Eleven

Goss wasn’t at brunch. Neither was I. I tucked myself in some bitter naked alcove where nobody had ever felt love and scarfed a hand pie Sunny had slipped me. It was delicious, warm and buttery and filled with something salty rich, but I did not pause to examine its insides. I swallowed, sucked my fingers clean, then stabbed an azurine with my thumb. Lapis lazuli suffered against a rind so blue. It was a fistful of sky. Gorgeous. No wonder Bellona shaped its economy around them. These and olives and wool and silphium, behold the whole of our inheritance. The white pith stained pink as I peeled away, exposed the splotchy blue and violet fruit inside. Juice glittered on my nail. I didn’t have the time for the proper ritual, nor did I have the people. I should peel the rind in a perfect spiral, then pass a segment to Sisphe, Harlow, Candor, Brandegor, Uthste, Valor, Amon, Teriasa, the Torn Child forever bleeding in the molten core of the world. Edna. Poesy. You. We should feast together. Savor the candy tartness as proof of life.

I held the fruit above my mouth and crushed it. It burst in my fist. I drank the bright nectar and sucked the filaments of pulp. Afterwards I didn’t know what to do with the sticky rind. There were no features in this hallway. There was a carpet runner and the occasional masculine sconce. I hated the thought of more work for the workers. I loved the thought of this place teeming with rats. I wandered, unsure in this way, until I found a windowsill overlooking the rolling pines. I threw it into open air. It disappeared soundlessly. I licked my fingers and convinced myself that this would sustain me through whatever group activity was demanded of us next.

We gathered in the library. It spanned the entire back face of the building, all four stories, in spines of endless shelves. Half of the leatherbound books rested behind glass. Some of the glass was locked. The scale seemed impossible, it was difficult to focus my eyes on any surface for long. Books became scales or feathers. I liked sorting. I liked compact material and obsessing over surfaces. When everything was hazy there was pleasure in the heavy and real. But here the books felt impossible, they were incalculable, it’d be like quantifying rays of the sun. The point was not the discrete volumes, the point was the power generated by their togetherness. It was a hoard that outclassed the IC Public Library, the insides of which I’d never seen, except in passing glimpses. I saw wealth. It looked like honeycomb. The library was a hive, and we stood on the pieced ivory floor, leaning between heavy cherrywood tables and handsome chairs. Nothing was ichorite in this room. This room was old money. It was an antiquarian’s jewel box. I did not belong here.

Goss sat in an armchair by the fireplace. She wore a blanket to her waist, dressed in a house coat, drank a tonic that smelled bitter from a delicate porcelain cup. Sisphe was nowhere in sight. Ygrainne stood, looking stricken, with her guard. Her face was red, her lips pursed tight, her hands twitched, half curled, stretched rigid. Her guard stood between her and Perdita Perfection, who was draped on a nearby settee, her lilac skirts arranged in a floral spill around her filthy blood-soaked combat boots, saccharinely needling an impossibly more pallid Alichsantre about her, whoever she was. Alichsantre looked dehydrated. She was near the point of petrification. She sat perfectly still, hair pulled into a bun tight to the point that nodding might tear her scalp in twain, and she ignored Perfection with obscene intensity. Her eyes looked powdered. Following her gaze, Alichsantre stared at Vikare. Vikare sat on a table in tapered trousers and a snug black blouse. She attended a journal with a fountain pen. She looked at Alichsantre under her lashes occasionally and curled her lip, then looked at me. Blisteringly at me. I looked away. Mir and Mago stood on either side of Susannah, spoke above her ears. Susannah endured it. Helena stood with Darya. Where had Darya been during the hunt? Ramtha was nowhere to be seen. I kept to myself. I stood behind a chair and braced my weight against it. What an inviting buttoned cushion this chair had. What lovely pucker and swell. If I let myself get comfortable I’d crumble. What did Vikare know?

“Do I have full suitor assembly?” Goss peered across the dark liquid in her cup. The softness I’d seen when she’d fallen was gone. She was all disaffected haughty coolness now. Her expression was neutral, more tired than emotive, but her shoulders were set. She swept one fingertip along her teacup’s edge. “Everyone who didn’t kill something this morning is out. Get out of my house.”

Nobody moved. Perfection hummed to herself.

“That’s Darya, Ramtha, Alichsantre, and Ygrainne. Out.” Goss spoke crisply. She sounded like a foreman. Some sunken little kid part of me howled.

“I killed your wolf for you,” said Ygrainne. “I stay.”

Goss looked at her. Incinerating fury swept her features, then was gone. She resumed neutrality. “You’ve been dismissed.”

“I rode for three weeks for an audience with you. You will hear me, Gossamer Dignity Chauncey.” Ygrainne tossed her head back. “Deny your heritage. Hate and rebuke me, hex me with slander, turn weapons against my watcher. Do as you will. A hundred million will die. That woman,” she jabbed a finger at Perfection, “will kill civilians in their beds. She will stomp our crops and reave the churches. She will rape our vestals and burn Halls with their elders inside. I did not travel here to dissuade you from funding the war that will destroy my culture. I came here to petition that you protect the refugees your greed will displace.

“Here is my promise to you: the Hall that bore you loved you. It is expensive sending blodfagra on boats to Ignavian sanatoriums. Parting with little ones is agony but there is medicine here. Look at you. Alive and wealthy, a grown woman, mostly hale. You could’ve died in the cradle. They could have left you in the snow. A Hall that did not love you would’ve exposed you and forgotten you, but they did not. Revile them if you must. Hate them, they are strangers to you. They did not teach you your language. You don’t know your faith or your history. You don’t need to know those things to be honorable. You must defend us, Chauncey. You have the means to shepherd our dispossessed and starving. You alone can help us.”

Perfection said, “What refugees do you imagine will require movement?”

“With respect to your pain,” said Darya quickly, before the guard could draw, her voice gorgeous, slow and smooth, pouring out in one breath like water on whatever evil blue fire Perfection was kindling, “I bid you come walk with me a while, Strife Maiden. We’ll sit in the garden while our bags are packed. I’d love to hear if your trip here was as eventful as mine. The cougars in Ignavia! Nobody told me. Gossamer Dignity Chauncey is not the only woman who might hear your pain and respond with aid. I come with the good faith of Tasmudan. Let’s spend a little time.”

Something flickered in Gossamer. I saw the equation shape behind her eyelids, the wings of humanitarian investment emblazoned with the name Chaunceyco in flaming letters juxtaposed with Tasmudani military forces north of Ignavia, too hilariously vast, if divided, to consider. Tasmudan had carefully respected their own treaty they’d struck with the rest of the continental powers about an end to domestic military engagement for the last two hundred years. They’d supported the barons against the queen when Rasenna had split in half, and only with years of careful coaxing and mad concessions did they agree not to absorb Ignavia into Tasmudan as payment for aid. Tasmudan giving aid to the Drustlands might look like the Drustlands striking back at Royston with Tasmudani force, Royston who’d demand support from Ignavia and Cisra, and then imagine! In a flash I saw Harlow, a baby clutching a gun screaming freedom, freedom, plucked howling from a smoldering safehouse by pirates and carried across the sea. Delphinia’s wars here?

