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“Wake up, Harrow.”
You were roused from oblivion by the benevolent press of the Body’s fingertips against the bow of your cracked lips. Often, the Body’s touch melted like mist in the sun before you were given the chance to perceive it, driving you to despair at the thought that she could not touch you—would not touch you—so you were always endlessly grateful when it lingered.
Sleep had dulled your senses; the Saint of Duty’s slackening enthusiasm to take your life had lulled you into a fall sense of security. Where before you would have been rising to your feet before you had fully finished waking, you allowed yourself the luxury of drifting to the surface of consciousness slowly. And the Body witnessed your wakening with an intensity that you fervidly believed almost translated into touch.
You’d lived so long in apprehension of being touched with any simulacrum of affection that you would have sooner walked into the burning heart of Dominicus before accepting any measure of it offered to you willingly. But a desire to know the Body intimately overrode all other instincts of self-preservation. Sometimes you thought you would die if you were never allowed to caress the graceful curve of her sartorius or palpate the curves of her iliac crests—you had been madly in love with her since you were ten, and you had loved her in the way that only an anatomist might love a body. But you knew there were other ways of loving and being loved, and you had often envied that you did not understand them.
“I have to go away for a while,” the Body said.
Overcome, you sat up in bed abruptly. The last dredges of drowsiness fled your body in haste. “Have I wronged you?” you asked with animal desperation.
“No,” the Body said.
You pleaded to know, “Why do you leave me, then?”
“I must,” the Body said simply.
You reached for her in the manner that you had observed others part affection with clinical interest previously: ghosts of exchanges between loved ones that had mortified you in Drearburh, the blasphemous acts the Saint of Duty had engaged in, God entrapped between his saints, Ianthe’s chapped, stained lips on your cheek—
The Body permitted the brush of your lips against her cheek silently. When you tried to tug the cloth of her shift, she withdrew abruptly.
That nearly drove you to despair. You persevered to bridge the gap between the two of you, grasping at her neck pitiably. Your cortex throbbed.
She retreated further. “Will you deny me your embrace before you go?” Harrow cried.
“I could not give you what you wanted,” the Body said, face downcast. She had retreated to the antechamber now. “But I might yet.” And saying so, she rounded the corner to the hallway that preceded your room.
She had given you no commandment, but you knew that she expected you to follow. The Body walked with a faltering, sloping gait that you had never seen her adopt before; if you had not been so preoccupied with thoughts of her imminent departure, you might have thought to question her about it.
You wavered but once, and you were deeply repentant for mistrusting her judgement. With the force of colliding neutrons, you came upon the realisation that she was leading you down the long, dreaded path to the chambers which had once housed Cyrus the First—now occupied by its newest heir, and walls still adorned with dreadful nude portraitures that induced a throb in your head even as fleeting thoughts.
You started to tremble from head to toe, an incessant tremor that jostled your bones and irritated your nerve endings. “My affections have always been reserved for you,” you told the Body. You realised, with mild consternation, that you were angry. “Have I not made that clear, beloved?”
She turned partway. The blue lights of the hall bathed her skin in a deoxygenated glow.
It was then that you realised that the Body had no understanding of love, or what it entailed, any better than you did. This exhilarated you; this comforted you. She had not rejected you—and you could not disappoint her even if you tried. “She can teach us,” the Body said, urgently. “If you want it, we must do it properly.” Then, “Come,” the object of your affections said, and your last defences broke, so you followed her obediently. You would have never denied the Body anything.
You were hot, embarrassed, flushed in places that frustrated and angered you by the time you knocked on the doors to Ianthe’s rooms. Ianthe was clad in shades of honey and buttercup yellow that glittered and made your eyes hurt, hair dishevelled from laying abed, but consented to let you in. She started, “Haven’t you—”
You stepped inside, and rose on your toes to press your mouth against hers.
Ianthe stopped talking before she had really started. When you pulled away, she said, “Harrow—”
You hated the exercise of separating your calcaneus from the floor and balancing your battered body on the digits of your feet to reach her mouth—loathed the contrast of your sister lyctor being firmly rooted to the ground while you wavered before her like a simpering maid from Dulcinea’s loathsome tomes. But you did it again to silence her. When the Body said, “Lead her to the bed, Harrow,” you were grateful for her timely advice. A secretive smile replaced Ianthe's attempts to question you, and she came willingly at your direction, allowing you to press her onto her back and scale the length of her long limbs. Her corn-silk hair fanned, arraying itself in a semi-circular halo around her head. You ran your fingers through Ianthe's hair because you knew intimate partners did such things, and decided that you disliked it because it did not resemble the Body’s hair—it did not shift colours between warm jaded browns, ambered oranges and resinous yellows, stubbornly set in its milk-pale shade you didn’t care for. To disguise your disenchantment, you swayed forward to clumsily crush your lips against hers, trying to replicate what you had done a lifetime ago on another ship. Your tongue quested in her buccal cavity and slid against hers. Ianthe’s neurons flared in bright spots of radiation in your mind; her lids closed shut. This allowed you to study the Body when she joined you both on the mattress, and you were momentarily transfixed by the crease and fold of the gold-and-white patterned sheets when she stretched out beside Ianthe and ran an inquisitive knuckle down Ianthe’s cheek.
