“Nav and I drove a sword through her breastbone,” said Harrow, and swallowed against a wad of saliva burning in her throat. Her brain was whirring like an overheated mechanism; she could almost smell the hot dust. It was long past the hour to put herself in order.

She said, “Give me a minute.”

“Take your time,” said Pent.

The cold did not worry Harrow until, as habit, she tried to warm her core from within, and found that she could not. She was somehow not a Lyctor here. Pushing her blood cells around made her feel that old, hungry pang for thanergy that she had not felt for the better part of a year. She closed her eyes so that the only senses assaulting her were the temperature—the reddening burn on her cheeks and hands—and the blackness of her lids, as blank as the pages of an unwritten book.

Sixty seconds. Anything more was indulgence. She opened her eyes and said, “Lady Pent. Tell me about your childhood bedroom.”

“It was the size of this sitting room, perhaps,” said Pent promptly. “Two beds with their heads against the far wall from the door. I liked to have my younger brother sleep in my room sometimes, when I was small. Primrose walls in paste-on flimsy, not wash—a pretty chroma of the Prince Undying, but a little cockeyed—a Vit-D panel in place of a window, with a repeated design on it. My grandfather’s arm bones over the door. A little reinforced table where I played at dolls or read, with a cubby beneath it where I was meant to crouch in case a zonal jet made it past the winnow. Phosphorescent stars painted on the ceiling, a peg on the wall for my gloves and robe. I haven’t thought of it in years. Why?”

“Initial test,” said Harrowhark. “The flexibility of metaphysical solipsism aside, I have hardly any knowledge of the Fifth House and how its people live there. The more nonsensical your answer, the more likely you were to be a construction of my brain.”

Abigail laughed, but it carried a tinge of rue: the laugh of a woman who had opened a long-lost book to find the most necessary page torn out.

“Reverend Daughter,” she said, “I’ve been accused of many things, but this is the first time I’ve been assumed to be a delusion.”

“But you are—”

“A ghost,” said the woman smilingly. “A revenant, more precisely.”

Then she said: “There was so much I wanted to ask. So much I’d assumed! I sought a deliberate pattern in your choices when, perhaps, none existed, which is a shameful mistake for a scholar. Therefore, let us debunk all my pet ideas. You are a Lyctor now, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Harrow. Gideon. Blood. A broken rail. “It was not my intention, at the end. But—yes.”