Love had broken her life into two separate halves: the half before she had fallen, and the half afterward. Afterward, she hated to sit in the apse during chant and listen to a weird, thuddering beat disrupt the prayers of the faithful, a distant striking at the back of her head that she had taken for someone being out of time. She heard doors open and close in distant halls where no doors were opening or closing; her body would become very frightened, and her brain very frustrated. In her agonies she would have to sit right beside her ageing marshal Crux, usually while being spoon-fed; he was insistent that she had to eat. And all the while she would demand, Is that real? for half of what she heard. And he could say, Yes, my lady, or No, my lady, and she might be content.

It killed all her peace. Even in the long dark days she spent wholly alone—in the libraries, or in her laboratory, fingers burnt from handling fatty ashes—she would hear voices just out of her hearing, or see things in her periphery that were not there. It seemed to her that sometimes her hands would grasp her own throat and press up against her windpipe until she saw spots in her vision. She would see dangling ropes; she would forget where she was and wipe out a whole morning’s scholarship with false memory.

In that first year after her parents’ deaths she often saw the Body, when she was sleeping or when she was waking, and that was relief and frustration both. The Body brought her total peace, but in its presence she lost track of time; she would sit with her hand very close to the dry, dead hand of her obsession, and when she looked up the hours would be eaten away. Or she would check the time and be astonished and discombobulated that it had been only a few minutes. When her pituitary gland kicked in, the Body stopped appearing when she was awake, but the other hallucinations kept on. Harrow was furious that she was doing something so—so pedestrian as to pubesce.

But as puberty changed her yet again, with hormones or time or both, she was able to regain some semblance of control over her maggot-eaten mind. She prayed often. Her brain took refuge in rituals. Sometimes she fasted, or ate the same thing for every meal, arranged in a specific pattern on her plate, consumed in the same order, for months on end. She wore her paint far beyond the strictures of any nun, wore it in private, sometimes slept in it. She found the sight of her own unpainted face in the mirror impossibly wearisome, monstrous, and nonsensical, somehow faraway and yet heinously attached to herself. Harrow did not often weep, but at times she sat within the shroud of her cot and rocked back and forth with hard, fast motions, often for hours.