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_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.

[we_do_bones]

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

[we_bring_hell]

"Gideon, promise me something," she whispers.

[we_do_bones]

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."

[we_bring_hell]

"In the event of my death," she says. "Gideon, if something ever does get the better of me, I ask you to make sure you survive."

"I need you to go back to the Ninth House and protect the Tomb. If I die, don't let your duty die with me."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon sits back a little, forcing a wave to lap up against their arms.

It is stupid for a cavalier to watch their necromancer die.

"That is such a dick move," she says, reproachful. "What the hell is in there, that you'd ask that of me?"

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow lets go, aware of the cruelty of what she's asking; wraps her arms around herself. She's gone years without a hug, but now that it's over, she grips her own elbows and huddles in the memory, eyes closing behind thick, ridiculously beautiful lashes.


"I know," she whispers. "I know."





"Beyond the doors there’s just the rock. The rock and the tomb surrounded by water. I won’t bore you with the magic or the locks, or the wards or the barriers: just know that it took me a year to walk six steps inside, and that it nearly killed me then."

"There's a blood ward bypass on the doors which will only respond for the Necromancer Divine, but I knew there had to be an exploit, a way through for the true and devout tomb-keeper. I knew in the end it had to open for me. The water's salt, and it's deep, and it moves with a tide that shouldn't exist."

The tide rocks them back and forth, and she feels time accordion around her.

"The sepulchre itself is small, and the tomb..." She opens her eyes and looks up into Gideon's face. Her smile transforms her face into an affliction of beauty.

"The tomb is stone and ice, Nav, ice that never melts and stone that’s even colder, and inside, in the dark, there’s a girl. The corpse of a girl."

"They packed her in ice--she’s frozen solid--and they laid a sword on her breast. Her hands are wrapped around the blade. There are chains around her wrists, coming out of her grave, and they go down into holes by each side of the tomb, and there are chains on her ankles that do the same, and there are chains around her throat..."

Her voice is dreamy; she remembers the twang in the library that swore to love her, the forgiveness of her cavalier, the two moments blurring together. "Nav, when I saw her face I decided I wanted to live. I decided to live forever just in case she ever woke up."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon had reached for Harrow's jaw when she moved away; now, as Harrow's features light like a dying star, she gently takes her hands away. Her adept isn't seeing her, she's seeing a frozen corpse in her memory, and it has transformed her. She's exquisitely, painfully lovely in a way Gideon has heretofore managed to ignore.

She slips back into the water and floats, eyes beginning to sting a little from the salt, and doesn't ask anything else for a long time.

Do you consider yourself a real cavalier?
I'm the one she has.

After a long while, they've drifted to the sand, and she reaches to take Harrow's hand in hers. Her brain moves and breaks upon itself like the wavelets lapping this impossible shore, discarding and then accepting, a final conclusion. It makes something sink in her chest, but she ignores it, closes the gap between them a little, until she can see tiny droplets run down the column of Harrow’s neck and slide beneath her sodden collar.

“One last question for you, Reverend Daughter,” she says.

[we_bring_hell]

As the tide bears them to the shore, she grounds slowly away from her memory, back to her body, to the present, to Gideon.

"Yes?"

[we_do_bones]

Gideon leans in.

“Do you really have the hots for some chilly weirdo in a coffin?”

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow freezes.

A skeleton--abandoned after the consecration ritual and forgotten until now--lurches out of the surf and clotheslines Gideon into the water.

By the time her cavalier has recovered, Harrow is already fastening her robe over her wet clothes.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon splutters and splashes and trips the skeleton into the waves before grabbing her sword belt to buckle back around her hips. Her makeup has all washed off – she looks very like the Gideon Nav who tried to escape for the eighty-seventh time only a few short months ago, except for how she's unwilling to allow more than a few feet between herself and her adept.

"Did your mom's rule have anything against getting some dry clothes after?" she asks, shivering a little. The breeze isn't especially cold, but they're both absolutely soaked through.

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow seizes Gideon's hand; it is hot and bony and fragile, like holding a small bird or rodent. "There is a back door I found that leads directly to the rooms."

That sounds like Harrowhark; drawing maps and finding doors. But the face looks nothing like her, paintless and young and sharp-edged. The little bow at the top of her lips you can't normally see; the heat in her parchment cheeks.

"You can have the first shower."