Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

On the morning of Harrow’s first breakfast, Pyrrha served her eggs.

“Humor me,” she’d said with an oddly sad smirk as she set the dish down on the table. Though Harrow couldn’t have said precisely why, the request felt ominous.

Harrow studied the offering with instant, visceral distrust, noting the strange, fluffy, disarmingly jiggly texture. She stood slowly as if prepared to dash out the door at the first hint of a threat.

“Nona couldn’t stand them,” Pyrrha admitted brazenly, her smile growing more genuine, and she laughed quietly to herself, shaking her head as if to dismiss the memory. “Clean slate, clean plate, right? I don’t want to assume you won’t love them.”

Just as slowly, Harrow sat back down, her shoulders relaxing.

“If you like eggs, it opens up a whole world of culinary possibilities and makes both our lives a hell of a lot easier.”

“And if I don’t?” Harrow queried, assessing the scrambled golden mass before her.

“Then I get to be creative. It’s a win-win. I wish I hadn’t been feeding her under austerity. I still think I could have found something she’d eat.”

To Harrow’s credit, she was brave about bringing the fork to her lips and giving the eggs the benefit of the doubt—and braver still about excusing herself to the bathroom to quietly and politely dry heave over the bin. Pyrrha had a private chuckle, but she also had an apology and some plain toast waiting for her when she returned.

“Well, now we know,” Pyrrha said, toasting her with her toast, “Here’s to getting to know you.”

While they didn’t discuss the egg incident again, they did discuss plants.

“This is about as low-maintenance as you’re going to get,” Pyrrha said, carrying a charming potted pepper plant in on her hip. It was already studded with a smattering of tiny green fruit, each small pepper on its way to bright red ripeness. Once Pyrrha set it down, Harrow reached out to touch each little pepper with her fingertips, amazed at their uniform perfection. They looked like tiny pointed light bulbs and were only about the width of her smallest finger. The plant was strangely beautiful—perhaps too beautiful—and a severe wrinkle formed in Harrow’s brow as she finished her initial inspection.

“I have been reading about the science of germination during my recuperation,” she shared, “And don’t think that I don’t appreciate this gesture, however—”

“You expected to start from scratch,” Pyrrha finished for her.

“This feels like gardening for children,” Harrow was forced to admit, “There’s no grit in it. If I’d wanted to start with a pre-grown shrub, I would have stayed home and admired a bush.”

“I didn’t think you two were quite at that point.”

“What?”

Pyrrha took a breath and fixed her smirk, coming to sit across from Harrow at the table. “The thing about starting from scratch is that it’s just not that satisfying. You’ll be watering dirt for months, and even if you get a plant, they don’t all fruit their first season.”

“I did not realize that,” Harrow said, biting her lip to mask her humiliation. Of all the things she despised, she despised not knowing the most.

“Of course, you didn’t realize it. You’re new. The thing you have to remember is that plants are alive. They’re individuals. Sometimes you get a late bloomer or a dud, and that’s part of the charm. This guy here was a compromise so you’d know I was serious about helping out. I didn’t want you to think I was trapping you into this arrangement.”

“How long would it take if we were to start from scratch?” “Depends on the plant and the conditions. Could be a few weeks, maybe a season. Could be two years.”

Harrow’s face fell, her brows diving severely toward her nose. Two years? She had read that growing things required patience, but this new timeline put a significant damper on her goal to grow a worthy gift for Gideon. In two years, Gideon could have a home of her own, with her own thriving garden.

She might even have someone else to prepare meals for.

It took Harrow tremendous effort to return to Pyrrha’s kitchen on the second day. After agonizing over it all night—she’d had some very strange dreams about being tackled, cuffed, and dragged into Pyrrha’s kitchen against her will by Camilla Paul-whilom-Hect—Harrow shut off her alarm clock, perched on the edge of the mattress, and listened to the dulcet tones of Gideon Nav singing nonsense songs in the sonic.

She decided to take the walk. To escape the caterwauling, she told herself, even though she’d always thought Gideon had a pleasant singing voice.

It was good that she’d come, as Pyrrha, too, had given the situation some thought in the interim. Harrow nibbled on the day’s bread crust while Pyrrha disappeared to scrounge up an empty plex container from a pile of garden rubbish out back. Trowel in hand, she’d filled it to overflowing with dark, speckled garden soil, then set it on the table in front of Harrow.

“Some seeds grow quicker than others,” she’d explained, digging a few creased, hand-labeled seed envelopes from her back pocket and throwing them down on the table like playing cards. Each one was labeled with the name of an herb. “Half-decent cooking requires more than veggies. Figured you could grow your girl some flavor—germination without the wait. Everybody wins.”

Pyrrha showed Harrow how to use her index finger to make little divots in the earth. With the utmost concentration, Harrow filled each hole with a pinch of seeds, covering them delicately with a blanket of soil. It was like tucking a child into bed.

Subsequently, she’d spent the afternoon hunched over as she created tidy, handwritten and illustrated labels for each plant. She’d been so absorbed in the task that, despite the previous day’s misgivings, she ended up staying for lunch.

