Now Harrowhark dropped to her haunches next to the ghost of the Seventh House necromancer as she carefully fashioned wards using the blunt end of a needle. Everyone but Harrow had presented themselves to Abigail to have wards scratched on their palms: she was embarrassed by how long it had taken her to realise that they were counter-wards, and that she did not need one. They were the dead. For now, she was alive.

Dulcie mistook Harrow’s expression as curiosity over the missing tube, and she tapped one nostril and said brightly, “We thought I didn’t really need it. I’m not breathing at all badly. Abigail and I suppose that we enforce some measure of our own rules here; that’s why I’m not too badly off.”

Harrow said, “That would explain why you were affected by physical stimulus—why you have needed to eat, and why you experience pain.”

“Yes, and I always believed that so long as I got eight hours’ sleep, did some stretches, and didn’t think about it, I wouldn’t get any worse,” said the adept, and she smiled that dimpled, wasted smile that was the only thing that Cytherea had come close to parodying with any accuracy. She said, “Pal always said I’d be the death of him. And I was … He and I never even got to meet. I never even really got off Rhodes. It seems like such a bastard. You did kill the Lyctor, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Harrowhark.

“Was it quick?”

“Quicker than she deserved,” said Harrow.

“She stabbed Protesilaus before he’d finished taking his sword out the scabbard,” she said, and scratched a flourish into her ward. “Then she started asking me questions. Who were my friends? Was I well enough to go out in public? Was I married? I told her a lot of hot bullshit,” finished Dulcie. “I knew she was going to take my place—thought maybe Camilla, at least, would figure out something was up … no such luck. I don’t even remember dying—I suppose that was nice of her.”

There was no resentment in that face, worn out before its time, heavily lined with the marks of pain and care. With her close-cropped curls and soft eyes, Dulcie Septimus in some lights looked like a child; in others, older than Magnus. She had a tip-tilted grin that showed little white teeth, and nowhere in that smile was a hint of pity, nor of condescension.

“I don’t understand why you’re here,” said Harrow, throwing her House’s caution to the wind. She said honestly: “I do not know you. I barely avenged you. You owe me no allegiance, and nor does your cavalier.”