Heartwarming / The Locked Tomb

Unmarked spoiler warning

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Gideon the Ninth

Chapter 4

• When Aiglamene stands up to her lady on Gideon's behalf, Gideon finds herself flustered and blushing.
  "I have condemned your escapes," said Aiglamene. "They were graceless and feeble. But." She turned to the other girl. "With all due respect, you've dealt her too ill, my lady. I hate this idea. If I were ten years younger I would beg you to condescend to take me. But you won't vouchsafe her, and so I must."
  "Must you?" said Harrow. There was a curious softness in her voice. Her black gaze was searching for something in the captain of her guard, and she did not seem to be finding it.
  "I must," said Aiglamene. "You'll be leaving me and Crux in charge of the House. If I vouchsafe the freedom of Gideon Nav and it is not given to her, then—begging pardon for my ingratitude—it is a betrayal of myself, who is your retainer and was your mother's retainer."
  Harrowhark said nothing. She wore a thin, pensive expression. Gideon wasn't fooled: this look usually betokened Harrow's brain percolating outrageous nastiness. But Gideon couldn't think straight. A horrible dark-red heat was travelling up her neck and she knew it would go right to her cheeks if she let it, so she pulled the hood up over her head and said not a word, and couldn't look at her swordmaster at all.

Chapter 16

• Harrow paying Gideon what is very likely the first compliment in her entire life:
  [...] The expression on her face was completely alien. Harrowhark Nonagesimus was looking at her with unalloyed admiration.
  "But for the love of the Emperor, Griddle," she said gruffly, "you are something else with that sword."
  The blood all drained away from Gideon's cheeks for some reason. The world spun off its axis. Bright spots sparked in her vision. She found herself saying, intelligently, "Mmf."

Chapter 20

• Gideon was able to figure out that the avulsion trial requires the necromancer to draw on their cavalier's life energy, causing the cavalier an enormous amount of pain and risking both of their lives. How'd she figure it out? Because it's something Palamedes would never do, since "he's a perfect moron over Camilla the Sixth."

Chapter 24

• In response to Harrow standing up for the Sixth, Palamedes, who Harrow once considered her greatest rival at Canaan House, says that he trusts her with his life:
  "Sextus," she said, as though to a very stupid child, "your [sic] necromancer is wounded. I could kill the both of you and take your keys—or just take your keys, which would be worse. Why would you willingly put yourself in that position?"
  "Because I am placing my trust in you," said Palamedes. "Yes, even though you're a black anchorite and loyal only to the numinous forces of the Locked Tomb. If you wanted my keys through chicanery you would have challenged me for them long ago. I don't trust Silas Octakiseron, and I don't trust Ianthe Tridentarius, but I trust the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus."
• While the Ninth, Sixth, and Fourth are working together to search for Protesilaus' body, Gideon surprises herself by hugging Harrow in gratitude:
  Gideon put her arms around Harrowhark. She lifted her up off the ground just an inch and squeezed her in an enormous hug before either she or Harrow knew what she was about. Her necromancer felt absurdly light in her grip, like a bag of bird's bones. She had always thought—when she bothered to think—that Harrow would feel cold, as everything in the Ninth felt cold. No, Harrow Nonagesimus was feverishly hot. Well, you couldn't think that amount of ghastly thoughts without generating energy. Hang on, what the hell was she doing.
  "Thanks for backing me up, my midnight hagette," said Gideon, placing her back down. Harrow had not struggled, but gone limp, like a prey animal feigning death. She had the same glassy thousand-yard stare and stilled breathing. Gideon belatedly wished to be exploded, but reminded herself to act cool. "I appreciate it, my crepuscular queen. It was good. You were good."
• Followed by:
  Jeannemary sidled up alongside Gideon, rather shyly. [...] She said, "Have you two been paired a very long time?"
  ("Don't just ask them that," her necromancer hissed. "It's a weird thing to ask."
  "Shut up! It was just a question!")

