“I asked you because you know what it is,” she said haltingly, “to be—fractured.”

Of such banality was grief made.

“Harrowhark,” said Ianthe. “Let me give you a little advice. It is free and smart. I’ll walk this back now—I’ll adopt the sweetest good humour about everything you’ve done for me already—if you admit that you are running away. And running away is for fools and children. You are a Lyctor. You have paid the price. The hardest part is over. Smile to the universe, thank it for its graciousness, and mount your throne. You answer to nobody now.”

“If you think that you and I are not more beholden than ever,” said the girl, “you are an idiot.”

“Who is left? What is left?”

Nonagesimus shut her eyes briefly. When they opened, one was—not correct. She stared at her own heterochromatic, night-and-day gaze, at those celestially mismatched irises. One black. One gold.

Then the Ninth House Lyctor said tightly: “We are wasting time. Open me up.”

“It will be worse for you in the end, Nonagesimus—”

And Harrowhark roared: “Do it, you faithless coward, you swore me an oath! Expose the brain—guide me—and let me handle it from there! There’s still time, and you thieve it from me!”

“All right, sister,” said Ianthe, and she reached for the awl first. The hammer would be second; the hammer for the living hand, the awl for the dead. She rested it high on the frontal bone, squinted, and gauged. “Time to absolutely fuck you up.”

She struck.

Once Harrowhark was sleeping a sleep she might never even wake from, her face marked with the lines of weary, heart-heavy exhaustion, Ianthe sat and watched. She had not been allowed to watch the entire process; for a stretch she had been forced to sit behind a screen and twiddle her thumbs as those paranoid amateur hands rummaged around in a way that would hopefully mean Harrowhark couldn’t coordinate enough to piss, if life was remotely fair. Now she pressed her fingers over that scalp, trying to work it out, trying to see exactly what had been done.

She gave up within a few minutes—impossible to tell with Lyctor privacy, even this close. No bleeds, certainly. Everything in the right place. Maybe a little reduction in the temporal lobe, a few out-of-order bumps in the temporal gyrus that might have been there already. As a last act of pettiness, Ianthe coaxed a new crop of that lightless black hair out of the scalp, and fidgeted with the follicles so that they would squirt out a little extra, cursing the Ninth House nun to almost ceaseless haircuts. It was the little things that mattered.