Abigail picked up a worn leather strap that must have belonged to a clockwork watch face, and said gently: “No. It’s not.”

“Does it get—better than this? Do you know?”

This did not seem to Harrow like a question that could ever be answered. She did not fully understand it. But the Seventh did love questions that were as beautiful as they were unanswerable. This oblique sally did not get a response from the other woman, who had taken off her glasses to examine a crisscrossed piece of wax and a fragment of darning thread. Harrowhark felt bounden to look at the things they had taken from the Master Warden’s pockets: a scrap of soft cloth that you might wipe your glasses with, a pen, a little fold-out examining lens, a crumpled-up piece of flimsy. When the cavaliers came to bear away the Warden (less heavy than his cavalier: only Magnus and the Seventh, Protesilaus, bore him, with Ortus hovering on the sidelines), the chair-bound girl gave a woeful little sigh.

“Oh, goodbye!” she called out suddenly, to the corpse borne aloft. “Goodbye, Palamedes, my first strand—goodbye, Camilla, my second … One cord was overpowered, two cords could defend themselves, but three were not broken by the living or the dead.”

Harrowhark suddenly felt something, in her core, though she did not know precisely what it was. Somehow in Canaan House her ability to feel had been blunted, leaving only a sense of dislocated longing, a bizarre yearning as though flipping through the pages of a book for a proverb she remembered but could not find. She focused on what was in her hands, instead of on a stranger’s farewell to strangers.

The piece of flimsy was rolled up so tightly that it resembled a kind of fat pill. She took off her gloves, and with the edges of her fingernails—bitten to the quick, and never much help—she started to prise open one wrinkled corner. She was thoroughly surprised when a deep shadow fell over her: when her cavalier primary laid one black-gloved hand down on her naked ones.

“My Lady Harrowhark,” whispered Ortus, “perhaps … maybe you shouldn’t … in case.”

“You presume overmuch,” she snapped.

He withdrew. “I have often thought so,” he said sadly.

By the time she swept into the corridor, the rain driving through the holes in the roof and the walls and lashing in with gusty, bad-smelling sprays, Ortus three-quarters of a step behind her, she had nearly gotten the whole thing open. She opened it, hummocked and humped all over with little rills from being over-folded, and she read:

HIM I’LL KILL QUICK BECAUSE SHE ASKED ME TO AND BECAUSE THAT MUCH HE HONESTLY DESERVES BUT YOU TWO MUMMIFIED WIZARD SHITS I WILL BURN AND BURN AND BURN AND BURN UNTIL THERE IS NO TRACE OF YOU LEFT IN THE SHADOW OF MY LONG-LOST NATAL SUN