Archive of Our Own

“From my House to yours, I bind myself to you. Blood of my blood, soul of my soul.”

And so the vow is spoken. Harrow’s fingers tighten on the bone handle as she runs the sacramental blade over the Prince’s forearm. It feels like cutting marble.

“Yeah, that happens,” the Prince says. “Don’t worry about it, it’s the thought that counts. May I?”

She takes the knife, and Harrow’s hand, in her own. The Prince rolls up the sleeve of Harrow’s vest to reveal a sliver of skin under her Ninth vestments, from her black boots to her black anchorite habit to the black lace veil, so heavily embroidered that it completely hides Harrow’s face from the disquieting eyes of her new wife.

“I take you, from your House to mine. Blood of my blood, soul of my soul.”

The Prince’s voice is flat and unemotional. The blade cuts into Harrow’s forearm, long and shallow, and the wound barely stings as blood pools over the skin. The Prince bends at the waist, as if she were about to kiss Harrow’s hand, and laps up the blood with the tip of her tongue. Harrow stills a wince.

The Prince straightens up. “There, wife. Shall we kiss now?”

Behind the veil, Harrow sputters.

“No? Well, okay, then.” Then the Prince turns to Aiglamene. “This official enough for the Ninth House, Captain? It’s official enough for the First—except for the afterparty.”

Aiglamene’s eyes narrow behind her sacramental paint. “It is. Congratulations, Your Highness. Congratulation, Reverend Mother.”

She says the last part in much warmer tones. The title that is Harrow’s by right and yet she only attained with marriage, now that she is tied inevitably to the House of the First and can be trusted with the legacy of her line. It’s not the only reason to resent the Prince, but it’s certainly one of them.

“Congratulations,” the Prince echoes to Harrow. “Captain, if you will leave us.”

The Captain looks to Harrow. Emperor’s Heir or not, this is the sanctuary of Drearburh her word is final, but Harrow doesn’t wish to get her retainers in trouble. She nods her assent without a word and Aiglamene bows rigidly, making her way to the narthex as the imposing double doors of the chapel slam closed. It’s a familiar noise, one Harrow has always found comforting—now, it feels like a trap about to spring.

“Well, that’s done.” The Prince has sprawled herself on a front row pew, one ankle crossed over her knee. “Our next wedding is going to be much nicer, I can promise you that. When do you want to leave?”

The letter of summons, which ordered that the marriage should be conducted as soon as possible, gave no instructions on the details of their departure. She considers the logistics.

“I will need one week to get my affairs in order.”

“Like hell. I’m not spending a week on this rock. Tonight or tomorrow, you decide.”

“Tomorrow—I can’t leave tomorrow,” Harrow sputters. “And leave the Ninth undefended? I will need to nominate a seneschal, and leave instructions, and sort the accounts... I have a duty to my people. You can’t possibly—”

“Harrow.” The name stops her cold. “Half the ships in the Fleet are bigger than the whole of the Ninth put together. How many people are in this place, two thousand? Two and a half? How long could it take to sort it out?”

“Almost four thousand.”

Three thousand, eight hundred and four. The Emperor was generous, after. After the secret came out, after her parents faced judgement, after the Ninth was renewed by the grace of His Celestial Kindliness, to be shepherded by His hand. The Ninth wouldn’t die out on one condition, and the condition was to be Harrow herself.

So she says, “Five days.”

“Two,” says the Prince. “You can send messages from the Emperor’s Seat, you know. There are comms, and mail shuttles, and you are coming back—though only Dad knows why anyone would. You aren’t going away forever, and you aren’t dying.”

Two days won’t be nearly enough, but the tone is final. Harrow bends her head. “As you wish.”

“As I wish. Great. Now… will you please take off that veil? It’s like talking to a mannequin.”

Through the lacework, Harrow can see glimpses of her wife’s face, her head thrown back and her bright eyes staring up at Harrow and the altar behind her. The cloth falls to her collarbones, heavy and intricately embroidered; it’s the same wedding veil that her mother once wore, and her mother’s parent before her, and their own mother before that for as long as the line of the Tombkeepers existed. Harrow is glad for the protection.

“I’d rather not.”

“You know we have to fuck, right?”

She says in such a crass, careless manner, as if it couldn’t matter to her one way or another. Harrow feels herself burn.

“I am aware of the requirements of a marriage ceremony.”

“At least there’s that. So, will you take that off or do you want me to bone a funeral shroud?”

“Now?”

For the first time, Harrow feels ill at ease. She thought—tonight, in her rooms. She thought she would have time. To refresh her paint, and to pray, and prepare…

“What’s wrong with now?”

Harrow swallows. “This is a holy place.”

“Well, I am not doing it in your parents’ bed—didn’t they kill two hundred babies screwing in there?” The Prince’s fingers move down her throat, undoing the buttons of her exquisite jacket. “Now is great. The sooner the better.”

“Not here!”