I saw history condense on Dignity’s face. She looked pensive, then dismissive. “You’ll leave in the morning. Where are my manners? Dinner first. Now. Get out of my library, sweet ladies.”

Darya touched Helena’s arm. They parted, I watched Helena watch Darya walk forward, her hierophant robes flowing frictionlessly down her back, and thought I saw Helena sigh. Darya extended an elbow and Ygrainne took it. She turned her head away from Goss. I sawYgrainne’s profile flush with rage. Darya led Ygrainne out of the library, the blond guard trailing a few paces behind. Perdita waved at the guard with two fingers. Everything was briefly still until Alichsantre stood up. Her sash with many hands hung askew. She huffed, touched her hip. A knife hung there on a slim belt. She swept her thumb along its handle but didn’t draw it, then stiffly about-faced. She left through a different door than the rest and slammed it behind her.

I looked at my boots. I wanted to break something. I folded my hands at the small of my back.

“Anyway,” said Goss. She finished her bitter drink. “Tell me where to find ichorite. My father was a scholar before he was a prospector. The answer is abundant in this room. Demonstrate basic research competency to me and I might just fall in love with you. Nobody is leaving until then.”

The room itched. The fireplace behind Goss crackled and jumped. Some hunk of log fell and disintegrated into sparks.

Goss waved her hand, dismissed us like shooing dogs. She looked deathly.

Helena crossed the room and knelt in front of Goss’s chair. The rest of the room peeled off, aristocrats stalking up and down the endless shelves with their eyes on the spines. Perdita Perfection pulled out several books at a time and unceremoniously dumped them on the floor. Mir pointed and Mago pulled and read a sentence, Mir grunted, Mago fetched something new.

My belly knotted. I walked into some far corner, tucked myself behind a jut of big red volumes, and touched the ribbon binding of some massive tome and thought, I cannot leave in the morning. Yann Industry Chauncey will not be here before the morning. The binding was stiff, I tested it with my rough little gnawed-off nail, folded down the crest of threads. I could scarcely read a letter. These books could have been stone slabs. There was no entry inside them for me. There were a million in this room. Half of them, I was sure, were written in Rasennan abjad, in Cisran authoritative tense. If they weren’t in Bellonan, whose script was wholly separate from the one I somewhat knew. In all my rigorous training, I’d learned to read common Ignavian, and Cisran in the alphabet we shared. I’d studied, I’d prepared myself for this, but not for these. I couldn’t fucking do these. Not a chance. I rubbed at the book’s binding, entertained a brief delusion that I could catch a thread and pull, and the strings inside the book could be reeled back like a fishing line, and at the end of the inevitable hook my answer would be dangling. Where can you find ichorite? Inside my body. Lining my guts. Gummed up in the bone marrow. Laced in the pulp of my gristle.

Hand between my shoulder blades. My diaphragm struck the shelves. I kept quiet, crushed the gasp, turned my head to peer behind me at who had me. I saw nothing. The suggestion of a shoulder but nobody attached.

“Come with me and be silent,” Vikare purred into the skin behind my ear. “Don’t struggle.”

I licked my teeth and nodded acutely.

She eased up on me. She passed me as I turned, walked with a predatory swing in her stride, reminded me of the lions in the hills of Montrose. I followed her. I touched the place on my arm where she’d scarred me, the tattoo there healed misaligned. I could feel the raised pinkness through my shirt. I kept my head low.

She took us through a nondescript door and shut it behind us. The room held more books, and boxes of unbound manuscripts lashed with butcher twine on ugly industrial steel slabs. It was dark here. Vikare struck a match, fed a hanging lamp wrapped in magenta paper. I watched her shoulders move in the dark pink glow. She stirred her wrists at her sides, fanned her fingers. She looked at me with her chin tucked down, her brows drawn over her deep-set eyes. Her bottom eyelashes cast shadows on her cheekbones.

“Unbutton to your navel,” she said.

I put my hands at the small of my back.

“Show me what you are, or I’ll cut the strings myself. Show me the name under your shirt,” she said. “Don’t lie to me.”

The blood in my body churned. I swept my dry tongue over my teeth and tilted my head back, made space between the notches of my spine, stood as tall as I could stand. I put my weight in my boots. She hadn’t told Gossamer. She could have but hadn’t. She wanted something. I had plenty of somethings to give.

Hurt flashed in Vikare’s face. It darted between her eyebrows, pulled the corner of her full mouth. She didn’t like the quiet.

She unsheathed her knife and showed me the milk-blue length of it. It shined like it was wet. “Draw.”

“I’m unarmed.” A lie. My knife shivered at the small of my back.

Vikare closed the distance between us. She reached for my wrist, brought my palm against the knife’s hilt. I wrapped my fingers around the handle. She wrapped her fingers around my fingers. She held it often, it was smooth to fit the contours of her grip. It was light. She let go of me and produced a second knife for herself from a sheath in her boot that looked thinner, clip tip more pronounced. It was a knife whose utility was misery and human violence. Not a tool at all.

“I have no designs to hurt you, Miss zel Tlesana,” I said and meant it.

“Everyone here intends to hurt me. That’s fine. You’ll do so directly, with deliberate action. That’s better.” Vikare rolled her handle over the back of her hand, caught it. The arch the blade made burned in the backs of my eyes. She wasn’t showing off, she was fidgeting. She was going to hurt me. I could see the brightness of bloodlust in her face. A trick with sadists that I loved was this: sadists pay attention. Sadists hang on your every reaction and attend to that which makes you twitch. Her focus on me was absolute. Her intensity cut away context. My purpose was suspended, the competition distant. Vikare took a liquid step away from me. The distance between us was electric and awful. Between us all matter would incinerate. We could melt sand into glass.

“To the blood if we must,” I said.

She licked the flat of her blade and flew at me. Downward strike. Deep puncture angled toward the spoons of my collarbone. Tough to parry and I’m not a duelist. I jumped back, the knife flashed in front of my face, my lungs and guts slammed my sternum. She flipped her grip, slashed upwards, I countered with a cut that scraped knife against knife with a horrible screeching. She wrenched her wrist. She’d pry the blade from my hand or break my bones. I slammed my boot against her belly before it could do either. She doubled back, spat on the floor, then reeled and swung at my shin. She slit the fabric. She slit my skin underneath. Might’ve kissed down to the bone. My blood came hot and slippery. Quick incredible pain, so bright I could scarcely perceive it. It soaked my sock, trickled down my boot around the arch of my foot.

