Reddit post by u/Solitae8 on July 14th 2022
Greetings, embodied and disembodied friends! Time to start on Harrow the Ninth, which I am so excited about! Rereading the first few chapters reminded me how much I adore this book. Sorry if it’s a little disorganized. Part of that is me taking this week at the last-minute, but a good portion of it is just these chapters being chaotic.
First time readers, welcome! This is a very different book from Gideon, and I found it a challenging read my first time through, but now it’s one of my favorite books of all time. If you have no idea what is going on, that is completely expected. Feel free to ask questions, but know in advance that a lot of the answers are likely to be “Keep reading”. It’s just the nature of the book.
On to the summaries!
Note: I use “Emperor” and “God” interchangeably, largely based on how he’s being referred to in the book.
Prologue - The night before the Emperor’s murder
We start off in second person narration with “you” in darkness on a ship with bodies flinging themselves at the hull. God comes on over the comm, and we discover that “you” is Harrow and that her necromancy won’t work while she’s in the River. Ianthe shows up and offers to protect Harrow, which Harrow turns down aggressively. During their argument, Harrow unwillingly thinks that Ianthe is beautiful, and Ianthe offers to undo what Harrow has done. Their conversation ends when the Emperor speaks over the comm and tells them to get to their places.
The Lyctors, including Harrow, go into the River to fight the Resurrection Beast, but Harrow gets bounced back out, or as the book says “Hell spat you back out.” She wakes up in a pool of her own blood and sweat with her rapier through her stomach, and when she tries to heal herself, she realizes that she is too injured to heal herself fully but also too powerful to die quickly.
“You prepared to die with the Locked Tomb on your lips. But your idiot dying mouth rounded out three totally different syllables, and they were three syllables that you did not even understand.”
Parodos - Fourteen months before the Emperor’s murder
The narration switches to third person, and suddenly we’re with Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus in her father’s library in the Ninth House having a conversation with Ortus about a letter. He tells her that he can’t help her become a Lyctor and that he is terrible at fighting. Harrow says she knows this because that’s all they’ve ever talked about. In the middle of this conversation where Ortus is trying to convince her that he should not go with her, he suddenly says “If a cavalier’s duty is to die by the sword--have you never considered ORTUS NIGENAD?” To which Harrow understandably reacts, “what?” Then Ortus repeats word for word what he said a page before and ends up quoting from his epic poem The Noniad.
While they are talking, a serving sister shows up in the library, and Harrow notices that under her paint she has the face of The Body. She tries to figure out if the serving sister is real while they talk more about The Noniad, then she informs Ortus that he will train with Aiglamene for the next twelve weeks.
The Body interrupts and says,"This isn't how it happens."
Then Harrow tells Ortus that she is insane and needs his help to hide it.
Chapter 1 - Nine months before the Emperor’s Murder
Second person narration.
Harrow’s sword hates her, and she hates it in return. It burns her hands, so she uses cartilage and bones to hold it, but she feels no understanding of it. And she vomits, which happens a lot in this chapter. She’s experiencing a loss of sense of time, and this line is the best description of this chapter: “Details sat at awkward angles to one another.” The only thing she seems to know is that the (two-hander) sword is very important to her, and she will not let anyone else touch it. The Body comes to her frequently and calms her and helps her sleep. All of this is taking place in the hospital quarter on the ship Erebos.
Chapter 2
God shows up with his entourage and takes Harrow (who is shadowed by the Body) down to a cargo hold where he shows her just under five hundred caskets with people who have been frozen since the Resurrection. He says that these people are to renew her House and will be shipped off to the Ninth House. Harrow begs to go with them, but he says they need to talk before she asks him that.
Harrow, with the Body exactly a half-step behind her, wanders through the caskets, and past them, she finds stone funerary caskets draped in House colors plus one with a single rose on it. The caskets destined for the Second and Third House are empty, as is one for the Sixth House while the other for the Sixth has only scraps of remains. When Harrow asks the Emperor about this, he says that he’s just flattening the truth and that he’d “rather the Houses weep now with room later for rejoicing”. The final casket with the rose, Harrow realizes, is for Cytherea, which distresses her, and the Body tries to calm her.
