Ylva

“Of course we’re not running,” said Harrowhark disdainfully. “I said a necromancer alone. I have you. We bring hell.”
“Harrow– Harrow, Dulcinea’s a Lyctor, a real one–”
“Then we’re all dead, Nav, but let’s bring hell first.”
…
Her adept said: “I’ll keep it off you. Nav, show them what the Ninth House does.
Gideon lifted her sword. The construct worked itself free of its last confines of masonry and rotted wood and heaved before them, flexing itself like a butterfly.
“We do bones, motherfucker,” she said.

She had left Harrowhark a note on her vastly underused pillow–
WHATS WITH THE SKULLS?
and received only a terse–
Ambiance.

The tragedy saturated the stiffening bones and static hearts lying in state at Canaan House, but there was also a deep tragedy in the flawed beams holding up their lives. An eight-year-old writing love letters to a terminally ill teenager. A girl falling in love with the beautiful stiff she’d been conceived solely to look after. A foundling chasing the approval of a House disappointed with her immunity to foundling-killing gas.

“Give me her sword,” she said.
“At least let us get you out of here,” said Gideon, who thought it was a shitty room to die in.
“No,” she said. “If he comes back to life again, I will be ready. And I won’t leave her now…nobody should ever have to watch their cavalier die.”
They left her with her head held high, and her face had no expression at all.

“He say anything?”
Gideon wavered. “He said to tell you he loved you,” she said.
“What? No, he didn’t.”
“Okay, no, sorry. He said–he said you knew what to do?”
“I do,” said Camilla with grim satisfaction, and laid herself back down among the bones.

“Hm,” said Camilla neutrally, and Gideon knew immediately that she organised Palamedes’s and her socks by colour and genre.

“We have a door to open.”
“Yes, tomorrow morning after at least eight hours’ sleep,” Gideon suggested without hope.
“An admirable attempt at comedy in these trying times,” said Harrowhark. “Let’s go.”

“Her blood’s on the floor down there.”
Because necromancers lived bad lives, he added: “To clarify. Her intravenous blood. Her intravenous blood.”

“Too many words,” said Gideon confidently. “How about these: One flesh, one end, bitch.”

“You know you can’t do this, Gideon of the Ninth,” she said. “You’re very brave–a bit like another Gideon I used to know. But you’re prettier in the eyes.”
“I may be from the Ninth house,” said Gideon, “but if you say any more cryptic shit at me, you’re going to see how well you can regenerate when you’re in eighteen pieces.”

It was no wider than a book and no deeper than two books stacked on top of each other, estimated Gideon, who thought of all books as being basically the same size.

“You wouldn’t know fealty if it–”
“Don’t hypothetically shove stuff up my butt again,” said Gideon, “it never does any good.”

Harrowhark was too busy storming out of the room with her robe billowing out behind her in the way Gideon suspected she had secretly practiced.

“Gideon, don’t be sorry for the dead. I think death must be an absolute triumph.”
Gideon could not get behind this. Jeannemary had died like a dog while Gideon napped, and Isaac had been made into a big teenage colander; she wanted to be sorry for them forever.

“None of you have learned how to die gracefully… I learned over ten thousand years ago.”
“I’m not done,” said Gideon’s half-dead necromancer.

“Harrow, I can’t keep my promise, because the entire point of me is you. You get that, right? That’s what cavaliers sign up for for. There is no me without you. One flesh, one end.”
A shade of exhausted suspicion flickered over her necromancer’s face. “Nav,” she said, “what are you doing?”
“The cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole entire life, believe me,” said Gideon.