Adrenaline lit up my body. I kicked again then lowered my center of gravity, I advanced and swung at her, clipped her defensive forearm, then she slashed back, pushed me backwards, she gained back the ground, there was hardly breathing distance between us. I was nearing the back wall. She was stronger than me. She was better than me, she moved with a fluidity I could not match. She slashed out and my spine slammed hard marble. If I ran she’d catch me. If she didn’t catch me she could tell Gossamer, they could hunt me with guns and leashed boars, they could send the whole party into the pines to pursue me. They’d really catch me then. Carry me home on their backs with my wings spread. Vikare would string my ankles up. She breathed through her teeth and cut and cut at me. Grazed my belly with a deft lightness. It was demonstrative violence: how easy it would be to empty my insides out! Neat and sweet to saw me in half. My life was soft in her hands, simple to rip. Blood pearled along the slit. My cut shirt dangled open like a mouth. Droplets fell down my belly and pooled in the waistband of my trousers.

I raised a hand against her and she struck my shoulder, my hand released. Her knife I held clattered to the floor. She leaned against me, bore her weight down on me. Her breath warmed my ear. She slid her knife’s clip point under my jaw. My top button fell. I heard it bounce against the floor. She got me. She had me.

In the nearness I fit my hands on her waist. Under the fabric I felt the pulsing. There was ichorite beneath, long showy stripes of it, enough I felt its churning stillness even through the gloves I wore. It held her from her sternum to her hip bones. Ribbing inside whatever corsetry she wore beneath her blouse. Silent I chanted, I prayed, bind bind bind bind bind.

The ribbing oozed through the fabric like blood. Sticky and thick. Vikare didn’t react like she noticed. She traipsed her knifepoint down my throat, with a flick of her wrist cut loose a button that fell and rolled into darkness. I tightened my hands around her. She looked at me. The ichorite bubbled through my fingers and shot out in tendrils, roped wetly around her arms, yanked them back. Her half-shut eyes snapped all the way open. She jerked her left shoulder but the ichorite wound around her like some pale sea monster, it held her against herself and she could not will her way through it. Her face contorted, full lips twisted back over her teeth, eyes on fire rolling, rolling. She swung up a thigh to slam her knee against my gut but I had her, I leaned her forward, the luster that bound her flowed relentlessly into the meat of my hands, and she was caught.

The room around us was suddenly emptied of features—gone was the dust and its governing paper structures, gone was the blue shadow on the white ground where a carpet used to be, gone walls, gone connective tissue and insulation, gone air and breath and planetary vibration. I took bound Vikare to the floor. I guided her ungently but supported her head. I laid her thrashing between my knees and pulled my hands from her body. My hands dripped rainbows. This luster was thin beyond friction. Something about it had changed. I flicked my hands like ridding water.

“You won,” I said. I bit my wrist and yanked off my glove. The luster pulling apart between the leather and my skin repulsed me. I averted my eyes and yanked off the second with my free hand. Naked, tattoos revealed, I took my ruined shirt in my hands and brought it over my head. I dropped it beside me. It landed soundlessly. I pushed off my bracers, they dangled limply around my hips, and raked up the clingy undershirt beneath. It smeared the blood around. I wore only my throbbing knife. It would burn my tailbone if I did not move it but I could not bear to move it. It was an embarrassing vulnerability, I blushed as I cast the undershirt down, and I leaned over Vikare zel Tlesana with smudged up pride. My name was marked across my chest. MARNEY HONEYCUTT and the rest of my quilt. Her eyes moved between the letters and my chest and my face. Her lips parted and her eyebrows shot up. I could not tell if she was crying. In the waves of my fit her expression flickered. Most of the glistening was my infirmity warping the light. “I’m the Whip Spider,” I said. “You’re still better than me.”

She strained again. It was an experimental movement, exploring how much give the luster gave her, the edges of her freedom. Slim. She bucked her hips, brought her boots underneath her, but did not torque me off. She shifted her body backwards. Put her pelvis under mine, freed up her ribcage. Flared her chest when she gasped as if to prove a point. I let her. She had no leverage, her elbows kissed, she could not lift her back off the ground. I put a hand on her breastbone. I pushed down, flattened her body against itself against the luster against the floor. Rabbit heartbeat. If she screamed, we’d both be dead, but I knew she would not scream. She glowered at me. Her braid was coming undone.

“I knew it was you,” she said. Her voice was high and frayed. “I recognized your girl.”

“Worried you might,” I said. “You haven’t exposed us. You’ve spared us. Thank you for your grace.”

Vikare panted. She flattened her tongue against her hard palate. I watched the veins in the whites of her eyes. Slowly, over-enunciating, lips full and without tension she said, “What do you want with her?”

“With Dignity?” I hated lying. The follicles prickled down my back. I rubbed my thumb on Vikare’s diaphragm and said, earnest as I could, “I want to marry her.”

“You’re a highwayman,” she said. “You want to rob her blind.”

I tried for a smile. “Fair thought.”

“You’ll lash her to the headboard on your wedding night. You’ll pull the curtains down and scrape the frescos from the walls. You’ll gut this place. You’ll come over it like locusts, you and your gang, and strip it bare. There will be nothing but wind and her body inside when you’re done. Then you’ll leave. You’ll abandon her to quiet and let the wolves take her.” Vikare spoke lightly, with slippery precision. She didn’t blink. She was watching for something. I wondered if it was pleasure. Abstractly I imagined the monster jaws snapping at Gossamer Dignity’s skinny white limbs, imagined the snapping sound that big teeth would make through twiggy bone, then slammed the heel of my conscious against the animal lump of my brain and made myself stop thinking.

“No,” I said. “I mean to retire. I’ve got riches to share. I want a fine life for myself and my friends. Barons made wealth for themselves by reaving their tenants biyearly for centuries. I’ve earned my slot on a faster timeframe. Now I’d like to show myself an upright life in the way of upright legal ne’er-do-wells. I’d like a wife whose seizure of wealth is similarly self-made. I’m not here to hurt nobody.”

What an ugly thing to say. I wound my darlings by speaking against them. We are nothing like her. We are better. Steadily, I bled on her. The front of her blouse was slick with me. She bit the tip of her very red tongue. It looked like a slice of fruit.

Vikare started laughing. It fluttered in her belly, I felt it move against my thighs, then she spat it up. She laughed so hard it barely made a sound. She trembled. Her core constricted and she kicked out her feet, I heard her heels knock the floor. Real tears eased down her cheek, I watched one tuck at the hinge of her jaw behind her ear. She swayed up her hips again. This time against me. She brought her chest against my hand and her hip bones against my thigh meat. Crushed the boundaries of our bodies together. She sounded woozy. The laugh spasmed through her, she twitched with it, and when she wrenched I did not stop her. She rolled onto her belly. The mess of ichorite down her arms pulsed silverpink, I thought about hoarfrost on spiderwebs. She arched her back. Looked at me from over her shoulder.

