“Oh, shit,” I said, once I’d stopped, because it was weird to hear you giggle that much. Sorry. It was pretty funny. “You think you can make me jealous? You think anything I did has been to make her love me? You don’t know. She didn’t even tell you.”

Her face didn’t flicker. The wan features were schooled into a look bright and interested, but those oily brown-pebbled eyes were like a snake’s.

“Enlighten me,” she said.

“Hang on, I don’t want to let this pass by—Harry?”

“I thought it was cute. Elucidate, Gideon, we really don’t have all day.”

“Like I said before. She’s just not into you. She’s into bones. She gave her heart to a corpse when she was ten years old,” I said. “She’s in love with the refrigerated museum piece in the Locked Tomb. You should’ve seen the look she had on when she told me about this ice-lolly bimbo. I knew the moment I saw it. I never made her look like that … She can’t love me, even if I’d wanted her to. She can’t love you. She can’t even try.”

She said, way too carefully: “Oh, please, as though—” but I cut her off.

“Don’t start the I was toying with her, mwah ha ha noise, because I won’t believe it. Your plan backfired, Tridentarius. You’ve got the sickness. I know the signs of Nonagesimitis. You were all lined up for a big hot injection of Vitamin H.”

Ianthe scrubbed at her forehead briefly with her bone hand.

“Really a corpse?” she said, with not totally believable carelessness.

“She wants the D,” I said. And: “The D stands for dead.” And: “Sorry.”

“I think I need a drink,” said Ianthe, and she murmured to herself: “All that fuss about the Saint of Duty. What a little hypocrite.”

“Don’t think this means you get more than the teeny-weeniest smidge of pity from me,” I added. “If you think anything I did, I did to make her love me, then you don’t know anything about her and me. I’m her cavalier, dipshit! I’d kill for her! I’d die for her. I did die for her. I’d do anything she needed, anything at all, before she even knew she needed it. I’m her sword, you pasty-faced Coronabeth-looking knock-off.”

Always your sword, my umbral sovereign; in life, in death, in anything beyond life or death that they want to throw at thee and me. I died knowing you’d hate me for dying; but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.