Chapter Text
His Celestial Kindliness, the First Reborn, begs this House to honor its love for the Creator, as set in the contract of tenderness made on the day of the Resurrection, and humbly asks for the first fruits of your household to join the first of Houses in a joyous competition for the hand of the First Daughter, the Star of the Nine Houses.
In loving the Golden Princess, you will be loved by Him, for the Emperor calls now for postulants to the position of Lyctor, heirs to the eight stalwarts who served Him ten thousand years.
To this end we beg the first of your House and their cavalier to kneel in glory and attend the finest study, that of being the Emperor's bones and joints, his fists and gestures… There is no dutiful gift so perfect, nor so lovely in his eyes.
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“It’s.” The words caught in Harrow’s throat, so they didn’t so much trail off as die before actuation.
“A courtship invitation,” Ortus helpfully finished.
“A prize contest,” Harrow choked, finally. She threw the paper down in disgust on her father’s desk, then picked it up again in remembrance that the single piece of cardstock was worth more than every treasure, trinket, and treaty the Ninth had to offer. Not that that meant much, considering the Ninth was too poor to afford God’s fingernail clippings.
Ortus peered demurely over Harrow’s shoulder to read the paper again. She let him do so without giving him the indignity of offering the letter to him, knowing he’d refuse it. Harrow knew he liked this sort of prose, after all, and a small bit of indulgence went a long way in preventing him from becoming insufferable.
She tapped the heel of her boot thoughtfully on the leg of her chair and rubbed the rough-shine scar of her neck. Despite being frustrated with herself for struggling, she was glad her voice failed far less often than it used to, and that it chose now to fail only in front of Ortus, who never minded and never commented on it. He’d never been impatient, even early on when it took 11-year-old Harrow minutes to croak out a single sentence. He’d taken over sermons in the Reverend family’s absence, and had actually become quite popular for his somber and reverential oration. Harrow had almost been sad to depose him when she’d recovered barring the fact she absolutely fucking hated his cadence and inflection. It was a sermon, God damnit, it’s not meant to be in enneameter.
“Well?” Ortus interrupted through Harrow’s thoughts.
“Well what?”
“Will you accept?” Ortus picked up the RSVP card, a crisp square of cardstock blooming with auburn appliques at the corners, likely made with real human hair. It had crisp little check boxes and the words “Attending” or “Not Attending” in a slender serif font. There was also an advisory note reminding Lyctoral hopefuls that retainers, servants, and the like were banned from accompanying. Had Harrow relied on the labor of anything other than skeletons, she might have been concerned.
Harrow didn’t answer at first. Her house needed support, and desperately. She was the greatest necromancer who ever lived, aside from the Emperor and his gestures, yet where did that bring her people monetarily? Prosperously? Marriage into the other Houses meant losing the Ninth, but the First House was a neutral party. There was no faction to consume the Ninth, only ghosts and God.
But, yuck. Marriage. Harrow distracted herself with a gnawing question. “Marriage to Her Gleaming Radiance is already enough to summon every eligible heir to the Emperor’s door, why throw Lyctorhood into the mix?”
“It’s past tense,” replied Ortus, gesturing to the second paragraph. “Served. And it seems to imply that multiple heirs can become Lyctors despite there being only one marriage position. Do you think the rumors are true?”
Harrowhark stood abruptly, throwing her church lace back over her shoulders. “If so, we’ll be smart to act fast. A head start is the only advantage one can take by choice, and we have a lot to prepare for.”
“Prepare what, exactly?”
“For starters,” Harrow clipped, acid building in her voice. “I’ll need something to wear. And you—” the acid reached a boil. “—have a lot of training to do with Aiglamene if we’re going to act like the Ninth’s legacy of swordsmanship didn’t die with your father.”
The contempt wasn’t deserved; Harrow knew it, and did not apologize, and Ortus did not expect her to. He merely bowed with a pinched, “Yes, my Lady,” as she strode into her parents’ cell.
