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“Do you grieve?”
Harrow was not sure she herself had asked the question, though it had undoubtedly been her lips from which the words had sprung. She was perched on a shockingly overstuffed and ridiculously over embellished armchair of the Third House quarters. Ianthe laid sprawled on her bed, making careful, coded notes in a little journal. They had both been sitting there in silence for a long time, somewhat in recovery from the preceding dinner.
It had been a very bad time. Certainly not one of their worst dinners, but Mercymorn had been unusually snapish and cruel, her usually snapish and cruel remarks developing serrated edges and poison tips. Augustine, for his part, was terrifyingly calm. He was barely reactive to her jibes and taunts except to say quipped, bloodless phrases that were so smoothly delivered Harrow was convinced he had practiced them in a mirror. The Emperor’s third saint was, like always, methodically picking through his soup and saying nothing.
Ianthe had made the soup that afternoon and, nobody else wanting to cook, it had been on the menu again for dinner. It was deeply terrible, though perhaps a bit more tolerable than some of her original concoctions. When Harrow asked what was in it Ianthe had simply waved her hand in the general direction of the food storage and said "Components" with a seductive eye waggle that made Harrow want to gag. As usual with Ianthe, there was too much salt. It burned Harrow's nostrils and choked the back of her throat. She had sat and nibbled on a carrot, trying to ignore its color, and trying to remember why they were all there to begin with. The blood rushing around in her head had been terribly loud, and everything else had seemed so far away.
Harrow only learned the reason for the unusually foul dinner energy when the night finally degraded utterly. God had sent all of them to bed in a rush, his fingers twitching with anxiety and his voice taking on a pleading, fatherly tone that could have never passed Harrow's actual father's lips.
It's the Anniversary , God had said, wringing his hands awkwardly. Harrow just stared, and turned a bit of carrot around inside her mouth, pushing it against her teeth with the tip of her tongue.
Anniversary. Ten thousand years and 40 billion light years away, and the lyctors of the Resurrection still remembered the day they decided to live forever.
Harrow and Ianthe had to pass Augustine on their way back to the Third House chambers. He was standing alone in the corridor, half slumped into a little bone filled niche.
"I was older than him," the Saint of Patience said, in a startling moment of geniality. He so rarely talked to Harrow with anything other than amusement or contempt, and she was rooted to the spot. His torso was covered in the remains of soup, the entire tureen having been dumped over his head by Mercymorn at the climax of the unfortunate dinner. He rolled an unlit, slightly soggy cigarette between his fingers, before slipping it back into his coat pocket. "He died before me. His life, ever eclipsed within mine."
Augustine did not need to specify who was meant by him . Alfred, his long dead cavalier, his younger brother, his other half. Dead ten thousand years and still burning inside of him. The Second Saint blinked those horrible ash gray eyes and then the moment was over, and the plex was back. He shivered slightly, like shaking off a fly, and smiled as he said something quick and cutting and irrelevant. Harrow was no longer listening, because Augustine did not say the final part: excepting the intractable mark made on Augustine's soul, this eclipse made it so Alfred might never have existed at all.
She let Ianthe pull her away.
And so, that night sitting of the edge of that grotesque armchair, Harrow asked:
"Do you grieve?"
At the question, Ianthe’s head snapped up. She narrowed her eyes, and did not need to ask about what . Harrow did not quite like this growing familiarity.
"Do you feel grief for the animals in your food? The sheep and cows and goats that adorn your table?"
"In the Ninth, we farmed snow leeks and subsisted on nutritionally dense protein substitutes. Anything else was shipped in, from off-planet.”
Ianthe rolled her eyes. "Typical," she said, in overly affectionate tones. "I don't understand why you persist in engaging me on such tedious topics, Nonagesimus. It's not like we can have a real conversation about this anyway, as you… well. This is going to be a very one sided conversation, is all I'm saying, and I do not delight in making myself raw before you, pardon the wording."
Harrow was not about to give in. "Either answer the question or state you are exiting the conversation, Tridentarius. You are either in or out, I don't care for your indecision."
"Oh how I crave your affections," Ianthe blew air out of her pursed lips and laid back, supine on her bed covers, her neglected right arm flopping out to the side at an odd angle. "The answer is no. Naberius was made for me. Bred and born and trained. He understood his purpose as our sword from the cradle, and I was never one to let myself succumb to thinking of him as anything else. Why would I ever feel grief that he became exactly what he was born to be?" Her voice was so perfectly casual it might have been carved from stone. She continued, a bit more brightly, "The other three are swimming in it though. Or at least, Mercy and Augustine are, and I can assume the Saint of Duty is by extension, although who knows what that man is really thinking at any given point. I can't speak for Teacher."