On her third visit, over oatmeal, Harrow glanced out the window at the wild, green plots behind the house. She watered her peppers and her herbs, and her careful scrutiny revealed that not much had changed in a day. She made a note that the peppers looked a bit more yellow than they had the day before, but jotting down her thoughts only added about thirty seconds to what was, at most, a two-minute procedure.

Pyrrha must’ve caught her gazing and dreaming, malcontent with her understimulating routine. As Harrow pushed her half-empty oatmeal bowl away, Dve spoke.

“Do you wanna stick around today?” she offered, leaning against the counter as she finished up her breakfast, “Cam’s at the clinic, so I could use the help. You can follow me while I fuck around out back. I’ll show you what’s what, and maybe I can offload a job, and you can get a real taste of the homestead, yeah?”

Once the pair trooped out into the vegetable patch, Harrow squinted in the daylight, feeling out of her element on multiple levels. Very quickly, she realized that, for all her reading, she couldn’t identify a single plant by its appearance in the ground, which made it nearly impossible to tell an edible plant from a common weed. Even Pyrrha’s most organized plots possessed an air of unbridled chaos, with secrets lurking beneath the surface.

Harrow could relate.

When Pyrrha knelt down in front of a patch of non-descript green stalks, some of which were flopping over under their own weight, Harrow felt an odd touch of deja vu. There was something nostalgic about those slender, cockeyed shoots, and her heart seized with the barest pang of homesickness at the sight of them.

“Wanna see a magic trick?” Pyrrha asked, grunting as she tugged on a soft-necked specimen and pulled a round yellow bulb out of the soil. She handed it to Harrow, who took the spherical, soil-covered vegetable in two palms. She studied it quietly, turning it over in her hands. It was alien, yet familiar—not unlike her life lately.

“Are they leeks?” Harrow asked.

“Close. Scallions,” Pyrrha corrected, “And on the bottom, that’s an onion. If I had to take a guess, you wouldn’t like them, but Gideon might. Actually—”

And that was why, on day four (after consuming homemade granola, which Harrow had to admit had a mild, pleasant flavor and a satisfying crunch), the former Reverend Daughter of Drearburh became a student of the fine art of quick pickling garden vegetables.

On day five (during which she’d been served muffins—blessedly without the awful purple berries), Pyrrha sent Harrow out into the garden on her own to pull up some carrots for their pickling project. She emerged triumphant, face streaked with so much dirt it almost looked like she’d applied her old paint.

When day six rolled around (muffins again, but toasted this time—Pyrrha had made too many), Harrow didn’t start her day in the kitchen at all. She went straight to the garden to check on the beans before circling around to tend to her indoor plants.

Granted, she’d had no idea if the beans were ready, but she’d been able to identify them on her own, and that had felt like success.

And it was. Slowly but surely, she was developing the barest sliver of competence, taking pride in her fledgling new skill. She liked watching her little peppers change color and sketching her herbs as they peeked their leafy heads out of the soil. More than that, she liked coming home with new things to talk about, the way Camilla and Palamedes brought home stories about the clinic, or the neighbors, or the neighbors who had recently been at the clinic.

In fact, when she finished at Pyrrha’s for the day, she often took a detour to the library. Now that she was learning about gardening in a practical sense, the texts were beginning to lose some of their initial allure. Once, she’d been perusing spines a bit aimlessly, and the librarian had pushed her encouragingly toward the fiction room.

She’d stood surrounded by shelves upon shelves of stories, and she’d had no idea what to do.

As a child, she’d often been jealous of Gideon’s comics and magazines. It had been easy to convince herself that they were vapid, empty things—just horny, violent, godless texts with no real value. Nav fiddled her days away, but Harrow hadn’t had the luxury of wasting her potential on silly fictions. The Reverand Daughter had too much necromancy to learn in the process of justifying her own existence.

But even if she really had believed that fiction was childish, she had been a child. She had been entitled to childish things.

Now she wondered if it was too late.

The librarian must have seen her standing in the middle of the room as if stuck at a crossroads, unsure where to begin. They’d asked her what she liked, and she’d admitted that she didn’t know. The shame had burned scarlet in her cheeks. What sort of adult didn’t know what kind of books she liked? What fully grown human being couldn’t list a single definitive interest?

She hadn’t realized that any librarian worth their salt would relish the opportunity to help a patron discover the answer to that question.

Ultimately, she’d gone home with four books, and only because that was the most she could carry without attracting well-meaning, unbearably humbling offers of assistance. The early evenings, with their rosy light, were perfect for reading on the porch swing or while sequestered in Pyrrha’s garden hammock. She was amazed at how easy it was to fall head-first into fictional worlds, only coming up for air when it became too dark to read, slipping back into the quiet house like a spirit.

And just like that, Harrow Nonagesimus was a girl who ate breakfast. She was a delicate, mortal creature who grew things, and took little walks, and read books for pleasure. She was sleeping well. She was in less physical pain. Her plants were alive, and so was she.

On the seventh day, Harrow rested.

It wasn’t intentional. She’d stayed up too late reading, forgot to set the alarm, and had slept in. After six successful mornings, she’d felt so ashamed of her mistake that she almost hadn’t shown her face at Pyrrha’s at all.