Chapter 30

• Gideon confesses to Palamedes that she killed Harrow's parents, and Palamedes dismantles her logic and comforts her instead.
  "You didn't kill her parents, and she shouldn't hate you like you did, and you shouldn't hate you like you did."
  [...] "Hey," she objected lamely, "I never said I hated myself."
  "Evidence," he said, "outweighs testimony."
  Awkwardly, and a bit brusquely, he took her hand. He squeezed it. They were both obviously embarrassed by this, but Gideon did not let go.

Chapter 31

• After Harrow reveals the last secrets of the Ninth house to Gideon, she all but begs Gideon to kill her. Gideon hugs her instead.
  Gideon braced her shoulders against the weight of what she was about to do. She shed eighteen years of living in the dark with a bunch of bad nuns. In the end her job was surprisingly easy: she wrapped her arms around Harrow Nonagesimus and held her long and hard, like a scream. They both went into the water, and the world went dark and salty. The Reverend Daughter fell calm and limp, as was natural for one being ritually drowned, but when she realized that she was being hugged she thrashed as though her fingernails were being ripped from their beds. Gideon did not let go. After more than one mouthful of saline, they ended up huddled together in one corner of the shadowy pool, tangled up in each other's wet shirtsleeves.
• The two of them also finally make (an abbreviated version of) the oath between cavalier and necromancer, solidifying their partnership.
  "Too many words," said Gideon confidentially. "How about these: One flesh, one end, bitch."
  The Ninth House necromancer flushed nearly black. Gideon tilted her head up and caught her gaze: "Say it, loser."
  "One flesh—one end," Harrow repeated fumblingly, and then could say no more.

Chapter 32

• After Gideon and Harrow have finally reconciled and cleared the air between them, Harrow gets protective of Gideon as they explore a Lyctoral study.
  Harrow stepped closer to Gideon and muttered, "If anything moves—"
  "Yaaas, I know. Let it head for Camilla."
  Gideon did not know how to handle this new, overprotective Harrowhark, this girl with the hunted expression. She kept looking at Gideon with the screwed up eyes of someone who had been handed an egg for safekeeping and was surrounded by egg-hunting snakes.

Chapter 35

• Gideon, after all that Palamedes has done for her, desperately wants to clear the air with him after finding out he's been in love with Dulcinea for 12 years
  Gideon emerged from her prone position and sprang to her feet. Her heart was a dry cinder, but it still seemed ridiculously important that Palamedes Sextus be okay with her: that at the end of this whole world, right before their divine intervention, all the little muddles of their personal lives be sorted out.