You disentangled your tongue from hers to kiss her fingers, but your lips instead made contact with the zygomatic process of Ianthe’s cheek. You sat up abruptly, wavering. The Body admonished, “You cannot let her know that I am here.”
You thought you might have foolishly attempted to answer her if Ianthe had not brought you back by saying, “You haven’t ever done this before, have you, you Ninth baby?”
And you, so terrified suddenly, so obstinate in your insistence that you could excel at everything, were momentarily stilled. “You are twenty-two,” you said scathingly, reminding her that she was only four years your senior, but she said, “And you are twelve and the only likely person you’ve had carnal relations with is your auntie’s skeleton,” in a poor mockery of the Saint of Joy’s high-pitched vocalisations.
When you said nothing, your hateful companion rolled her eyes. With the long-suffering sigh of a martyr, she stuck her hands beneath your pants and you felt—something. Ianthe moved her fingers curiously, as if she was attempting to map your pelvic diaphragm. She studied you closely, and expectantly, although you could not understand why.
You shifted against her fingers, shifted again when the Body nodded in approval, and kept rocking your hips against them when the tension in her muscles melted and a small smile tugged at the corner of her lips. But you felt frankly ridiculous moving atop her while Cyrus and his cavalier’s painted visages witnessed the uncomely union between two ill-made lyctors.
I took pity on you, by urging you to reciprocate. You followed easily when I moved your hand; you peeled back the layers that sheathed Ianthe’s body to perceive the skin beneath. I was proud, Nonagesimus, that I didn't even have to urge you to place your hands on the sharp rise of her hips. Heat pooled in your ears but you paid it no mind except to wipe it periodically. Ianthe was a flesh magician—you did not think she would mind, anyway, if your blood got all over her.
You realised, distantly, that you felt more relief than any real aversion to finally making contact with her skin. You had hated more than anything her predisposition to secrecy—yours had always come from a place of self-defence and stark necessity but the other girl had delighted in deceptions and elaborate stratagems to some end you had failed to uncover. The relief grew manifold when, gradually, the secretive corners of her body were revealed to you—her heart beating quick as a hummingbird in her mediastinum, the dull slosh of her blood in its chambers, the heave of her lungs expanding with increased urgency, her neurons firing like sparking machinery as you dragged your hands up her waist, counting the intercostal spaces with tiptoeing fingers—oh, you’re a natural tease—to eventually caress her breasts. Her capillaries dilated, infusing her skin with a carminous hue that failed to impart any real loveliness to the eighth saint to serve the King Undying. Ianthe, oblivious to your scathing assessment, lifted her hips. “Harry—” She produced a guttural noise that made you think of a dying animal. And you hadn’t even done anything.
She was just that desperate for you.
You were not as coarse as her, or as unkind. You did not call to question her supposed area of expertise in matters of the flesh, instead shifting a hand to place the pads of your fingers on her pubic symphysis and trace a straight line down to the moist warmth of the space between her thighs, at my guidance. The Body placed her long fingers on the angle of her mandible, and this time you understood what she had meant to ask of you the first time—you placed a kiss there as you pushed your digits in, aiming towards her pubic outlet. Ianthe moaned.
The Body’s hot yellow gaze devoured Ianthe’s face and the micro-expressions generated by her furiously constricting facial muscles. Her fingers found her jugular pulse. You obediently placed your lips there. When they landed on her sternal notch and traced a line along her obscenely conspicuous clavicle, you followed her fingers with your mouth. You had been the best scholar produced by your house, and she had suggested it in the first place; you both observed, and you learned which places best made the conglomeration of flesh and nerves writhe beneath you, rendered boneless by precisely placed touches. The bony distal phalanges of the arm you had constructed dented the fascia overlaying the muscles of your back with vigorous force. Your dermatomes ignited, trying to fire impulses that seemed to you to be out of sync with time and space. Ianthe’s fingers were still moving curiously over you; you paid it no mind, directing your razor-sharp focus to the next place your secret lover placed her hands.