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The whole process of preparing for courtship was an execrable and miserable experience in every possible way. Harrow’s wardrobe was beautiful, black, and very very old; but given the churchliness of Ninth raiment, there wasn’t a lot that screamed “marriage candidate”. There were skull designs that did, but only to those who understood what they meant and might blush at the implications. Harrow brushed up on the applicable designs, just in case the First Daughter was fluent.
Ortus suffered worse than his necromancer. Aiglamene didn’t hold back a single iota despite knowing the poor man was a lost cause.
“The skill he’s lacking would have had to be whipped into a regular man well into his youth, 20s at the latest,” she’d commented to the Reverend Daughter discretely while Ortus flailed mallardly at a defenseless combat dummy. “Ortus should have started when he was child.”
“My understanding is that you trained him,” Harrow had remarked.
“I came in later. His training began with his father,” Aiglamene had murmured in a darker tone. “You were a little too young to know him, truly. Mortus spent more time beating the boy than training him. Developed tender edges, trigger nerves. There was little I could do for him after that.”
Harrow rubbed her throat discreetly underneath her bone collar. She suddenly felt embarrassed to have shared a rafter with the man.
“I could go in his stead,” Aiglamene offered in the informative tone of someone who already knew the answer was no.
“You’re a commendable swordswoman, Aiglamene, but I doubt you are so talented as to convince Her Gleaming Radiance that we have had no need to replace you with a younger candidate all these years.”
“Had the call been made ten years ago, I would have been.”
“Had the call been made ten years ago, I'd still be cuffing my robe sleeves.” This passed for humor for the two, and they left the conversation at that.
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Though the preparations had been torturous, Harrow found herself wishing they’d had just a few weeks longer to put off the agonizing voidsickness of space travel. Floating through deathless Hell felt like the blood in her veins had been siphoned out her ears. Being unable to feel the thanergy in the world felt the same as being without fingers and toes, without eyes and tongue, in a word that otherwise was abuzz with stimulation. Lying on gravedirt helped, but Ortus had decided to practice his oration to occupy the hours, so any improvement to Harrow’s agony was negated.
Harrow was able to scrape herself off the ship's bench in time to look presentable. She hated the gnawing feeling of anxiety growing in her chest as she contemplated her fashion in a small painting mirror. Surely a princess who’d been raised with fine silks, inestimable jewelry, and lavish cavaliers at her beck and call would instantly clock Harrow as, frankly, fucking destitute. Ninth House traditionalism could only help her bluff so far; gaslighting would have to carry Harrow the rest of the way, and she had no idea how susceptible the First Daughter was to bullshit.
No one knew anything, really, about the First Daughter aside from the Cohort. There were statues honoring her in every capitol, but they leaned more toward iconography than realism. As long as it was red and gold, folks got the picture. Her birthday wasn’t even common knowledge, despite the Houses begging the King Undying for the holiday. Secretive as always, the Necrolord Prime kept his daughter’s life under wraps, just as taciturn as he’d been when she was born. No one even knew who the mother was, or if the Princess had one.
The ship rocked softly as it came to a stop at the planetary partition that kept them in orbit. Harrow steered away from the windows while Ortus very nearly smeared greasepaint all over the plex in his eagerness to take in the view. Dominicus was brighter here than it had ever been on the Ninth planet, and its blazing glory glinted off the planet’s cerulean rim and cut yellow streaks into the ship’s passenger bay. When Ortus finally peeled himself away, his skull had already been ruined with tears and he was half blind from sunspots. Snorting with disgust, Harrow yanked his veil over his face just as the autopilot was given clearance to descend.
Harrow found herself blinking strobishly as the voidsickness left her and the ocean’s waves spread out to greet her. It was a relief to feel thanergy again, but it didn’t take long for the weight to start suffocating her from the inside out. She’d always been accustomed to ridiculous amounts of thanergy — she was, after all, a heaping pile of thanergy living on a thanergenic planet stacked ceiling to floor with dead people — but this was exceptional even to that. The First Planet was a mass grave, the likes of which she had never felt even growing up on one.