Chapter 36

• Camilla repeatedly offers to sacrifice herself to Cytherea in order to let Gideon and Harrow survive, which both of them immediately dismiss. This has even more significance given the reveal in Harrow the Ninth that Camilla and Palamedes had developed a plan to preserve his spirit inside the River; as much as she is devoted to Palamedes, she was still willing to give up any potential of his resurrection in order to save both Gideon and Harrow.
• While Gideon, Harrow, and Camilla are backed into a corner by Cytherea, and think this is the end for them, Gideon and Harrow have a last heart-to-heart:
  [...] Harrow reached up—her hand was trembling—and tapped Gideon on the cheek.
  "Nav," she said, "have you really forgiven me?"
  Confirmed. They were all going to eat it.
  "Of course I have, you bozo."
  "I don't deserve it."
  "Maybe not," said Gideon, "but that doesn't stop me forgiving you. Harrow—"
  "Yes?"
  "You know I don't give a damn about the Locked Tomb, right? You know I only care about you," she said in a brokenhearted rush. She didn't know what she was trying to say, only that she had to say it now. [...] "I'm no good at this duty thing. I'm just me. I can't do this without you. And I'm not your real cavalier primary, I never could've been."
  [...] The construct wasn't there: the shelter wasn't there. Even Camilla, who had turned away to politely investigate something on the opposite wall, wasn't there. It was just her and Harrow and Harrow's bitter, high-boned, stupid little face.
  Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound.
  "Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House," she said hoarsely, "you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer."
• A pair of easily overlooked moments as Gideon is grappling with killing herself that shows how she and Camilla had become unlikely friends:
  [...] Camilla—Camilla looked back at her, but she was already moving on. She couldn't do this to Camilla. [...]
  [...] Camilla watched her with an expression that showed nothing at all. Camilla the Sixth was no idiot.
• Right before her Heroic Suicide, Gideon finally lets go of all of her hatred of the Ninth House, and embraces it.
  She mentally found herself all of a sudden in front of the doors of Drearburh—four years old again, and screaming—and all her fear and hate of them went away. Drearburh was empty. There was no Crux. There were no godawful great-aunts. There were no restless corpses, no strangers in coffins, no dead parents. Instead, she was Drearburh. She was Gideon Nav, and Nav was a Niner name. She took the whole putrid, quiet, filth-strewn madness of the place, and she opened her doors to it. Her hands were not shaking anymore.
  [...]
  "For the Ninth!" said Gideon.
  And she fell forward, right on the iron spikes.

Harrow the Ninth

Chapter 33

• "Long time no see, Reverend Daughter."
• After thinking Harrow consumed Gideon to become a Lyctor, he catches a glimpse of her behind Harrow and his reaction is immediate:
  Sextus was rubbing his temple and looking at you, awestruck, as though he had seen some stupefying glimpse of the beyond; you did not remotely understand the sharp smile that suddenly crossed his face.
  "Kill us twice, shame on God," he said, and he leaned forward, and much to your intense distress, he swiftly kissed your brow.

Chapter 34

• Camilla's reaction to hearing Palamedes' Thanatos Gambit worked and she doesn't have to go hunt down more of his remains:
  Your distaste and paranoia were stopped in midswing by Camilla saying with barely repressed intensity: "So?"
  You said, "He's in there."
  The cavalier of the Sixth House looked at you; then she collapsed back in a long controlled movement. She lay flat on her back staring sightlessly at the sky, half shadowed by the sheeting, half-glowing in the light. At last she gave a long, shuddering breath and sat back up with the same abruptness.
  "Good," she said, and she smiled, very briefly. This smile lit the corners of her face like a rising comet. It made her look, in fact, ridiculously like her adept.

Chapter 36

• Harrow fondly remembers that when she was three years old Mortus, her parents' cavalier, held her in his arms in the chapel so she could see her mother at the altar. He even gave her mint candies to keep her quiet.

Chapter 40

• All three of Harrow's elseworld visions really drive home that, no matter what the world looks like around them, Harrow desperately wants to find her way back to Gideon.
• Even after her own parents replaced her, Crux is on Harrow's side and makes no efforts to hide his contempt for the new Daughter.

Chapter 45

• Harrow and Ortus have a heart-to-heart, and he apologizes to her for not being there for her and Gideon when they were growing up:
  Ortus dropped his book. He rose from the chair. He put his arms about her. The dead cavalier held her with a quiet, unassuming firmness; he petted her hair like a brother, and he said, "I am so sorry, Harrowhark. I am sorry for everything... I am sorry for what they did... I am sorry that I was no kind of cavalier to you. I was so much older, and too selfish to take responsibility, and too affrighted by the idea of doing anything difficult or painful. I was weak because weakness is easy, and because rebuff is hard. I should have known there was really nobody left... I should have seen the cruelty in what Crux and Aiglamene encouraged you to bear. I knew what had happened to my father, and I suspected for so long what had happened to the Reverend Father and Mother. I knew I had been spared, somehow, from the crèche flu, and that my mother had been driven demented by the truth. I should have offered to help. I should have died for you. Gideon should still be alive. I was, and am, a grown man, and you were both neglected children."
  She should have loathed what he was saying to the very depths of her soul. She was Harrowhark Nonagesimus. She was the Reverend Daughter. She was beyond pity, beyond the tenderness of a member of her congregation rendering her down to a neglected child. The problem was that she had never been a child; she and Gideon had become women before their time, and watched each other's childhood crumble away like so much dust. But there was a part of her soul that wanted to hear it—wanted to hear it from Ortus's lips more, even, than from the lips of God. He had been there. He had witnessed.

