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How often as a child would you hold your breath and feel your heartbeat slow? Trying to imagine death, which swarmed you every waking moment—which in fact birthed you, cradling you in skeletal arms, presenting you with terrible and unwarranted pride to the decaying world?
You would lie in bed, counting prayer beads, breathing so shallowly that lights danced behind your eyes. You would sit patiently at your mother’s tomb, tempting her bitter ghost to come and wrap its hands around your throat. You would let Harrowhark bruise you, bite you, cut you, inches away from flaying you open. Later you would rip bone shards from your shoulder and leave wounds untended, waiting to rot.
Those were the early years.
But then you learned how to pick up a sword. You learned that vengeance tempers grief. You learned that steel slices through skin and sinew and bone. You held a broadsword in both hands, and you outgrew death.
You outgrew death. Its bones could not bear your weight. The chokehold in which it held you was as oppressive as it was tender: Unlike everyone else in that desolate place, you wanted the freedom of living. So you pried its curling fingers, stiff with rigor mortis, from your throat.
Now, watching her, your heart beats fast.
Her sickness does not frighten you. Even at her weakest, she is more alive than anything you ever knew on the Ninth. I’m a walking corpse! she’ll laugh. After which she’ll cough. After which she’ll spit up blood. But all you will see is that delicate wrist meeting her sweet red mouth. The sheer fabric falling from her arm. Her curls shaking with the motion, catching different light.
She takes every opportunity to remind you of the inevitable, but in the glow of her fevered cheeks you see only the honesty of her being alive. Sometimes you pretend that she’s blushing when she sees you. Sometimes you imagine how far that blush extends—down her neck, her small shoulders, her chest…
Her chest often heaves with the effort of movement, forcing you to glance away: A vain effort to avoid picturing her flushed and pliable beneath the gauzy layers of her dress.
You don’t know what she sees in you. Why she seems to care so much. At first you thought it was because you swept in to catch her like a prince in one of her trashy romances, lifted your shades to show off golden eyes; in other words, you were all the tall dark handsome mystery she could ask for. But then you realized she’s hardly that naïve. So, you decided, she was keeping you around for her amusement. Maybe it was purely physical; she wouldn’t stop remarking on your muscles, your hair. Perhaps, in true Seventh House fashion, your presence served as little more than decor.
Any of these reasons was enough for you. You were just grateful she wanted to have you around. You found her beautiful, of course; even Coronabeth’s glow faded in her company, but more than that you liked the way she met your eyes when she spoke to you. She never looked away, content to let her blue gaze bore into you. No one had ever wanted to see you before. Certainly no one had enjoyed looking.
And then: The trial. Harrow stripped down, your breath stripped from you. Closer to death than you had ever been. She held your shaking body in her lap and stroked your hair and said baby. Good girl. Don’t you ever let them do this to you again…
You barely registered the words, because you were dying. But after the pain subsided and you were washed and clothed and fed, laying in the dark, all you could think was: What does that mean? What do you want from me? What could you possibly feel—
And why can’t you breach even the edges of that memory without shuddering?
Now she lounges in her usual spot in the sun room, reading, lying perfectly still but pulsing with an energy so vibrant it leeches the blackness from your robes. This happens, sometimes, in between the usual moments where she’s lavishly, languidly fading.
“You’re staring, Ninth.”
You’re sitting beside her feet at the end of the bench. At her words you give a start and shift a little closer to the stone’s edge, using all your willpower to make sure your eyes fall on anything but her. You end up staring at the dark vines that creep along the edge of the ceiling, winding down the columns in curling tendrils.
“Don’t fall, sweetheart,” she says, tapping your lap with the tip of one soft seafoam shoe. She turns a page. “I said you’re staring. I didn’t say I mind.”
“What, um…” You draw up your shoulders, tense up your core, like the slight ache of your muscles will distract you from your nervousness. You force yourself to look directly at her. She’s still occupied with her book. “What is this?”
She hums noncommittally. “I believe this is what the kids call hanging out.”
“Oh,” you say, swallowing, as if there’s anything in your dry throat left to swallow. “Is that all?”
