"Of course I had no idea," says Harrow, willing her voice to skew just far enough into irritation to be believable. She racks her brain, quickly, trying to think of some clue she might have missed, some way in which either of the pair might have tipped their hand or scattered some clue in her path. "The third of the Emperor's Lyctors is not prone to idle conversations. Or intentional ones. Not with me."

Palamedes draws the parallel she expects, the line between their circumstances both of them know and neither of them have mentioned--not this clearly. They are a mirror of one another, but skewed, imperfect and cracked; both of them having done the unimaginable, and left their counterparts with the aftermath. The guilt that crosses the other necromancer's face is terrible, another knife among many, and Harrow can't school away the echo of it that momentarily clouds her own expression. "I kept her alive," she says, wishing it sounded like enough. "The variables should have been different, for us all, but...we managed. For as much as that is worth."