We learn more about how revenants are formed, and that Resurrection Beasts are planetary revenants. The Body listens very carefully to this conversation. The Emperor informs Harrow that originally the Resurrection Beasts (RBs) ran off to the farthest parts of the universe, but that now they won’t stop until he and the Nine Houses are dead. They are very difficult to kill, and many of the Lyctors have died just trying to distract the RBs. Harrow asks how many Resurrection Beasts there are, and the Emperor tells her that there are three still alive, which makes the Body raise her eyebrows. He goes on to say that there were nine originally, but they have killed five of the Resurrection Beasts then leaves no time for Harrow to question his terrible math.
The Emperor also admits that the choice he gave Harrow to go back to her House was a false one because the Resurrection Beasts hunt Lyctosr. He also says he will teach Harrow to run from the RBs first, and the Body informs Harrow that he means that she needs to learn how to use her sword. Harrow gets upset because she believes she misapprehended the Lyctor process and says she can’t learn the sword. The Emperor tells her that Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing, but his mouth looks strange and Harrow feels sharp pain in her temporal bone. Harrow ends up falling over, but does not throw up on God which is very important to her.
I don’t know where to put this, but this is the section where the Emperor quotes The Little Mermaid to Harrow: “Why have we not an immortal soul? I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human only for one day.”
Chapter 3
Third person narration.
We get some background on Harrow and her family, including “She was the eighty-seventh Nona of her House.” There’s a little about her life and how she knew from a very small child that two hundred children had died to make her, and that it was part of her prayers and devotion.
Then we learn that her life changed when she fell in love. By in love, she meant when she wrote a suicide note and broke into the Tomb, which she and everyone else believed would bring doom on them all. “Unexpectedly, this did not kill her, and what did not kill her made her curious.” The Tomb was ridiculously trapped: it took her several years to actually get to the island in the middle, but she found a young woman in an open-face casket there when she did and fell wildly in love with her. But her parents found out about her visits, and they and their cavalier hung themselves, and Harrow was supposed to hang herself too, but she wanted too badly to live.
“Love had broken her life into two separate halves: the half before she had fallen, and the half afterward.”
After this, Harrow started hearing things and often had to ask Crux if things were real or not. In the first year after her parents’ death, the Body was with her often and time was weird. After that, when Harrow went through puberty, she started to have a lot of difficult symptoms and had to rely on rituals and routine to function. She also struggled with seeing her face in the mirror, which is the main reason she so zealously keeps it painted still.
While she was going through all of this, she also had to keep her house going and make it appear that her parents were leading it. She sharpened her necromantic skills in all her day-to-day duties that keep the House running, but she could do no more than maintain the status quo. There was no one left, other than her, with a womb who was young enough to have children, and the only potential source of XY for fertilization was Ortus, which would combine the cavalier and necromancer lines so Harrow’s “father” shut this idea down. She also refused to ask the other Houses for help because whoever came to help would take over the Ninth, and she believed this would endanger the Tomb.
And then she got the chance to become a Lyctor. This would solve all of her problems, allow her to renew the House on her own terms. But it all went wrong, and she had not been able to absorb Ortus Nigenad’s soul.
“There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow--but she had died before Harrow was born."
Chapter 4
Second person narration.
Harrow wakes up to someone trying to smother her with a pillow. She defends herself by ripping out a thumbnail, expanding it and tearing it into many sharp fragments, then flinging them at her attacker and the room in general. She hears them hit flesh and the wall, and the weight lets up ...
Then she comes to fully, and her pillow is dry, her thumbnail is whole, and there are no fragments or scarring on the wall. Ianthe is there with two arms now, sitting in a chair near the door, wearing a white iridescent robe. Her eyes are still doing weird shit.
