Ianthe pushed away her empty soup bowl and sat up, looking at you, stolen eyes narrowing with a sudden spurt of inspiration. Her paste-blond hair fell lankly over a face that should have been beautiful and over shoulders that should have been exquisite, but only contributed to the general impression of a wax figure in a pink dolly dress. You had never been given the option to play with dolls, but given hindsight you could not see yourself ever volunteering to have done so.

“But you might do it,” she said, softly. You saw her looking at the necklet of bone that peeked out from the collar of your shirt, the top of your homebrew exoskeleton. “You could do it, Harrowhark. And maybe I’d even let you, seeing as we’re comrades-in-arms. Seeing as we’re intimates.”

You stood up, more than a little repulsed, and your exoskeleton creaked as you bent to pick up the two-handed sword. “I am not perfection yet, when it comes to meat,” you said. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t be close … but you want something I can’t give. Nor is it something I’m prepared to give. Being honest, I am mildly disgusted you asked. Is there soup left in the kitchen?”

“Oh, heaps,” said Ianthe, who appeared not to have taken offence at your rejection. It was so impossible to tell, with Ianthe. “I made it. It’s vile.”

Were there less likely bedfellows now than you and she, the daughters of mystical Drearburh and self-regarding Ida? It was not a connection formed of any mutual admiration; if anything, the more you saw of Ianthe the less likely you were to mistake her for likeable. She made herself like an overdecorated cake: covered so thickly in icing and fondants and gums that it would take serious excavation to find any bread. As a necromancer she was a genius, though you thought she relied too much on shortcuts and circumventions. She had an exceptionally fine mind. She was not afraid of rigour. She was also obsessed with what might lie beneath the River and, though this was a touch hypocritical coming from you but never mind, a fucking crank.

But a crank who had attained Lyctorhood. A crank whom you were now obliged to call sister, though you thought it hurt her to call anyone sister much more than it hurt you. A crank whom a dead self had respected enough to include in the work. A crank who had found you, distracted nearly to death, beside yourself, disgraced, having thrust your blade straight through a dead woman’s sternum, and simply said: Wish you’d taken off her arms. Perhaps there were more likely bedfellows, but yours hadn’t killed you yet.

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