It was with some effort that you finally peeled back from the hand that was trying to stimulate some release from you, following the Body’s fingers as she continued to direct you to explore the different crevices of her body. I encouraged some teeth, Harrow, and you took to it enthusiastically, leaving red prints on her skin. When your mouth replaced where your fingers had been, you—kissed her, having formed only vague notions about what bodies did together, but that was not quite how it was done. I was no expert, but what I’d learned through the illegal magazines you’d loathed lent itself to your service, and your own eagerness made up the difference. Ianthe’s hips bucked. “Harry,” she begged and pleaded, often enough that you wondered whether you might be willing to debase yourself by seeking intimate relations with her again, “Harry, don’t be shy.”
But you were also learning, so you did your best to oblige, showing her more courtesy than she deserved. Impatience and raw desperation drove the eighth saint to stick her golden hand into your unruly hair and tug you forward roughly, nearly smothering you. You started to make a protesting noise, but the Body’s cool hands landed on your shoulders from behind, were reassured by her presence, and so allowed Ianthe to lock her thighs tight around your head. The bright spots of impulses grew in intensity until they flared like miniature supernovas, overwhelming your senses.
You fell back when Ianthe’s quadriceps contracted, and she pushed your head away slightly, bracing yourself on your elbows. Two sets of lungs noisily heaved in the vast chamber for long minutes, without exchanging any barbed witticisms.
When Ianthe’s heart finally slowed, she thrust her fingers back into your hair and roughly dragged you up, up, up. You followed.
“I wonder who taught you that,” she said breathlessly, with a questing gaze that made you feel more naked than undressing before her would have. “Was it your cavalier?” Her gilded knucklebones caressed your puckering face, circled to the back of your neck and paused over the base of your skull. Her grip tightened, and she drew you closer so that you were sharing breaths. After a bruising kiss, she amended, “Never mind the cavalier. What do you say about round two?”
The body wrapped her hand around your waist from behind, resting her cheek on your shoulder. You felt calmer than you ought to have, but did not want to seem overeager, so you nodded mutely, and let her tug you about as she pleased this time. It was just practice in your head, anyway.
You fit together clumsily—with the imperfect grace of the glenoid and the humerus, capable of so much together, but vulnerable to disuse by dislocation when lethal pressure was applied at the right angle. You had not always enjoyed all that your duties entailed in the Ninth House, but you had performed them the same—and you similarly applied yourself when your bodies came together again and again. The Body never left your side.
Much later, the liminal space between your room and Ianthe’s was crossed in a dream-like fugue. You wandered like a lonely protostar in the blue-limned corridors, aglow with your new-found erudition.
You would die in a week, in betrayal of your own injunction that it was essential for you to survive no matter the cost, but you had never known such peace. You had reacquainted yourself with failure as old friends crossing paths once again, although it had not been easy. Friendship had always come to you uneasily. Instincts that you had meticulously trained into your subconscious would not be ignored, but your spirit had been tempered during your stay on the Mithraeum.
Once you were safely ensconced in your rooms, the Body stood beside you and watched you part the folds of your skin and shed fresh arterial blood to repaint your wards. Less than a day had passed since you had replaced them last, but you intended to be preoccupied for hours. I didn’t know why I was surprised. It didn’t matter that you had found no real pleasure in the hours you had spent with Ianthe—it mattered that you would be able to replicate the same now with the Body.
Wards freshly reapplied, you realised that you were nervous, so you resorted to your old rituals to give yourself the time to pump the cortisol and adrenaline out of your bloodstream to the best of your abilities. You washed yourself meticulously; you shaved your head close to your scalp; you reapplied your sacramental paint; you rinsed the taste of the Tridentarii twin from your mouth.
When you finally went to bed, the Body followed you. You undressed shyly, putting aside the corset of bones that you never shed even when you bathed. The Body pressed her corpse-cold lips to yours and drew you into her salty embrace. Your head and heart throbbed painfully. You had to—I had to—remember to keep breathing. I felt more awake than I ever had in my whole entire undead existence.
You continued to subject me to petty cruelties even when you didn’t know that I existed. She really wasn’t that pretty, anyway. Would she die for you, too?
Blood dripped from various orifices in your body, but she had witnessed you in all your states of ungrace, so you were not embarrassed. “This is how meat loves meat,” your life and your death whispered, and I watched, pensive, as you locked hands, hips, limbs, and started to copy the motions of love.