Which did not make me happy, Harrow. It did not fill my heart with soft and sentimental yearning. You set me up. You set all of it up. I gave you one damn job. And instead you rolled a rock over me and turned your back. I spent all that time drowning and surfacing in you, over and over and over, and all because in the end you could not bear to do the one thing I asked you to do.

I wanted you to use me, you malign, double-crossing, corpse-obsessed bag of bones, you broken, used-up shithead! I wanted you to live and not die, you imaginary-girlfriend-having asshole! Fuck one flesh, one end, Harrow. I already gave my flesh to you, and I already gave you my end. I gave you my sword. I gave you myself. I did it while knowing I’d do it all again, without hesitation, because all I ever wanted you to do was eat me.

Which is, coincidentally, what your mother said to me last night.

“She is such a romantic,” drawled Ianthe.

I crumpled the flimsy and crammed it in your pocket.

“Tridentarius,” I said, and I had to take a breath to stop myself from hewing her in half. Then I said:

“If you keep acting like you know her—not even like you care about her, but like you know the first thing about her—I will end you here and now. Everything you did to her, you did because she was alone. You thought nobody gave a shit about Harrowhark Nonagesimus. You played with her because you thought it was funny. But she never gave you anything. You never got anywhere.”

Naberius’s eyes narrowed. I hated those eyes in that face; I kept expecting to smell hair gel. Ianthe sat down on the bed with her long skinny legs crossed at the knee, that waxen face just one more memorial on this goddamned floating funeral, and she remarked: “Did you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about forgetting, you big-mouthed warrior nunlet,” she said, and examined her fingernails, and levered a glob of dried-up green from her thumb with a brief flash of nausea. “Good God! Try taking Coronabeth’s memories from me … I’d kill you myself. Love—don’t make that face, child, I have loved plenty—true love is acquisitive. You keep anything … strands of hair … an envelope they might’ve licked … a note saying, Good morning, simply because they wrote it to you. Love is a revenant, Gideon Nav, and it accumulates love-stuff to itself, because it is homeless otherwise. I’m not saying she didn’t care about you. One does care about one’s cavalier, it can’t be helped … but I watched Harry rearrange her brain so that she could empty herself of you.”

I laughed right in her face.