why I am an Alecto Harrowbod truther
Ever since I read the epilogue of Harrow, I’ve liked the idea of Alecto being in Nona’s body. I wanted Gideon/Harrow/Alecto to do a true three-person game of musical chairs with corpses! It would be fun! The epilogue itself leaves so much open that there was really nothing to go off of, but the Nona the Ninth cover and the excerpt released today gave us a LOT of new information. There’s still many, many questions, but I think there’s good evidence to support this theory, both within the excerpt and on a meta level.
The Harrowbod part is easy. Nona’s physical appearance on the cover is not a match for Gideon, and while she looks quite different from Harrow on her cover, a lot of that can be chalked up to the smile and the lack of goth facepaint. The physical description in the excerpt is the cincher for me:
Nona ate while Pyrrha brushed out her hair in short, brisk strokes, letting its fine black sheets fall over Nona’s shoulders. It went almost to the bottom of her back now, and it was soft and thin as water: every fourth haircut day they cut it, but not every haircut day because it was a pain, and because people noticed your hair growing less when it was already long, Camilla said.
Nona has black hair that grows preternaturally fast, fitting with Harrow’s hair color and Ianthe’s hair-growing curse. (I also think that Nona’s aversion to eating eggs is related to Harrow’s food sensitivities.)
“The painted face is on top of me. I’m in the safe water—I’m lying down, I think. Something’s pushing at me. The water goes over my head and it’s in my mouth. It goes up my nose.”
“I like it. I like the water, I like her hands.”
“They’re the things around me—maybe they’re my hands.”
I think this is intentionally written to evoke the pool scene in Gideon. After all, Harrow does tell us that she can only speak the Ninth House’s secrets immersed in saltwater, and Gideon and Harrow spend a not-insignificant portion of the scene gripping at each other. But I think that’s a red herring.
Let’s compare Nona’s narration to Harrow’s description of the Body:
They packed her in ice – she’s frozen solid – and they laid a sword on her breast. Her hands are wrapped around the blade. There are chains around her wrists, coming out of her grave, and they go into holes by each side of the tomb, and there are chains on her ankles that do the same, and there are chains around her throat…
I think Nona’s narration is the Body’s perspective of this scene. The “safe water” is the ice, which is packed all around her, matching Nona’s statement that it’s in her mouth and up her nose. Critically, Nona describes the hands as “the things around me”; I think this is intentionally vague language for the chains. (And at least partly Nona’s in-character ignorance.) The painted face is, of course, Harrow as a child, looking down at the body.
On a meta level, some of Tamsyn’s interviews make me lean towards the Alecto-as-Nona theory as well.
Nona sprang from the planned first act of Alecto. I always intended to let her have the entire first act — it felt appropriate
Both Gideon and Harrow were the predominate narrators of their books, and the switch to the other’s narration came at a moment when the lines between them were blurred (i.e. when Harrow ate Gideon’s soul and when Harrow remembered Gideon and let her soul out). To maintain this pattern, I think Nona is an aspect of Alecto, or Alecto without her memories; someone Alecto could have been in a different life. Nona’s arc will be about discovering who she is, and rebecoming (or rejecting) her Alecto-self.
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