But now she knew what she’d be missing if she turned over and went back to sleep. She dressed quickly and went.

Upon arrival, Pyrrha had the radio on. She was dancing at the stove, flipping fluffy, brown pikelets with her shirt off. It was almost as absurd as Griddle’s morning sonic concerts. If they combined their powers of song and dance, the mortification they’d produce in her would be enough to power a fleet of faster-than-light shuttles for a decade.

She also briefly wondered what it might be like to live with so few inhibitions. She didn’t even mean the nudity or the dancing, which were certainly choices. What flummoxed her most was the woman’s maddening ability to seamlessly adjust her routine to compensate for Harrow’s error.

The truly baffling part was that even once Dve noticed Harrow in the doorway, she didn’t get mad. She didn’t snap, or yell, or even make a disparaging remark at her expense. All she said was, “Glad you could make it,” as she loaded a few piping hot cakes onto a dish.

It was exhausting to brace oneself for a lashing that would never come. When she went to water her pepper plant, she was still holding that unearned tension in her body. It only grew when she hoisted up her watering can and noticed that a few of the tiny fruiting bodies—which, according to her journal, had been an orangey hue just yesterday—had turned a bright, brilliant red.

“Hey, look at that,” Pyrrha observed once she’d set the pikelets on the table, “It’s a good day for a harvest. Eat up. You’ll need your stamina,” she teased, “You’ve got, what, five peppers to pick? Might take you a whole ten seconds.”

Harrow, however, could not tear her eyes away. Her entire body was on alert as she reached out and plucked one of the peppers from the plant. She held it in the palm of her small hand, and it still looked impossibly tiny. Despite its size, it was whole and complete in a way she envied.

What a gift it was to be something whole and uncomplicated that knew how to grow into what it was meant to be.

Pyrrha had told her that the peppers would be hot, and she understood that intellectually. Why, then, was overcome with the desire to pop the entire tiny, perfect thing in her mouth and keep it for herself forever? Why, as always, was her first urge to take, to consume, to burn and burn and hate every second of the burning?

But she didn’t place the pepper on her tongue, and she did not receive that secret, red-hot communion. Instead, she looked down at that bright, once-wild thing with reverence and thought about how, finally, finally, she would show the restraint she’d lacked for so long.

At last, she would be the one to feed Gideon Nav.

“What’s the matter?” Pyrrha asked with a cheekful of pikelet, “Found a worm?”

Harrow clutched the pepper in a closed fist as she came to join Pyrrha at the table. She didn’t want to set it down. “I was thinking about the best way to present the peppers to Gideon.”

She didn’t say what she was really thinking, which was that she’d so seldom given Gideon anything at all. She barely knew where to start.

“We can spitball,” Pyrrha suggested, leaning back in her chair, “Tell me what you’re thinking, and I’ll tell you whether it’s a bad idea.”

“I’m confident that I know Gideon Nav far better than you do,” she retorted primly, cutting into her pikelet the way she’d seen Pyrrha do earlier.

“So am I,” Pyrrha agreed, “But a second opinion just confirms what you already know. If you were really as confident as you’re pretending to be, you’d tell me your idea instead of getting prissy and defensive about it.”

For the first time in her life, food was Harrow’s savior. Rather than talking back, she put the piece of pikelet in her mouth and took her time chewing, trying to make herself look unperturbed by Pyrrha’s painfully accurate accusation. Instead, she managed to look like she was contemplating murdering a pikelet. Still, she bought herself enough time to calm down (and to vaguely register that she really liked pikelets).

“I have considered leaving them in her room,” she said, taking her time cutting up the rest of her pikelet into tiny strips, “I am debating whether or not to include a note.”

“That’s your big plan?” Pyrrha asked incredulously, her face caught in a state between laughter and disgust.

“I could also leave them in the kitchen,” Harrow supplied, as if that was the magic alternative that would lead Pyrrha to see sense.

“You could also hide them in her sock drawer and see how long it takes her to find them, or maybe toss them in the river and see if they float.”

“Are you mocking me, Dve?”

“No, I’m helping you, if you’ll let me. If you’re going to give them to her, give them to her. You didn’t bust your ass getting yourself out of bed every day this week so she could find them in private and wonder what the hell they are. Give her some context, and let yourself enjoy it.”

“You are saying I should approach her and hand them to her directly.”

“At a minimum, yeah. Don’t just throw them at her and walk away. A gift is supposed to say something, right? Say it.”

Harrow considered this. It shouldn’t have been so difficult to talk to Gideon. Even six months on, nearly every conversation eventually became a fight. For anything softer, Gideon literally had to pass through Harrow’s closed bedroom door.

She wanted to say something to her, even if it was incoherent nonsense or small talk about vegetables. She wanted to talk to her the way the Sixth spoke to one another, without winding up or pretension. Somehow, despite all they’d gone through, both separately and together, she still didn’t quite understand how.

“What would you do if you wanted to give a gift to someone?” Harrow asked tentatively, still cutting up her pikelet into smaller and smaller bits.

“Invite her to breakfast. Show her the plants. Let her know what it all means to me,” Pyrrha shrugged, rising to drop her dish in the sink.

“We could come here?”

