“Don’t start the I was toying with her, mwah ha ha noise, because I won’t believe it. Your plan backfired, Tridentarius. You’ve got the sickness. I know the signs of Nonagesimitis. You were all lined up for a big hot injection of Vitamin H.”

Ianthe scrubbed at her forehead briefly with her bone hand.

“Really a corpse?” she said, with not totally believable carelessness.

“She wants the D,” I said. And: “The D stands for dead.” And: “Sorry.”

“I think I need a drink,” said Ianthe, and she murmured to herself: “All that fuss about the Saint of Duty. What a little hypocrite.”

“Don’t think this means you get more than the teeny-weeniest smidge of pity from me,” I added. “If you think anything I did, I did to make her love me, then you don’t know anything about her and me. I’m her cavalier, dipshit! I’d kill for her! I’d die for her. I did die for her. I’d do anything she needed, anything at all, before she even knew she needed it. I’m her sword, you pasty-faced Coronabeth-looking knock-off.”

Always your sword, my umbral sovereign; in life, in death, in anything beyond life or death that they want to throw at thee and me. I died knowing you’d hate me for dying; but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.

Ianthe was chewing pettishly on a lock of that bone-yellow hair. I added, “I need you to lay off. I was already the worst thing that ever happened to her, and she doesn’t need you trying to one-up that, like, Bet I can make this double shit.”

I watched her recross her legs slowly at the knee. She was no longer examining her nails. She looked at me with a searching, almost studious expression, pale lashes down over her dead-man’s eyes. Her biceps weren’t bad, actually, there was definite muscle in her remaining skim-milk arm. Nothing to write home about, but she didn’t have to be completely ashamed. Unlike you.

“You’re wrong, you know,” she said calmly. “It’s an interesting revelation. Perhaps it even gives some context. But my … attachment … to Harry isn’t remotely what you think it is. I’m not her cavalier, her servant or thrall. I am a Lyctor … Harrow is a Lyctor … and the centuries will entangle us whether she wants them to or— Nav, if you persist in making jack-off motions when I am talking, I will show you what Harrow’s kidneys look like.”

“That! That’s what I’m talking about,” I said. “Don’t show me her kidneys. Don’t think about her kidneys. Don’t do anything with her goddamn kidneys. Get a grip. Don’t look at her blood, or lick her bones, or do any of the shit necromancers lie and say they don’t do the moment two of them get nasty.”

She shrugged that gold-skinned shoulder.