Chapter 48

• Ianthe gives Gideon the second letter Harrow left in her care, and Gideon's narration to Harrow gets fully sentimental:
  She handed me a fat, bulging envelope with your handwriting, and it said To be given to Gideon Nav, and I felt—strange. Time softened as I held it, and I didn't even care about the barely repressed mirthful scorn on the other girl's face. It was your curt, aggravated handwriting, curter and more aggravated than ever, like you'd written it in a hurry. I'd gotten so many letters in that handwriting, calling me names or bossing me around. You'd touched that letter, and I—you know it was killing me twice that you weren't there, right? You must know it was destroying me to be there in your body, trying to keep your thumbs on, and I couldn't even hear your damn voice?

Chapter 49

• Ortus starts reciting a passage from The Noniad—in what is later revealed to be an attempt to allow Abigail to summon Matthias Nonius' soul to help them fight the Sleeper—but gets wounded partway through. Up to this point, Harrow has spent most of her life mocking Ortus' writing and calling it boring, not to mention dismissing Ortus himself as a cavalier and as a person, but in this moment, she finally steps up and is there for him when it matters, and continues the recitation for him.
  Her cavalier cleared his throat again, and said, faltering, working that huge resonant bellow: "Nonius, woun..." He had to swallow. "Nonius, wounded..." But he managed no more.
  Harrowhark's heart crumpled like foil. [...] She did not know why Ortus had to go mad now, but when the Ninth House advanced, its Reverend Daughter would advance with it.
  She roared, her voice not so much a ringing trumpet as it was a howling alarm:
  "Nonius, wounded full sore, spat blood and gave him a grim smile; nor did the sword in his hand shake—"

• Harrow's ruminations on her feelings for Gideon:
  It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon. For one brief and beautiful space of time, she had welcomed it: that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall. Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow's end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.

Chapter 52

• After Mercymorn kills the emperor, Augustine talks her down from immediately committing suicide. Despite their intense animosity, it's made abundantly clear that they're the only ones in the universe who truly understand one another.
  "You cannot make me do this"
  "You have a job, Joy," he said. "If you kill yourself now, you'll leave everything remarkably untidy, and that's not like you, is it?"
  She said numbly, "That was not the agreement."
  "Bad luck," said Augustine. "It's done—as you chose to stain your hands so mine could be clean, you're going to have to put up with the fact that you picked the wrong man to enter into a suicide pact with. I hate 'em. Cristabel might have undone all my good work with Alfred, but here comes the reckoning. We're going to go round up the ships—everyone who's left—sue for peace as best we can—get the Edenites on side. And then we'll find a place to fulfill the old promise ... Somewhere out there exists a home not paid for with blood; it won't be for us, but it will be for those who have been spared. Babies always get born. Houses always get built. And flowers will die on necromancy's grave."
  Her throat was working. "Augustine—"
  The Lyctor took her silently in his arms: they held each other like children who'd had a nightmare and had woken in a fright. Just as silently, they detached.
  She said in a low voice, "He was right. There can be no forgiveness."
  "Then let us not seek out forgiveness, but forgetfulness," he said. "Bury me next to you in that unmarked grave, Joy. We knew that was the only hope we ever had—that we would live to see it through ... and pray for our own cessation. Oh, we'll still hate each other my dear, we have hated each other too long and too passionately to stop ... but my bones will rest easy next to your bones."

