71 pages • 2 hours read
Tamsyn MuirHarrow the Ninth
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Act 3, Chapter 23 Summary: “Four Months Before the Emperor’s Murder”
The atmosphere grows tense in the Mithraeum as the Resurrection Beast is only four months away. Harrow tries to train alone at night and contemplates her coming death. She is certain she will die, since her body cannot defend itself against the Heralds. After practice, Harrow wanders the halls and finds Duty in Cytherea’s tomb, cuddling her corpse. She flees and tells Ianthe, who is flippant about the situation and believes Duty is a necrophiliac. Ianthe begins to question Harrow’s mental health directly to her face.
Act 3, Chapter 24 Summary
Harrow’s 18th birthday passes without any fanfare. Meanwhile, Ianthe has made no progress with her replacement right arm. Harrow, worried due to Duty’s attacks, has warded and trapped her entire apartment. Thinking she is safe, she takes a bath. Duty attacks her while she is naked and completely defenseless, obliterating her wards without a thought. Harrow survives the ordeal and sends him fleeing by gouging his eyes out. The attack leaves her with trauma, as she has been robbed of the last place where she felt safe. Harrow talks to the Body, who agrees that she must kill Duty.
Act 3, Chapter 25 Summary
Harrow tries to tell John that Duty kissed Cytherea’s corpse, but he does not believe her. He tells her she must “do something normal” (218), so she learns how to make soup. Ianthe helps her learn. Harrow refuses to sleep after the attack, terrified of making herself vulnerable to Duty. Meanwhile, Ianthe has been given a five-day deadline to improve her relationship with her right arm, otherwise Augustine will stop teaching her.
After 126 hours without sleep, Harrow makes dinner for the entire crew. She slips her own bone marrow into the soup, intending to assassinate Duty with her prodigious control over bone matter. Once the group sits down for dinner, Harrow rips Duty apart from the inside out with her own bone marrow. Harrow successfully eviscerates him beyond recognition, but John intervenes. He saves Duty from complete obliteration, a feat only he can perform; he refuses to let the two kill one another. John displays little concern for the fact that Duty attacked her in her own living quarters in a place as vulnerable as the bathtub. John finds out how long Harrow has been awake and commands Ianthe to take her to bed. As Harrow leaves, Duty displays a newfound respect for her and salutes her.
Act 3, Chapter 26 Summary
Back in the false Canaan House, Harrow watches as Silas Octakiseron, of the Eighth House, shoves Coronabeth Tridentarius—Ianthe’s sister—into the ocean surrounding Canaan House. Silas then throws himself to his death. Unbeknownst to Harrow, neither of them are real; Corona and Silas’s souls are not present in her personal play.
Act 3, Chapter 27 Summary
Harrow finds herself in Ianthe’s bed, dozing, while Ianthe practices with her sword to no avail. Harrow drifts to sleep, comforted by Ianthe’s scent and presence. She awakens to find Ianthe desperately attempting to cut off her right arm. Ianthe fails due to her superhuman Lyctor regenerative abilities. Harrow helps remove Ianthe’s arm and sculpts a new, fully useable bone-arm from Ianthe’s own bone. The scene is marked with highly suggestive, sensual language as Harrow shapes Ianthe’s body. Once completed, Ianthe is immediately able to use the arm since it is made from her body and is a perfect replica of the arm she used to have. Ianthe promises to help Harrow kill Duty in exchange for helping her with the arm.
Act 3, Chapter 28 Summary
In the false Canaan House, those remaining have gathered to keep one another safe. Harrow tells Abigail and Magnus about Silas and Coronabeth and they chastise her for keeping the information for several days. They ask her to read a note, another angry screed by the Sleeper. This note references Commander Wake’s affair with Pyrrha Dve (who used Duty’s body to initiate the affair). The note says nothing of the sort to Abigail and Magnus. Harrow believes the note confirms her unreliable perception. Abigail and Magnus suggest that, rather than anything to do with her mind, Harrow is being haunted by a spirit.
Act 3, Chapter 29 Summary
Augustine is proud of Ianthe’s new sword-fighting abilities with the skeleton arm. He encases the arm in gold. Mercy is astounded by Harrow’s craftsmanship with the arm and confronts her about it. Mercy asks Harrow what the Saint of Duty’s name is; when Harrow says “Ortus,” Mercy taps her on the head, then appears shocked; it is heavily implied she has realized what Harrow has done to her own mind.
Harrow only feels safe in Ianthe’s room and her bed. The two begin plotting how to kill Duty. Ianthe calls in a favor with Augustine and ropes him into the plan. As the two plot side by side in bed, Harrow is struck by her intense physical loneliness and her simultaneous fear of Ianthe’s touch. Some time later, an invitation to dinner arrives from Augustine. The two are to meet him in his apartment before dinner.
When they arrive in Augustine’s rooms, Mercy shows up. Augustine calls this plot to kill Duty Dios Apate, Minor (roughly “deception of God, minor”) (256). He does not clarify why they are both willing to kill Duty. He cryptically tells the two younger Lyctors to leave the dinner and follow Duty when he gives the signal. Augustine claims Duty always goes to the training room after dinner.