Sunlight licked the waves and blinded her only moderately less than the glinting white stone of the docking bay. Poles with streamers were erected starting at the bottlenecked apex of the dock and extending across the bridge and down the open hallway of the castle. Oh, the castle. Harrow very nearly caught herself a bout of vertigo as she glanced up at the dizzying spires and criss-crossed terraces. Drearburh was a castle not unlike this one on the outside, but a distinct difference was that Drearburh started low and went deeper. Canaan House was pillared high above the waves and continued to climb. Harrow didn’t have to look at Ortus to know that he was already dreaming up new words to describe it.
Shuttles belonging to the other Houses touched ground at the same time, and a spectacular army of jaunty-footed skeletons danced their way over to assist with disembarkment. Harrow could only gawk as constructs with articulation beyond anything she had seen, both real and theoretical, hauled her luggage inside like a team of gymnastic strongmen. If they’d had lungs, Harrow was sure they’d be going, hup hup hup! and hoo-ah!as they tossed the luggage from one set of hands to another. After the last of Ortus’s bags had been claimed, a lone construct stayed behind and held its hand out expectantly at her cavalier. Confused, Ortus patted his pockets and gingerly placed their invite between the skeleton’s phalanges. It perked at first, but upon inspecting the envelope it made a gesture of frustration and handed the envelope back to Ortus before joining its brethren.
“I. Don’t know what that was,” Ortus remarked sotto voce.
“I believe it was asking for a tip,” Harrow responded in like. With no one else to lead them, the two followed the skeletons inside.
Approaching the bottleneck, Harrow was able to get a good look at the other attendees. The turnout was about what was expected. The Fifth House had not attended on account of being married, and the Fourth House had not attended on account of being infants. The Second, Third, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Houses made an appearance as expected.
Harrow raised her chin, mustering all the gravitas Drearburh had trained her for. From this point onward, image was everything. Image was survival. Ortus was stepping on her cloak.
Harrow stumbled only a half-step, and everyone noticed that. There was a hiccup in the procession as Ortus quickly tried to recover and, instead, bumped into his necromancer’s back. He lost the book and pencil in his hands — why did he have a book and pencil in his hands?— and got stuck somewhere between bending down to pick them up and remaining vigilant to protect and honor his charge.
It was in this moment between Harrow ending his life and Ortus wishing she would that Dulcinea frothed into the scene.
She was all seafoam and cupcake frosting, with gorgeously transparent layers of tulle piled over and over until their translucency added up to a creamy gown. The fabric was nearly put to shame by the thinness of the Duchess’s own skin, through which pretty veins of blue and green pressed against the surface. “It’s absolutely sublime, oh, isn’t it?” she cooed empathetically. “I could scarcely keep my chin down, myself. Dulcinea Septimus — it’s a pleasure.”
All Harrow could do was pretend she wasn’t mortified in every sense of the word. She bowed her head respectfully toward the older woman, whose brown curls bounced effervescently when she bowed her head back. “Regards from the Ninth House.”
In her periphery, a mountain given human form was helping Ortus collect his things. He collected a stray leaflet and scanned it indiscreetly before slipping it back between the pages of the Ninth cavalier’s scrawlings. “Struggling to describe the sea?”
Ortus grimaced and reclaimed his belongings from the larger man. Harrow had forced him into a feigned vow of silence, and she could tell he was struggling with it.
“Gentians.” To dull silence, Dulcinea’s cavalier clarified, “The flower. They’re blue, the bluest you can grow naturally. I apologize for skimming, but your words were implying, if not screaming the color blue! to me as I read them. Very evocative.”
Ortus looked as if meeting a singular other person who gave a living or dying shit about prosody was the final step needed for his soul to become fully realized and carry his bones personally to rest at the Mithraeum. Harrow was glad to interrupt his flight of fancy to leave, expeditiously. She bid her leave from the Duchess’s company and snapped her robe as she turned. A twitch of her finger and the bones Ortus was toting yanked him into step behind her. He fell gloomily into line.