I didn’t know what she wanted. I didn’t know where to put my hands. Breathing was tough.

“Fuck me,” she said.

I touched her wrist. I pulled back sharply, like I’d burn her.

“Do as I said.” Something flashed across her face. She stretched her fingers wide, then pulled them into fists. “You want me. I can see it on your face. I can smell it on you.”

Hoarsely, “Is this blackmail?”

“Are you stupid? It doesn’t need to be blackmail,” she said. “Nothing will stop me if I want to expose you. Kill me and reveal yourself if you want to pick the time. Everything’s the same. Just fuck me. I want you to fuck me.”

I pulled a finger between her arms and snapped all the ichorite binds. My gums ached against my teeth. My head swam, my guts swam, I felt a lurch of want just above my cunt. Vikare put her palms on the floor. Her shoulder blades moved under her blouse, I watched her roll her spine, adjust her stance. I expected the blow. There was no blow. She didn’t hit me. She pressed up against me, hands flat on the marble, and hitched her hips higher. I slid my hand up the backs of her thighs, over the curve of her ass and the small of her back. I couldn’t think over my blood buzzing. Her blouse moved with my hand, untucked from her fishtail trousers, a worker’s style she’d made from impossible singing cashmere. She’d made it. The memories glossed in this ichorite were hers. How could she wear ichorite? Faintly, but persistently, it was ichorite. I saw her work it. Her hands pulling, pressing, pinching. Her sweat between her shoulders. Under her shirt her corset, stripped of all its ichorite boning, fell off her flank in black ribbons. The flare of her waist into her hips was overwhelming. She had little dimples on either side of her tailbone. Anyone sane would worship them.

“Vikare,” I said. Vikare, Vih-carr-ay in my Tullian twang, teeth against my bottom lip and my jaw dropping, then the movement of my tongue against the back of throat to the roof of my mouth, I spent time on her name, devoted an entire exhale to it, tasted the whole of all three syllables like rare candy. I slid my hand over the slants of her ribs. No tattoos, no scars, but I felt muscle under her skin. I touched her lightly. Touched her barely. “You’re sure on this?”

“Call me whore instead.” She lifted her cheek off the marble. “We are not through fighting.”

I grabbed her throat and yanked her body back. I held her upright against me. I closed my hand, her breathing snuffed. Her lashes fluttered, her lips parted, her face went crimson and I squeezed tighter, I counted, then released her. Vikare swooned. As she gasped I took her blouse in my hands, dazed and grinning she lifted her arms, I pulled the fabric over her head. I threw it. I slid my hands down the skin of her chest. Kneaded her breast, marveled at how my palm fit her, how her flesh spilled through my fingers, then pushed lower, touched her belly. I bit her shoulder. Her sweat tasted sharp. I flat tongued behind her ear and felt my pulse change. I lit up with electric colors. I adored her. I wanted to tear her apart. I had no higher thought. She reached back, stole her hands through my hair, knotted the curls around her knuckles. Pain sparked. I pulled her trousers open. I pushed them down, her hips moved with my hands, I brought the fabric to her knees. I pulled my hand between her thighs. I felt the texture of her dark sparse pubic curls, her wet cunt on my palm. She shivered. She widened her stance. She tightened her grip on my hair. I hissed, I bit her ear. I brushed the pads of my fingers over her clit. My guts were liquid, my language was gone, I said something past words against her jugular. She rocked against my hand. Her wetness was unbearable. Love flickered under my nail beds, quick real love, mean love. She panted, she dripped between my fingers, softer than water, and I lost my decorum. We were not through fighting.

I shoved her down. She caught herself, fingers splayed on the marble. I saw her ribs flutter inside her. I slid my hand down her spine, I sculpted her body, pressed her breastbone, her throat, her cheek against the floor. I ached for a moment, at a horrible loss. My cock was upstairs. Empty harness chafed against my skin. I felt my heartbeat slam in the O-ring, felt phantom nerves twitch and scream for friction. I suffered. I stepped on her braid. I stood over her. I watched her profile change. Fury, rebellion, curiosity, want. Watched her watch me. She swayed her hips in the air. Goading permission.

I licked my fingers, gloated to myself over the taste of her, and brought my hand down hard. I hit her. My palm sang. The pain shot up my wrist, I reveled in it, I watched her flesh recoil, she hiked her hips higher to take her licks. I beat her vigorously and watched her eyes roll back. When I couldn’t stand it I pressed three fingers inside her. How could I ever leave her? She bared her teeth. I moved my shoulder, I curled my fingers toward my palm, rotated my wrist. I fixated on her breathing. Tight, timed breathing. I moved until her regimented inhale fucked up and I leaned against the spot I’d grazed that’d got her. I fucked into her. Fourth finger, she made a sound deep in her throat, I thought of purring. She breathed raggedly. I felt drunk on her smell and the oil on velvet insides of her body. I fucked her with a death-wish liberty—she knew and I was over, she knew and Day and Night could war again, tear the life under the earth again, the end could fall over us and drown us in molten light, I would not survive the assassination I was alive to carry out, I would not survive to see what became of a world with dead Industry, Hereafter would skip me, it’d be rolling liquid nothing forever soon, who fucking cares. She wanted something from me and I’d give it. I’d fucking give it. I wanted to fuck her forever. I wanted to stay inside her, stay warm under her skin. When she came it surprised her, I felt the texture of her wetness change inside her, softness somehow softer, hotter, I watched her snarl melt when the tremors started in her thighs. She cried out, lifted her chest and head, but my boot didn’t move and she was fixed, she couldn’t pull away from the feeling, her face lit up with divine relief. She laughed once, panting, brows in a knot. I didn’t let up. I slowed my pace, bade myself be gentle. Her eyelids fluttered back. I watched the whites of her eyes in pink-rimmed crescent. She spasmed violently, once, then unraveled into twitches. She went limp under my hand. I stepped off her braid. She stretched her arms over her head, whole upper body flush to the marble floor, in easy feline pleasure. She stretched out her legs. I pulled my hands away, and with my absence awareness cut through her afterglow.

She rolled over onto her back. She seized my wrist. She put my hand back between her thighs.

I held it there obediently. Her heartbeat throbbed on my palm. I wanted back inside her. Desire struck me, and I swayed down and kissed her open mouth. I kissed her sweeter than I’d intended. She took a fistful of my hair and pulled me down, held me on top of her, belly to bleeding belly, breast to breast, and she kissed me back. She bit my bottom lip and I put my free arm behind her neck, kissed her like she was my girl. Like we would take care of each other. She slid her hand under the waistband of my trousers and my guts froze.

“It’s my turn,” she said.

