Chapter Text
“Tell me about the ritual, Tridentarius.” Harrow’s white-painted brows almost met in the middle of her forehead as she stared at Ianthe, full of distrust. She had already somewhat accepted that a marriage between her and the sole other remaining saint was necessary to mend the political tensions, but now that Ianthe had mentioned some sort of marriage ritual, she was immediately on edge again.
“Relax, Harry. You’ll enjoy it.” Ianthe smiled a smile that was the opposite of reassuring. “It actually goes back almost four millennia. Don't you love things that are old and dead and deliciously rotten? It’s an ancient tradition whose revival would win us some favor among the other houses, and we really need that.”
Harrow moved no muscle. “Continue.”
“It’s called the ‘Distant Lascivity’. I can hardly imagine you haven’t heard of it, I am sure your ancestors practiced it a lot.” Ianthe’s already unsettling smile widened into an abhorrent gash across her face that showed teeth the color of her skin.
Yes, Harrow had heard of it. It was somewhat ubiquitous in the historical records of most house nobles’ genealogies, though she had not delved deep enough to come upon any proper description of the ritual itself. She was, however, not inclined to inform Ianthe about any lapse in her research, so she needed an inconspicuous cover to ask for details. “Which variant do you propose we use?”
Ianthe either immediately saw through her ruse, or fell for it so hard she saw no need for an explanation. “I thought it would be appropriate to use the Ninth House version, wouldn’t it?”
Dangerous. Did Ianthe suggest the Ninth House variant - whatever it may be, whatever the ritual itself may be - because she wanted to bait Harrow into another game of hers? Was the Ninth House version the most humiliating and debauched one, and Ianthe counted on Harrow agreeing to it out of pride for her house? Or did she expect Harrow to expect a ruse and to bait her into suggesting something worse? Or were there maybe even no extant descriptions of how the Ninth House used to perform the ritual and Ianthe was just going to invent one because she knew Harrow had no one to ask?
Harrow decided to take the risk. “Agreed. Let us discuss the details later.”
They parted, and Harrow returned to the library, desperate to find clarification. First, she scoured the annals of her lineage for any mention of the Distant Lascivity, and, surely enough, she had to go back in time only as far as to her great great grandmother to find mention of the ritual. The entry read: “Carinatricia Naoúmentic married Vigilirandus Zazpigarrena on the day of the Tormented Anchoress.True to the customs of her husband’s house, the ceremony ended with the performance of the Distant Lascivity. To avoid criticism from the fundamentalist Ninth House population, a lace curtain was added to separate the wedded from the guests.”
The notion of the Distant Lascivity as a tradition of her great great grandfather’s house - the Seventh - led Harrow deeper into the rabbit hole of historical research, but to little avail. When she finally resigned from the library for the day, it was purely by chance that she found a more fruitful avenue of historical inquisition.
It presented itself in the form of Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia broodily circling a training dummy in the middle of a barren leek-field, and occasionally hitting it with her sword. Harrows feet had led her to see her cavalier without her conscious intention, but she took the opportunity to let off some steam in the oldest way she knew, getting into a fight with Griddle.
As they flung meaningless, infantile insults at one another - God’s child and his saint - Harrow came to share the cause of her discontent with her cavalier in some run-on sentence full of stringed-together insults. This somehow brought their familiar altercation to a screeching halt as Gideon erupted into sudden laughter.
When she had calmed down enough to answer the question Harrow had asked only through murderous glares, Gideon rammed her sword into the battered dummy. “Oh I know what the Distant Lascivity is. I actually have… historical records… of it.”
She led - still occasionally swallowing giggles that worried Harrow immensely - her necromancer to her old cell, where she reached down to pull a stack of filthy magazines from beneath her mattress. She flicked through a few of them, and finally handed Harrow one of them. The title read: “Used and put on Display - My Necromancer Married and Made Me Her Whore”.
Harrow grasped the pages with pointed fingertips and flicked through the story. Gideon decided to do something she rarely thought about doing, and offered her the relief of a quick explanation.
“Yeah the Distant Lascivity is a Seventh House sex ritual. When two weak little Seventh necros marry, they sometimes don’t have the stamina to have a hot and steamy wedding night, so they make their cavaliers fuck instead and watch them. It’s a pretty hot trope, happens in a bunch of mags, sometimes they do the whole thing in front of the guests, sometimes the couple joins in, sometimes they-” Gideon paused. “Hey hold up. I’m talking about porn and you’ve neither yelled at me nor run away. Why the fuck did you ask about the Distant Lascivity in the first place?!”
There were a million things Harrow wanted to yell at different people in this moment - which were a few too many - and so she tried her best to retreat into the sepulchral tones she was most comfortable with. “Tridentarius has affirmed my assessment that the most promising way to calm the tensions among the houses would be a political marriage between her and me, and she has proposed to incorporate an ancient ritual into the ceremony for additional gravitas. I agreed.” She didn’t draw any attention to the fact that she had clearly agreed without any idea of what it entailed, which luckily flew over Gideon’s head entirely as she seemed to suddenly realize the implications.
“But that. Wait. That means. She. Me. You. What the fuck. I? I’m not fucking Naberius!”
Harrow curtly answered: “Tern has been dead for more than a year, and I know from a reliable source that his body is no longer available. I do not have the slightest idea as to how she plans to go through with thus, but… yes, it would seem that you have been made a part of our pacification efforts.”
There was a little voice deep in Harrow’s mind that tried to tell her that it actually found this course of action rather erotic, but she did her very best to ignore it. There was another, slightly bigger voice in her head that told her that it not only found the ritual rather erotic, but even more so the flustered way Griddle had reacted to the proposal, nay: the order.