Ianthe gives Harrow a letter that is in Harrow’s own writing and addressed to herself: “To be given to Harrowhark immediately upon coherence.” This is written in Ninth House crypt-script. This letter does not answer any questions because former Harrow says the answers would be actively harmful to current Harrow, but we find out that the letter is one of many and was written fourty-eight hours after Harrow became a Lyctor. It provides guidelines for how she is to live from here on out, including the fact that she is deeply in debt to Ianthe and that she must re-swear her fealty. It also tells her to examine Ianthe’s jaw and tongue.
To do this, Harrow abruptly kisses Ianthe and determines that her jaw and tongue have not been replaced, so she reswears to Ianthe. They snipe at each other a bit before Ianthe tosses another white iridescent robe on Harrow’s bed along with a packet of letters. Each of the letters are numbered with requirements written on them in crypt-script, except for one that is written plainly: “To open if you meet Coronabeth Tridentarius”. Ianthe explains that Harrow’s pledge extends to Coronabeth which leads to Harrow saying that Coronabeth is likely no longer alive. Ianthe laughs this off, then there is more sniping and Harrow makes a remark about Naberius still fighting Ianthe.
Ianthe responds to this by taking out a knife and stabbing her own hand, which heals immediately. Then she does the same to Harrow, and Harrow’s hand does not automatically heal. It takes effort from her to knit it back together. Harrow mistakenly thinks this is punishment for the remark about Naberius, but Ianthe tells her to never suggest that Coronabeth is dead. When Ianthe leaves, Harrow staggers over to the Body who has been watching this and buries her face in the Body’s thighs. When she does this, she sees the thick nail fragments hidden behind some crates. With the Body’s help, she gets back to bed with her sword and her letters and falls unconscious.
Chapter 5
Third person narration.
Harrow comes to consciousness in a shuttle full of light with Ortus, who she describes as “that perfect modern Ninth cavalier”. He tells her that they are four hundred kilometres above the surface and that they are securing clearance to land. They have an exchange where he ends up telling her that he thinks her insanity might be useful, then Harrow sees a piece of flimsy she had not noticed before on a seat. To her, it says “THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME” but to Ortus, it’s blank.
Questions:
What do you think about the change in tone from Gideon the Ninth? How does this book feel different? How does it feel similar?
What do you think about Harrow’s motivations for becoming a Lyctor?
Why do you think Ortus Nigenad is now Harrow’s cavalier? Why are they going to Canaan House together?
Who or what is the Body?
What do you think of God/The Emperor so far? Any impressions? Why is his math off?
Who tried to kill Harrowhark? Did it even happen?
What do you think of Harrow’s guidelines for herself? Why do you think she needs to bathe the sword in blood? What’s going on with her and Ianthe?
SPOILERS BELIOW
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Re-read Questions
Q1. Now that you know who the narrator is, where do you see her in the second person narration? What bits jump out at you? (changed the phrasing just in case the spoilers break again)
Q2. Do you think our narrator is correct that the Emperor can’t see the Body? We get assured multiple times that when Harrow thinks he might have noticed the Body that it isn’t possible.
Q3. Why are the Body’s eyes now gold when they were black in Harrow’s childhood? Thoughts about Harrow’s relationship to her? Is she really there? Is she sometimes a cover for Gideon? Anything related to the Body that jumps out at you?
Q4. Talk to me about the idea that “love had broken her life into two separate halves”
Q5. The section about the Tomb makes me curious. It’s strongly implied at the end of this book that the reason Harrow could break into the Tomb was because she literally had Gideon’s blood on her hands, but these early sections make it clear that Harrow made multiple visits to the Tomb. How is that possible?
Q6. Thoughts about Harrow's letter and guidelines? I keep thinking about her choice to say No.
Q7. What do you think Ianthe’s goals are? In general? As relates to Harrow?
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END OF SPOILERS
Link to full discussion on Reddit with Comments