Reddit Post by u/Solitae8on June 27th 2022
Happy Pride, bone friends! There are even rainbows in these chapters! Well, rainbow push pins that end up being pretty unsettling, but that’s as close as we’re gonna get to rainbows. Otherwise, we are at the point where, as Palamedes would put it, the feces hit the proverbial fan and a bunch of secrets are revealed.
First time readers, how are you holding up? Are you seriously able to stick to the reading schedule? If so, you’ve got way more willpower than I do. From the discovery of Pro’s head onward, I basically devoured the book.
Onwards!
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Chapter 32
(Holy crap, this is a really dense chapter)
We find our heroes with Camilla and Palamedes (Sixth House) trying to break into a Lyctoral study. Harrow and Pal argue over whether this constitutes entering a door without permission since Pal completed the trial. Regardless, they have no key, but Dulcinea let Palamedes hold the key to the room–which for a Sixth House necro means he has a complete molecular memory of it. Unfortunately, he has no way to make a key, but Harrow does bones, so by technically sort of reading Palamedes’ mind, Harrow manages to create a replica of the key. Gideon makes a “that’s what she said” joke about Harrow working with something so small, but everyone is impressed and surprised when the key actually works.
Inside is a very messy study. While they’re poking around, Palamedes explains the trial for this room and how it led to the Sixth’s discovery that the bone servants are not actually constructs as Gideon and Harrow had assumed, but instead they are autonomously powered revenants with fully intact souls. Palamedes also informs them that the tooth from the trial and the skeletons themselves have no ghost energy signature, and that them being revenants doesn’t explain this weirdness.
After stumbling on a note that says “FIVE HUNDRED INTO FIFTY IT IS FINISHED”, they find a pinboard covered with pins and bits of string. It’s got different sized clusters of pins around single white pins, from three around one all the way up to an enormous cluster in a rainbow of colors that Gideon counts into the hundreds. Cam distracts them from this discovery though when she opens an ancient ring-binder full of lithographs with a note from Anastasia in the front. A couple pages in, there is a picture of Teacher, looking exactly as he currently is. This picture is circled. Pal turns to study the pinboard in response to this ...when BRRRAAAPPPP!!
FIRE ALARM! But no heat, no fire, and in the kitchen, they find sprinklers going and fish burning in a pan. ...Because all of the skeletons simply fell to pieces. When Cam touches the bones, they dissolve. Pal and Harrow share a look and a brain for a moment then they all go to check on Dulcinea (with Gideon strongly rejecting Cam’s idea that they split up.)
When they get there, they find Salt-and-Pepper Plait (the priest) dead in the chair next to Dulcinea, and Dulcinea swearing that it wasn’t her. She tells them that Teacher left her about an hour ago to go lock a door, so they go look for him. They find the other priest and a bunch of skeletons piled up in front of a door in the priest’s corridor. When they open the door, Judith Deuteros (Second necro) is there, badly injured. Teacher has a rapier and a dagger through him and seems dead, but is not bleeding from his wounds. Marta Dyas (Second cav) is on the floor dead where “her skeleton and her body had apparently tried to divorce”.
Judith gives them a Cohort style report and says Teacher turned aggressive. She believes that Marta avenged the Fifth and the Fourth, but Harrow tells her that she fixed nothing and that Teacher was powerful but that he was actually just a prototype and likely not involved in the violence at all since he was made to protect the First House. They also discover that Judith sent an SOS, but she could not reach the Houses, only the Imperial flagship which means that the Emperor is coming to help them. Dead Teacher says that she’s called the Emperor back to the once place he must not return to. And also cryptically says that one of them has come back.
Judith won’t leave Marta, so they give her Marta’s rapier and we end the chapter with “Nobody should ever have to watch their cavalier die.”
Chapter 33
The Eighth House shows up to announce that the Third House has opened up Abigail’s body. This prompts all of them (Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth) to go to the morgue where they find that there is a big hole cut in Abigail’s abdomen. Palamedes and Camilla examine the body, and Palamedes is very upset to realize he missed something: a key was hidden inside Abigail’s body, either by herself or by someone else.
Silas is aghast that anyone would go to such lengths to get into the rooms and wonders if it’s worth it, prompting the discovery that he only went into one of the Lyctoral studies, and that he’s only been collecting keys because he didn’t want anyone else to use them. Palamedes and Harrow decide they need to go find the Third House before it’s too late, and they know which door the missing key opens.
Before they leave the morgue, Harrow goes to the cremains and admits that half of them are Protesilaus since it had no skull. And half of them are someone else.
Chapter 34
The whole group go to the Lyctoral door that Harrow had removed the regenerating bone from earlier and find that Abigail’s key is still in the lock, so they all head in.This Lyctoral study is different from all of the others, decorated prettily, but on one of the walls painted in black foot high letters, it says “YOU LIED TO US”.
Here they find the Third House: Ianthe is reclining in the middle of the room, Corona is crying nearby, and Naberius is dead on the floor. Ianthe admits to killing him, and she has all sorts of strange physical symptoms going on, making her appear quite the mess which irritates her. She goes on about what a good necromancer she is and tells them all that her true necromantic field is large-scale energy transferral. Also her eyes are doing weird shit.
