She set down an empty cup of coffee on the frigid windowsill, and she took a little flimsy bag from her pocket. She unzipped the plex tab on the top and removed, delicately, a piece of yellowing paper. The Fifth adept used the very edges of her fingernails to unfold it, carefully and tenderly. Harrow stood up at once, but the cavalier was somehow between her and the door. The sweat beaded behind her knees and prickled behind her ears as she glanced down at the paper.

Harrow said, “I would like to bring my cavalier into this conversa—”

“You need Ortus the Ninth to read a piece of paper with you?” said Magnus Quinn, with broad good humour, the type that was as resolute and inflexible and polite as a summons. She had been stitched up. She was a fool. She had lost her fear of the Fifth House, and now she had been boxed in as only the Fifth House might box you: smiling the whole time, and acting as though the whole thing might be a bit of a joke. Harrow made her face imperturbable, and swallowed slowly, so that her throat did not so obviously gulp.

She stalled. “The text is small.”

Pent said, “Do you think so?”

The Fifth necromancer did not let go of the paper. Harrowhark looked down at its bloodred, panicked writing: a hasty, furious scrawl, written with such fury that the pen had bitten the paper.

I WILL REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU KISSED ME—YOU APOLOGISED—YOU SAID, I AM SORRY, DESTROY ME AS I AM, BUT I WANT TO KISS YOU BEFORE I AM KILLED, AND I SAID TO YOU WHY, AND YOU SAID, BECAUSE I HAVE ONLY ONCE MET SOMEONE SO UTTERLY WILLING TO BURN FOR WHAT THEY BELIEVED IN, AND I LOVED HIM ON SIGHT, AND THE FIRST TIME I DIED I ASKED OF HIM WHAT I NOW ASK OF YOU

I KISSED YOU AND LATER I WOULD KISS HIM TOO BEFORE I UNDERSTOOD WHAT YOU WERE, AND ALL THREE OF US LIVED TO REGRET IT—BUT WHEN I AM IN HEAVEN I WILL REMEMBER YOUR MOUTH, AND WHEN YOU ROAST DOWN IN HELL I THINK YOU WILL REMEMBER MINE

Harrow read this screed in a flat and affectless monotone, her voice dying away on mine. The cavalier looked at the paper, and his necromancer looked at her.

“Read it to me,” she said, knowing her voice was still flat and hard as the hail.

Abigail turned the note back to herself, still with the care reserved for some priceless antique.

“I still get an erotic charge from snakes, sorry to say,” she read.