“Here,” the Prince says, implacable. “In your holy chapel, by your blessed Tomb, where you knelt in prayer every day of your life to worship a corpse. Just the spot. Take off that veil, wife.”

“Is this an order, Your Highness?”

“I like it when you call me that.” The Prince smiles, not unkindly, but Harrow can’t look at her mouth. “Not an order. Keep the veil or don’t, let’s do this now and then you won’t have to suffer my presence until we leave the system. Now… the altar, I think.”

As they are to leave the system in only two days, that promise is not much of a comfort. The thought of the altar is even more so: made out of appendicular bones and carved stone, with a black granite slab on top, it sits at the centre of the ciborium, the holiest place in Drearburh excepting the Tomb. The Prince, when she hadn’t been a Prince, had been whipped in front of that altar more than once. It makes sense that she would want to debase Harrow in here, to sully the place of her faith.

Harrow looks to the altar again. Behind it are the lanterns and the candles, burning low, the font and the fingerbone pillars on either side of the vesting tables. At the centre is the tabernacle—the boneheart of the Ninth House!—made from the skull of the first Novena of the Reverend Line, carved and polished and guarded jealously, which holds the Key that symbolises the duty of the Keepers. There hasn’t been a day in her life when Harrow hasn’t knelt among these candles and prayed to the holy corpse.

Tearing her eyes away, she turns to her wife. She wants to get this over with.

“Do you wish to undress me?”

Those gold eyes widen, but nothing else changes; the Prince remains sat in that same loose-limbed sprawl, arms spread open to rest against the wooden back of the pew, looking intently. Then the lips twist, and the Prince sighs.

“I wish for you to do it yourself.”

Which isn’t much of an instruction. Harrow cannot remember the last time someone saw her nude, if that ever happened past her very early childhood—somehow, the shape of her flesh has never mattered before. Her mind and her aptitude are what enables her to serve her House, and her cursed lineage put her at its head. Her body is an afterthought, only making itself known through its aches and limitations. A deficiency.

The Prince’s body, on the other hand, is obviously well taken care of. Even covered from neck to toe, Harrow can see broad shoulders and well-muscled thighs under the tight fit of the uniform. She’s even wearing gloves—so that her fingers wouldn’t touch the filth of the Ninth, or some other moronic assumption—and the shirt she wears under the embroidered jacket is buttoned up to her throat.

“Harrow…”

Her name, from that mouth. Such familiarity from a complete stranger.

“I’d rather you didn’t call me that.”

Harrow unbuttons her outer robe as she speaks so she won’t have to look at the Prince’s face. This morning she clothed herself in old garments, deciding that she should save her robes of office for her official departure and, besides, she owns nothing else that wouldn’t be taken as an implied insult next to First House finery. It means that Harrow makes no qualms about letting her robe fall to the floor, picking it up to fold half-heartedly over the nearest pew before unbuttoning her habit. She turned away so she doesn’t have to see the Prince looking at her, but the back of her neck still prickles.

She’s wearing tight trousers under her habit, and their removal requires her to slip off her boots and woollen socks. Harrow shivers at the cold emanating from the stone pavements and debates over her shift and veil, before deciding that if her wife wishes her more naked she can damn well order Harrow herself. The underwear she takes off with hardly a thought, as it suits a consummation.

“You said the altar?”

Harrow keeps her eyes on it. It’s a comforting sight: the boneheart and the candles and the carved seals on the sanctuary wall in the shape of the locked door of the Tomb, and the familiar altar with the top slab at thigh height, so that the devouts may lie on it for the rites with some ease. Hip joints aren’t a strength of the Ninth House.

“Yes. On it.”

What the Prince means, undoubtedly, is that Harrow should lie on her back and spread her legs and present herself for fucking. But she hasn’t said it, so—spitefully—Harrow walks up the nave on bare feet and arranges herself facedown along the length, like a penitent about to get a whipping.

The stone slab is cold against her thighs and hips and her arms, and only slightly less cold against those parts of her that are still covered up. Like this, she’s facing the part of the chapel where the altar attendants usually stand during services. It’s a good thing that now the Ninth has enough people to spare youths as altar children. It was worth it, Harrow tells herself. Not her parents’ sin, never, but everything that came after it, this moment. It’s all worth it.

“You know I didn’t mean it like that.”

Her wife. She stood up and made her way to the altar, and now stands over Harrow casting shadows in candlelight. That gloved hand finds the back of her thigh, and Harrow shivers.

“That’s okay, anyway. I can work with it.”

Then the Prince’s hands lift her legs.

Harrow bites back a startled sound of surprise as her body is lifted around, manoeuvred with ease until she’s lying shifted by ninety degrees. The Prince moves her like she doesn’t weigh a thing, placing Harrow so that her head is facing the sacred heart of the ciborium and her upper body is across the altar, her legs dangling off the edge and feet brushing the stone floor.

“Better,” says the Prince. “Scoot back.”

“What?” Harrow chokes out.

