With numb fingers, Gideon removed the severed head of Protesilaus the Seventh.
30
IN THE FLIMSY-PAPERED LIVING room of the Sixth quarters, Gideon sat staring into a steaming mug of tea. It was grey with the sheer amount of powdered milk stirred into it, and it was her third cup. She had been terribly afraid that they’d put medicines into it, or tranquillizers or something: when she wouldn’t drink, both necromancer and cavalier had taken sips to prove it was unadulterated, with expressions that plainly said idiot. Palamedes had been the one to wait patiently next to her while she had thrown up lavishly in the Sixth’s toilet.
Now she sat, haggard and empty, on a spongy mattress they had pulled out as a chair. Protesilaus’s head sat, dead-eyed, on the desk. It looked exactly as it had in life: as though, upon being separated from its trunk, it had entered into some perfect state of preservation to remain boring forever. It looked about as lively as it had when she’d met him. Palamedes was investigating the white gleam of the spinal column at the nape of the neck for maybe the millionth time.
Camilla had shoved a mug of hot tea into Gideon’s hands, strapped two swords to her back, and disappeared. This had all happened before Gideon could protest and now she was left alone with Palamedes, her discovery, and a cluster headache. Things were happening too much. She took a hot mouthful, swilled tea around her teeth, and swallowed mechanically. “She’s mine.”
“You’ve said that five times now.”
“I mean it. Whatever goes down—whatever happens—you have to let me do it. You have to.”
“Gideon—”
“What do I do,” she said, quite casually, “if she’s the murderer?”
His interest in the spinal column was not abating. Palamedes had slipped his glasses down his long craggy nose, and was holding the head upside down like he was emptying a piggy bank. He had even shone light into the nose and ears and horrible warp of the throat. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you do?”
“What would you do if you discovered Camilla was a murderer?”
“Help her bury the body,” said Palamedes promptly.
“Sextus.”
“I mean it. If Camilla wants someone dead,” he said, “then far be it from me to stand in her way. All I can do at that point is watch the bloodshed and look for a mop. One flesh, one end, and all that.”
“Everyone wants to tell me about fleshes and ends today,” said Gideon unhappily.
“There’s a joke in there somewhere. You’re sure there was nothing else along with the head—bone matter, fingernails, cloth?”
“I checked. I’m not a total tool, Palamedes.”
“I trust Camilla. I trust that her reasons for ending someone’s life would be logical, moral, and probably to my benefit,” he said, sliding one fragile eyelid up an eyeball. “Your problem here is that you suspect that Harrow has killed people for much less.”
“She didn’t kill the Fourth or Fifth.”
“Conjecture, but we’ll leave it.”
“Okay, so,” said Gideon, putting her empty mug next to her mattress. “Um. You are now getting the impression that my relationship with her is more—fraught—than you might’ve guessed.” （“You shock me,” muttered Palamedes.） “But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve known her as long as she’s lived. And I thought I knew how far she’d go, because I will tell you for free she has gone to some intensely shitty lengths, and I guess she’s gone to some shittier lengths than I thought concerning me, but that’s the thing—it’s me, Sextus. It’s always me. She nearly killed me half a dozen times growing up, but I always knew why.”
Palamedes took off his glasses. He finally stopped molesting the head, and he pushed himself up and away from the desk; he sat down heavily on the mattress next to Gideon, skinny knees tucked up into his chest. “Okay. Why?” he asked simply.
“Because I killed her parents,” said Gideon.
He did not say anything. He just waited, and in the space of that waiting, she talked. And she told him the beginning stuff—how she was born, how she grew up, and how she came to be the primary cavalier of the Ninth House—and she told him the secret she had kept for seven long and awful years.
* * *
Harrowhark had hated Gideon the moment she clapped eyes on her, but everyone did. The difference was that although most people ignored small Gideon Nav the way you would a turd that had sprouted legs, tiny Harrow had found her an object of tormentable fascination—prey, rival, and audience all wrapped up in one. And though Gideon hated the cloisterites, and hated the Locked Tomb, and hated the ghastly great-aunts, and hated Crux most of all, she was hungry for the Reverend Daughter’s preoccupation. They were the only two children in a House that was otherwise busy getting gangrene.