I had no words. I kissed her, desperate.

“Do you not let your girls fuck you?” Vikare grinned. She had a crooked smile and long teeth. I wondered how it looked in all the advertisements. Miss Ichorite, face of the lustrous future. I wondered if she’d smiled like that when she’d plucked Alichsantre’s eye out. She released my hair and took my face in her left hand, held my jaw, made me look at her. She had a little mole under her eye. “I beat you. I want my way with you.”

Boycrawlies don’t seek touch often. Some of us, sure. Not me. Not plenty. Wasn’t the aftermath of having survived violence alone, girlcrawlies were harrowed the same by enforcers in crawly bar raids. It was a disjuncture in the meat of me. A bone-deep fear. That fear was hungry, it wanted, I wanted, I lusted and was satisfied. Just not with hands on me. It sometimes seemed to me I had a cuntless cockless body. I was nothing but output and appetite, I gave, my pleasure lived in my knuckles and my nail beds and the leather belts around my hips. My clit was my tongue. My slit was my throat. I was touched back, fucking the way I fucked was being touched in its way, but someone else inside me? No. It seemed contrary to whatever kind of person I was. But bleed above me—I was dying! I would die soon. I’d get caught and be killed or I’d be righteous and upright and my revenge would soak the soil and make flowers grow and get caught and be killed. My mortality throbbed in me. My extinguishable youth. I was struck by a compulsion toward experience, and I had no fucking experience getting fucked. All the sex I’d had and I’d never been touched because I’d wanted it. I wanted it. I felt dizzy, delirious. “Above my waistband,” I said, betraying myself and my own desire. My voice was not the polished politeness I aimed toward usually. It shook. Something must’ve shown on my face.

Something dark flickered behind Vikare’s eyes. She turned my face this way then that, examined me. Pressed her thumb on the fullest part of my fit-swollen bottom lip. “You have the sweetest slut mouth. You look bitten,” she said. “Open your mouth, Marney. Show me how you take it.”

My name in her mouth was a shock. I knew it was on my chest. I knew she knew it. Still. Lightning in my belly. Delirious post-strangulation sparkles in the front of my skull. I did as she said.

“Soft tongue,” she said. “No teeth.” She slipped her thumb between my lips, swayed her wrist, withdrew. She replaced it with her index. I held my jaw low, felt a familiar rush in the back of my skull. My mouth I knew I liked use of. I sucked lazily. Imagined through my frenetic haziness what we’d look like from above. She fit two fingers, then three, four. She reached back across my tongue. She touched my throat. She kept pushing. Fear kicked up in my gut and I blinked, tears welled from nowhere, one fell thickly down my cheek. Vikare purred. “You yield easy,” she said. “I thought you’d have fight in you. Immediate obedience is so sweet.” My face burned but I couldn’t say something in my defense, she pressed her fingers over my voice, not that there’d be anything to say. I hummed against her fingers and choked. More tears. I kissed at her knuckles and felt faint.

“I’m keeping you alive,” Vikare said. She sat astride me, thighs on my breasts, wet on my sternum, and forced the fast-depleting air out of me. She pinned my arms under her knees. “I am binding you to me. I won’t expose you. I won’t have to. She’ll want to be fucked by you when you marry her and she’ll see you naked for it. Your vulgarity is embroidered on your skin. No hiding yourself. But I’ll vouch for you. I’ll plead insight and skill. You’re a cunning brute, that makes for a good businessman. Helps that Whip Spider’s famous. Have you heard the songs about you? You’ll be hers, and she’ll still be mine.” She pulled her hand out of my mouth. I gasped, heaved a cough, and she caught my chin and held it open, spat in the back of my throat. “Gossamer without me is a tyrant. She’s a cruel, vile girl and she will inflict herself on the world and nothing will escape her. When she makes her gleaming kingdom, I’ll keep the carnage back. Keep me and save us. Keep me or I’ll kill you. Say you’ll keep me.”

“I’ll keep you.” Ragged little voice.

She struck me across the face.

The world went up in sparks. I blinked, rolled my head aside. She had a good arm.

“I want it in writing that you’ll keep me. Chief advisor. Operational officer. Make it a role. I’m staying,” she said. She panted, and I thought I saw real fear flash on her face. “We’ll draw up a contract tonight and you’ll sign it and I’ll make sure you’re who she picks.”

Her weight on me was starting to affect my breathing. I wondered between her conviction and Helena’s what might happen. Abstract ideas. I couldn’t focus. I saw the slope of her belly and her breasts and her lips and cheeks from here, her hair spilling loose over her hips, her hands floating above my neck, wringing the air above me in lieu of taking my life. I found my hands, placed them on the backs of her thighs. I had no more lies in me. “Forgive me ma’am,” I said. “You’ll have to do the drawing. Can’t write for nothing.”

She snorted. She grabbed my face and held it, squeezed my cheeks. “Can you read?”

“Slowly,” I managed.

“Yann is an antiquarian. He called ichorite ichorite because the Bellonans called monster blood ichor. There’s your hint.” She stood. I shivered without her touching me. She stepped off, pulled up her trousers, and bent to pluck her blouse off the floor. She buttoned it curtly. “You’re bleeding everywhere and I ruined your shirt. I’ll send a servant here with spare clothes. Don’t fuck this up. We need each other, Marney.”

I propped myself up on my elbows and stared at her. She kissed her knife before she sheathed it, both knifes, both sheaths I hadn’t noticed earlier. They were strapped between her shoulder blades. She started plaiting her hair. Perfectly even sections twisted between the rhythm of her knuckles shifting, rolling. Every movement deliberate, tight and liquid, like she’d practiced the basic choreography of animal maintenance in front of a mirror until all the kinks were gone. Immaculate. A pianist could use her movements for a metronome. I said, sounding gruff: “Will we speak again?”

“Until you marry her? Yes. We’ll keep fucking,” she snapped. She dropped her shoulders, cracked her neck, and turned away from me. “You’ll never be rid of me. I will plague you for the rest of your natural life.”

“Good,” I said. Wouldn’t be long.

With that she left me.

I shivered in silence on the marble in the dark and watched the smudges of my blood congeal in stripes.

Lust and want felt like god. I was sick and cloying with god. In the hot dark, amid waves of religious feelings, I considered Vikare’s thighs apart, and ichor, monster blood. So much faith called for monster blood. My mind moved backwards through what I knew.

Bellona plowed. The Bellonan Republic, ancient just past memory, was comprised of sickly river worshipers who tended their land and made vases. They wore glass earrings so long they brushed their shoulders and lived in spacious clustered domes built of rock and clay. To break the pleasant monotony, the sky opened overhead, and monsters descended, enraged by the simplicity and ease of the pre–Old Bellonan pastoral lifestyle. The monsters were giant and horrible. They crushed the domes with their fists and pulled families from the rubble to squish and swallow like grapes. Chaos swept the republic. The senators raised armies and fought them with unspeakable loss. Carnage drenched the land and tainted the rivers, which killed the goddesses I’d assume. Hope fell rotten. The soldiers were all dead. The monsters advanced on a small town in what is now Cisra, the last place left where humans lived.

