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.”

Comments

[we_do_bones]

"But – then –"

If not Harrow, trying to off Gideon finally and spectacularly, then who?

[we_bring_hell]

"Crux," she says, in a voice like a weary sigh.

Crux was the only person who took care of Harrow after her parents decided to exit existence; yet Harrow knows perfectly well he was beastly to literally every other person on the Ninth.

"He meant it for Ortus, not you. Ninegad and I were perfectly agreed that he had no business going to Canaan House, but Crux..."

Crux, who had sold his soul with the rest of them but was the only who didn't direct his guilt onto the child they created; who instead created a monument to service where his conscience should be and washed his hands of it.

"He could never bear any sign of disloyalty."

[we_do_bones]

So that was it. The rotten old seneschal with his implacable fury and grasping devotion to his House had sent Sister Glaurica's ghost screaming back to the Eighth, and now Silas Octakiseron knew too much.

She doesn't say so. If Harrow heard what Silas had told Gideon, she'd be straight through the door in her nightdress with a sack of emergency bones and a very focused expression. “What a dope,” Gideon says instead. “I was never loyal a day in my life and I still saw you in the raw.”

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow exhales.

Gideon's arm is draped across her like a safety belt on a shuttle, Harrow's hands clasped loosely around the wrist, the powerful hand flat against her stomach, unbelievable in its span.

On the whole, it is not necessarily any less... disturbing... than facing the other way.

"Go to sleep, Gideon," Harrow says in a slightly strangled voice.

[we_do_bones]

Likely to her adept's surprise...

Gideon does.




And for once, she doesn't dream of anything.

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow takes longer to get to sleep, but eventually her mind and body quiet enough to let her go.

She has the same dream she always has.

I dreamt that I was perched atop a throne of human skulls
On a cliff above the ocean, howling wind and shrieking seagulls
And the dream went on forever, one single static frame

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.