“Hips back, knees on the floor. If I can’t look you in the face, wife, I’ll have you on your knees and bent over.”

To Harrow’s surprise, her knees find soft cloth on the stone—the Prince has taken Harrow’s discarded clothes and arranged them as a makeshift cushion. As if Harrow couldn’t take hours of kneeling on hard rock. As if Harrow would need coddling .

The Prince’s hand comes to rest on the back of her thigh. Harrow grits her teeth and looks straight ahead, to the boneheart and the carved door.

“Maybe you’ll even like it better this way.” The Prince’s hands are caressing her outer thighs, pushing her shift up past her hips. “Used to kneeling in this place, aren’t you? I think you’ll like it. You can tell me. I want to know what gets you off.”

Like this, she can feel the faintest tingle of a draft of the chapel brushing between her legs, making her shiver. Her jaw clenches.

“I would like to get this over with.”

The Prince’s hand falls. Harrow yelps. She’s been hit—the Prince hit her— she spanked Harrow on the top of her thigh, right below her cheek. The skin burns.

“That’ll be a while, sweetheart.”

And then she strikes again, and again, alternating between the meaty part of Harrow’s thighs and her cheeks until what little flesh she has there feels heated and sore. The Prince has a steady hand and a strong arm, and the blows sting —Harrow can’t help but shift on her knees under the impact, gritting her teeth against the muffled sounds that escape her mouth.

The Prince’s gloved hands fondle and tease at the tender skin, and Harrow doesn’t feel quite as cold anymore. Another hit, a hard, solid slap with the open palm. Harrow squirms despite herself.

“Good. You don’t have to stay still, you know. Or quiet.”

And then the hand nudges between her thighs, over her folds.

“Spread your knees,” the Prince says, in a much different voice. “Wider than your hips… like that. Good.”

Then her palm comes up sharply against Harrow’s cunt.

Pain blooms through her like a flower, like the hot sting of thorns. Harrow arches against the touch and the Prince’s other hand comes to rest over the centre of her back, flattening her chest and shoulders against the altar, keeping her still for the next blow—right there , on the same spot where her cunt is swollen and hot and smarting, and Harrow moans with it. She feels warm all over.

She flinches instinctively at the next touch, but it’s only the Prince’s fingers rubbing across her labia, spreading her open. She’s exposed to the cold air in an obscene display, shivering into the hand that’s petting her aching cunt, and the sturdy cloth of those gloves feels impossibly rough against her—it feels pleasant, too, and she finds herself leaning into the touch.

A forbidden sort of pleasure: the heat that’s spreading up from her cunt to her belly, the smarting tenderness on her skin, and the pain —some part of Harrow has come to associate physical discomfort with a sense of accomplishment. She feels it now, hard-won triumph coursing through her veins as she lies half-slumped across the altar like a penitent before the congregation, and God’s daughter is stroking the bare skin of her back and rubbing her cunt until her thighs are twitching. In a way, it feels like a blessing.

Harrow can’t hold back a moan; it echoes in the cavernous emptiness, impossibly loud. The Prince’s hand pulls back.

“Good.” Her voice is warm. She slaps Harrow’s cunt again, hard, and the sound of it is lewd, a wet sticky noise that brings a wave of heat to Harrow’s cheeks. “There you go.”

A heartbeat, her burning cunt spasming around nothing. She feels the rush of her blood, the sodden humiliation of her arousal.

“I knew you’d like it.” The self-satisfaction dripping from the Prince’s voice is just as insufferable as the way she’s stroking the pad of two fingers up the inner side of Harrow’s labia, the delicate teasing at her clit. “Go on, wife. I want you to say it.”

Harrow turns her face to press her cheek to the altar, relishing the cold of the stone through the veil. She breathes through her nostrils, swallows spit back into her parched throat.

She says, “Are you done?”

The defiance makes her whole body tense—her stiff limbs and her clenched cunt, hot and gushing, twitching against a slap that doesn’t come. Instead, the Prince’s hands pull away, and Harrow hears a soft rustling of cloth—she’s taking off her gloves. The next time Harrow feels her wife’s touch the hands are cold against her tender flesh, and she can’t help a shiver.

“If you don’t want to speak, I can stuff that glove into your mouth and gag you with it. Or you can let me hear you.”

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Mother of Drearburh, gathers around her all the dignity of the Locked Tomb like a cloak. She exhales. “Do what you will.”

“Have it your way, sugarlips. More fun for me.”

The Prince’s hand strikes again. This time the slap is so hard that Harrow shrieks —her veil gets tangled between her lips and she twists over the altar, arching her chest into the stone, rolling her hips back into the Prince’s hands.

She’s barely had time to catch her breath when another slap hits her, on her outer thigh this time, then two on her ass in quick succession. Her hips begin to drop but the Prince’s hands are there, keeping her up, keeping her legs spread open—there are fingers caressing her inner thigh, patting her labia, and Harrow goes rigid in anticipation.