Now she looks up at you. So crushingly blue. “What did you want it to be?” Slowly she lowers her book and stretches her legs out so that her feet are in your lap. You’re always just a little warm when she’s near. Now you feel your whole body heating up, rising to a temperature that was impossible to reach on the Ninth. Stammering, you try, “This is weird, right? These trials, this—whole, secret path to Lyctorhood…”
“Weird is one way to describe it.” She smiles grimly. “Get to the point, my darling girl.”
“See that, that—do you call everybody that? Palamades, and—and Abigail—?”
When she’s amused, her nose wrinkles like a child’s. “Do I call Palamades darling girl?”
“You know what I mean—”
More solemnly, “Does anyone call Pent anything anymore?” She is so careless with grief, and you understand why, but you—until Abigail and Magnus, you had not yet seen death and grief nestled into each other. For you, living was grief, and death was just—there. It’s still there, all around you like a fog, but now whenever you breathe it in, you find your lungs are stinging.
You realize with a jolt that you’re gripping one small ankle in your hands. You let go at once. “I’m sorry—”
Her laugh is all spring rain, too cool, too teasing. “Sorry, yes—I’m the one who should be sorry. I’m sorry about Abigail.”
“It wasn’t your fault…”
“It was everyone’s fault.” Her voice harder than rock, a cliff face, a tombstone.
For a moment, just this. Sitting with the full weight of ghosts. The sea is too calm for the storm that besieges the palace.
“Gideon.”
At the way she says your name, every hair on your body stands on end. “Yes?”
She puts the book down beside her and, for a long moment, gazes out at the endless stretch of water. You almost begin to relax again.
Then she looks back at you and suddenly everything is flame-blue and scalding. “Why did you move your hand?”
“I—”
“You and Nonagesimus. Your church. Are warm bodies forbidden from touching warm bodies?”
You always found the word seductress to be a little overdramatic. Frilly, fun. The stuff of pulp and porn mags. She leans forward, brown curls shining, sheer scarf falling away from flushed shoulders, and you can’t think of any other word to describe her.
Her eyes are brutal in their blueness. “Whatever lies in the Tomb, it can’t reach you here.” Her red mouth is very close. “Gideon.”
“Yes,” you whisper.
So low you almost miss it: “You can touch me.”
And you can’t help it. You lean in to close the chasm that has so far yawned between you. Like sinking into the crypt that was carved out for you at birth, it is splendid and obscene.
The air is thick with salt and lust and the smell of sweet botanicals. Your hands rush up her waist, all your former hesitation smothered.
She kisses you open-mouthed, holding you to her, as if you do not tower over her small body like a beast. Her fists grasp at your hair. One leg wraps around your hip. Does she think you will bolt like startled prey at the first promise of escape?
You won’t. You could drown here. You want to.
“Gideon,” she gasps.
—you do. You swallow her words and her whines and her short, shaking breaths, fill yourself with them, giving into your hunger. You take her tongue into your mouth, tasting metal. You lean into her touch, letting her tighten her grip. You run your hand up her leg—first her ankle, her calf—now you grasp fully the soft flesh of her thigh, squeezing until she whimpers. You swallow that too, and in an unprecedented act of necromancy somehow stifle your body’s need to breathe.
Breathing, dying, for once it is all the same to you. Enough of this and you will be whole forever.
Your thumb strokes the dip at her inner thigh, precarious. Harrow would already know a word for this cluster of muscles, something clinical and ancient, but you’d give it your own name if you had the coherence to do so, and it would sound like: Take my body as thy bread, tear me asunder. Eat me whole and be filled.
Her legs fall open at your touch and you cry out at the want of it, dropping your forehead to her shoulder. Her shoulder which is so small, so white, so exposed. Like bone, you think, but this is not true. Bone as you know it can always be remade. This is—breakable. Fragile in ways you’ve never thought to imagine. So long you’ve been fighting the same fights, slicing into the same scars, making no movement one way or another. The amount of matter in the universe is constant. You’d forgotten it was possible for something to touch you and be changed.
