This calm agreement made her all the more furious. She did not examine why. “And it ought to be Non-i-us as three syllables, or Non-yus as two,” Harrow added, taking bloody satisfaction in cruelty. “Not whichever you happen to feel like at the time. It’s amateurish.”

Her cavalier stopped immediately, like a beast of burden shying before a jump. He said, “Yes, my Lady Harrowhark. I am flattered by your attention to my craft. It’s consciously archaic. Emphasising my commitment to spoken performance.”

“For God’s sake, Ortus, please stop sounding as though I’m about to whip you. I am taking care of our affairs, despite your ignorance.”

“Let me not be unpleasing to my lady,” he said. “Let the unseeing eye of the Locked Tomb gaze down upon me, and see me guard her with the unmoving aegis of a cavalier’s love. But I will not modulate my tone for you.”

She rounded on him. Harrowhark knew that she was being unfair; she knew that she was being petulant—had been scared into it, and could not soothe herself, and was using any means fair and foul to try to do so now. But when she was scared, she was a child again, and she was more afraid of being a child again than anything else in her life. Almost.

“I have every right to correct you. We are at the gates of the Tomb, even now,” she said. “I carry it with me, and its rules hold clear.”

“Let us never leave it,” said Ortus. “My lady, I follow your every order … I will accept your chidings gratefully. I will watch you slay whomsoever you feel the need to slay, and I will sponge the blood from your brow … but when I lay me down to sleep, I am a fully grown man who is allowed to feel precisely what I want, about anything I want. There has never been a rule against doing so, and that has always been my deep and unyielding relief with regard to you—to my lady mother—to Captain Aiglamene. Your final will be done, my lady.”

Then he bowed to her—the very correct bow of a Ninth House tomb swordsman; his paint a perfect, if sad and melting, skull, his attitude sombre, his face the blankness of the grave. And just when his Lady might feel the pain of any reflective empathy for him, he saved her by establishing his position as the biggest source of passive aggression her House had ever produced. “I might also note that synizesis is characteristic of some of our finest examples of early Ninth prosody. I’m certain your studies have kept you from the full breadth of the classics.”