She braced herself for pain but it’s pleasure that washes over her, overwhelming. Those hands stroking her cunt with devious attention, the bright hot pressure against her clit, the minute stretch of fingertips dipping inside her, teasing at her entrance. Playing with her.

Harrow clamps against the intrusion, as though to squeeze every last drop of sensation. She’s pressing down into the delicious friction of the Prince’s hand—and Harrow can hear it , those obscene wet noises that mingle with the sound of her ragged breaths, the thumping of her heartbeat in her throat. The fluttering sensation within her makes her thighs spasm and her stomach clench, fills her with heat all over.

She comes arching into her wife’s touch, and just as Harrow’s cunt flutters with release the Prince withdraws her hand and hits her again, spanking Harrow’s clit through the last of her orgasm, drawing out a choked sob.

She’s flushed, even half-naked in the cold. Her abdomen feels sore, her thighs on fire, her skin oversensitive to touch.

“Let me hear it, wife.” Delicate touches against Harrow’s inflamed ass, her tender cunt. The Prince’s gentleness is infinitely worse than the pain. “Or do you want another one?”

“No!” She blurts out. Too much, too soon. “No.”

“Then say it.”

“I do,” Harrow breathes. She opens her eyes to stare at the sanctuary through her tears, the boneheart and the candles. “I like it.”

“I know.” The hand strokes her through the aftershocks almost cruelly, drawing one last small whimper out of her. “There you go.”

The Prince pulls away, leaving Harrow sore and discarded. Exposed. On her knees with her legs splayed and her cunt on display to the rows of pews where the congregation would sit, looking up at the sacred heart of the Ninth through black ceremonial lace. She’s sweaty and shivering, feeling oddly bereft, and her body aches with pain and discomfort and need.

Harrow waits. She counts heartbeats, fighting the urge to turn around and check , growing uneasy and aroused, absolutely maddened. She finds herself biting on her lip. She could usually remain for hours like this, kneeling in silence, but now she cannot wait even two minutes.

“What are you doing?”

“Just enjoying the view.” Sounding pleased, just as crass as Harrow has come to expect.

“Will you…” Harrow falters. She doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how this goes now. “What now?”

“Stand up, please.” It’s gently worded, but still a demand. Harrow’s legs shake as she rises to her feet.

“I want to look at you. Will you take off that thing?”

“It’s part of the traditional vestments.”

“Whatever. We’re married, sweetheart, and I barely know what you look like. I want to see you—take it off.”

Harrow would’ve almost preferred if the Prince had done it herself, but at least this way she doesn’t have to bear any more of her touch. She doesn’t know if she could handle it.

The veil is pinned to the collar of her shift so that it wouldn’t slip. Harrow tugs it all off from the back of her neck and the cold air hits her naked back, her nape, her shorn head—somehow, baring her scalp in front of the altar feels like the most sacrilegious part of it all. The prayer knucklebeads at her neck fall between her breasts. She stands, staring straight ahead.

“Your ass is all red,” says the Prince, marvelling. “Will you turn around?”

It will happen anyway, soon enough, whether Harrow turns around now or not. So she braces herself and turns on her heels, standing bare-footed in front of the altar of her ancestors, naked for the Prince’s pleasure.

She gets an impression of reds and whites at the forefront of her vision. Harrow keeps her gaze resolutely ahead, looking through the Prince and past her, so that the figure of her new wife blurs away and she may comfort herself with the familiar sight of the chapel around them. The nave and pews, the low ceilings, the bonework on the walls. Harrow counts the skeleton niches as the Prince approaches. She doesn’t want to see that face, doesn’t want to meet those eyes.

“Your paint’s all smudged. The Wailing Skull, babe? Should I take that personally?”

The Prince’s hand feels warmer on her hip than it did touching her abused cunt. The other hand traces a path up her chest with the back of the fingers, still faintly wet with the traces of her orgasm—the touch makes Harrow flush with angry humiliation, makes her shamefully wet.

This close, she’s eye-level with the Prince’s collarbone, facing the stiff pressed shirt under the beautiful jacket, white on white, the warm brown of her throat in the candlelight. It fills her field of vision just as she fills all of Harrow’s senses—the warmth of her body, so close, the sounds of her breaths past the rumble of Harrow’s blood in her ears. The Prince’s hands stroking her stomach, calloused fingers between her legs, teasing her spent bruised cunt. Palming her breasts. A thumb under her lip.

Caresses on her face, which make Harrow shiver—she wants to shrug it off, wants to call forth the bone studs at her ears and make manacles out of it, to keep herself safe from the touch. Not that it would work—her necromancy would dissolve before she could even touch God’s divine daughter, and Harrow doesn’t want to give her new wife any cause to be displeased. She stands and lets her flesh be inspected and when she trembles and her breathing grows ragged she reminds herself that this is duty, not pleasure. It’s not…

That mouth on her breast. Wet suction. The Prince is sucking on her breast as fingers fondle Harrow’s other nipple, pinching it sharply, twisting in a demanding manner that makes blood rush to her face. That warm mouth, a hint of teeth, a sharper pinch that draws a sound high in her throat—Harrow snaps her mouth closed, but it’s too late. The Prince draws back, and Harrow doesn’t have to see her face to imagine how she must be smiling.

