Do you think Harrow is genuinely in love with Alecto?
This is such a great question. Yeah, I definitely think so. I think she’s in love in the way that a child who has decided to die with the blood of her only friend under her fingernails loves the singular reason she has found to keep living. The ravenous, scrabbling, sightless way a plant starved in darkness loves a tendril of sunlight. The way a creature of worship on the verge of faithlessness loves the promise of divinity. The way a little girl who is two hundred dead sons and daughters of her dying house loves a big beautiful blonde babe with a sword.
I think Harrow loves Gideon like a person, with history and specificity and knowing, like a dickhead with acne and dimples who has punched her in the face and bitten her fingers and hugged her when she wanted to be drowned and looked at her like she was capable of being wrong. And she loves Alecto blindly, desperately, wholly, like something perfect and true and terrible, like a universe, like a symbol, like a god.
These books are very weird and gross and mutable and poly about love, I think. What do you think?