“If you want. Door’s always open. I don’t mind screwing off and giving you and your girl some space, either. I’ve got plenty to do outside.”

“Thank you,” Harrow said softly, opening her tightly clenched hand and looking down at the lonely little sweat-slick pepper in her palm. Her breath caught in her chest as, all at once, she understood what she had to do.

Along with the peppers, she’d offer the one gift Nav had tried to take for herself upward of 80 times.

She had to set Gideon free.

—

Two days ago, when Gideon opened her eyes and rolled over in her bed, something crinkled beneath her. Brow furrowed, she reached under her torso and fished around until her hand closed over a hastily scrawled note in familiar handwriting. Sitting up, she squinted at the missive, blinking as she parsed it:

“I wish to speak to you in two days’ time. The conversation will take place at Pyrrha’s house during breakfast. Please be prompt.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus”

It was a simple enough request, but it still made Gideon’s stomach hurt. She flopped over dramatically in bed, staring up at the ceiling like it had insulted her. Harrow wanted to speak to her? Now? About what? And why did she send a note… with no context… and give her 48-hours to freak out about it?

Gideon groaned, throwing an arm over her eyes. What was the point of getting up? She was obviously about to be the first woman in the universe to get dumped by someone she was barely speaking to, let alone dating. What the hell was she going to tell her? That she didn’t want to be casual acquaintances anymore?

Once she was out of bed and decent (or as decent as she could be, given she was completely freaking the fuck out), she thrust the folded flimsy in Pal Paul’s face and took a step back.

He took it in his hands and read it thoughtfully, making all the appropriate faces. It felt like it took him five full minutes to read the note, though it was probably only about four seconds.

“I think,” he said, pausing and looking her directly in the face, “And take this with a grain of salt,” he continued, pausing for dramatic effect as he removed and polished his glasses.

“Whaaaaat?” Gideon moaned, sitting down hard on the sofa and sinking into the cushions.

“It seems Harrow wants to eat breakfast with you,” Pal said, because he was a huge asshole.

“But she doesn’t,” Gideon whined, “She knows where I eat breakfast. As a matter of fact, she lives in the same building where I eat breakfast! Hell, if she was desperate, she knows where I eat lunch and dinner, too. But no. She’s been leaving the house! Every day! We’ve barely even talked since the soup,” Gideon said, throwing herself back against the couch with an anguished whump.

“Well, this sounds like an excellent opportunity to remedy that,” Pal suggested, “And she clearly has something she wants to say.”

“Then why is she serving me papers? She doesn’t need to make an appointment to talk to me. I saw her this morning! Have I mentioned that we live in the same house?”

Palamedes crossed one leg over his knee, moistened his lips, and adjusted his glasses. By now, Gideon recognized these small, slow gestures as polite, measured alternatives to blatantly sighing in her face. She was groaning again before he even opened his mouth to respond.

“What is the worst thing that could happen if you accept the invitation and talk to her?”

“Uh, she ambushes me and kicks my ass? She’s done it before.”

“Lately?”

“No,” Gideon had to admit, frowning.

“So, by my estimation, that’s unlikely. What’s the second worst thing that could happen?”

“I don’t know,” Gideon muttered, “She tells me she doesn’t want to live with me anymore?”

“The good news is that she can’t evict you. This isn’t her house.”

“But she could leave,” Gideon said softly, recalling the weird conversation in Harrow’s bedroom before she’d gotten sick.

Even Palamedes didn’t have the words to refute that. They’d chosen this arrangement. Any one of them could fuck off without notice whenever the spirit moved them. Harrow, despite being the largest small presence in her life since the day of her cursed birth, was merely a speck compared to the vastness of space. If she left this moon, Gideon could search her whole life and never see her again.

She’d already lost her once. She didn’t intend to do it a second time.

“If she’s planning something like that, she hasn’t said anything to us,” Palamedes assured her.

Eager for a distraction from her misery, Gideon glanced around the room for the other half of the ‘us,’ but it appeared they were alone.

“Where’s Cam, anyway?” she asked.

“Leash training the dog she didn’t want.”

“Without you?”

Palamedes smiled.

“Believe me, it scares me to death when she’s out of my sight, and I’m sure she feels the same way, but I have to believe it’s a good thing in this case. When she gets back—and she will—she’ll have things to tell me that I don’t already know. Spice of life and all that.”

“I guess it must be boring having Cam up your butt all the time,” Gideon mused.

Palamedes decided not to.

Instead, he said, “Have you considered that Harrow might have new things to say, too?”

“She’s gotta be doing something all day long.”

“Talk to her,” he said, “The worst thing that can happen is you’ll learn something.”

Later that day, dressed in her mud-spattered dungarees, Pyrrha hailed Gideon from across the lawn, moving to sit roughly on the front porch swing. Gideon joined her, planting her tush on the bench and propelling the swing back and forth with her heels.

“You talk to Harrow yet?” Pyrrha asked, which sent a single, terrible jolt of nervous electricity through Gideon’s entire gut.

“No,” Gideon said, “But I got her creepy invitation. She always has to be so fucking enigmatic. Do you know what she wants?”

“I know she wants to talk to you,” Pyrrha said, “I don’t think it’s anything bad. I offered my kitchen for the occasion, and you know how she is about food, so I wanted to ask what you like for breakfast.”