“You liked that.”

“Yes.” As perverse as it feels to admit, maybe she won’t drag this out if Harrow does. It’s too much, already—she shifts uncomfortably on her feet, minute rolls of her hips as that uncomfortable heat pools low in her abdomen. Her cunt clutching and tensing at that terrible touch, smarting and gushing wet. The Prince’s thumb on her stinging nipple. Her other hand caressing Harrow’s bare neck, her jaw, tracing her spit-wet mouth.

“Look at me,” says the Prince, almost softly.

Harrow doesn’t want to, Not right here, not like this—she isn’t sure she would survive it. “No.” She shakes her head, and the Prince sighs.

“Harrow…”

“I said don’t call me that.”

“This how it is going to be?” The Prince says, like it’s any news, like it hasn’t been this way for years.

“This is how it is.”

“Right.” The Prince steps back. “Back on the altar, wife. On your back, open your legs—I’m going to fuck you, and then you’ll get your two days before you have to lay eyes on me again.”

The curt tone is a relief. Harrow always worked best with clear directives, and the coldness is better than any attempt at familiarity would be. She displays herself on the slab—her discarded veil cushioning her scalp, the cold of the stone only the barest relief against her bruised buttocks—and she parts her legs under the Prince’s pleased gaze.

“Where do you keep the holy oils?”

Harrow startles. “You can’t—”

“Can’t I,” says the Prince, Heir to the First, the Emperor’s only child. “I think I can do whatever I want.”

She swallows. “The font. By the sacramental table.”

Harrow closes her eyes and listens as the Prince rummages through everything the Ninth holds dear: the sacramental paint for the holy rites, the reliquaries and the blessed ashes, the braided lash that must have given her pause. Then the sounds of footsteps, and the light filtering through her closed eyelids gets brighter.

“I want to look at you,” says the Prince, even though Harrow has not asked. In her hand is a candelabra made from the femur of some blessed ancestor, a dikirion meant to be placed in front of a venerated icon.

The Prince sets it firmly on the floor by the altar—at the other end of it, so that the burning candles will cast their light directly across Harrow’s cunt. She clenches—she doesn’t mean to, but the thought of being so on display is perverse— it feels heady. A hand spreads her open.

“I want to hear you,” the Prince reminds her. “I’m going to fuck you on your blessed altar and you’re going to love it.” She’s rubbing gently between Harrow’s labia, her other hand patting her bruised thighs softly—soothing, patronising. “I never want you to forget this. Every time you’re in this place.”

The hands pull back and return slick with oil. Harrow blessed it herself—it’s obscene that it should be used for this , coating the finger that slides inside her spasming cunt with ease, teasing around the entrance, withdrawing—then it’s two fingers, which feel substantially more. Pumping in and out, playing with her hole, sliding up to circle her clit and twisting it sharply.

Harrow draws in a breath. She closed her eyes—she can’t look at the Prince, the soft candlelight, the way she’s staring right inside her, the filthy noises of her oiled fingers against Harrow’s flushed wet cunt. The fingers dipping inside her again, crooked just so—Harrow gasps, hips jerking—she clenches against the stretch inside of her, thrusting up to chase that warmth friction, the fullness. Her hips slam back down, and the impact of her sore ass on the stone draws a whine out of her.

“There’s a good girl,” the Prince says. And she lays another stinging slap against Harrow’s cunt.

Harrow howls—she can’t help it. She wasn’t expecting this. She opens her eyes, blinking off tears that aren’t only pain, she opens her mouth to croak—something, but those fingers are back on her sore flesh and it’s too much now. So good on the edge of too much.

She feels that tight feeling again as the fingers fuck into her eager cunt. There are noises escaping her throat that she can’t control, and it’s spurring Her on, rougher, faster. The Prince leans in and, oh , she’s going to put her mouth on her. Harrow makes a guttural sound—she can’t help this either, thrusting her hips up eagerly, offering her aching cunt to her wife. The Prince laughs, and her mouth is so close that Harrow can feel the puff of her breath against her flesh. She’s buzzing.

“Please,” she begs, because she figures that it’s what the Prince wants to hear—that her wife likes her like this, wanton and loud, debasing herself with willing eagerness, and Harrow can’t even bring herself to resist.

There is a brief moment—a touch of lips that feels like a blessing, the wet suction of the Prince’s tongue against her labia—and then it’s gone, barely a heartbeat. Harrow groans.

“Not yet,” the Prince says, and Harrow clenches her hands into fists at her sides, twitching open on that slab.

“Please,” she chokes out, but the Prince doesn’t move. She only teases, patting the mound of hair over Harrow’s cunt.

