“Oh, Protesilaus is here because he wouldn’t be able to help it,” Dulcie said dismissively, putting one of the candles down and, with a total lack of shame, wriggling her hands up into her shirt so that she could warm them on her abdomen. “I love him, but he’s such a pest. I wish he hadn’t even come with me to Canaan House. I feel horrible. He should’ve stayed home with his wife and his sons—his wife does tapestries and he breeds flowers for a hobby. I stayed on their farm right after my pneumonia because they thought the sitting temperature would be better for me, and if I ever see another rose I shall scream … No chance of that now. Don’t worry about Protesilaus. He can’t help being so fantastically, dorkily noble.”

“But you—”

Dulcie’s smile became ferocious; her lips curled to show that some of the very white teeth were a little pointed, and her pallid eyes seemed to turn up at the corners. She was no longer languid, but breathless, alive, and resembling nothing quite so much as a malign fairy. Harrow remembered that Palamedes Sextus had made a war of his whole life in order to prosecute his desire to marry this woman.

“The only thing that ever stopped me being exactly who I wanted,” she said, “was the worry that I would soon be dead … and now I am dead, Reverend Daughter, and I am sick of roses, and I am horny for revenge.”

Then she took her hands away from her middle and went back to happily fixing the ward.

It did not take long to complete the circle. They worked swiftly and quietly. When they finished the coffin was cocooned in an enormous circle of enmeshed ward and candle anchorage, although Abigail looked discontented. “I hate doing anything to spirits without something to feed them,” she said, “and there’s no real blood here … there’s nothing to tempt it. I wish we knew what it was anchoring itself to—what’s the thanergetic link, and why has it been able to follow it to you? Harrowhark, you really don’t have any insight into who might be haunting you? Do any of its signifiers mean anything? The suit? The blood? The gun?”

Harrow’s brain, though still a jumble, was no longer a mess in a darkened room. Memory had gifted her a small torch she could light the disarray with. She remembered the clipped Cohort accents:

A standard-issue infantry sword. A two-hander.

“The sword,” she said. “It’s Gideon’s. But none of the other signifiers match.”

“Did the sword belong to anyone before her?”