There a goatherd saw them. He commanded them to hide their ugliness beneath the earth, and they cowered. The monsters slithered under the firmaments of mud and became inextricable from it, bound only by fear of the goatherd’s special power, which was authority. The goatherd soon thereafter became the first emperor of Bellona. In tribute to his surfeit of success, he ordered that all temples evoke the threat below our feet. Without authority, the incarnate chaos would claw loose and harrow the world again. The emperor was deified and stood on carved hands until he died. Everybody forgot about the rivers. This was about three thousand years ago, give or take.

Simultaneously, none of this happened. Life began in the planet’s core, having fallen from infinite fullness into matter into the nascent shape of the world, and out of Life the Oneness flowed, and became the order of all tangible things, an imitation of the endless ethereal as refracted by Life deep below. Bellona became an empire. Tasmudan had long been an empire, as long as Life has been in the ground. No need for supernatural theatrics.

Meanwhile on a more Bellonan timescale, there were normal people, and they were failures. They created the evils of their world with ill action and blemished hearts, which was not their fault, due to their newness. These people were the first attempt at life as conceived by Mortality, a wakeful component of the above-described infinite fullness, who’d made these people as a hasty misshapen attempt at understanding endlessness via creation, as endlessness had itself made the world, which is an end. Mortality just made things that feel pain. So Mortality’s twin bride, Immortality (this sounds better in dead languages), made a new attempt, bade this second crop of humans live beside and befriend the first, so that the project of Life, which was the name shared by Mortality and Immortality alike, might be a successful union. Immortality dove into the terrestrial mass to join misguided and hurting Mortality, and the crater its impact left cradled the newborn righteous Veltuni, the first ancestors, people like Alichsantre number one, who would not die but be born anew in flesh and remain watchful in thought to guide their children’s children, mortal and immortal. This crater is also in Cisra, like with the goatherd situation, though fringe sects say it’s a valley in Kimball, the barony northish of here.

Contrary to this, the Stellarine faith says, before Bellona or humans generally existed at all, Virtues existed on this world. They were abstract concepts made physical while remaining abstract. It’s been argued that Mortality and Immortality are Virtues but the arguments are weak. The Virtues’ society was perfect and nothing ever happened in it, because it did not exist. Being total and being corporeal revealed themselves to be irreconcilable intensities. There were no animals to prove their grandeur by enacting their essence, they had only their own singularity to prove itself, which was agony. Things want to be seen. Even gods. So they killed themselves, or maybe each other, separated breath from body, air from mud, and rose up to heaven, and crashed down through dust and brine. The bodies sank underground and became the ground, and their spiritual breath wafted skyward and became the sky. Both ground and sky existed previously but these things happened in sort a non-time time so it doesn’t matter if events follow each other in a row. Thus, the Virtues watch down over all of humanity, who rose from the mud made from the bodies, so they can see the puppets cut from their corpses run around and attempt their nature. Of all humans, Stellarines are biggest on missions and conversion. They wear pearls because the opalescence is said to resemble the doubled Virtues who walked across the world. Must’ve been shiny.

Every Drustish Hall has a slightly different iteration of what happened, oral histories with a common chorus and dissimilar verses. Your account and Mors Brandegor’s didn’t match. You were little and prone to lying. Brandegor is grown and scarred by experience such that she drinks too much. My sampling is not nearly enough. I’m too ignorant for my own conjecture. Here is what you said in common: People lived across the world, and life was hard. Babies died. Precious friends fell to sickness. People fought over meadows. They hurt and adored each other. They made art. They burned livestock alive. They braided each other’s hair and beards. They traveled in summer, built Halls in autumn, huddled through winter, then burned the Halls in a spectacular pyre to celebrate the coming spring. They did this for a very long time. They’d been doing this for a very long time already when Bellona decided to be Bellona.

Then a star fell down from heaven. The star broke across the sky and bore smoldering holes in the world. A war council was gathered across Halls, and the chosen strife maidens looked into the craters and decided, This complicates our essential belief that a vast essential grandeur exists in all things, human and animal, alive and dead, that demands respect and dignity, because aspects of many harmonious gods were revealed in objects and the arrangement of crowds. Stars stayed up. They didn’t come down. These blistering rocks were nature misaligned. They were the limbs of an evil god whose malfeasance rotted it. It was contaminated. Anybody who touched it was exiled. So nobody touched it. Nobody wanted god rot in their house.

Then there was my god. My Torn Child, your archetypal predecessor. Split by Day and Night, its warring father and mother, and buried still alive to hide and protect their treasured shame. Alive down there, never forget it. Twitching and breathing and waiting in pain.

God monster blood was everywhere. It touched everything. Everywhere people have been on this continent, gore squelched under our feet. It made for good harvests and nightmares. If ichorite was found where ichor was buried, we stood on an impossible vastness of luster. Gossamer Dignity Chauncey could mine the planet’s core, then the whole painted structure might collapse in on itself, robbed of its fundament, and become crumbles and fistfuls of ash. I pictured her drilling with a long hilarious straw, like a mosquito’s beak, and drinking up the pulp from the rind of the world. Sucking away blissfully, progressively richer until there was nothing but pith.

I said a prayer. I smeared my thumb across my belly and daubed my eyelids. I had no idea what time it was. Still, I said the bleed and miserably, sure of war, I slid my hand under my waistband and pressed my palm over my clit. My heart slugged slow.

Teriasa clicked across the floor and dropped a pile of clothes on my ankles before panic bade me scramble for my knife. I blinked at her in the darkness. She was real. In the dark her expression was obscured but I could make out the strings of her body under her flowy shapeless silk-like-water dress, saw her immense tension, the stiffness in each step. Mad at me? Frightened? I sat upright and felt along the corduroy she’d brought. It was good under my nails. I felt a lick of shame, then shame for that shame, and reached to pull the shirt over my head.

“Stop that,” Teriasa said. “You’re a mess.”

I stopped but didn’t know how I ought proceed. I looked at her knees. It was easy to hallucinate that I could see through the silk down to the bone. “I’m sorry, Sunny.”

She struck a match. I wasn’t sure on what. The friction in the air, maybe. In the illumination I could see her face twist. She stepped back from me. “I could smell that you were bleeding but stars above us.”

I looked down at my belly. What a smear. I covered the cut with my palm. It didn’t feel deep, but the pressure gave way to a needy, embarrassing pain. Vulnerability excruciates. “It looks worse than it feels.”