“I don’t care,” Gideon said, dragging her toes against the porch's weathered wood floor.

“Careful who you say that to,” Pyrrha warned, “Someone might believe you, and you’ll end up with all of Harrow’s favorites. I could be wrong, but you don’t seem like a plain oatmeal kinda guy.”

“I don’t care,” Gideon repeated, gritting her teeth. With Harrow’s talk looming, the stupid breakfast menu was the farthest thing from her mind.

“Well, I care, and I’m asking you to care,” Pyrrha said, propping one leg up on the swing as she turned toward Gideon. “Let me try it this way: if you could eat anything for breakfast, real or imagined, what would you pick?”

Gideon paused, though she didn’t have to. She immediately knew what her answer would be, but, as always, she was afraid to admit it. Admitting it would mean wanting something and wanting things was humiliating. Actually telling people that she wanted things was worse. She slunk down on the bench, stretching her legs out, crossing her arms loosely over her chest as she gazed down at her shoes. She said nothing.

“Alright, if you’re going to be like that, oatmeal it is,” Pyrrha said, standing up, her inertia causing the swing to shift violently, “Don’t say I didn’t ask.”

Suddenly, the only thing worse than admitting a desire was the thought of being alone with her dumb, anxious thoughts. Gideon sat up straight, snapping out of her grumpy tantrum.

“Fine,” she said suddenly. “If I could have anything then, I guess—this is really dumb, but have you ever read comics?”

“Not recently,” Pyrrha said, “But I’m familiar with the concept.” She sat back down, and the swing slowed in its frantic rocking.

“Sometimes in the comics, they have this big, like, cartoon breakfast,” Gideon explained, feeling utterly stupid, but she continued. “All these different things that cover the whole table. Fruit, and meat, and eggs, and these little pastry things, and there’s always something in a bowl. The butter always looks really yellow, and there’s usually some kind of juice. I don’t know. I know it was just drawings, but it looked so good.”

Gideon had fallen in love with the fantasy of not only having enough to eat but enough to share—a full table where she could afford to be picky and discerning. The food in those drawings was loaded with color, and she’d devoured every inch of it with her eyes. On the frequent occasions when she was sent to bed without her supper, she used to conjure those breakfast scenes in her head, imagining what each individual element would taste like. She had no idea if anyone actually ate that way in real life, but she’d once been certain that it was how she’d eat once she got off the Ninth.

Well, now she was off the Ninth, and she was still scarfing down leftovers in secret as if she feared retribution for feeding herself. She figured that, as always, her childhood fantasies were just that.

Everything else she’d once wanted had turned out to be shitty and disappointing, from the cohort to her parents. Why should this be any different?

“I can make that happen,” Pyrrha said, “A full spread of breakfast’s greatest hits. It’ll be waiting for you when you get there.”

“You don’t have to make it,” Gideon said incredulously, “I was just answering the question.”

“I know I don’t have to,” Pyrrha said, “But I want to. And listen, I’m not the only one here who’s going to offer to do things for you. Sometimes people are going to offer because they’re decent people and they’re being nice, but sometimes they’ll go out of their way for you for their own reasons, and if you want to keep the peace, you just have to let them,” she explained, stretching her arms up and resting them behind her head. “I’m too old to keep score anymore. The sooner you shake the habit, the better.”

Gideon was quiet, considering the advice she hadn’t asked for. She didn’t think she’d ever get used to people taking care of her, even as she yearned for connection. But she did want kindness, and she did want her storybook breakfast with the little pats of butter and the jam with the gingham lid. More crucially, she remembered how she’d felt when Harrow had refused her help with the bath and the way that harsh refusal continued to resonate, echoing in her head as if bouncing off the bathroom tiles.

She didn’t want to have the power to do that to another person.

“What’s Harrow going to eat?” Gideon asked at last, choosing not to argue, “She hates flavors.”

“Well, what are you up to tomorrow afternoon?” Pyrrha asked.

“Let me check my schedule real quick,” Gideon said, remaining completely still as a few long seconds passed in silence. “Yeah, I’m free,” she said sarcastically, “Why?”

“Swing by. I’ll show you how to make granola.”

“What the fuck is granola?”

“Human bird food. Dried oats, bunch of nuts, seeds. She loves the stuff. I send her off with a bag of it every morning, and she doesn’t even realize how much nutrition I’ve been hiding in there. It does take a while to cook up, though, so I figured if I got two of us working on it, we can keep her eating.”

“Tomorrow?” Gideon asked.

“Sure. Stick around, and I can even show you how to bake a pie.”

“Yeah, alright,” Gideon said, and when Pyrrha grinned her easy, hot butter grin, she knew she’d made the right choice.

—

There was one more sleep before Harrow’s breakfast with Gideon, and her nerves, which were causing all her appendages to tingle uncomfortably, would not allow her to relax. When she finished breakfast, she passed through Pyrrha’s back door, and she walked, and she walked, and she walked.

She had no idea that, at that moment, Gideon was in Pyrrha’s kitchen preparing to roll out a pie crust. All she knew was that she needed to do something with her own restless hands. She kept reaching for knucklebones that weren’t there, seeking comfort in the old familiar places and finding her palms and pockets empty.

