13. dance card

[outsidebones]

Harrowhark stood in the ruins of the crumbling Canaan House, a place entirely existing in her mind, and stared at the ghosts of Dulcinea Septimus, Magnus Quinn, and Abigail Pent. With rising agitation that she could not quite quell, Harrow found herself asking curtly: “What’s my role in this exodus, Pent?”

“If you stay,” said Abigail, and there was something quite careful in the way she said it. “Spirits always wish to return to their bodies, and pine without them. The only exits for you now are the River, leaving your body completely, or you can simply go home, and wake up.”

Gideon. It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon. For one brief and beautiful space of time, she had welcomed it: that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall. Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.

She could let herself go, or she could go back to her body, and let her go. Nav had made it her decision, when it came to imminent death either way. The free will to say Harrow dies or Harrow lives. And she had said, albeit fuck her for saying it: Harrow lives, which required its opposite
balance: Gideon dies. Now here she was back again with what she had always wanted—the choice to say Yes, and the choice to say No, with the needle of No sliding fatally back toward Yes.

She said: “If I go back, it will finally destroy her soul.”

It was Magnus who stepped forward and looked at Harrow face-to-face. And perhaps she felt that more keenly: that he was the man who had, in Gideon’s own words a lifetime ago, been nice to her cavalier. His mouth was hard now, but his eyes were as kind as they had ever been. And kindness was a knife.

“This whole thing happened because you wouldn’t face up to Gideon dying,” he said, which was a stab as precise as any Nonius had managed. “I don’t blame you. But where would you be, right now, if you’d said: She is dead? You’re keeping her things like a lover keeping old notes, but with her death, the stuff that made her Gideon was destroyed. That’s how Lyctorhood works, isn’t it? She died. She can’t come back, even if you keep her stuffed away in a drawer you can’t look at. You’re not waiting for her resurrection; you’ve made yourself her mausoleum.”

His wife looked at Harrow’s face and murmured, “Magnus, you’ve made your point,” but he uncharacteristically ignored her.

“D’you know, Abigail broke up with me when we were seventeen? I kept a ripped-up corner of her dance card for three years. It didn’t even have any writing on it, or her initials, or mine. Just a ripped-up corner of card.”

One of the lights detached from the ceiling above them with a trailing shower of sparks and shattered on the grille beneath. To Harrow, it sounded like a tolling bell.

“This is your ripped-up corner of card,” said Magnus. “You’re a smart girl, Harrowhark. You might turn some of that brain to the toughest lesson: that of grief.”

Even with her feelings schooled, Harrow’s voice sounded feeble and childlike and plaintive. “Is there nothing I can do before entering the River that might mean I stay put?”

“No,” said Abigail. “It’s the River. It moves. You’d have to pick the revenant’s path and travel along a thanergetic link, and that’s just madness again: sitting inside—I don’t know—a teapot, clinging on without sense or understanding, going slowly insane. And as I said, your soul longs for your body. Harrowhark, you stand before a known quantity and hideous unknowns. Don’t walk back toward the unknown.”

“If it were me,” Magnus said, “I’d go home, and live, and live for her.”

The Fifth House spirit-caller lost her reserve, and took Harrow’s hands in her own, and said: “I’m so sorry, Harrow. I wish it were different. I am so tremendously sorry.”

The ceiling above them buckled and shuddered, but held. Harrow looked at the stricken faces before her: at the now-sombre lines of the cavalier of the Fifth, his jolly face achieving a certain supernatural dignity; his historian wife, a woman whom she now knew could never be properly avenged. The tragedy of the genius and the useless death. The irreparable loss to the universe.


Harrowhark said, “You’ve got to go before the roof comes down on you.”

Abigail gave a weary, rueful half smile. A very Fifth House embarrassment. “Not until you tell me what you’re doing. In loco parentis, you see. I’m afraid I feel responsible for you, and need you to promise me you’ll live.”

“Gideon decided that for me,” said Harrow. She was not really afraid; it was only that her hands were, and were shaking independent of her feelings. Harrowhark said briskly, “Pent; Quinn; Septimus. I’m poor with thanks and worse at goodbyes. Therefore, I won’t bother with them.”

Magnus said, “Have you—”

“Someday I’ll die and get buried in the ground and you can take it up with me then,” said Harrow, and found, after all, that she was not really speaking to them. “Until then—I am afraid that I have to live.”

“Then this is not goodbye,” said Abigail, and she reached forward to brush a stray lock of hair behind Harrowhark’s ear, which was an instinct Harrow could not find it within herself to feel humiliated by. “I believe that we will see each other again.”

And then with a shimmer, their ghosts were gone.