Chapter 53

• After Gideon spent much of her brief stint in control of Harrow's body talking about how she knew Harrow couldn't love her because of how she smiled over the Body, Harrow surfaces inside the Tomb, in what's heavily implied to be a mental space created by Gideon, and shamelessly embraces Gideon's longsword and smiles helplessly over the copy of Frontline Titties of the Fifth shoved inside the Body's coffin.

Nona the Ninth

Unsorted

• At several different points in the book, Palamedes makes it clear that he considers himself a passenger in Camilla's body, and that he's going to do everything in his power both to respect her privacy and protect her.
• Hot Sauce lets Nona back into the gang, despite her being a "zombie," because of her earnest devotion.
  Hot Sauce: I'll always love you, Nona.
• Palamedes chooses not to kill Ianthe because, following a Battle in the Center of the Mind (that he won), he is genuinely impressed and doesn't want to kill her.
• Near the end, as Nona is terrified of becoming Alecto again, Pyrrha assures her that she and Gideon the First did like her way back then. Not all the lyctors hated Alecto.
• When Nona is having a breakdown, Paul tells her that they, Palamedes, Camilla, and Pyrrha all loved her, and nothing that happens next will change that.
  Paul: You can't take loved away.
• Pyrrha reminisces about Commander Wake to Pash, her niece, and tells Pash that Wake kept Pash's photo on her and was obviously really proud of her. Nona notes that Pash looks like she's having a religious experience when she hears it.

Chapter 1

• One of the first things Nona does? Ask Cam to tell Palamedes Nona loves him. Once that's done, Nona assures Cam that she loves her, too.
• Despite her gruff exterior, Pyrrha makes it clear right off the bat that she genuinely cares about Palamedes, Cam, and Nona.
  Pyrrha: If you asked me to pick between the three of us and those twelve million plus sixteen, I'd pick us without turning a hair.

Chapter 6

• When Pyrrha thinks Nona is already asleep, she looks down on her and her "my darling hearts, my sleeping babes, Daddy's own treasures." It's unclear if she's talking to Nona, Gideon, Harrow, maybe Alecto, or even all of them at once, but it's still cute.

Chapter 7

• Though it's heavily colored by Palamedes being defensive and Pyrrha being, well... Pyrrha, their constant arguments about the risks inherent in the Lyctorhood process show that both Palamedes and Pyrrha care a lot about Cam, and want to make sure that she's as safe as possible.

Chapter 10

• Nona's skill at reading body language comes in handy when she realizes that after her argument with Palamedes, Pyrrha went to the park and mercy killed the prisoners before they could be burned alive.
  "There's always some softie in the crowd."

Chapter 13

• Though Corona and Camilla's relationship is complicated to say the least, their conversation after Palamedes reveals that he's sharing Cam's body shows that they do actually care about each other.
  Crown: You know I really am glad you two are together... in whatever way you've managed. I'm glad Harrowhark helped you both. I know I said it was dangerous at the time... and I"m sorry that we didn't believe you when we said he was in there.
  Camilla: Come back with me. Leave the facility. Before the negotiator arrives, come back with us.

Chapter 13

• Hot Sauce warns Nona to stay away from the burnings at the park, not because she knows Nona's a necromancer, but because she doesn't want her to be scared.

Chapter 30

• Nona nearly gives up on piloting the shuttle out of exhaustion and desperation, which would kill everyone on board. As soon as Paul reminds them that Noodle is on the shuttle too, her resolve returns because she can't bear to lose the dog.

Epilogue

• One of Alecto's first acts is to offer her service to Harrow, because as the trueblood descendant of Anastasia the Ninth, she is the inheritor of Alecto's ancient vow of service.

Other

• In The Unwanted Guest, Palamedes finally gets to talk to and see the real Dulcinea, and tell her he loves her.
  Dulcinea: Was I cute?
  Palamedes: You're perfect.

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