She felt too restless for the library, and she had nothing to do at home, so she meandered around Pyrrha’s garden, looking for tasks to occupy her. Camilla had clearly already been there that morning, and she couldn’t find a single thing that still needed doing. Instead, she began gathering natural detritus—rocks, twigs, oddly shaped seed pods, fallen leaves—lovely, natural things that fit comfortably in her empty, shaking hands.

As she hunted, her palms grew muddy, and soil found its way beneath her short fingernails, but she continued building her collection. When her hands were full, she deposited her treasures in the shade of the trees lining the property, where, recently, she’d taken to bringing her books.

Once she decided her cache was complete, she settled in the grass and began arranging the objects. There was little rhyme or reason to her placement except a ravenous desire for rhythm and harmony. She was not a naturally organized person, but this wasn’t one of Camilla’s jigsaw puzzles—there was no right answer here, which was bizarrely comforting. She built mandalas, weaving patterns, forcing order out of chaos.

When she’d incorporated every precious thing into her design, she sat back on her heels and admired her unconventional altar—a meditative tribute to the very moon on which she knelt, which she now understood was an entity with a soul, a thing divine. In a universe without John, this was the closest she could get to the comfort of worship. It was a tiny, profoundly personal tribute to life.

Harrow shut her eyes. Sometimes, she feared being alone in her own head. Even free of ghosts and tagalong souls, there were still occasional sounds she couldn’t account for, and it killed the exacting girl to know that she was still an unreliable narrator in her own life.

Her ritual left her mind quiet, however, and she allowed herself to feel the kiss of the pollen-heavy breeze against her cheeks. She reached down and grasped at the grass beneath her, tugging at it without pulling it loose. She inhaled mold and fertilizer. The air smelled like every living thing.

Speak to me, she implored the moon silently, send me a sign.

She wanted to feel the way she felt at Drearburh during silent prayer when the sound of dozens of discrete strands of knucklebones sent quiet chills down her spine. She wanted to feel like she was in communion with someone or something. More than anything, she wanted to relive the moment she’d first looked upon the face of the girl in the tomb.

She would never forget that day. Instead of earth between her nails, there had been dry, crimson blood and tagalong bits of flesh. The air had smelled of iron and brine, not wet grass and ozone. She had seen Alecto, her beloved, and she had decided to persist until the day she woke up.

Now, as she knelt in the dirt, she was forced to acknowledge that she had lived that long and longer. After everything, Harrowhark had lived to see the First House wake, and stand, and breathe. The girl, who had never been a girl, had returned to her planetary body, far, far away.

She had done exactly what she said she would do. She had done more.

Now all she could see was her silhouetted shadow distorted on the ground before her. It was time to decide again: what would she live for this time?

If Gideon denied her tomorrow morning, she would need another reason to stay—on this moon or anywhere else. Were books enough? Were plants? If Gideon chose to part ways, could she live for the neighbor’s sun-warmed persimmons or the librarian’s welcoming smile? Was breakfast or a walk through the neighborhood enough of a reason to get out of bed? What about the next day and the next?

There was no prayer for this. She did not have the words to ask for the strength she needed. For a moment, her lips moved soundlessly as she searched. Slowly, softly, she put voice behind them.

“I want to live,” she said firmly, as if trying to convince herself, “I want to live. I want to live. I want to want to live.”

The moon did not respond. She spoke louder.

“I want to make things grow,” she said to the lunar soul that cradled her, “I want to be more patient. I want to be enough as I am.”

Though her eyes were shut, there were tears rolling down her cheeks. They were huge and warm, and they stung her eyes. When they grew fat and heavy, they fell into her lap, leaving tiny, dark stains on her skirt.

“Please,” she begged the trees, and the soil, and the shimmering suns in the sky, “Please, let me be enough without her.”

There was a sound from the trees, and Harrow, still waiting for her sign, held her breath and grew silent. She remained perfectly still as the sound, which had begun as a single, graceless thump, resolved into footsteps, slender ankles whispering against the grass.

Then she felt her heart let go of its tethers and plummet into the hot, roiling juices of her gut.

“A wise woman I once knew gave me advice for moments like these,” Palamedes said, contorting his long limbs as he came to sit beside her, a sage stickbug in repose. He hugged his arms around his knees, staring off at something in the distance. Unbeknownst to Harrow, he’d been tucked away in Pyrrha’s hammock, perfectly situated to observe what she thought had been a private ritual.

She wanted to feel humiliated, but from the beginning, she knew a part of her had wanted to be seen.

She had spent her whole life waiting to be seen.

“I’ve died at least twice since I received the letter, so I can only recall her wording through a mirror darkly,” Palamedes went on, “But I believe what she wrote was, ‘dying is obnoxiously boring, so I’ve decided not to do it.’”

“How many times does Dulcinea Septimus have to perish before I’ll be free of her inane wisdom?” Harrow sniffed.

“Case in point,” Palamedes smiled softly, “If we’re still talking about her, I’d say that means her plan worked.”

