Work Text:
They had been small, once.
Gideon, seven years old, a screaming lonely orphan who craved nothing so much as sunlight. Harrowhark, five years eleven months and sixteen days old, on the cusp of her parents finally telling her why they looked at her with such horrific grief, who craved nothing so much as knowing.
Gideon the foundling was bound in service to the Ninth, and thus to Harrowhark, but at seven wasn’t good for much more than threading sinew through knucklebone rosaries and getting underfoot. She painted her face every morning and presented herself for an inspection she always failed. She got cuffed ‘round the ear by Sister Glaurica for climbing the shelves in the empty classroom instead of focusing on her lessons. She stood in front of the entire congregation and recited every Tomb Keeper back to Anastasia, and every hesitation or missed name earned her the hissing, venomous disapproval of the Great-Aunts in the front pews.
Harrowhark thought she was fascinating.
“Talk to me,” she demanded, trailing behind the older girl, small enough that her robes and lace looked like doll’s clothes and still swallowed her tiny body whole. “Tell me a story, Giddy.” She was young enough then that a nickname was simple childishness not yet sharpened.
“Once upon a time there was a princess made of bones,” Gideon replied dutifully. She was walking the perimeter of the snow leek field, trying to spot her mother’s skeleton at work. “She never ever talked and she super never tattled on anyone for keeping a rat in their cell as a pet, the end.”
Harrow scowled.
“That’s a bad story. And rats have diseases.”
“Nah,” Gideon scoffed. “I looked it up, they clean themselves all the time. It’s a bonding thing, like how if you have a friend you fix each other’s paint and brush hair and stuff.”
Gideon had never had a friend. Until last year, one of the nuns had helped her apply her paint and scolded her for letting it smudge, but now she was old enough for it to be her responsibility alone. And she had certainly never had hair long enough to need a brush. But those seemed like suitably intimate, important things to trust a friend with. And her rat Drolessa (from her least-least-favourite story about a pilgrim from the Third whose bones now decorated the chapel) had definitely liked to groom the babies that she didn’t eat.
“I have a story,” Harrow bragged, ignoring her. “Once upon a time there was a nun, and she was so blessed by the Tomb and by God that she learned how to make skeleton armies that could beat everyone, and they won every war ever. And then the Emperor was so proud of her that he sent twenty ships of people to the Ninth House and they filled up all the rooms, the end.”
She had come up with that one yesterday, after she named every bone in the human body in ascending order by size. Mother had looked so very pleased with her, had lifted her veil and pressed the pad of her thumb to Harrow’s zygomatic arch with momentarily infinite gentleness and affection.
“You are everything,” she’d said. “Our glory and the Rock’s stillness lies in you, Reverend Daughter.”
“I’ll get better,” Harrow had promised, leaning eagerly into her mother’s touch. “I’ll raise every bone in the whole House.”
Mother had withdrawn then, her face still and suddenly remote under her usual day-paint of the Jawless Skull Ecstastic. Her dark eyes, which were Harrow’s dark eyes, turned distant and haunted.
“You can’t send constructs to the Cohort,” Gideon said scornfully, drawing Harrow back to their loop around the field. “Captain Aiglamene says you need living people to get things ready for necromancers.”
Gideon had recently decided that Captain Aiglamene was her least-least-favourite person in the Ninth House. The old soldier was scary and stern and had no problem knocking Gideon about when she was being a nuisance, but she also made her run laps and do push-ups instead of writing lines when she got into trouble, which to Gideon was a much better punishment.
The best part of all was that, if she was in the right mood and Gideon hadn’t been a terrible waste of meat and bones that day, Captain Aiglamene might tell stories. Short, brusque and brutal retellings of some of the battles she’d seen, or how many limbs a makeshift IED could blow off, or sometimes even what it was like to put on a starched white dress uniform (and oh, how fascinated Gideon was by the idea of crisp white clothing) and stand at attention through broadcast readings of missives from The Emperor Himself.
“You don’t even know what a theorem is,” Harrow whined back at her, stomping her tiny black-slippered foot into the loose soil at the edge of the planting field. “How do you know what necromancy can do? Maybe I’ll make a brand new kind of skeleton, and then you’ll look stupid. More stupid.”
Gideon rolled her eyes. Across the field, the next shift of skeletons were clattering their way into the rows of grayish-green sprouts struggling their way out of the dirt. The ones that had been working passed off their tools, every motion choreographed and almost elegant if not for the scraping of dry bone on bone, and retreated into the bowels of the Ninth to be inspected by the Great-Aunts for chips and cracks. Gideon bounced on her toes and leaned forward, trying to pick out a single construct from the crowd.
The skeleton that was most definitely Gideon’s mother had two distinctive long-healed fractures, one a starburst shape beside the right eye socket and the other precisely halfway down both the right ulna and radius, like the forearm had once been snapped perfectly in half. It always took the hoe with the lime green duct tape keeping its handle together, and spent its shift in the fields tilling rows for another skeleton to put seeds into. It would start at the far end of the field, and Gideon would wait until it reached her side to say hello and tell her mother about her day until the skeleton moved on.
Distantly, the bells rang out, announcing the time. The old bell-keeper skeletons were off by whole minutes, having been meant to mark the shift change; Crux was surely turning purple already, hauling off to find someone to blame. Gideon winced to herself and crossed her fingers behind her back, hoping that for once it wouldn’t be her.
“I’m bored,” Harrow whined even louder. “Come inside, Giddy, it stinks like dirt out here.”
Gideon rolls her eyes, “That would be the dirt. You go inside, I’m busy.” Her mother’s skeleton turned towards them - their general direction - and Gideon waved madly. It didn’t react, but she didn’t really care. “Don’t you have nun things to do? Or maybe Ortus has more poems for you.”
Gideon didn’t turn to look, but she could picture the look of disgust in Harrow’s haunted little face and it made her grin. She would definitely be telling her mother about Ortus’s terrible recitations, and how Captain Aiglamene talked about splitting his skull even more than she did Gideon’s because he was so terrible with a rapier.
If Harrowhark would just leave her alone, maybe Gideon would even tell her mother about how so very badly she wanted a sword of her own.
Harrowhark, being a blight on Gideon’s existence apparently by nature, did not leave. Instead she followed Gideon’s line of sight to the trio of skeletons that included Gideon’s mother. She put her hands on her hips, making her stupid poofy sleeves bubble out.
“You don’t like skeletons,” Harrow said. She sounded honestly confused, which she did less and less as she aged. “These aren’t even good skeletons. What are you looking at?”
Gideon, seven and screaming-lonely and hated, with only Harrowhark, five-almost-six and with the weight of her House on her narrow shoulders, for company, kicked the dirt, digging a hole with the toe of her shoe. She shrugged. Harrow pinched her elbow. She elbowed Harrow in the side of the head. Harrow tried to bite her, and Gideon grappled her to the ground.
Across the planting field, slow-crumbling skeletons clattered as they worked under Drearburh’s artificial dusk light. The skeleton with the green-taped hoe lost a pair of metacarpals in the dirt and continued on unbothered, another facet of slow collapse in the House above the unopened Tomb.