Act 3, Chapter 30 Summary
Augustine’s plan is to get everybody extremely drunk at dinner. Augustine begins toasting their cavaliers and brings up the contentious Cristabel. Usually, Cristabel sparks a fight between him, Duty, and Mercy. Duty leaves, upset to hear Cristabel’s name, as well as Pyrrha’s, his own cavalier’s. Instead of fighting over Cristabel, Augustine and Mercy began passionately kissing. The two Lyctors eventually rope John into their eroticism. Harrow is appalled as she watches the man she calls God engage sexually with the other two Lyctors. Ianthe drags Harrow away, understanding that this is their cue.
Act 3, Chapter 31 Summary
Ianthe tries to kiss Harrow after they leave the dinner, though Harrow refuses; Harrow claims her affection belongs to the Locked Tomb. Once Ianthe leaves, Harrow follows Duty to the training room and blows the room up with bone-shrapnel. Harrow finds the room is empty. She decides to check Cytherea’s tomb. She finds large spatters of blood and sees that Cytherea’s body is missing. Harrow follows the blood and discovers that a wounded and unconscious Duty has been placed inside an incinerator. Cytherea’s body is operating the controls. Harrow acts decisively to save Duty from the incinerator. Duty, nearly dead, tells Harrow how to construct wards to keep him out of her bedroom. He then talks to Harrow cryptically; Harrow does not realize he thinks she is Wake and is asking about the baby (Gideon).
The breaching of the incinerator set off alarms, summoning the other Lyctors. John grills Harrow and Duty; Duty does not remember what happened and admits that he is mentally often not present. Cytherea’s body is missing from the crypt; Harrow saw it leave once she entered the incinerator room to save Duty.
Act 3 Analysis
As Dios Apate, Minor is put into action, Harrow is forced to reconcile with the human nature of John again, furthering the theme of Religion and Cycles of Violence. The casual, openly sexual relationship between Augustine, John, and Mercy juxtaposes sharply against Harrow’s assumptions that life on the Mithraeum would be “spent in prayer, training, and the beauty of necromantic mysteries” (265). The Ninth House is the most deeply religious within the Nine Houses, evidenced by the House’s heavily Catholic imagery of rosary beads, saintly reliquaries of bones, and the nun-like aesthetic of the Ninth House members. The all-too-human exchange between John and the elder Lyctors leading up to the sexual relations between the three “destroy[s] some cavern of [Harrow’s] reverence” (265). The foundation of Harrow’s religiosity assumed that John was a typical God: detached from the world and above the desires of a regular person. John’s human actions cause Harrow to reevaluate the meaning of her devotion to him, which puts her faith in crisis. When John tells Harrow that he wishes she were his daughter in Chapter 37, John’s status as an aloof divinity is destroyed for Harrow. Her devotion to him cannot rest on the idea that he is a divine God and instead must rest on devotion to the man himself, much like how the elder Lyctors view John.
The destruction of Harrow’s reverence for John means that her reverence lies before the Locked Tomb instead. The inability for Harrow’s reverence to survive contact with John suggests that religious reverence requires a distant, unobtainable object; Harrow had not met John until very recently, and after she does, her reverence for him as a divine figure crumbles. Muir portrays devotion as both malleable and ripe for exploitation to commit atrocities, regardless of whether that devotion is religious or familial in nature. Muir plays with the distinction between the sacred and the profane by exploring the deep ramifications of God’s human side.
These chapters further the theme of Lost Childhood. Beyond being confronted with John’s secular approach to sexuality, Harrow herself delves into charged intimacy as her 18th birthday comes and goes. There is no celebration of her birth, which further emphasizes the lack of acknowledgment of Harrow’s young age and the responsibilities placed on her shoulders. As she moves toward adulthood, Harrow finds herself growing closer to Ianthe. Harrow and Ianthe both share a sense of dysphoria over their failure to become full, perfect Lyctors. This locks them together, even more than their shared part in Harrow’s plan to save Gideon. These feelings culminate in Chapter 27, when Harrow crafts Ianthe an arm from her own bones, allowing her to finally feel whole and comfortable with herself. The scene is highly suggestive, adding a sexual element that displays Harrow’s growing maturity. It is also written with explicit descriptions of the blood, flesh, and bone that Harrow works with as she crafts Ianthe’s arm, adding a visceral layer to Harrow and Ianthe’s shared intimacy. Though Harrow rejects Ianthe’s kiss later, their closeness complicates the relationship between Harrow and Gideon, who is an unwilling witness to the entire situation but cannot interfere.
Harrow the Ninth is filled with clues that foreshadow the denouement in Act 5. These small moments of foreshadowing are used to build intrigue and entice readers into looking deeply into each scene and its word choices. When Augustine agrees to help kill Duty, he says, “Just believe me when I say that when I want Ortus to go, he’ll be giddy-gone” (255). Harrow’s brain programming is not perfect and cannot account for all instances of “Gideon,” such as somebody making a play on words with the name. Small incongruities such as this occur often whenever Duty is called “Ortus the First,” leaving clues in the text that hint toward the particularities surrounding the name Gideon. Muir borrows conventions of suspense from thriller and mystery novels to reinforce the meta-dramatic irony of the novel. Almost every character who is not Harrow is aware of the circumstances surrounding her. Everybody aboard the Mithraeum is aware that she calls Gideon the First “Ortus the First” and everybody is aware that Gideon Nav was her cavalier. Likewise, all of the ghosts in Harrow’s false-memory theater understand that they are putting on plays for Harrow’s mind. The clues Muir uses, often incongruities within the text and discrepancies against past details, allow readers to momentarily glimpse beyond Harrow’s immensely restricted perspective.
