, and Harrow glared at her. She booped Harrow’s nose. Harrow glared harder.
“Identify yourselves, over,” came the barked command, fuzzy and indistinct through the hardware.
“Uh—this is Gideon Nav, cavalier primary of the Ninth,” said Gideon. “I’m here with Harrowhark Nonegesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth, Palamedes Sextus, Master Warden of the Sixth, and Camilla Hect, cavalier primary of the Sixth. Who are you?”
“What is your purpose in identifying us? Over,” asked the voice, which Gideon thought was pretty rude. Before she could tell the voice as much, Harrow took over.
“The Master Warden has elected to initiate the Break Clause, on the basis that we can longer put our trust in the Emperor. We have come to this location under the advice of Source Gram.”
There was a short pause before the voice said,
“This is Wing Commander We Suffer And We Suffer, Ctesiphon Wing, Blood of Eden. Stay where you are, we’re coming to get you. Over.”
“Message received and understood,” said Harrow. “Um, over.”
The line went dead, and neither Gideon nor Harrow could do much beyond stare at the now-silent radio.
“Did they say Blood of Eden?” Gideon said eventually, and Harrow nodded.
“That’s what I heard.”
“Oh, okay,” said Gideon. Then, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I suppose,” said Harrow, darkly, “we’re about to find out.”
Gideon supposed they were.
“We should probably tell the Sixth.”
Harrow said nothing in response, but turned and made towards the cabins at the back of the shuttle, which Gideon took for agreement. Out of habit (and absolutely not because she just wanted to stay close to Harrow, even now) Gideon followed her.
The shuttle was small enough that by the time Gideon caught up to Harrow, she had already opened the door of the berth, and was standing, horrified, on the threshold.
“What’s—holy shit!”
Gideon would be lying if she claimed she wasn’t interested in knowing what Camilla’s tits looked like, but this was not the ideal context for such a revelation. Luckily for both of them, Camilla was already in the midst of shoving her shirt back over her torso as she scrambled out of Palamedes’s lap. For his part, her necromancer only looked dazed and vaguely disappointed that he no longer had a lapful of Camilla.
In an effort to cheer him up, Gideon proffered her fist. Second Lieutenant Troilus Chiteron had been very into fistbumps, and once Gideon learned what they were, she realised she had nineteen long, stupid, fistbumpless years to make up for and set about attempting to make that right.
“Nice work, Sex Pal,” she said, grinning. “Bump it.”
Palamedes looked at the fist as though it was interesting but potentially venomous fauna.
“Why?” he asked.
“Tits,” said Gideon.
Gideon hadn’t thought that anyone possessed a more threatening stare than Harrow, but she (like many idiots before her) had not reckoned on Camilla Hect.
“Warden,” she said, “do not engage.”
Unfortunately for Camilla, the clear threat in her voice was undercut quite severely by her still-rumpled appearance. Slowly, with the air of a cat knocking a priceless heirloom onto the floor, Palamedes raised his fist and bumped it against Gideon’s own.
“I’m breaking up with you,” said Camilla.
Palamedes was entirely unfazed by this. He looked back over his shoulder at her, crinkles at the corners of his clear grey eyes, and smiled a soft, small smile that would have been disgusting if Gideon weren’t so damn happy for them both.
“Sure, Jan,” he said.
She met his gaze with unbearable warmth—it looked as though she was trying incredibly hard not to smile. Having never seen Camilla Hect in less than total control of her facial expressions, even when plastered, Gideon didn’t know if the display was heartwarming or vaguely nauseating.
Harrow was clearly unimpressed by the whole display, because she coughed pointedly.
“Heartbroken as I am by this development, husband dearest—”she began, and Palamedes grinned.
“You’ve just—Harrow, you’ve got a little something.” Palamedes gestured around his own mouth, and Gideon promptly realised that the lower half of Harrow’s face paint was smudged a faint grey in the few places it was still valiantly clinging to her skin. Gideon knew she had similar grey smudges on her own face, and expected that she’d ingested the rest.
“Oh,” said Harrow. It was adorable to see the bare lower parts of her face flush, the faintest hint of a lovely little smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Yes. Well. I was only going to say that someone made contact.”
Both Palamedes and Camilla sat up to attention at that.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Palamedes asked, straightening his comically askew glasses. Camilla was tucking her shirt hurriedly back into her trousers, glaring at them as she did so.
“Why do you think we barged in here?” Gideon countered, and Palamedes flushed.
“Right. Yes. Do they have an ETA?”
“No,” said Harrow. “Apologies, I didn’t think to ask. They only told us to stay put.”
“Well, that’s easy enough,” said Palamedes. “Though one of you really ought to stay by the radio in case they call back.”
“Why don’t you wait by the radio?” Gideon said, just to be contrary (and because she felt a bit stupid for not thinking of that).
“I would be happy to do so,” said Palamedes evenly, “if you would just—give me a minute.”
His gaze dropped, momentarily, to his pointedly crossed legs, and Gideon felt her face heat up.