“Oh, Pro,” Dulcinea sighed as the green-clad man fell into step behind her, blocking the sun from her delicate face and adjusting the breathing tube pinned to her collar. “You just couldn’t help yourself, could you? You artist types.”
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The heels of the skeleton constructs could be seen fleeting toward the separate wings of Canaan House, luggage in tow. Upon crossing the propped-open doors of the palace, the first actual people came forth to greet them.
They were three individuals, white-robed with chromatic belts that lended no favor toward any particular House. They were kind, and jovial, though only one spoke; he asked Harrow to call him Teacher, and spoke familiarly of the Ninth House as if he’d personally shaken the hand of Anastasia in his youth. Given that he looked trapped between baby-faced and decrepit, Harrow could half believe it.
There was a moment of confusion over the Third House. Teacher asked, “There are three of you?” And Coronabeth answered, “Why, of course. Is that going to be a problem?”
“The letter,” Teacher said with a gleamy smile, “requested the first of all Houses, and no retainers or servants.”
“Ianthe and I are both heirs, equal in every right,” Coronabeth declared with a gravitas that made her statements entirely non-negotiable. “Naberius is our cavalier and can represent us both individually. We trust there will be no issue with this arrangement.”
Teacher dismissed himself momentarily to converse with the two other priests. Harrow couldn’t pick up exact words, but caught the tail whisper of, "—figure it out, I guess—” before they broke their huddle and cleared the twins for entry.
As the two women glided by, Harrow was nearly choked by the scent of perfume. It was pleasant, like how a bouquet might smell, but had an acrid undercut that smelled like embalming. As if sensing her insulting thoughts, the milkish twin next to Coronabeth nicked her with an inquisitive glance. Her eyes were just as violet as beautiful Coronabeth’s, but unlike her vibrant twin, Ianthe’s eyes only served to wash out the rest of her body. She looked like elegancy low on battery.
All parties were greeted personally by Teacher, then lead into massive stretch of tile crowned with balconies, reachable only by a massive set of dilapidated marble stairs. The carpet meant to cover the steps had given up some centuries ago and lay in stringy heaps near the hand railings. There was nowhere to sit, though the priests offered everyone water, which Harrow refused for both herself and Ortus. Ortus’s reaching fingers curled meekly back into his palm.
“Oh, beautiful young adepts, you’re in for a treat,” Teacher said with barely contained glee. “Your courtship attempts — and studies, of course — are going to be overseen by the Princess herself.”
The room erupted with wide eyes and frantically straightened backs. Harrow and Ortus’s own shock was prudently hidden by their veils, but Harrow could hear her cavalier’s hiss of surprise. She was here? Naturally, no one expected God himself to host this event — he was far too busy — but given the tradition of arranged marriages, most everyone expected some attendant or chaperone to organize the event in his stead. No one expected his daughterto host her own marriage competition.
The doors at the top of the stairs began to creak.
“May I present,” Teacher projected, “The First Daughter, Her Gleaming Radiance, the Star of the Nine Houses — Gideon Ptolemaia.”
The twin doors, easily heavier than the combined weight of every necromancer present, were pushed apart by the arms of someone who looked nothing like a princess, but everything like the progeny of God. Instead of silks, the woman wore a white tunic ripped completely down the sides, completely exposing the weft of her serratus as it weaved into her obliques. She wore no jewelry, the only color being the shimmering iridescence of her cloak and the burning red of her short-cropped hair. She wore Cohort boots, but lacked any of the propriety expected from the Cohort.
She looked like a douche. She unsheathed her rapier — an obsidian needle that hinted at chroma when the light hit its angles — and propped it lazily over one shoulder. She grinned down at them all, head tilted in such a way that the light filtering through the caved in ceiling of Canaan House reflected off the smoked glass covering her eyes.
“Welcome, class,” she bellowed, “to Swords I. Our first lesson will be “one fleche , one end.” Hope you all stretched when you got off the ship, cuz the lesson starts now.”