She lifts her hips, radiating heat. Your hand slides just an inch further, but this is enough. You run your thumb across soft fabric and find yourself on the brink of ruin.
She is letting you touch her here. She wants you to touch her here. She wants you. You slide your thumb through her folds, trembling, in your haze still finding a moment to marvel at how different it feels to yourself, and as you reach lower still you choke on your own breath. Her wetness has soaked through the fabric and is spreading like the ocean tides you’ve heard of but never seen. Never believed in, frankly, until now.
Into the soft dint of her collarbone, lips against skin, you press a question: “Why me?”
“Are you crying?” she asks, by way of an answer.
You did not know. Immediately you drop your fingers back to her thigh, your face burning with heat as you stifle your face against her even more.
“Oh, Gideon the Ninth.” She runs her fingers through your cropped hair, and kisses your forehead. “Why not you? Why not someone kind and young and beautiful? Just because I’m no longer any of those things…”
Which is such a violently wrong statement you do not even know how to form a reply.
“If you don’t want to do this, we don’t have to.”
Unbidden, you tremble. “I want to—”
“And I want to,” she says softly. In her voice a smile, and something bittersweet too. She holds onto your arms, the curve of your biceps firm with tension as you cling to her. “You make me feel things I haven’t felt in a long, long time.”
You lift your head. Already she looks perfectly debauched: Hair undone, curls astray, dress fallen to reveal her collar and shoulders and much of her breasts. She meets your gaze warmly.
Your voice is rough with tears, with need. Still you find it in you for a jab. “You’re not ancient, you know. Just old.”
At that, she laughs. “Oh, too old for you?” She releases you and begins to pull her dress back over her arms. “That’s fine, I suspected as much. I guess I’ll be on my way…”
You touch her hands gently with your own. She looks at you, blue eyes scorching.
“Let me,” you say.
You undress her with the reverence you were always meant to show another. Reverence you fought tooth and nail not to give. Sometimes you hear soft laughter above you, as close to joy as you’ve ever heard it. Other times: Quiet, deep, impossible sounds which remind you of all the caverns of a body, the echoes between ribs.
You kiss the soft meat of her palm. You think about death, about living. Aren’t you and she the same? Aren’t you standing at the precipice between two worlds that neither of you fully understand?
Your lips latch around her breast and for all you’ve thought about it, for all your depraved and drool-slick dreams, you feel more than anything: Warmer than fever. Safer than home. Did your mother nurse you in those early days.
You weep. She curls your fingers in your hair.
You hold her hand tight as you breathe through your nose, suck until it has to hurt. Still she doesn’t let go, still she doesn’t cry out. And when your head is fuzzy and your tongue is lolling, she pushes you downward, a gentle insistence against your head.
“Please,” she says.
Before you know it you are contending with the heady scent of her, the otherworldly heat. Like the ocean, you think again, and this time you are not awestruck but giddy. Water, salt; please stick to my skin. I will lick you from my wrist when I think nobody is looking.
Instead you drink straight from the source and unlike the ocean, it heals. From the noises she makes you would think you were giving her something, as if you are capable of giving, as if you have anything to give. Really, you consume as you always have: Greedily, blindly, not quite stopping to savor the taste.
Graciously, she gives. She fills your mouth and rubs herself against your nose. She pulls your hair and fills the air with gasps. Everything is warm flesh, wet pink, and for once you do not dream of any far-off cohort. You do not reach for memories of who you may have been. You are Gideon, outside of any time, outside of any House. You exist here, now, alive, entangled in the aliveness of someone else, wrapped up in her breath and her heat and her racing heart, in her hands and her thighs and your name in her mouth. She works her hips with shocking strength, using you like she needs you. Like you are needed. It is a relief, a joy, an agony. You hold tight to her legs and take it, burying your face deeper, flattening your tongue so she can ride it with stuttering hips. Her pulse throbs against your mouth, a beacon. And just like that she comes, her wetness uncontainable, dripping from your lips.
You lie there, both of you, breathing heavily and not quite in sync. Your cheek rests against her thigh. You can still smell her.
