If the Harrow/Gideon relationship is the heart of this series, then the Ortus&Harrow bond is its kidneys or something. It’s so important to me, and it’s so hard to say why! Basically, Ortus and Harrow don’t like each other. They also don’t hate each other. Their relationship isn’t like the overwhelmingly emotional bond between Harrow and Gideon, Ortus and Harrow genuinely don’t care all that much about one another. But they still spent most of their lives side by side, each immersed in their own separate obsession, both suffocated by the solitude of the Ninth House.
And that brings with it the horrible intimacy of knowing someone very deeply despite not really wanting or trying to know them at all. The bond with the-other-person-who-was-there-when-the-thing-happened, the person who can restore your sanity and equilibrium just by acknowledging that the things that happened, happened. In this, Ortus&Harrow very much reminds me of a relationship between siblings, possibly estranged siblings. Ortus knows how much Harrow suffered, and he knows he could have reached out but did not, and he apologises, and that too little too late gesture is far more healing and far more truthful than anything Harrow could have ever gotten from another adult, including God. And Harrow in turn, despite mocking Ortus’s poetry, turns out to know quite a lot of it by heart. You don’t have to love something to know it way too well.