A heavy weight pressed on your hips and legs. You strained to see, chin tucked hard against the top of your chest, and beheld with relief your double-handed sword. Your relationship with it was becoming increasingly complex: you hated its presence, but the world without it would be unimaginable. You smelled blood. You smelled something else more distantly; above the blood hung the crisp, faecal sweetness of a rose. You struggled to sit up: the breath seized in your lungs, and you worried yourself out of a thrusting cough just as a hand touched your shoulder, lightly, in warning. You nearly flinched off your seat.

“Quiet,” said Ianthe, beneath her breath.

She was sitting next to you, an incandescent pillar of white, staring straight ahead. The look on her face was typical of her, a recollection; an icy, exhausted tedium, with top notes of intrigued disgust. You were dazed. You hated her to touch you. You glued the sword to the back of the pew with a push, the bone lifting it and muffling the noise, sticking in hot gobs to the genuine wood as you swung your legs over to press your toes to the floor. And you saw where you were, and you were immediately stricken with horror.

You had been laid in a pew halfway down a small, exquisite chapel. Now that you could look, you recognised the tender and yellow light as that which came from hundreds of candles. They lit an interior of shining charcoal-coloured stone, layered with whorls of bone—bone everywhere, bone enough for a hundred Ninth House tomb chapels: the chancel formed of long carved runnels of bone, fretworked into human lace; the black check tiles polished granite beneath your feet, their white counterparts soft worn squares of femur, orange in that lenient candle light; and the seats of wood—wood like you’d first seen in Canaan House, real, brown, glimmering wood, polished to the particular sheen that neither stone nor bone could take. You stared up at a plex cruciform window: cold stars outside, gleaming with a weird and unearthly light. You stared up at skulls: an ossuary of skulls, a multitude of skulls, set into the wall, overlapping in empty-eyed rows, set cheek-by-jowl to await infinity. Thin sheets of metal had been worked over this lovely mass of faceless dead, in shadowed tints: deep red crimsons, smoky amethysts, lightless navy. House colours. House heroes brought here to rest. Slender columns of white tapers bathed those bones in forgiving lights that made them beautiful in the way only bones could be for you; the candles were wrapped in different colours, which made them look like the dressed-up throats of flowers, or rings on long slender fingers. And great clusters of these candles shone down on a central altar, and on the central altar was a body.

You were at a funeral. You knew its bride; you’d killed her.