“Good girl,” she says, though she sounds like the wind has been knocked out of her. Suddenly afraid, you grasp at her wrist, feeling for her heartbeat. It is, as you feared, unnaturally fast, but she places one small hand over yours, keeps it there until you feel her pulse slow down to a normal pace. Her breathing evens out. She holds your face, runs a thumb across your cheek, laughs.
“I’m sorry about your makeup, Ninth.” You wipe your mouth with the back of your wrist and glance down at the smears of paint. She thumbs your lip, rubbing the last of the black pigment away.
“As if Harrowhark needs another reason to hate me…”
“She doesn’t hate you.” Your voice feels rough, unused. “How could anyone hate you?”
She smiles and it does not reach her eyes. Your head feels heavy in her hands. “It is so much easier than you think.”
You do not understand her. You do not feel as if you ever will. But unlike the other mysteries in your life, this one is not fatal. You are free to hold these questions in your hand. You will carry them around and go on living. Maybe one day, given time, you will find the answers.
You haul yourself up the bench so that you are lying properly beside her. You are still wearing all your vestments; she is still unclothed. You take her in your arms. She is so small, so light.
“I wouldn’t hate you,” you say. She is tense against you. “No matter what you think you’ve done—trust me. I’ve seen worse.”
At these words, all the strain seems to leave her body. She collapses limply into your chest. You curl protectively around her, your heart surging. All you ever wanted, you realize, was to care for someone.
She lifts her head. Startled, you see that the fire has gone from her eyes. Raised on the Ninth, you know firsthand the glacial blue of empty winter. But seeing it here, in her, you feel lost.
“What have you seen?” she asks, and her voice is like the voice of someone else. “Your friends have died. Your necromancer has hurt you. But these are flesh wounds, Gideon the Ninth. Broken skin. Broken bones. The lungs, the liver, the stomach, the heart… Your guts spilled on the ground, you’ve seen nothing of that yet.”
She blinks and you see that her lashes are glistening.“So close your eyes, Gideon,” she says, placing a hand over your desperate gaze. “Close your eyes before it’s too late.”
She is just a creature in your arms, a frail body. How can she speak like she’s so much more than that?
“I get it,” you say softly, wrapping your arm tighter around her waist. “You’re going to die.”
“I’m dying,” she hisses, “Here, now, all the time. There’s a difference.”
“Fine, you’re dying.” You pull her fingers from your eyes. The blue flame in hers is back, burning cerulean. “So am I. So are all of us. We’ve probably got days left on this wretched planet, who knows. But I’m tired.”
She stares at you, silent and furious.
“I’m tired of death. I’m tired of bowing to the people who wield it. Yes, I’m dying. You think it doesn’t kill me every day? Serving Harrow, living on the Ninth? But my skeleton’s still got plenty of meat on its bones.” You wink. She scoffs; you see the smile in it. “My heart is still pumping. My dick still gets hard. So like, why should I care? Food—sun—you—it’s enough, I’m alive. I’m alive, I’m here. Sure, it gets worse. But it doesn’t get any better. Look. The world is on fire and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
And it’s true, for the sun is setting over the sea. Endless orange water, endless orange light. Everything reflected and refracted so that to look at it is almost blinding. Still, you both turn your gaze toward the horizon.
She doesn’t reply, but she doesn’t move, and you feel her clutching at your vestments. You undo your outer robe and cover her with it: The Drearburh black makes her skin look almost translucent, a petal trembling on a branch.
You press your nose to her hair. Her usual scent, which is sickly sweet, has been covered by that of her own sweat; it’s clean and new, made saltier by ocean air. And then there are the flowering trees, the winding vines, the grass that has made its way through crevices of stone. You breathe in, and out, and in.
She kisses you, cutting off your exhalation. “You are beautiful,” she says softly, “Gideon, you are good. Don’t forget that.”
She is not angry anymore, but still, she is hurting. Maybe there will never be a day when she is not. What can you do but keep your sword sheathed and hold her close, until your chests rise in sync, until she’s fallen asleep? Alive, the very picture of death.
You take a deep breath, and do not close your eyes.