Harrowhark had found her eyes avoiding the stairs, and the armchair; that was cowardly, and now she looked there straight and true. Ortus met her gaze quite tranquilly. He sat in the chair with his hood down, and he had opened up a book; he had been using it as a prop to unobtrusively write something on a scrap of flimsy. She mounted those stairs like a tremulous bridegroom, climbing toward a man who had known her all the days of her life.

At the top, she said: “How long did you know? Did you see it from the start?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “Not fully, until talking to Lady Pent and Sir Magnus, a week or so ago. At times I would recall, and then in the next few seconds, forget I had recalled anything. At times I knew, and at other times I did not. I realise that does not make much sense,” he added humbly.

“Ortus,” she said. “Do not bow and scrape to me. My family killed you.”

“No. Marshal Crux killed me, and my mother too,” he said, and he bent his nearly black eyes to the page balanced within the book, and he scribbled something down. “I knew that, when we discovered the bomb. The pilot found it midroute, and he stopped the shuttle so we could look at it; and my mother wept and wailed as he and I tried to work out its mechanism, but obviously—neither of us were experts in bombs.”

Her heart crushed within her. She said, “I take full responsibility.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Ortus.

“I asked him to put you on the ship—I was trying to—”

“It does not matter what you tried to do,” he said, and he took the flimsy away and put it in his pocket. “If you are culpable … you are culpable only of giving the marshal the means to murder me. Marshal Crux was not a good man … and yet, perhaps, he did what he saw was fit. Perhaps if I had said, ‘No, I must stay and do my duty, and aid the Reverend Daughter whatever her will,’ then I would have lived. But I was a coward, and I let my mother overrule me. My mother was strong … so strong, I hear, that her spirit lasted beyond death. I was weak. I always was weak, my Lady Harrowhark.”

She said tightly, “Don’t call me that.”

“My apologies, Reverend Daughter.”

“Don’t call me your lady,” she said. “You owe me nothing. You don’t owe me fealty. You don’t owe me duty. Though the way I treated Gideon Nav defies description, I treated you in a manner that rejects any claim I had to your loyalty. You don’t have to stay, Nigenad—tell Pent to get you through the barrier and back into the River.” As though the River was the better option. She said, “In the River, you’ll be relatively safe.”