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]

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."

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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.

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"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.

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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."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon laces their fingers together and doesn't let go. There's a lump in her throat she can't quite swallow down; she nods and looks at Harrow's face and swears silently to herself that she won't be like Jeannemary, helpless as her necromancer died.

(She never agreed to Harrow's request. She's not sure she can.)

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow, as has been noted, has not been touched very often by anything but specters and hallucinations. Holding Moiraine's hand shattered her; Ingress's gentle concern consumed her. Gideon is--

(One flesh, one end.)

She doesn't want to let go of Gideon. She doesn't want to be disentangled from Gideon. She wants her molecules to be rendered down and be shown to be 50% Gideon Nav by volume. For now she will settle for holding hands and gluing herself to side of her cavalier, even if it makes the stairs difficult.

She disarms the wards with one hand, but once they are inside she has to let go. "I will get a towel and then you can shower." With her short hair and her robe absorbing water from the walk and her feverish active-necromancer body temperature, she is already closer to dry than Gideon. She really just needs to wash off the salt.

[we_do_bones]

Inside the room, Gideon lurks furtively at the door leading to the bathroom, absolutely against letting Harrow out of her sight for more than a few seconds. How she'll shower is anyone's guess – she considers leaving the door open even though it would mean stripping down to nothing in the sight of her ancient enemy turned...what.

Friend doesn't seem right. Gideon doesn't have the vocabulary to parse what Harrow is to her, so she doesn't try. All she needs to know is that it suddenly feels like her heart is walking around in Harrow's skinny, feverish body, and she doesn't want it back even a little, even at all.

In the end she showers in record time. She turns the hot water all the way up and when she exits, does so in an enveloping cloud of steam with wet hair and flushed, brilliant cheeks. She'd tugged some soft pants and and soft shirt on and she's barefoot. She feels absolutely haphazard and jittery, and she only really breathes again when she spots Harrow, exactly where she's supposed to be.

[we_bring_hell]

While Gideon is gone she strips out of her wet clothes and mops herself down with the towel, rescuing her journal and feeding the rest of the clothing into the chute provided for such things.

She wraps the towel around herself, uncomfortable being nude even alone in the room, and dives into the closet. She looks consideringly for longer than she can even believe at the baggy 'Chivalry is a Butch' t-shirt, but finally takes down one of her full-length black schoolmarm-style nightgowns.

When Gideon leaves the bathroom, she is at the rolltop desk, glaring at her naked face in the mirror of the makeup box and cleaning up the greasy remains of her skull paint with cold cream.

She beckons Gideon over, holding up the handtowel.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon beelines for the desk, grinning at the way Harrow is glaring at her own reflection. She can't get over Harrow's face: her delicate, aggressively prominent cheekbones, the straight slashes of her dark eyebrows, the angular heart that is the real face of the Reverend Daughter.

Harrow is always smaller than her; Harrow sitting down necessitates Gideon kneeling by her chair so she can look up at her adept.

[we_bring_hell]

She turns and puts a finger under Gideon's chin, turning her head from side to side. She dabs carefully with the cold cream, polishing off the streaks and edges of makeup. She notes the scattering of acne in the corner of her jaw, the hot bubbles of thalergy just under the skin blocking the pores, and kills the bacteria with a thought.

"Why don't you ever do the nice skulls, Griddle? Ninegad favored the Jawless Skull for good reason, but you have a good jaw for something prettier."