“Good for her,” Harrow muttered tersely, rubbing desperately at her eyes in a poor attempt to conceal the evidence of her tears. For once, she was grateful for the absence of her paint.

Palamedes chuckled. “I can’t help but think that, before I know it, I’m going to be older than she ever was. I know that was always the plan, but nothing else has gone to plan, so why should this? How do I justify laying in a hammock in the afternoon without her?”

“We were given a choice,” Harrow reminded him, “You chose life.”

“No, Paul chose death,” Palamedes corrected, “And I don’t blame him at all. How could I? Choosing death is the easiest thing a person can do. You can trust me on that—I’ve done it more than once, and I’ve regretted it every time.”

“But when you were restored, you were in agony, and still you chose to stay.”

“So did you, Harrowhark,” Palamedes sighed, smiling tiredly, “I know very few people who have chosen life as often or as ardently as you have.”

“It is a punishment,” Harrow said, “It is a curse.”

“I can’t disagree with you. Some days, I think, aside from blowing oneself up with thenergetic fission, living is the maddest, most irresponsible thing a person can do,” Palamedes laughed, “But don’t tell Camilla I said so. I told her it’s brave, and I think she’s finally starting to believe me.”

Before he even finished his sentence, Palamedes lifted one arm and waved at a dark speck in the distance. When Harrow lifted her chin to look, squinting, she noticed Camilla and the unfortunately named canine creature silhouetted against the horizon. Cam, too, lifted an arm in greeting as the shadow of the chaotic creature ran a circuit around her ankles.

Beside Harrow, Palamedes was beaming, all the odd angles of his face contorting into unexpected beauty. The sight of that connection, that grin, made Harrow ache.

“Tomorrow,” Harrow said, “I am going to offer Gideon a choice, and I am preparing to accept her response, whatever it might be.” Harrow swallowed tightly against an invisible stone in her throat. “In anticipation, I am trying to understand what it might mean to be alone.”

“And, humor me—why would you be alone?” Palamedes asked.

“I am not the same person I once was,” Harrow said, “I would like to believe that I am improving, and it is for that reason that I want to offer her the opportunity to walk away from me and all I’ve done to her. A final kindness.”

“And, pardon my ignorance, but what’s keeping her here now?”

“Residual devotion,” Harrow suggested immediately, tugging at the grass, “Familiarity. The peculiar affection one feels for a captor. Mostly, I fear it’s habit. She deserves better.”

Harrow thought of Pyrrha and of the Saint of Duty—the love and kindness Pyrrha remembered and the relentless cruelty she’d failed (or refused) to see. She did not want to be someone whom Gideon had to defend until the end of her days—for both Gideon’s sake and her own.

“And here I thought Gideon enjoyed your company,” Palamedes said, looking at her with a raised-browed glance.

“Wipe the smirk off your face, Sextus. I will not presume anything. I owe her far more than that.”

For a moment, there was silence as, maddeningly, Palamedes sucked his teeth.

“So, let’s assume she made you soup and single-handedly nursed you back to health because she resents you and can’t wait to be free of you,” he began, and Harrow rolled her eyes, “You’ve been joining Pyrrha for breakfast lately, haven’t you?”

“I have. What does that possibly have to do with—”

“And I know the librarian has been waiting to hear what you think about whatever you’ve been reading lately—which I’d love to hear about, for what it’s worth. I’ve been meaning to get back into novels. I suppose I never thought I’d have the time.”

“I can make several recommendations.”

“Also, Cam put you on the latest chore rota, and she’s counting on you to dust the common areas, and Gaia help us all if you don’t.”

“Get to the point, Sextus.”

“The point,” Palamedes said, “Is that many people, including Gideon, are waiting for you. Whatever happens, you won’t really be alone unless you want to be, and I don’t think you do. Think of all the people who will miss you if you suddenly stop showing up. Hell, Harrow, think of me if that does anything for you. Think of whoever you need to think about, or not a single one of us will be able to stop thinking about the space you leave behind.”

Harrow exhaled, long and slow. She nodded almost imperceptibly, allowing his words to sink into her grey matter. Of all the pain she’d ever faced, she wasn’t sure she’d ever recover from the gash in her brain where she’d once hidden the memory of Gideon Nav. She understood the knife-sharp cruelty of removing oneself from the equation for some abstract greater good.

She wondered if living was merely the act of choosing the least cruel option over and over again—of choosing the pain one was willing to bear and making sacrifices to inflict as little as possible on others. When she put it that way, it felt simpler, more manageable.

Harrow’s shoulders relaxed, and she sat up straighter, gazing down at her shrine. It was only now that she could see her collection clearly. What she’d mistaken as a tribute to life consisted of brown, curling leaves, silent stones, empty seed pods, and sticks that would grow no more.

In her desperation for life, the recovering necromancer had sought out comfort and had erroneously reached for death.

She stood suddenly and walked right through it, crushing her shrine beneath her feet, where it resolved into a pile of scattered, disorganized leaf litter. She would not worship here. In time, these lifeless things would return to the earth. When that time came, she would plant something new.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” she scowled at Palamedes, turning on her heel, jaw set, “I am not going anywhere anytime soon. I don’t trust anyone else to water my plants.”