Ianthe relates the steps to the Eightfold Path in a creepy sing-song, and we learn that Palamedes was correct about the megatheorem. While they’re discussing this, Palamedes bumps against something on the wall and goes still. The debate continues over whether she’s actually achieved Lyctorhood, and Silas eventually addresses Corona who doesn’t respond. Ianthe, however, has plenty to say, and she reveals Corona’s big secret: Corona isn’t a necromancer, and Ianthe has been covering for her since they were six.
Silas finally gets it, then entirely rejects the idea of Lyctorhood and declares Ianthe a traitor. He challenges her and says that she has to stand in for her slain cavalier. An increasingly surreal fight goes down, which starts with Gideon realizing that Naberius is literally fighting inside Ianthe’s body. Eventually Silas takes over from Colum, who begs Silas not to drain him. During the fight, Ianthe is still struggling to get Naberius to work with her. Silas ends up trying to drain both Colum and Ianthe at the same time, and when he suddenly pulls on his siphoning really hard, Ianthe looks at Colum and tells him he’s fucked. ...At which point, Colum’s eyes turn liquid black and his head spins around 180 degrees and something else not-Colum takes over his body. Silas tries to get him to come back, and the thing in Colum’s body stabs Silas in the throat and kills him.
Gideon launches herself into the fight, but Ianthe has finally had enough. She snaps Colum’s neck and banishes whatever possessed him somehow, then disappears herself. Gideon goes to check on Corona and discovers that she’s crying because Ianthe took Naberius instead of herself.
Chapter 35
Harrow, Camilla, and Gideon all leave the room together, and abruptly realize that Palamedes isn’t there and that they lost track of him in the fight. Gideon reassures everyone by saying he probably went to go check on Dulcinea, but also that she doesn’t understand why he’s such a weenie over her. Camilla reveals that Palamedes and Dulcinea have been exchanging letters for twelve years and that Palamedes had asked Dulcinea to marry him a year ago even though the two of them had never met in person until they arrived at Canaan House. Gideon progressively melts down during this conversation because she feels so bad and ends up lying dramatically on the floor and lamenting her own hotness. On another level, Gideon is realizing how messed up their lives are in this beautiful and heartbreaking moment that is one of my favorite quotes in GtN:
The tragedy saturated the stiffening bones and static hearts lying in state at Canaan House, but there was also deep tragedy in the flawed beams holding up their lives. An eight-year-old writing love letters to a terminally ill teenager. A girl falling in love with the beautiful stiff she’d been conceived solely to look after. A foundling chasing the approval of a House disappointed with her immunity to foundling-killing gas.
Gideon feels a desperate need to make things right with Palamedes, and as she leaves, she tells Harrow to retrieve her two-hander sword. Gideon finds Palamedes in the corridor outside of Dulcinea’s room, and just as she’s approaching him to apologize, he freezes her and she’s stuck listening since Palamedes leaves the door open. We get an entirely wild conversation between Palamedes and Dulcinea where we realize part way through the conversation that she is in fact not Dulcinea Septimus and that Palamedes has figured this out. “Dulcinea” answers Pal’s questions, and we get confirmation that she was behind the Fifth’s deaths. She also admits to killing Protesilaus and Dulcinea before explaining that what she’s doing isn’t about any of them at Canaan House. She’s trying to draw the Emperor into a trap. He asks her why one of the Emperor’s Lyctors would hate him, and now we know a Lyctor has been pretending to be Dulcinea the whole time.
They talk about Lyctorhood and Teacher too with Pal keeping the conversation going for a while, and then he finally tells her that he made the decision to kill her once he knew there was no chance to save the real Dulcinea. He used the time while they were talking to amp up her blood cancer to the point that the cell renewal process for a Lyctor couldn’t keep up. He shouts for Gideon, but then says Camilla knows what to do ...and he becomes a god-killing star as he releases all of his thanergy reserves at once.
This breaks the hold on Gideon, and she takes off. Eventually “Dulcinea” catches up with her and announces that she’s Cytherea the First, and that she’s the vengeance of the ten billion here to kill the Emperor and burn his houses ...and that starts with Gideon.
A lot of secrets are revealed in this section: Teacher’s true nature, Corona’s lack of necromancy, Palamedes and Dulcinea’s history, who the cremains were, everything about Dulcinea not being Dulcinea but actually Cytherea. Which reveal surprised you the most? Did you see any of them coming? Which ones do you just need to flail about?
Cytherea claims multiple times to Palamedes that she never lied. What do you think? Did she? Obviously she meant to deceive people, but can you think of any examples where she outright lied?
After Ianthe’s fight with Silas and Colum, she says to the others, “There are worse things than myself in this building. Have that for free.” Thoughts? Theories?
What biblical/religious references did you notice in this section?
We learn a lot about Teacher in this section. How does this part change what you thought of him through the book? Do you think he’s a tragedy? A villain? How much do you think he knew about what was going on and about Cytherea?
SPOILERS BELIOW
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Re-read Discussion Thoughts
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END OF SPOILERS
Link to full discussion on Reddit with Comments
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