Gideon the Ninth, Chapter 31

[we_bring_hell]

Harrowhark stands in the hallway and watches the Third retreat, her brow furrowing a wrinkle into her paint. She has an uncomfortable feeling she's been underestimating Ianthe Tridentarius all along, and her head whirls with being suddenly hurled back into the unforgiving meatgrinder of House politics.

But the secret is out and she is vindicated; she did not kill Protesilaus Ebdoma, and Dulcinea Septimus is a liar.

She hears the unmistakable footsteps of Gideon Nav joining her, and forgets all that. She turns in a swish of black cloth and says, “Follow me.”

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[we_do_bones]

She can't – she can't hear this.

(She knows what it must be taking from Harrow to tell her, but she can't, she can't.)

She lets her feet come off the sandy bottom and exhales, letting herself sink. Fingers of water slide gently over her skin, through her hair. She exhales in a slow stream, only surfaces when her empty lungs are screaming. Her pulse explodes against her temples, her breath sounds like the shushing of the waves, and Harrowhark is still there.

"Gross," she says, dully. "Ew. Ick. The worst. What the fuck am I supposed to say to that?"

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"That's where I came from," she says. "That's how they got me. The supposed genius."

"They told me as soon as I could understood. I knew I had to be the best necromancer ever; that my parents had mortgaged our future to birth me. I had to find that future for myself. I am two hundred sons and daughters of my house; Wei Wuxian saw it the moment he set eyes on me. The sin seething under my skin."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon knows she's not processing this right – or maybe at all – but she's stuck on something else. "I don't get it," she mutters. "I mean, I get it, your mother and father decided to saddle you with the guilt trip of a thousand lifetimes – but why did they leave me?

"They murdered the rest of the House but decided to leave me off the list?"

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"They didn't," she says in a voice like a small creature dying. "You just... wouldn't die."

"They were terrified of you for the rest of their lives."

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"What?"

The world spins. If she hadn't been in water, she would have collapsed.

She remembers the way Pelleamena watched her, as if she was something nasty the Reverend Mother had stepped in, and refocuses the way it slid through and over her from contempt to dread. She thinks of the stentorious, short-changed breath when Priamhark saw her and breathes it again in horror instead of repugnance.

This was what she was to them. Their own worst nightmare, their own personal demon. One small kid who, to two adults, was a walking reminder of the day they had chosen to mortgage the future of their House.

"Do you think you're worth it?"

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow doesn't flinch. She wades closer. "If I become a Lyctor," she says. "If I live ten thousand years as the Emperor's right hand, and restore the Ninth to a glory it's never seen. If every House had to bow to us instead of salivating for our blood. If my life was a monument to the dead."

Her eyes seethe and burn, finding Gideon's. Looking into the darkness of Harrowhark Nonagesimus eyes is like looking through two windows into a pitch-black hell. "Of course it wouldn't be worth it," she snarls. "I'm an abomination. I'm a war crime. If the other Houses knew they would destroy us from orbit, and they'd be right.

"It is a necromantic sin beyond all sins, because--can you imagine the arms race? The people in there should spit on the ground where I walked." All the paint has rubbed off, and Harrowhark looks thin and haggard and no older than Jeannemary Chatur, her face a collection of points and angles and shadows.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon has nothing to say to this, so she just looks. She's never before seen Harrowhark's naked face, and was unprepared for how young her adept looks. In the darkness, her pointed face is nearly as stark as the paints she clings to, and her eyes are swallowing, terribly black.

[we_bring_hell]

"But if they hadn't..." she says. "I never could have entered the Tomb. Only a powerful necromancer could breach the door. Only the perfect necromancer could make it to the center. To the sepulcher."

"Moiraine Sedai says there are people born for a reason, because the time has come. My parents didn't make me to open the Tomb but no one else could have done it. She was waiting for me."

[we_do_bones]

"What the fuck," says Gideon slowly, all over goosebumps despite the warm water and warm breeze, "happened to praying that the tomb be shut forever and the rock never be rolled away?"

She remembers that day. She'd run – sprinted! – to Pelleamena and Priamhark to tell them what Harrow had done. To get her in trouble.

She'd never imagined that Harrow had been able to do more than unlock it. "Why?"

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow swallows. "I was tired of being two hundred corpses. I was old enough to begin to understand why... why my parents wouldn't touch me. Wouldn't look at me. The sin I represented to them. The impossibility of my task."

"The Locked Tomb is meant to house the one true enemy of the King Undying, Nav, something older than time, the cost of the Resurrection; the beast that he defeated once but can't defeat twice. The abyss of the First. The death of the Lord. He left the grave with us for our safekeeping, and he trusted the ones who built the tomb a myriad ago to wall themselves up with the corpse and die there. But we didn't. We stayed to guard it."

"That's why my parents thought it was worth it. I decided if I looked at it and it wasn't, I'd go up to the top of the bore and walk out into the dust until my oxygen ran out."

[we_do_bones]

"But you didn't," says Gideon, dizzy with too many revelations. "You came back, and I'd... I’d told the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father what I’d seen you do."

Her throat feels too thick to speak, but she hauls it out anyhow. "I wanted you to get in trouble, but I... I killed your parents."

[we_bring_hell]

She knew about this; Wei Wuxian heard it. She puts her hand on Gideon's shoulder. "No," she says firmly. "My parents killed my parents. I should know. I was there."