“It looks hideous. She cut your whip spider.” Between my fingers I saw she had. The slash parted the armored abdomen just below the eyes. I didn’t imagine I’d live long enough to see whether there’d be a scar. Sunny stood over me. She inclined her head, but didn’t kneel to meet my level. Her scrutiny itched. “Vikare zel Tlesana is a choice I wouldn’t have made.”

“She recognized me. This was negotiating.” I reached for my ruined shirt and spat on the sleeve, tried to wick up the congealed blood with a quick scrub across my navel. It smeared things around. “Thank you for bringing me spares.”

“A welcome break from entertaining Prince Mir. You’re alive and everyone isn’t rushing to find and kill you, so I assume it went well. Good. If you fumbled this I’d lose sight of Sisphe, and I’m starting to like her. I let her explain how lurcher engines worked for three hours yesterday.” She nudged the toe of her boot against my solar plexus. “You shouldn’t have named the Loveday heir after my doll. My doll is just me. I’d never tangle things up so much.”

“Had to hope for success somehow. You’re a good namesake.” I strained my neck and pressed a brief kiss to her boot lacing, the bow at the top of her shin. “Is the challenge over?”

“Dignity feels unwell. She’s retired to her bedroom and has suspended time for research. You’re encouraged to stop for sportsmanship’s sake and double encouraged to take advantage of her weariness to gather information ruthlessly and unkindly to impress her.” Sunny furrowed her eyebrows, and I felt very small suddenly, felt like my parents were freshly dead and I was filthy on her bedroom floor. She leaned into the ball of her foot, and her weight brought my body down. She pinned me to the floor. It was cold on the wing bones in my back. It’d be easy to throw her off but I wouldn’t dare. I abandoned efforts to scrub off the blood and dragged my wrist over my mouth. Teriasa said, “The Drustish pair and Hierophant Darya are walking together in the gardens. Or maybe just the strife maiden? Ramtha is in a tiff with Alichsantre. Mir is probably still sleeping. No idea about Susannah or Helena. I need to go find Sisphe. We’re planning.”

I thought about Beauty, how she’d empty her lungs on a monologue before anyone else got a word in edgewise, such was the strength of her passion. Sunny Teriasa didn’t have passion like that, but her conviction felt similar. She had a goal at the end of her sentences and she’d pursue it for however long the goal required. “May I know what you’re planning?”

“For the Choir’s stand. The war for Hereafter in Ignavia. I’m not telling you details when you’re so torturable.” She ground her heel in and I mouthed a word of gratitude for the attention, for the pain. I had nothing to combat that. Here I lay bleeding, successfully tortured. Not that I’d given up my purpose. “Get good with Goss and grab her expansion plans.”

“There are many forces conspiring for me to get good with Goss. Helena thinks Loveday is a good anti-war match. Vikare thinks I want to retire and become a passive thief and live a soft life, and that I’ll keep her in the picture in the business.” And personally. I entertained a fleeting hallucination that Velma Truth Loveday, future Baron Fingerbluffs, was a real woman who was once the damned and much-reviled Whip Spider, enemy to peace, besmircher of the publicly lustless Lunarists, but is now a crawly no more, and loves Goss Dignity Chauncey, and is content to wade through blood siphoned from Burn Street, thick and hot forever, rich beyond the stars. Would that woman carry on an affair with Vikare zel Tlesana? Would Gossamer love her as well, and the marriage be a sick web where everyone lied about sharing each other? How miserable for Vikare. Velma Truth Loveday-Chauncey would have to spoil her rotten to compensate.

I pushed myself up on my elbows. It displaced Sunny. She took that moment to turn away from me. Her match snuffed, and I cringed at the darkness. “Go be charming. Don’t bleed on anyone.”

Then she was gone.

I got back to scrubbing.

In the yawning, chilly library, there was nobody. I walked alone with my eyes down. Books had been abandoned on armchairs and animal-pelt rugs with their creamy pages spread. I glanced at a few and my eyes slid off the text. It was cramped and square and closed itself to me. I saw an illustration of a Virtue I didn’t recognize with pearls gummed between his teeth. Little filigree edges and quick hatched lines. The library’s vastness after the cramped side room felt dizzying, I wanted sky instead of roof, I pressed my hands against the stand of an elaborate topographical globe and forced myself to breathe. I worried that I smelled like blood.

I tapped my wrist bone against my jaw and splayed my first and second fingers, a pose for praising Day. Day ruled time and measurement. Research belonged to Day. If ichorite was the grand underground thing described by so many religions, where? Everywhere? Under temples? Holy sites? I looked at the illustration of the horrible Virtue and his mass of shimmery teeth and wondered for a moment about the glossy enamel in common between mother-of-pearl and cast ichorite. I felt sickish. My belly hurt where Vikare had cut me. I took my hand off my jaw and spun the globe, watched the mountains that cut through the continent we stood on, ripple from the Drustlands down to Tasmudan and into the sea. The map was old enough for an independent Delphinia on the opposing continent. I couldn’t suffer to think about the ways it’d change over the next few years. I couldn’t think at all.

Susannah read on the floor. Or had been reading. A book rested open on her lap, and her knees were bent, concealed with a traditional embroidered long skirt. I nearly tripped on her when I stepped out from behind the globe. I froze and shot my hands out, touched a jutting bookshelf lightly, queasy with sudden flickering post-fit pinks and greens at the edges of every object. Susannah looked up at me. I thought wrongly that she looked like Poesy, my middle sister, but I couldn’t properly remember what Poesy looked like. Susannah wore a brimmed wicker bonnet, a work style. In Glitslough, Tullian faith was farmer’s pride. It shadowed her cheekbones. I saw her looking at me and felt a horrible rush of embarrassment. It was like she could see my bad liver and mucky lungs. Could map the bruises under my skin. I straightened my shoulders and tried my mockery of Stellarine uprightness. Book on my head, pearls in my mouth, hands folded at the small of my back in a mimicry of temple school trauma.

She brought her hand to her jaw and splayed her fingers. Her gesture was small, delicate, neat. The better-studied version of my prayer pose. She returned her hands to her lap and pressed her palms over the pages. She waited silently, expectantly.

I didn’t know what to say.

She bowed her head. Humility and poise. Good Tullian Day posture. She was waiting to be called upon to pass judgement.

Edna, labor avenger legend of my head, was such a bad Tullian.

“Baron Apparent Susannah Loomis,” I said.

“Hello Truth,” she said. “Where did you learn to do that?”

Tullian faith was closed. Velma Truth Loveday shouldn’t know a thing about it. I searched for words but she could see the language shape in my gut, I was sure of it. “We have Tullian servants.” Amon, for instance.

Susannah didn’t blink. Her serenity was inscrutable. She knew I was lying. It wasn’t enough.

