Otherwise, Harrowhark was left completely to her own devices. She would rise well before First Bell and pray in the chapel before they turned on the heating, her fingers much too cold to count her prayer beads, and then she would ensconce herself in one of the libraries with a battery lantern and a blanket and her books. She embarked on her study of necromancy alone: the dead were her mentors and tutors. Harrow had no idea how difficult it was to understand the work of adult necromancers, which meant she did not fear trying to understand it. Her development suffered from neither ego nor apprehension. Her parents would sometimes have her recite her theorems of an evening, or make her conjure ulnar bones from a skeleton ground up to powder; or they would have their elderly marshal, Crux, heave some recent corpse over the top tier to squash right to the bottom, and have her fuse the bones back together blind, through the dermis and meat. Then they would open up the body to see how well or badly she had done, but either way their approval was mostly relief. In her genius, they had received the goods that they had so dearly paid for.

Crux told her that her parents had been different, once. This must have been before they committed a little light child massacre. Harrow had been dimly interested in this factoid; she could never recall her parents being anything but exhausted, their joy all spent. Her mother rarely spoke, or if she did, addressed all her remarks to their hulking cavalier, a man who looked as though he would weep if he could only figure out how. Her most vivid memory of her mother was of her hands guiding Harrow’s over an inexpertly rendered portion of skull, her fingers encircling the fat baby bracelets of Harrow’s wrists, tightening this cuff to indicate correct technique.

Her father had been the more voluble of the two. In the evenings he read to his little family, sometimes sermons and sometimes antique family letters. That was another rare memory: the electric light strung up behind her father’s chair, her sat on a three-legged stool next to her mother, her father’s voice a drone unceasing until a touch from his cavalier indicated that he might stop. Harrow would shrug herself inside her black-hooded church robe and practice moulding tiny motes of bone between her finger and thumb, pressing them into soft fingerprints, mentally chopping her body into two hundred relic pieces.

Then everything changed, abruptly, forever. Harrowhark fell in love.

“Falling” was not the right term, precisely. It was a long process. She more correctly climbed down into love, picked its locks, opened its gates, and breached its inner chamber.