"Ten thousand years to learn anything and everything there is to know about necromancy, and I cannot imagine spending more than a second of it pining over Ortus." Harrow said. She studied her fingernails, where the keratin met split flesh. There was a growing pain in her skull, just deep to her pterion, and a trickle of blood was worming its way out of her ear.
Ianthe made an almost imperceptible facial expression. Just a twitch. Like she could laugh, but had decided at the last second that doing so would be very mean and so she was holding back, but that her restraint should be known and appreciated.
"You're so unsympathetic, Harry," she said, all teeth and terrible fondness. "If only everyone else in this abominable sanctuary was so cruel."
Harrow thought about Augustine, with his plex facade and playful face. Of Mercy, with her simmering derision and bleeding anger. Of Ortus, with his silence and dog dead loyalty. She thought of Teacher, and how they all spoke of the long dead as if everything had only happened yesterday. Ten thousand years removed from their crimes, and they were still drowning in them.
The entire process was alien to Harrow. She was a child of the Ninth, and all of the Ninth’s children. Harrow had never known much of grief, in the way a fish has never known water; when you are surrounded by a thing so utterly, it is hard to be aware of it at all.
She had known death before she had known anything else, and only became more familiar with it as she grew. Harrow remembered dimly, in the very depths of her memory, the way the people of her congregation would look at her when they thought she couldn't see. They looked to her as salvation, they looked to her for absolution, but they also looked at her with eyes weighed down heavy with loss. When she was a child she would often imagine how they thought of her in the privacy of their own homes. Perhaps they thought of her and seethed with rage, and jealousy, and barely bridled loss as each and every year she lived and grew, and their dead children did not. Her congregation didn't know the truth -- they could never know the truth of her and the truth of their loss, but she imagined it was enough for them to see her to live and grow and for their homes to rot, empty. Sometimes Harrow imagined them cursing her name with the same prayer knuckles that they diligently clicked along with her every day at morning orison. For every dead child that burned within her, there were so many more lives shattered. By her own birth, she had caused more grief than she could ever truly comprehend.
Perhaps that was why Harrow could not feel grief. She did not deserve to feel grief. She was the future of her House, and she was their unfathomable loss given human frame. What was the point of it all if she regretted any part of it? To feel grief was to feel regret, and to feel regret would be to make those lives lost meaningless.
“We are a new generation, Harry,” Ianthe said. “Those old fogies can’t go one night without making everything about people who haven't been alive for hundreds of years, at a minimum. We can do better.”
Harrow did not quite believe Ianthe's statement on her own absence of loss. She could hardly remember Naberius Tern, and could remember even less of the interactions between him and Ianthe. She could not remember Ianthe's ascension, nor if Naberious went willingly or not. But there was the wobble of Ianthe’s sword arm, the way she sharpened whenever she mentioned his name, the way she cried at night but only when she thought nobody could hear. There was the way she had bucked and screamed like a gut fish during that first foray into the River.
When she said that, Ianthe looked at her, all cruel edges.
"I do not grieve Naberius," She said. "But I will tell you this, for free: Coronabeth was older than me by minutes. We lied to Teacher -- the weird little priest, not God -- on that first day, in order to get off the shuttle. Someday she is going to die, and I will not, and then I will never again be the younger sister."
Harrow thought about that statement, turning it around in her head until it almost lost meaning. She could not conceive much of Ortus, of his memory. He was always large, and sad, and despite being what seemed like fifty years younger than the average Ninth House acolyte, he had always seemed so old . He would have been thirty five now, probably. Thirty six? Harrow didn't know, and had never truly bothered to keep track. He had been maybe seventeen when Harrow had been born, which felt impossible, because he had never seemed anything approaching young.
She realized in a slow, creeping way that might have been a cousin to guilt, that someday he would no longer be older than her. That now he burned as the battery of her immortal soul and someday she would think of his thirty some odd years as hardly as long as the life cycle of a fly. The thought made her feel like something was stuck somewhere in her mediastinum. It just felt wrong – regardless of how many myriads passed, she did not want to ever think of being older than him.
Harrow will, at least, have never been born before him. He will always have existed, and so too, will her dead two hundred children.
On the bed, Ianthe had long since rolled over and was writing again in her notebook.
Harrow stared at her fingernails and said nothing more.