“Come here,” you said, less steadily than you would have liked.

Ianthe—still dreamily doused in starlight—obliged you instantly, still smiling that same secret, conspiratorial smile, like a spider tucked inside a shoe. She arranged herself in the chair by the bed, and you noticed again her favouring the left arm, as though the right was too heavy a burden.

You swung your legs off the hospital cot, and you took the sheeting away from your face, despising your nakedness. Her mismatched eyes widened, just briefly, as you stood before her, considering—the sword was six feet of abandoned steel tangled in the thin blankets, but you thought that for now, a small distance would have to do—and you reached out to cup Ianthe’s face in your hands. Your thumbs pressed up against the warm flesh that skinned her ramus and your other fingers butterflied over her cheeks. Your metacarpus nudged up against the body of the mandible. When you tilted her jaw up to you your skin was discoloured against her skin; her skin was discoloured against your skin. There was the faintest suggestion of dried blood beneath your fingernails.

You found your mouth and eyes screwing up, as though against the light, or a sour taste; you could not help it. But the vile course of action was obvious. You leant down and—holy shit—kissed her squarely on the mouth.

This, at least, she hadn’t expected—how could she, what the fuck—and her mouth froze against yours, which gave you time to work. Ianthe was a black hole to you, a null, an empty, overradiant space, unreadable; but close physical proximity could echolocate that darkness. It was osteoids your fingers searched for. New bone always gave itself away, its fresh collagen spongy and bright with thalergy. The lining of her cells was in keeping with old bone. When you pressed the tip of your tongue to her tongue she made a small, tight, half-wounded sound—she was probably trying to call for help—but although the lingual muscle was not your area of specialty, you could probe through flesh the signs that her foramen bone was whole, unscarred by a fresh rip of the tongue from the mouth. You were safe.

You withdrew, finally, your mouth from her mouth. Ianthe was left, lips slightly parted, eyebrows raised, her bloodless face untouched by maidenly blushes.

“I pledge myself again to the service of Ianthe Tridentarius, Princess of Ida, daughter of the Third House,” you said. “I swear again to honour any previous agreements I made to her. I swear by my mother; by the salt water; by that which lies dead and unbreathing in the Tomb; by the ripped and remade soul of Ortus Nigenad.”

“Who?” she said. “Oh, yes—the cavalier.”

Ianthe wiped the pad of her thumb over the blanched bow of her lips, then considered her fingers. “Well,” she said eventually, “that constitutes some improvement over your sewing my lips shut, like you did the … no, pardon me, I agreed not to mention incidental detail.”

“Wait. You submitted to be made a Sewn Tongue?”

“Ask me no questions and I shall tell you no lies,” said the Princess of Ida, wiping her thumb against her bottom lip again, very delicately. “Look, all I shall say is that for a House that trades solely in bone, you own some enormous needles. I accept your fealty again, Ninth House, and can only assume that you have now read the agreement.”

You sat back down on the bed and placed your hand on the sword, which had the effect it always did: your oesophagus gave a little exhausted shiver, your salivary glands jolted, and the nausea rose up behind your eyeballs. “You have wrung a great deal of blood from what seems to be a very little stone,” you said.

“I gave you something you cared about very deeply at the time,” she said, idly swinging one leg to perch over one knee. “I don’t consider my price all that high … and neither did you. What’s more, now we are about to embark on what promises to be a truly beautiful friendship, with me the lone fruitful thing in your salted field, et cetera, so I’ll thank you to not embark on the I have been hard done by act.”

Your fingers pressed down hard on the wide breadth of steel. The thundering in your ears was a patchwork of sound and adrenaline, and your heart was sore. “The pledge did not condone disrespect,” you said. “I will not suckle at your bootheel.” (“Unnecessarily descriptive,” said Ianthe.) “I will not suffer insult. I am the Reverend Daughter. I am a Lyctor. I am in your debt … but I am not here for your amusement.”

“Not in that thing you’re not, certainly,” said Ianthe, whose lip was curling. “You look like a huge peppermint. Take this—and this.”

This—as Ianthe reached suddenly beneath her chair, right arm still strangely flopsome—proved to be a great shiny wadded-up bundle. She tossed it lightly at you—you didn’t even try to catch it—and it landed in a lovely pool on the bed. It was a mass of the same thin and frivolous material that currently shrouded Ianthe: a robe in mother-of-pearl colours, all its wrinkles and creases disappearing as you tentatively shook it out. It had a hood. It had deep sleeves. That was all you needed. The colour was not going to become you, but it was hugely preferable to the turquoise shift. You squirmed inside it with unseemly haste. You pulled the hood deep over your head and did not bother to hide your sigh of relief. You were clad from the arms down to the legs, if not modestly; the whole rest of your face was on show.

And this was a neat stack of flimsy envelopes, the same as the first. The Harrowhark who had addressed them had taken the time to write their labels—apart from the numbers—in neat crypt-script. You flicked through them to count, and could not help scanning the requirements. Some of them were plain and stark. To open in the event of the Emperor’s death. To open in the event of Ianthe’s death. To open if the Ninth House is in mortal danger. Some of them were opaque to the point of madness. To open if your eyes change. If met, to give to Camilla Hect.

You wondered, mystified, if you had ever known the last name of Camilla the Sixth, a woman you could not recall interacting with at any point.

“I will remain in possession of the last two,” said Ianthe, having risen to stand. It was always difficult when she stood: she looked so completely like a shoddy wax cast of some more beautiful sculpture. “I will tell you openly that there’s one I get to open in case you die, which is fun.”

You flipped through. Your eyes fell on: To open if you meet Coronabeth Tridentarius. This was different from the other envelopes in that it was not written in cipher. You were not happy at the idea that Ianthe had spent any time with your code, and thought your past self complacent in the extreme. Ianthe’s eyes fell on it too. “You wrote that one in front of me,” she said. “I can summarise the contents … you are now pledged to me and by extension to Coronabeth, and I tell you for free that one of the riders is that you will never harm a hair on my sister’s head.”

“Your sister is likely no longer alive,” you said, seeing no reason not to say it.

She threw back her pale head and laughed outright. “Corona!” she said, when she was done. “My sweet baby Corona is far too stupid to die—she’d walk backward out of the River swearing blind she was going in the right direction. I will tell you when my sister is dead, thank you, Harrowhark—and that day is not today.”

Your head was swimming. In a way, you were relieved. Part of you was afraid that this was just another complex part of the hallucination; that you would wake up again, and soon, back in a world where you were not part of your own master plan—a plan you resented, as you resented any peremptory order and any attempt to keep things secret from you, but a plan that nonetheless existed. You could follow any blind precept, if the alternative was madness.

“If it is all the same to you, I would like to be alone now,” you said. “I have a great deal to think about.”

Ianthe said, “How politely expressed!”

She drew her skirts around her and curtseyed to you—a beautiful, thoughtless movement, prismatic breadths clutched in her fingers, and it was somehow also mockery. When she looked up at you, you saw her eyes had changed yet again. They were both that bleached lavender now, but freckled with light brown like a constellation of little pupils.

“Take your time,” she said. “I would have thought time was the last thing we had at the moment … but who am I to judge the King Undying, the God of the Nine Houses?”