“Time can render one impotent beyond meaning,” said Ortus unexpectedly. He made his eyes downcast again, and said: “I would not expect you to—be crushed by the weight of that particular comprehension, Reverend Daughter.”

He might as well have said, You are a baby of seventeen, and I am an adult of thirty-five. She regretted, not for the first time, not going for broke and taking Aiglamene. Perhaps there would have been something in rocking up to the First House with an octogenarian in tow: a sort of wild and confident fuck-you—Oh, your cavaliers are young? And they fight? How classic! So jejune!—but that would not have been the wild and confident fuck-you of the Ninth House. The Ninth House character, she was forced to admit, had always been low on wild and confident fucks.

“Nigenad,” she said, “I am what I am, and I am seventeen. Yet I assure you that I contain multitudes.”

“I am fully aware of that, my lady,” said Ortus.

Which was perfectly correct of him to say. But Harrow somehow did not like the way he said it. “They are taking too long to vet us,” she said, and stood, and restlessly pulled down the plexiform barrier between them and the empty cockpit. She was about to press her fingers to the communication button, to ask the pilot what the holdup was and how he was to explain it; but she saw something she either had not seen before or that had suddenly appeared, upon one of the padded seats. It was a piece of flimsy. She took it and withdrew into the bleeding light of the passenger hold.

She could feel Ortus’s eyes upon her as she turned the piece of flimsy over. It was coloured all over with thin blue ink, scribbled so hard that the termination of each letter pushed holes into the surface, and it read:

THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME

She gave it to her cavalier. The shuttle seemed totally quiet now. No mechanism ground; no pipe gurgled. The light was very still and white and she no longer felt it moving. He scanned over the piece of flimsy, frontward, then flipped it over to scan it backward. He cleared his throat—Harrowhark found herself flinching, and nearly tore herself to pieces for it—and he said:

“It’s blank, my lady.”

“Fuck,” said Harrow.

6

WHEN YOU WOKE, you were already sitting up. Your chin was bowed on your chest so that you had an exciting view of your lap. You were no longer in your bed, and the lower walls and floor were blurring past you in scuffed washes of black stone, bones, and steel.