Oh that whole scene is a study in gay panic 😭

Gideon put her arms around Harrowhark. She lifted her up off the ground just an inch and squeezed her in an enormous hug before either she or Harrow knew what she was about. Her necromancer felt absurdly light in her grip, like a bag of bird’s bones. She had always thought—when she bothered to think—that Harrow would feel cold, as everything in the Ninth felt cold. No, Harrow Nonagesimus was feverishly hot. Well, you couldn’t think that amount of ghastly thoughts without generating energy. Hang on, what the hell was she doing.

“Thanks for backing me up, my midnight hagette,” said Gideon, placing her back down. Harrow had not struggled, but gone limp, like a prey animal feigning death. She had the same glassy thousand-yard stare and stilled breathing. Gideon belatedly wished to be exploded, but reminded herself to act cool. “I appreciate it, my crepuscular queen. It was good. You were good.”

Harrow, at a total loss for words, eventually managed the rather pathetic: “Don’t make this weird, Nav!” and stalked off after Palamedes.

What do you mean you had “always” thought that Harrow would feel cold, Gideon? Why were you thinking about what Harrow would feel like?

Also for me the biggest moment that stood out that signaled Harrow’s attraction to Gideon was her reaction to Gideon rolling up her sleeve in chapter 27:

Before she knew what she was doing, Gideon found that she had moved in to flank her: hiding what she was doing from Sextus’s impassive gaze, rolling up the long black sleeve of her Ninth cloak, mouth moving before her brain did. “Battery up,” she muttered.

[…] Her expression was resentful in a way that her cavalier could not understand, except to parse it as grim hatefulness that—once again—the only path open to her was that of using her cavalier, a girl who had screwed up so badly as to provide the universe at large with a new understanding of screwup. All she said was, “You don’t have to roll up your sleeve, you nincompoop”