"They were frightened and ashamed. They thought I had betrayed God. That it was for nothing. It wasn't-our-fault."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon stares at her, barely registering the hand on her shoulder. "But you hated me," she protests. "You always did but after that, I thought it was because you blamed me. You hated me for killing your parents and I deserved it."

[we_bring_hell]

"For a time," she admits. "And later I hated you for trying to run away. For being alive and reminding me of everyone who wasn't."

"But mostly I hated you because of what you saw. You saw them dead. And me alive. After all my planning..."

"They were very kind to me. They helped me tie the noose. But I couldn't... I couldn't do one thing right." She bows her head; closes her eyes. "I entered the tomb. I turned aside from the only honorable way out. And now I can't solve this mystery, or the secrets of Canaan House, or... or have a cavalier who doesn't hate me. I'm supposed to be a genius but I've failed at everything, Gideon."

"You're not the only one who couldn't die," she says with a bitter wryness.

[we_do_bones]

"Harrow..."

Her voice catches. She stares at her adept in mixed sorrow and wonder and finds within herself a well of sympathy burrowing deeper than the darkest and dankest levels of Drearburh.

"Harrow, I'm sorry." As it had before, memory provides new context: Harrow, bored and spiteful becomes Harrow, saddled with an impossible guilt. Harrow hating her for merely existing becomes Harrow hating herself and lashing out at Gideon as the only alternative. Harrow, imperious and aloof, becomes Harrow, tormented and alone. "I'm so sorry."

[we_bring_hell]

For a moment all Harrow hears is static. This is impossible. Impossible.

Her head snaps up, moonlight in her eyes, wide and wild. Her bony fists knot in Gideon's shirt and shake her with shocking force, churning the water around them.

"You apologise to me?" she bellows. "You apologise to me now? You say that you're sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You were my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second's goddamned thought! I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren't dead, all because—I regretted I wasn't! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re sorry?"

There are flecks of spittle on Harrowhark's lips. She retches for air.

"I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot--I brought you to the killing field of the First as my slave--you refuse to die, and you pity me!" She shakes her head. "Strike me down. You’ve won. I've lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand."

Her voice is hoarse and barely audible above the surf: "You are my only friend. I am undone without you."

Do it. Do it. End it.

If she's going to die--and she's increasingly sure they will die in Canaan House--let it be like this.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon braces her shoulders against the weight of what she's about to do, sheds eighteen years of living in the dark with a bunch of bad nuns. In the end it's surprisingly easy: she wraps her arms around Harrow Nonagesimus and holds her long and hard, like a scream, and doesn't let her go even when Harrow begins to struggle, apparently realizing she is not being ritually drowned, but hugged.

They wind up half-huddled in the wavelets near the shore: even soaked through, Harrow feels as insubstantial as a breath in Gideon's arms. She pulls Harrow's head up off her shoulder and studies this face she's never really seen before: her point-boned, hateful little face, her woeful black brows, the bloodless bow of her lips. She examines the disdainful set of Harrow's jaw, the panic in her starless eyes. And she presses her mouth to the place just above the clean line of Harrow's nose.

"Too many words," she says, confidentially, a little rough, a little shaky. "How about these: One flesh, one end, bitch."

Before Harrow can respond, or pull away, Gideon's hand is at her chin, tipping her face up. "Say it, loser."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow swallows.

"One flesh--one end," she says fumblingly, and can say no more, burying her face in Gideon's chest.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon lets her face go and wraps her arms around Harrow's shoulders, and holds her, and holds her, and holds her.







After long moments of silence, with nothing but Harrow's pulse beating beneath Gideon's hands like a trapped bird and the shush... shush... of the waves, Gideon bends her head and says low and giddy, on the breath of a laugh and directly into the shell of Harrow's ear:

"You're a fucking liar, Nonagesimus. Every goddamned person at this Bar is your friend."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow snorts. It's not quite a laugh, but it's the closest Harrow's ever come around Gideon; the closest she's come in years.

"Despite my best efforts, it appears so."

She shows no intention of letting go of her cavalier. "But you were all I had for many, many years."








"Do you forgive me, Nav? You are the only one who could. The only confessor I could have." She sounds tentative and skittish.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon nods. They were each all the other had; she'd spent her life craving Harrow's attention and hating it in equal measure.

She can't seem to stop touching Harrow now that she's started; she runs a thumb carefully along the slash of one black eyebrow, smoothes out a wrinkle in Harrow's wet shirt.

"Harrow..." she says. Sighs. "Your parents are criminals. That doesn't make you a crime. And you and me..."

She's never wished more fervently to be better with words, sharply aware that what she says here, incredibly, will affect Harrow in ways she never could have predicted.

Are there words to say forgiving you would be like forgiving my right hand? If there are, she can't find them: she sighs again and shakes her head. Thinks about their years of strife, how Harrow kept her in the dark; her outburst to Wei Wuxian, her confession to Palamedes, every fantasy of revenge she'd ever harbored.

"Yeah, Harrow: I forgive you."

[we_bring_hell]

She buries her face in Gideon's shirt again.

(Forgiveness. Can you imagine?)

It feels impossible. Unreal. Staggering.

"Gideon," she says quietly.

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Gideon shudders a little and her arms tighten; she can count the number of times Harrow's used her actual name on one hand.

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"Gideon, promise me something," she whispers.

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Gideon wipes a thumb over her temple, tidies away a stringy lock of shadow-coloured hair, fusses with the collar of Harrow's shirt.

"I thought that this was all about me getting a bunch of concessions and you groveling," she says, "but you called me Gideon, so shoot."