“If you won’t do me the courtesy of your name, you’ll do me that of my title, wife.” Her fingers pump lazily inside her again, thumb circling her clit.

“Please.” Harrow swallows. “Your Highness.”

Just saying the words provokes a reaction in her that is best left unexplored. The Prince notices it, of course—there’s no way she could miss it when she’s touching her so intimately, her ungloved fingers dipping in and out of the mess of Harrow’s cunt. Her clutching hole, the wet heat dripping from her, the way her hips twitch onto the stone slab. The Prince says, “See, sweetheart? You like being good.”

Harrow’s face burns with something that’s not quite shame. The Prince says, “Good,” still in that low, maddening voice, and then there’s something smooth nudging against her. Splitting her open.

It’s—an object, inside her, something cool and heavy that makes Harrow’s hips shoot up as her walls clamp down on the sensation. It’s about as thick as the fingers had been, longer, filling her up with that pleasant sensation she associates with thanergy. Bone .

“What’s—” It dies in her throat. She lifts herself on her elbows so she can see and the movement makes the thing inside of her feel bigger, unwieldy, and the pressure on her ass makes her hips jerk with that heady pain. The thing slips in and out of her in time with the Prince’s fingers teasing at her clit. Harrow can see the red hair between her legs, feel the itch of those self-satisfied breaths. The Prince’s mouth, so close.

“Tell me how it feels.”

Just the steady rumble of the words makes her breath hitch. “I don’t… what is that?”

“Something holy.”

The object slips out of her as the Prince dribbles more of the sacramental oil over Harrow’s cunt so, that she might get fucked better. The stretch shouldn’t feel as good as it does—Harrow makes a sound as the object thrusts inside her again.

“Tell me how it feels.”

“I don’t—don’t know.” It hurts—she’s too sore for anything else, but the edge of pain makes it better, like it’s something she worked hard for. “It’s good,” Harrow chokes out, though it feels reductive. It’s appalling and grandiose. Thrusting into the depths of her like she’s something to be claimed, something for her to claim. “Plea—Your Highness.”

It shouldn’t feel so good. Giving voice to her needs in throaty desperation as she’s being fucked hard and fast. The Prince’s spread open hand pinning her hips to the slab to keep her still, paining those fresh bruises. The other hand, twisting and pushing that thing inside her, teasing her folds, rubbing her clit until her whole body tenses, needing more—Harrow keens through a short fluttering orgasm. All of her aches, flushed and spasming and hungry. She’s never been more aware of her cunt than she is now, clutched around that foreign width that’s keeping her open.

Then the Prince takes it out—Harrow whimpers at the loss, shivering when she realises that the noise was her , she sounded like that, and she squints through the pleasure to make out the object held out for her to see—the object that was just inside her.

It’s the ceremonial knife, another sainted object of the Ninth House reduced to a toy for her wife to fuck her with. The carved hilt is slick with oil and Harrow’s arousal. It gleams in the candlelight as the Prince turns it around, holding it by the thick sheath, but it would make a difference even if she gripped the blade in her bare hands. Not to God’s divine progeny, invulnerable.

“You took it well.” The words spark hot and warm inside her, straight to her sodden cunt, her clenched muscles. “I thought it might be too much—wasn’t sure.” The Prince muses, “You know, I had half a mind to stuff you full with your prayer beads and spank your cunt like that.”

It’s like all the air is sucked out of the room. She’s looking up to Harrow as she says it, those gold eyes bearing into her own, and it’s the first time they’ve made eye contact this side of the new myriad. Harrow doesn’t know what her face is doing— just the image conjured by those words makes a whine catch in her throat.

“That’s cruel,” she manages, tearing her gaze off her wife’s eyes, down to her hungry mouth.

“I thought about it on the shuttle ride here. Thought it’d be fitting.” The Prince pushes the knife hilt back inside Harrow’s cunt, deeper than it ever was before. “Have you prayed this morning?”

Harrow answers out of reflex. “Orison.”

“Who to?”

She asks it with her fingers rubbing Harrow’s clit, her face barely inches away—it makes Harrow squirm.

“What?”

“Did you pray to the Tomb? That’s not holy enough where we’re going, you know. You need a better repertoire.”

Something sweeps through her, like a wave. She feels feverish, tingling all over—she’s never felt so much in her body, but now her senses threaten to overwhelm her. It’s all Harrow can think of, her bare skin and aching thighs, the minute twists in her belly, her needy cunt sore and spread open. Her throat is dry. “What?” But she knows.

The Prince says, “I want you to hear you pray. Call it practice. Do it for me.” She says, “To me.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“And you’re begging for it. Look at me.”

Harrow does. Her new wife in all her First House finery, keeling by the altar but with nothing of the supplicant in her. Rather, she looks every inch like the guest of honour at a feast. “Is this divinity enough for you?”

