She stood at the doorway and watched the breath minutely fill those lungs, in—and out—and in. There were smudges of sweat on the face that in this light looked just like tears. It tickled her fancy to imagine Harrowhark falling asleep crying, like any lovelorn child. What a fool. What a destructive, romantic, ridiculous act. It was always a certain kind of ass who approached love like that—a certain kind of very good, talented ass, who had been overly used to their hands on the reins and never could cope when they were taken off—nor had the personality to put them back on again.

Ianthe had that type of personality. And she had a few years on Harrow.

“Someday I’ll marry that girl,” she said aloud. “It might be good for her.” And: “Probably not, though.”

And then Ianthe the First went to see a man about a queen.

ACT FIVE

40

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HARROW NOVA HELD HER black rapier thrust upward in the direction of the top tiershaft. She laid her offhand arm across her chest, her knuckles against her collarbone, where the black chain of Samael Novenary—true black Drearburh steel, each link a death’s head, the weighted end a carved butterfly of pelvis in lead-filled bone—clinked unmusically against itself. Her nerves were steel; her guts were some lesser material due to a curious admixture of fear and fury. They had assumed the qualities of gruel, or hot porridge. “To the floor,” she said.

“Harrow,” said the cavalier opposite her, “we don’t have to do this.”

“Then withdraw your claim and acknowledge me as the cavalier primary, you weed, you worm, you slime. I’m your superior in every way. I do not possess your size—I do not possess your strength—but I have trained for one singular purpose, and I will not be denied this chance.”

“Yes, Harrow; but my father would kill me,” he said.

Ortus Nigenad hulked before her sadly. Massive in his new robe and boots, with new panniers too, and his grandmother’s rapier—the new boots and rapier she envied, but the panniers she did not. They were freshly crafted of obsidian and the strongest type of canvas, which must have emptied out the treasury. Harrow wondered bitterly if her parents had flogged something.

Ortus was all muscle and fat; he had the desired enormity of the modern Ninth House cavalier, and she never could have hoped to match it. She had never tried. Harrow realised early in her career that if she could not have the size, nor the weight, nor the sheer breadth, that she would have the speed, the technique, the agility. She had decided this at around five years old.