“It’s from a longer work of my own,” admitted Protesilaus.

From behind them, Lieutenant Dyas said, “I’m going too.”

They all turned to look at her. Her injured hand was stoically clutching her rapier; Harrow noticed that she had tied the hilt to her glove with a length of wire, so that it could not fall out of her grip. She was bloody, smeared, and untidy, but perfectly calm. “I’m going,” she repeated. And she shrugged. “Cohort rules.”

“What Cohort rule, Marta?” Abigail asked, bewildered.

“‘Chickenshits don’t get beer,’” Dyas said. And, after a pause: “Might not be the official wording, but that’s how I’ve always heard it.”

Magnus said, more than slightly delighted, “I have never heard that one.”

“As it happens, I have,” said Matthias Nonius.

They all looked to Harrow, as though on fatal cue: legends, soldiers, poets, Magnus.

“Nonius. Nigenad. I cannot in good faith hold you,” she said, finally. “You have both served your House ably, and I thank you both. Nonius, if you owe something to the Saint of Duty, he could probably use your help. Go now. I have to get back as soon as possible myself.”

He stepped back and bowed to her. It was an unpretentious, entirely modest movement. In The Noniad it might have taken half a page. There was no time for him to make any kind of speech, but despite over twelve books of Ortus celebrating his verbosity, he did not seem the type of man to make one; all he said was, “Many thanks, and farewell. Spirit-guide of the Fifth, can you send us four to the shore’s edge?”

“Easily,” Abigail said. She stepped forward and put one hand on Protesilaus’s and Ortus’s shoulders, and she peered through her thick glasses at them, and said quickly: “Are you—”

“For the Seventh,” said Protesilaus.

“For the Second,” said Marta.

“For the Ninth,” said Ortus.

The candles flared up again, that black flame threatening to scorch the ceiling, and Canaan House seemed to rock again as though with some earthquake—the electric lights overhead flickered and died briefly—and all four cavaliers were gone, back into the River. Harrow found herself imagining them in her mind’s eye: rising out of those turbid waters before the Saint of Duty with his spear and his sword, something looming behind him, bigger than the eye could comprehend. Bluer than death; unimaginable, advancing to greet the four dead swordsmen and the Lyctor.

She had not said goodbye. Harrow so rarely got to say goodbye.

* * *

The lights flickered again. A fine haze was rising from the grille beneath their feet, carrying a thin suggestion of smoke. The candles had gone out entirely, and their thin satiny souls were rising to heaven in the metal rafters. There was a pervasive, clinging smell of burning dust, and the continuous rumbling of softly piling rock and bending metal. They stared at each other with a left-behind, exhausted bemusement: Harrowhark and 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, there’s no question of you absorbing yourself or expelling yourself,” said Abigail, and there was something quite careful in the way she said it. “You’re the host soul, and can only be displaced willingly—or with the kind of violence the Sleeper attempted. 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.”

The drizzling dust had become a blizzard, and something buckled against the whiteboard wall. If the destruction of Canaan House kept progressing at this rate, even if it was some kind of metaphorical shift, it would, in a very unmetaphorical sense, squash everyone flat. Rules were rules. If a chunk of her psychological landscape fell on Abigail, or Dulcie, or Magnus, it would be a second death. Their spirits would be erased from existence, never able even to enter the River. They clustered closer toward her, like plants sensing sunlight: as though she were the eye of the storm, the destruction seemed to revolve around her, and the ground beneath their feet was still.

Harrowhark found herself studying Dulcie’s face: there was a strange, tucked-in stillness that made her old again, those fine sigil wrinkles on either side of the mouth that told her own lesson of suffering. Harrow said, “Then there is the River.”

“The River means madness,” said Abigail immediately. “You’ve never been there as an unanchored soul. You don’t know what it’s like. I haven’t the faintest idea of what would happen to the secondary soul in a Lyctoral bond if the host soul abandons the body … You are alive, Harrowhark—that does mean something where souls are concerned. Your soul longs for your body, and without something else to inhabit, I could not even promise that in your madness you wouldn’t somehow find your way back, rendering all this moot.”

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. What if you lose yourself to eventual madness and are reabsorbed, leading to some kind of melange—you know what Teacher was—a patchwork fusion between your soul and fragments of Gideon’s? 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.”