“Yep!” she said. “Absolutely. Come on, Harrow, let’s leave them to it. See you both in a second, don’t jump each other again while we’re gone—”
“Nav,” said Camilla.
“Bye!”
Gideon had trouble keeping the grin from her face as she and Harrow made their way back to the comms radio. Sure, perhaps they were all about to die, but at least everyone got to touch the boobs they really wanted to touch before the end.
It wasn’t long before they were joined by Palamedes and Camilla, who were looking slightly flustered and absolutely mortified, respectively.
“Do not,” said Camilla, taking a seat. Palamedes did not hesitate before planting himself squarely in her lap, which was equal parts gross and adorable.
Gideon grinned, resting her chin in her hands and fluttering her eyelashes in a manner she desperately hoped was endearing.
“But I want all the details! Who confessed?”
“You first,” said Palamedes, looking from Gideon to Harrow with an indulgent little smile.
Harrow huffed.
“Gideon was under the impression that you and I were…” she scowled, which seemed to get the message across, because Palamedes exclaimed,
“A distressingly popular opinion! Camilla thought the same.”
“You two are married,” Gideon pointed out, but Palamedes only waved a hand imperiously at her.
“Immaterial,” he said. “I know why Cam thought that, but why did you?”
Gideon grinned.
“Harrow, do you want to share with the class?”
The glare Harrow sent her way indicated pretty clearly that Harrow did not want to do this, but Gideon wasn’t going to back down. Eventually, Harrow rolled her pit black eyes and said,
“I may have said, when I came down to breakfast the morning after our wedding, that I was sore,” she admitted.
“Oh my god,” said Palamedes.
“And while I was of course referencing a sore neck and back from sleeping hunched over our books—”
“Oh my god,” said Palamedes.
“—it appears that everyone else in the room made other assumptions.”
There was a long pause, in which Palamedes took off his glasses, cleaned them on his sleeve, put them back on, took them back off, cleaned them again, and put them once more on his face.
“Oh my god,” he said, for a third time. “I’m a homewrecker.”
“Don’t be a drama queen,” said Camilla, but she was struggling not to smile. That was the second time in fifteen minutes that this had occurred, and Gideon was starting to think that finally getting groped by her necro had broken Cam’s brain on a fundamental level.
“I think we can all agree that no-one here is entirely blameless,” said Harrow. Gideon hated when she was right.
“Doesn’t stand us in good stead for this whole overthrowing the Empire thing, does it?” said Gideon. “Seeing as how we’re all idiots.”
“Only about each other, hopefully,” said Palamedes.
No-one could argue with that, and so they found themselves lapsing into a surprisingly comfortable silence. Palamedes’s fingers ran absently through Camilla’s hair, and Gideon rested her head on the questionable pillow of Harrow’s thigh. In a few minutes, or a few hours, or a few days (Gideon really should have asked for an ETA from Blood of Eden), they would once again be swept up into something immeasurably larger than themselves. Not one of them could say they knew they had made the right choice, or that they had even an inkling of what awaited them when the comms radio eventually crackled to life again. For her part, Gideon hoped that intergalactic politics would give them at least a few more moments to sit in that ancient shuttle and bask in the warmth of one another’s presence.
There was, at least, enough time for Harrow to repaint her face. Much as Gideon despised the feeling of the paint on her own skin, there was a strange wonder in being allowed to hold up the mirror for Harrow, watching the meticulous strokes of her brush. Harrow seemed to grow stronger with every inch of skin she covered, less like the trembling girl Gideon had held in her arms the previous night, and more like the imperious Reverend Daughter. Shockingly, Gideon found that she loved this hard, cold, painted Harrow just as much as she’d once hated her.
Across from them, Camilla had shifted Palamedes reluctantly out of her lap to begin secreting far too many knives about her person. Palamedes watched her do it with a smile that was only a little bit sad, and he caught Gideon’s eye to share it with her. She smiled back, and hoped he understood it as thanks. Together, they waited.
When the comms radio buzzed back to life a few hours later, it was far too soon.
“We’ve identified your shuttle,” came that static-riddled voice. “Moving in to dock you on our port side. Over.”
Almost as soon as the radio cut out, there was the rushing sound of a larger ship approaching, and the ominous deep rumbling of their shuttle fusing to its side. A tiny, cold hand gripped Gideon’s as the shuttle trembled around them. Gideon squeezed it, desperately hoping she didn’t look as terrified as she felt.
The radio buzzed again.
“Docking successful. Doors opening. Over.”
Looking over at Camilla, Gideon could see her own panic reflected in Camilla’s blank expression. Palamedes’s own hand in Camilla’s seemed not to be asking for comfort, but holding her back. Both of them stood, tense and ready as the light above the shuttle’s outer door flicked from red to green. It was Harrow who bridged the gap, slipping her hand into Palamedes’s free one, and he looked down, surprised, before a shaky smile made its way across his face.
They said nothing, grasping each others’ hands like lifelines as the door slid slowly open.