I sat down beside her. Screaming soreness shot all the way down to the gristle of me. My bones creaked. I pulled a thigh against my chest, rested my heavy skull on it, and moved my hands flat through the air as though along an invisible table. I did the movements of the morning bleed. I flipped my wrists to praise an imaginary Torn Child Idol, shooed off the boletes and honeyed bread of Night, redressed the table with wheat spikes and shallow cups of cream and puffy lamb’s wool; a flash and twist of knuckles, a fist, a fan, a cupping then flattening of my left palm over my right. I so rarely went to real Shrines for the bleeds now. I was clumsy. My faith was imprecise.

Susannah watched my hands. She smiled politely, delicately, revealing no emotion.

“My mother was Tullian.” Horace Veracity Loveday hadn’t married, a flaw in his otherwise rigid religious life. The heir was somebody’s bastard. Could’ve been a servant. Likely was. “She shared the faith with me.”

“I’ve been wondering where you got your twang from.” She smiled for real with a flash of blocky teeth, then brought her eyebrows close. She touched my arm. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Pardon?”

“You said was.”

I angled my head straight and shut my eyes and didn’t dare breathe lest I betray myself and crumble. The grief was immediate and total. It came as a riptide. I felt skinned. She didn’t move her hand. She touched my cheek with something soft, linen maybe. Paused when I flinched away from her but didn’t stop. She daubed away the tears and, maybe, the blood spots. Would they mean anything to her? Would reverendship to the Torn Child itself, not Day nor Night, have any sort of weight? Would it be understood as real legitimate faith to a true Tullian girl? She was so gentle. What a slithery feeling, softness.

I looked at her eventually. She had resumed her perfection and I had no idea what the fuck she was thinking. She might rightly be embarrassed by me. This didn’t feel like cutting scrutiny, but I couldn’t read her. I projected too much. She wasn’t a Burn Street revenant and I did her injury pretending she was. Susannah had prominent bones and a beige complexion. Roundish cheeks and rosacea. Thin upper lip. No callouses, she wasn’t a field worker. The bonnet was symbolic. She was wealthy, after all. She pulled the handkerchief back and worried her thumb over the orange dampness.

Susannah said, “You don’t know Dignity.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I hardly know anybody at all.”

“Why do you want to marry her?”

I swallowed snot and worked one shoulder in circles but I knew the kink would never come out. “Wealth. Peace. I’d like a bride and a partner. Same as most of us.”

“I love her.”

Through the blur she looked serious. I thought nonspecifically about Vikare.

“Right,” I said. “How?”

“We spent a summer alone together, she and I. At Wilton School. There was a fever in my household, it wasn’t safe for me to return to Glitslough, and Industry is a busy man. When other students scattered across the continent between terms, we stayed stranded in Wilton together. That school is viciousness and brutality with full all the students present but between terms things seemed serene. Vast empty halls, lasting quiet, undisturbed flocks of songbirds always chiming outside. Dignity was bored. She sought me out and interrupted my solitude and somehow my annoyance softened, I entertained her pestering, I let her near me. I grew fond of her. She’s important to me. I’m important to her. Wilton is beside this beautiful creek, it’s small beside the Flip, but it’s so clear and just deep enough for rowing. She’d come find me in my dusk prayers and pull me down the long hallways by my hand, and she’d lead me down to the boathouse, this horrible little shack behind the school, too dilapidated to feign safety, scarcely habitable for two women, and sometimes we’d even leave the boathouse and she and I would glide down the creek until it was too dark to see. We abandoned hope one night and slept under the stars, just drifting. We woke up a town over when our poor rowboat struck a watermill. The wheel came over us and sundered the boat. Poor Dignity and I, shivering wrecks. We convalesced in a tavern and miserable shivering Dignity somehow convinced a tanner to take us north toward Wilton in the back of his trade wagon. We huddled close in the back of that wagon and I knew I’d never love someone so fiercely so long as I live. She told me about her life in the Drustlands when she was small, before they sent her away to an Ignavian sanatorium. The monsters she’s seen!”

Something big and evil slugged in my gut. I blinked the tears back and looked at her. Her eyes had boiling stars or melting sequins or a pure soft lovely bomb inside them. Conviction. She looked more sure than anybody’s ever been before. She kept rubbing my blood on her handkerchief. The stain looked fawn brown.

Susannah smiled at me. Tremulously, she said, “Baron Glitslough holds the Flip River delta, that’ll be me soon enough. I have wealth. We in Glitslough are Ignavia’s harvesthead and we are her heart’s big artery and whatever wealth Dignity inherits from Industry will flow through my cupped hands before spilling into the broad world. The future is a fiction. We have only now and history. War’s bound to happen. I’ve hosted Miles Exemplar and Perdita Perfection as they’ve sailed home from their border skirmishes. Without sanction from the rest of us they gladly lock whole villages inside their Halls and chain the doors and burn them. Rape and slaughter and poison mud. None of us will stop it. You’re of the faith. Or you know it! Through your mother, who sleeps at ease and works no longer, you know that if I could love again, I couldn’t. I’ve been had. She’s touched me. I’ll belong to no other. I can be her Day or her Night, whatever she demands of me. I am going to marry Dignity. I’d ask you not to stand in my way. You’re a stranger. You don’t know her at all.”

Plunging cold. I needed to get away from her. An impulse to hurt her took me, then seething shame. I searched for something in character to say. Something Velma could say, something that wasn’t an insult to her, or condescending to her, or outright cruel. “Dignity’s no man,” I tried. “There aren’t codes that bind you to marriage if there wasn’t—”

“Penetration?” Susannah tapped the bloody linen against her forehead. “What a sorry Lunarist you are, if you count as one at all. We can’t advocate that companionship between women is as worthy and virtuous as that between woman and man and not mean it. I mean it. I think it’s just as worthy. I think that makes the severity of folly the same. I will marry Dignity Chauncey. There’s nothing else for me.”

The strictest way to serve as a Tullian was binding marriage from first fuck. The unthinkable failure to marry whom you first fuck blemishes you forever. It pulls you closer to the anguish in heaven and farther from the ground, our place of duty. You don’t rest when you die. You walk as a revenant, pulled skyward and kept awake and ravaged by insatiable desire. Your immateriality makes you go insane. Superstitious cruelty, a hateful thing to inflict on a people. A nightmare for the curious and the abused.

Pregnant Edna wasn’t married. I remembered my mother screaming. I was in bed, it was bluish dark and humid, the air was very still inside our bedroom, Poesy faced away from me and brushed her long blond hair, and Ma hollered and howled through the wall in animal anguish. What have you done? You whore, what have you done? Pa went out to drink to avoid the noise. Our neighbors upstairs stomped dust down from the ceiling. What had Edna done?

I stood up. Susannah stayed on the floor with her book.

“Go rest, Truth,” Susannah said sweetly. “You have time to nap before the bleed.”