The blue eyes cracked open.
“They’re not familiar?”
“Should they be?”
“Well,” said Dulcinea calmly, “you would have said them to your Reverend Daughter the day you pledged yourself in the service of her cavalier, and she would have said them to you—but you never did that, did you? You weren’t trained in the traditions of the House of the Locked Tomb, and you’re nothing like a Ninth House nun. And you fight like—I don’t know. I’m not even certain you were raised in the Ninth House.”
Gideon let her head rest against the bed frame momentarily. When she had thought about this moment, she had expected to feel panic. There was no more panic left in the box. She just felt tired.
“Rumbled,” she said. “I’m sick of pretending, so yeah. Right on nearly all those counts. You know I’m the fakest-ass cavalier who ever faked. The actual cav had chronic hyperthyroid and was a serial limpdick. I’ve been faking my way through his duties for less than two months. I’m a pretend cavalier. I could not be worse at it.”
The smile she got in return had no dimples. It was strangely tender—as Dulcinea was always strangely tender with her—as though they had always shared some delicious secret. “You’re wrong there,” she said. “If you want to know what I think … I think that you’re a cavalier worthy of a Lyctor. I want to see that, what you’d become. I wonder if the Reverend Daughter even knows what she has in you?”
They looked at each other, and Gideon knew that she was holding that chemical blue gaze too long. Dulcinea’s hand was hot on hers. Now the old panic of confession seemed to rise up—her adrenaline was getting a second wind from deep down in her gut—and in that convenient moment the door opened. Palamedes Sextus walked in with his big black bag of weird shit, adjusted his glasses, and stared two seconds too long at their hands’ proximity.
There was something dreadfully tactful and remote and un-Palamedes-y as he said, “I came to check in on the both of you. Bad time?”
“Only in that I am officially out,” said Gideon, snatching her hand away. Everyone was mad at her, which was great, albeit they could not possibly be as mad as she was. She stood and rolled her neck until all the joints popped and crackled anxiously, was relieved to find her rapier still on her hip, and squared up to Palamedes feeling—terrifically dusty and guilty. “I’m going back to my quarters. No, I’m fine, quit it. Thanks for the ointment, it smells bewitchingly like piss.”
“For God’s sake, Ninth,” said Palamedes impatiently, “sit back down. You need to rest.”
“Cast your mind back to previous rests I have enjoyed. Yeah, nah.”
“It’s not even ointment, it’s drawing salve. Be reminded that Cam pulled twenty bone splinters out of you and said there were still a dozen left—”
“Nonagesimus can get them out—or maybe not,” added Gideon, a bit wildly. “Might as well leave them in until I’m through getting people bumped off, am I right?”
“Ninth—”
She indulged herself in storming out past the Warden of the Sixth, and in careering down the hallway like a bomb. It was about the least dignified way to leave a perfectly normal conversation, but it was also really satisfying, and it got her out of there in record time. Gideon staggered down the hallway picking orange goo out of her fingernails, and it was in this scratchy frame of mind that she nearly knocked down Silas Octakiseron in his floaty, bactericidal Eighth House whites. Colum the Eighth flanked him automatically, looking more like jaundice than ever in the same colour.
“They are dead, then,” his uncle said, by way of hello.
The only thing that saved Gideon from howling like an animal was the relief that, finally, she would get the chance to shove one of Octakiseron’s feet so deep into his ass he’d be gargling with his calcaneus.
“They had names, you lily-livered, tooth-coloured asshole,” she said, “and if you want to make a thing about it, I warn you that I’m in the kind of mood that can only be alleviated by walloping you.”
Colum blinked. His necromancer did not.
“I had heard that you were speaking now,” he said. “It seems a pity. Save your gaucherie for someone else, Gideon Nav. I’ve no interest in the frightened rantings of a Ninth House thrall.”
“What did you call me?”
“Thrall,” said Silas. “Serf. Servant.”
“I don’t want a bunch of synonyms, you smarmy cloud-looking motherfucker,” said Gideon. “You said Gideon Nav.”