The scholarship grew difficult once she realised belatedly that it was difficult; but that was cured by working harder. She spent sometimes half a month on the same theorem. She moved her mother and father through the House like chess pieces, trying every year to correct their stiff and unnatural gait, sitting them in chapel as her people asked them for guidance she had little idea how to give. But the penitents and devoted of the Locked Tomb were getting old, and she learned that they all wanted to be told the same thing. More often than not she would stand between her parents’ corpses at some death bed, watching one more of her penitents rattle their last as she repeated the words of their final service. They died happy. They loved it. She had a real talent. Harrowhark had attended so many deathbeds, and given so many solemn takes about death and duty, that in the end she started to believe them.

The Ninth House elderly became the Ninth House decrepit, and the Ninth House decrepit became the Ninth House dead. Harrowhark was by most of them when they died, except if they had a sudden pulmonary, and even at fourteen she was good enough with a heart arrest to keep them going until she could give them final rites. She’d always disdained flesh magic, but she had a knack for the aorta. Later, when their meat had trickled away, she personally raised their de-fleshed skeletons to work the mangle or quietly rake the snow-leek fields in the upper reaches of Drearburh. Much of her necromancy had been sharpened by the day-to-day busywork of geriatric death, of the niche and the skull, of sitting with osteoporotic bones and filling up their honeycomb so that the constructs did not end up a confusion of ribcages with their legs powdering off. Her parents knew what they had been about, making a genius out of two hundred dead children: it took a genius simply to keep the House from deliquescing into a pile of bones and pneumonia victims.