Then she said: “Children as fists! Infants as gestures! Yuck! Pfaugh! I live in the worst of all possible worlds.”

And without saying another word, Mercymorn stalked off down the corridor in the opposite direction, the lights making rainbows of her tightly shrouded robes.

When you reported this conversation to Ianthe, she was not particularly interested. This was, you thought, your sister-saint’s downfall: she had pre-defined a set of things that merited her attention and consideration, and everything else she put aside. (“You brood over everything,” she had said once, to this accusation. “You read unholy omens in the way people say good morning.”)

“She’s a crank,” said Ianthe. “Augustine says she went funny years ago, and that much like a stopped clock, she’s ‘right twice a day, by coincidence.’ Avoid, avoid.”

How you loathed any sentence beginning with Augustine says. “But she touched my head,” you said. “She was changing something, or looking for something—and I have no idea what.”

“Your brain,” suggested Ianthe.

Later you lay together in her lavish bed, far apart enough that if you reached out your hand, you might just brush her with your fingertips. It was, you had admitted, the only place you now felt safe to sleep, what with your wards so eminently destroyable. The mockery you endured for needing her proximity was exquisitely painful, but humiliation was steadily becoming your existence whole and entire.

But sleeping side by side was—awkward. It had been her idea. You would have slept on the carpet, if you hadn’t thought it would leave you more vulnerable to the Saint of Duty—it would have been too easy to see you from the window in the case of a spaceside assault. Trauma prevented you from simply taking a pillow and sleeping in the bathtub. You lay flat on your back in borrowed blankets, wearing third-hand clothes. Ianthe had given you a daffodil-coloured nightgown, rummaged from some ancient drawer of artefacts belonging to a long-dead Lyctor’s cavalier. It made you look like a liver inflammation. You stared glumly at a painting opposite the bed of an exquisite woman with lots of ruddy golden hair, a dreamy smile, and no clothes—though she was holding a rapier and, for no reason you could see, a melon.

That first night in her bed, you’d placed your bone-dressed sword between you, and felt better; she had, unsurprisingly, ragged you for it. “Relax,” she had said. “I haven’t invited you to an orgy, Harrow.”

From this lying-down angle, the painting of the nude and obstreperously beautiful woman was in full sightline. You had murmured, “I believe you … albeit many wouldn’t.”

“This is why I cultivate you, Harrowhark,” she had remarked, “the suspicion that you might possess a sense of humour.”

You had said, “I’m not so gullible to think that your only reason.”