Before Harrow could take two steps and stalk off indignantly, she teetered on her feet, nearly bowled over by a speedy gray and white blur at her ankles. She walked backward rapidly, very nearly going end-over-end and falling on her narrow, boney ass. Meanwhile, the beast circled her and Palamedes both, weaving a cockeyed figure-eight around them. Its terribly pink tongue hung out of its mouth, flopping around as it sprinted.

A few seconds later, at a casual and leisurely clip, came Camilla, leash in hand, looking unperturbed by this turn of events. It would appear that she was responsible for siccing the creature on her.

When Harrow glanced back down, the unhinged animal was rolling on her back in the grass, fuzzy peach belly to the sky.

Harrow took another step backward. And another. Perhaps if she continued taking steps backward, she’d pass back through Pyrrha’s kitchen door and out the other side, continue on to her bed, and could start this absurd day all over again.

The beast, however, would not be deterred. It wrapped its tiny maw around one of Harrow’s abandoned sticks and circled her like the fiercest of all cavaliers, showing off her beloved rapier. Harrow remained stock still, baffled by the varmint’s behavior. Just when she thought the dog was through, it paused at her feet and dropped the stick expectantly, panting, head cocked stupidly to one side.

When Harrow glanced up to see what Camilla and Palamedes planned to do about the situation, she found their gazes trained on her in a way she couldn’t quite parse. Even dead-faced Hect had something intense and hopeful behind the eyes.

“If you throw the stick for her, she’ll chase it,” Cam said, which Harrow graciously perceived as instructions to encourage the dog to go away.

“Thank you,” she said as she bent down, took the slobbery twig in her hands, and gave it a good toss.

The attempt was heartfelt but pathetic, and it did not go very far, but the puppy didn’t seem to know that. It overshot it by a tremendous margin before circling back, grasping it between the teeth, and… dropping it at Harrow’s toes again.

“It did not work,” Harrow observed.

“Sure it did,” Cam said, “Now throw it again.”

“Why should I do that?” Harrow asked, exasperated, “So the creature can bring it right back?”

“Yes,” Cam said, “It’s fun for her. It’s a game.”

Harrow blinked.

“Watch,” Cam said, coming beside her and taking up the stick itself. She gave it a far more generous toss than Harrow, and it whipped through the air, end-over-end, falling somewhere in the distance. The dog sprinted after it, mouth open in a way that almost resembled a grin. When Fish returned, she was so overcome with love and exhaustion that she threw herself to the ground. Not a second later, Camilla was kneeling, scratching her near the scruff. Harrow watched, captivated by the easy affection on both sides.

“Do you want to pet her?” Palamedes asked, speaking to Harrow from just behind her shoulder, just loud enough for Camilla to hear.

“Camilla seems to be doing a fine job.”

“You’re right.” Cam said, “You probably can’t do it better.”

Harrow’s hackles immediately went up, her back straightening perceptibly.

“What? That isn’t—”

“You can prove us wrong, you know,” Palamedes suggested, shrugging a single shoulder as if to say ‘ball’s in your court.’

“I have never pet a dog before,” Harrow admitted, “I have seldom been this close to one and, regardless, I have never seen the appeal.”

“Then how do you know you won’t be a savant?” Palamedes asked.

How did they always know how to press her buttons? Harrow was so hungry to be good at something, anything, that the possibility of success alone was enough to entice her. She wasn’t so oblivious that she couldn’t recognize that humiliating desire in herself—the yearning to feel halfway competent again—but neither could she ignore it.

She looked askance at the dog, who was ensorcelled into a transcendent state of pure bliss by Camilla’s massage technique. She looked at Palamedes, who had his arms crossed over his chest and a challenge behind the eyes.

“Fine,” Harrow said, “Fine. I will pet your… Fish.”

The puppy’s ears perked straight up at the sound of her name, and she looked to Harrow with her massive brown eyes. Harrow had to admit it was a bit cute.

She knelt in the grass and took a deep breath, reviewing her mental notes on what Cam had done to get the dog to melt into the ground in a way that disobeyed her understanding of the physical sciences.

This was just a simple theorem. It was a stimulus and a response. She nodded to herself, then reached out her hands for the puppy, who trotted over obediently and began sniffing at her fingers.

Harrow pet the dog.

She was not aware of Camilla rising and moving to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Palamedes. She was certainly not aware of Pyrrha glancing out the kitchen door to see what nonsense was happening in her garden. It was just her and this creature with the rapidly wagging tail, responding to her with unbridled, unselfconscious joy.

It was so blissful. It was so easy. And, oddly, Harrow was struck by how powerful she felt knowing she had the ability to make another creature feel this way.

Without meaning to, she thought of Gideon, and her ears felt warm. The momentary distraction was enough to distract the dog, who jumped up on her bent knees and slobbered lovingly on her face.

That was when Camilla took over, stepping forward with a firm but emotionless “Down.”

Fish obeyed, tail still wagging. Harrow ducked her head and smiled.

“I’m putting puppy socialization on the rota,” Cam said to Harrow, clipping the leash back on the dog’s collar, “Can I count on you?”

“Yes,” Harrow said without hesitation.

Whatever happened tomorrow, she planned to stick around for a while.