“You big baby,” she said, and shamelessly kissed her on the forehead.
Harrowhark was sitting on the cold ground opposite. She was wrapped in chilly dignity and Gideon’s overcloak. Even the bone studs in her ears had disappeared, leaving little pockmarks where they ought to have been. “Lady Septimus,” she said, “unhand my cavalier. Nav, are you able to stand?”
“Oh, Reverend Daughter, no … give her a minute,” Dulcinea begged. “Pro, help her … don’t let her stand alone.”
“I do not want you or your cavalier to touch her,” said Harrow. Gideon wanted to say, Nonagesimus, quit the sacred-bat-black-vestal act, but found she couldn’t say anything. Her mouth felt like a dried-out sponge. Her adept rummaged around in her overcloak pockets and emerged with a few bone chips, which gave rise to the horrible idea that she had stashed them there. “Again … unhand her.”
Dulcinea ignored Harrow totally. “You were incredible,” she told Gideon, “astonishing.”
“Lady Septimus,” the other necromancer repeated, “I will not ask thrice.”
Gideon could not manage anything better than a very feeble thumbs-up in Dulcinea’s direction. Dulcinea unwound herself, which was a shame; she was warm, and the room was colder than ten witches’ tits. She reached out one last time to skim a hand over Gideon’s forehead. She whispered archly: “Nice hair.”
Harrow said, “Septimus.”
Dulcinea scooted herself back to the stairs. Gideon watched with dim interest as Harrow cracked her knuckles and sucked in a breath: nothing loath, her necromancer leant down and heaved one of Gideon’s arms around her skinny shoulders. Before Gideon could even think Oh shit, she had been pulled to stand as Harrowhark’s knees buckled beneath her. There was a bad moment when she wanted to puke, a good moment when she didn’t, and a bad moment again when she realised that she only hadn’t because she couldn’t.
The lady of the Seventh was saying, “Reverend Daughter … I’m terribly grateful for what you just did. I’m sorry for the cost.”
“Don’t. It was a business decision. You’ll get your key when I’m done.”
“But Gideon—”
“Is not your business.”
Dulcinea’s hands came to rest in her lap, and she tilted her head. “I see,” she said, smiling and somewhat crestfallen.
A barefoot Harrow grunted under her breath as she continued to try to haul Gideon up the short flight of stairs, panting for breath by the top step. Gideon could only watch, willing herself to come to full consciousness, astonished by the unreceptivity of her body. It was all she could do to not deliquesce out of Harrow’s grip. At the top of the stairs they stopped, and the Reverend Daughter looked back searchingly.
She said abruptly, “Why did you want to be a Lyctor?”
Gideon mumbled, “Harrow, you can’t just ask someone why they want to be a Lyctor,” but was roundly ignored.
The older woman was leaning against Protesilaus’s arm. She looked extraordinarily sad, even regretful; when she caught Gideon’s eye, a tiny smile tugged on the corners of her mouth, then drooped again. Eventually, she said: “I didn’t want to die.”
Walking back through the chilly foyer out to the corridor was bad: Gideon had to break away from Harrow and rest her cheek on the cold metal panelling next to the door. Her necromancer waited with uncharacteristic patience for her to regain some semblance of consciousness, and they stumbled onward—Gideon drunken, Harrow flinching her bare feet away from the grille.
“You didn’t have to be a dick,” she found herself saying, thickly. “I like her.”
“I don’t like her,” said Harrowhark. “I don’t like her cavalier.”
“I still don’t get why you’re all up in arms against what is a very basic man hulk. Did you get the key?”
The key appeared in Harrow’s other hand, shining silvery white, austerely plain with a single loop for a head and three simple teeth on the shaft. “Nice,” said Gideon. She rummaged in an inner pocket and removed the ring; the key slid next to the hatch key and red Response key with an untidy musical tinkle. Then she said: “Sorry your clothes melted.”
“Nav,” said Harrow, with the slow deliberation of someone close to screaming, “stay quiet. You’re not—you’re not … entirely well. I underestimated how long it would take me. The field was vicious, much more so than Septimus communicated. It had started to strip the moisture from my eyeballs before I refined on the fly.”