“Don’t—”

“I think you have more devotion left in you, wife, than just to the Tomb, and I’ll get you off while you’re at it. Think of it as a blessing. Lie back,” she orders. “Say your prayers and think about me.”

And then her mouth is on Harrow’s cunt and she does, oh , she does. All the holy verses she memorised through her life come to mind in time with the flickers of that tongue lapping at her sore lips, in time with the twists of the bone handle keeping her open. Your lips have been blessed with grace . Your tongue has mapped the way... Harrow’s mouth opens and sounds spill out of it, needy breathless noises that she doesn’t recognise.

Eyes shut, gasping under that hallowed ceiling, Harrow feels like she’s floating. She’s thrusting up against that terrible mouth with rising eagerness, moaning as the Prince’s tongue licks around her stretched hole, matching her strokes with the thrusts of the bone hilt inside her. Then it’s pulled out—Harrow hears, distantly, the sound of the knife clattering to the floor, holy relic that it is, but she can’t focus on anything but the fingers pushing inside of her, the hot suction against her tender cunt.

The fragrance of the oil hits her nostrils, another blessed sacrament made profane. It mingle with the smell of sex, of Harrow’s orgasms.

“Speak up.” The Prince’s voice is muffled against the twitching heat of Harrow’s cunt. Another stroke of her tongue, and she keens. “All that praying, Harrow? I think you’re dying to let me hear how devout you can be.”

Harrow thinks she might come, then, just from the violent surge crashing through her. Shame and need and the intrigue of the forbidden, a flush of heat to her cunt, her lungs emptied of air. There’s a rushing noise in her ears, and her mouth is dry as old bone.

Harrow licks her lips and swallows. She tries again. “ I… ” Her voice breaks. The Prince’s fingers twist sharply inside her.

“Like that. Go on.”

“I adore you…” A whisper. “I—adore you deeply, I offer you my whole heart. Beloved…”

Harrow learned the litany at her great-aunt’s knees; she could recite it in her sleep. It rushes from her lips with the ease of a river flowing and she could no sooner stop the gushing heat sweeping through her, the needy twitches of her fluttering cunt.

“Divine Beloved, I offer you my devotion—” The Prince’s filthy tongue strokes into her with such ferocious hunger, like she’s never wanted anything more in the universe than watching Harrow writhe underneath her. She’s dripping on those relentless fingers, and she hears herself babbling, please, please, please—then those lips close on her oversensitive clit, and she comes so hard that her vision fills with spots.

The Prince doesn’t let her up, teasing Harrow through it all with her fingers and her tongue until she’s wrung even the last of her orgasm out of her. When she finally moves away, Harrow’s twitching and spent and bone tired and some part of her mourns the loss of contact. She feels cold all of a sudden, dazed.

She sits up. The Prince’s lips are red, curled into a smile.

“Oh, but you are going to remember this.” She sounds incredibly pleased with herself. She sounds rough. “I hope you can’t walk into a Ninth House crypt without thinking how much you loved it.”

“Are you quite done?”

Harrow sits up, legs dangling off the end of the altar. She’s angry—not at the words but at how they’re making her feel, annoyance turning to warm arousal at the back of her throat. The Prince is staring up at her, crouched between Harrow’s spread legs, and her chin is wet.

“Not yet.” Her hand reaches out. Harrow could pull away; she doesn’t. She can barely think.

“You know, this doesn’t have to be so cold.” The Prince’s hand strokes her thigh, then comes predictably to play with her cunt. Even more predictably, Harrow presses into it, even as spent as she is, shamefully grinding into the touch, lifting her hips to present herself better.

“Look at you, you can’t get enough,” the Prince whispers. “You loved me fucking you.”

She’s fucking Harrow now , again, fingers sliding in and out of her oversensitive hole. “Please,” Harrow says, and she doesn’t even know what she’s asking for.

“Harrow…”

“I said don’t.”

“Right. You realise, wife, that I’ll need something to call you over the course of this marriage?” That hand is at her hip now, grasping her tight.

“Wife suits me fine,” Harrow says, putting up the last barrier of defence she has left. “Your Highness.”

“Wife.” The Prince’s voice is flat. She stands up. “As you wish. Let’s get this over with.”

“What…”

“Lie down.” Then her voice turns rougher. “Your paint is going to be all fucked up.”

Something about the words—the low expectant tone, the filthy images they evoke in front of Harrow’s eyes—sends an answering spark of need through her, coiled in nervous anticipation. She’s parched.

Harrow lies on the altar to which she’s prayed thousands of times, the pieces of her vestments strewn over it like rags, and watches the Prince divest herself of her finery with brutal efficiency until she can no longer stand the sight. She closes her eyes. The Prince—her wife —vaults atop the stone slab so that she’s facing Harrow’s splayed legs, and Harrow holds her breath—her limbs are twitching. The Prince lowers to straddle Harrow’s face, and then her whole world is brackish heat and salt.

