"In part," says Harrow, and though Gideon might not mean it as a rebuke, she feels the sting of one anyway. "Perhaps if I'd been at full Lyctoral strength, I'd have acquitted myself better when he came for me in the kitchen, but after that..."

She chews on her lip, looking up at the bathroom ceiling. It's an instinctive gesture, a firing of muscle memory and trauma, even though this room is as far from her Mithraeum quarters as she could possibly get. "He broke my wards," she says, her voice low and heavy with shame. "Obliterated them. He stripped the thanergy before my very eyes, Nav. I was in the bath. One moment I had the illusion of safety, and then even that was gone."