She can’t think. Her lips tingle, her senses overwhelmed by the syrupy musk all over her face, the hot flesh filling her mouth. Nothing else matters except for the slow grind against her chin, the harsh breathing filling her ears. The taste of her.

Harrow has never done this, but she knows the body as any necromancer should. She knows the nerves, the sensitivities of the flesh, and even divine flesh cannot be much different. She applies to her task with the reverence of a sacrament and hardly any finesse at all, lapping at the Prince’s cunt in a trembling kind of desperation.

“That’s good.” The words wash over her, spurring her on. “You little wicked nun. Like that.”

The Prince half-lifts up—she’s bending forward, reaching between Harrow’s thighs. “Open up.”

Her voice is gentle. The push of the knife hilt inside her is anything but.

It goes in smoothly, slick as she is, but Harrow hadn’t expected—she didn’t see the Prince pick the knife back up, and the sensation of being full, so good and so sore, is—

“Oh.”

She gasps. Her cunt clenches as if remembering the aching pleasure of being fucked, and above her the Prince is moaning too, grinding her cunt harder against Harrow’s mouth, using her face however she wishes.

“Like that,” the Prince sighs. Harrow’s tongue flicks awkwardly against her clit. “There. There’s a good girl.”

The words cause a horrible reaction within her. A keening noise rises from her throat—a whimper, Harrow can’t believe it came from her—and she clamps around the bone hilt like a vice, hips jerking off the altar, arching up so the Prince can shove it in deeper.

“Holy shit.” A sound, unlike anything Harrow has ever heard before—and then the object inside her withdraws and Prince’s voice says, “Hold tight, babe.”

The hilt is thrust deep inside her.

A hot rush burns through Harrow’s belly. It’s almost too much—the knife hilt fucking into her, the frantic grinding of the Prince’s cunt against her face, the sodden flesh against her mouth—the hilt is thrust inside her again and again, hard and fast.

“This what you wanted?” The hilt twists inside her, deep—Harrow moans, voicelessly, into the Prince’s cunt. “Your holy relic filling you up—you should see how it looks, sweetheart, sticking out of you… It’s drenched—”

She’s breathless, grinding against Harrow’s mouth with methodical determination, riding her face until Harrow is begging and gasping for air, making use of her—Harrow is being used, in every possible way, and nothing else matters in this moment except for the taste of cunt in her mouth and the coiling heat within her.

She comes. Noiselessly this time, hole twitching around the bone hilt, writhing on the altar of her House with her lips and cheeks and her chin all coated in sticky glistening spend. She’s wrung out, all hollow.

At some point, she’s released. Minutes later, or an eternity; the grinding against her face stops, and the Prince dismounts—the back of her fingers strokes the side of Harrow’s cheek. Her face feels cold and wet, all the ornaments of her House smeared away.

“That’s it then?”

“Sure it is. I think this counts as married even on fucking Ida.” The hand pulls back. “All good and official. Get dressed, wife, you have a trip to plan.”

And another ceremony, after. A public one, with the Emperor himself in attendance, grand and exceedingly torturous. but this was the one that counted. There had been concerns that the Eight would try to detain Harrow, to have her tried for the sins of her birth—they won’t touch her now. It should be a relief.

Her prayer beads swing around her neck as she stands. All of her aches. Harrow looks around the sordid wreckage her new wife has made of the Drearburh sanctuary, and she feels as though something has changed forever.

The Prince’s voice startles her. “I’ll leave you. Remember, wife—two days. Not that I think you’re going to forget any of this.” And the way she says that—self-assured, smug. So very pleased with herself. Harrow digs her fingernails into her palm.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Your Highness,” she says, coolly. “You aren’t that important. I don’t even remember about you most of the time.”

“Just like you don’t remember my name?”

Harrow turns. The Prince has done up her trousers and that stiff jacket, picked up the discarded gloves—she’s put together, face emotionless. “You won’t even say—”

“You may leave,” Harrow says. “You have been given quarters in the guesthouse. Talk to Sister Berenice to find accommodations for your retinue, and keep away from—”

“No way. I’m marching out of here as fast as I can. I’ll sleep on the shuttle—I’ll sleep in the fucking prison if I have to. Don’t worry, sweetheart. You won’t see me.”

“Good,” Harrow says, ferociously. “As if I wanted to.”

At some point, her hands have gathered the discarded veil half folded on the altar. Harrow throws it aside and uses the wrinkled shift to wipe her face; it comes out streaked with ash-grey paint.

She will have to redress the ciborium before the vespers. She will have to lead the vespers, and even the prospect of this habitual duty crushes her with the magnitude of a mountain. The thought of taking her place at the head of the congregation, as though nothing happened, brings out the taste of bile in her throat.

The heavy doors slam closed, leaving Harrow alone in the empty chapel with the weight of all her dead. The name is on the tip of her tongue—three syllables, just like the one on the marriage certificate; the new one foreign, the other tinged with regret.

Harrow swallows it all back and sets to work.