Nor was that the worst of it. As Gideon watched, somewhere between horror and fascination, the earlier wounds—the ones Palamedes had inflicted when he blew up the sickroom—began to reopen. Strips of skin along the Lyctor’s arms blackened and curled; a big, messy gouge split down her thigh, independent of Ianthe’s blade. Even the curly hair started to sizzle and crisp back up.
“What the hell?” objected Gideon, more to relieve her feelings than in hope of an answer.
“She hadn’t healed,” said Camilla weakly from beside her. Gideon glanced around; the other cav had dragged herself up into a sitting position against the wall and was watching the fight with grim, professional eyes. Of course, cavaliers from Houses with more than one living necromancer probably saw necromancers duel all the time. “She’d just skinned over the damage—a surface fix, hides the cracks. To really heal, she needs thalergy—life force—and she hasn’t got any to spare.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Gideon. “Sextus gave her turbo cancer.”
Camilla nodded with enormous personal satisfaction. “Well,” she said, “that’ll do it.”
Ianthe’s magic was as efficient and lean as Naberius’s swordsmanship—neat and contemptuous, clean and too perfect, not a beat missed or a second’s hesitation. Cytherea stumbled away from her onslaught, and Ianthe closed the trap. The cage of blood suddenly contracted, tightened, clinging to the older Lyctor like a net. Cytherea stood tangled in it, not even bothering to try to fight free, eyes closed to slits. Her hair was scorched almost down to stubble. She was struggling to breathe. Her shrapnel wounds were gaping red and fresh, and her knees were buckling. The smell of blood and leaves was overpowering.
Ianthe stood before her, panting now herself. She kept shaking her head as though to clear it—kept rubbing her temples fretfully—but she was gleaming and triumphant, sweating, smug. “Tired?” she said.
Cytherea opened her eyes and coughed. “Not particularly,” she said. “But you’re exhausted.”
The filmy red net dissolved to nothing. It didn’t even fall away from her; it seemed almost to be absorbed back through her skin. She straightened up, stepped forward, and grabbed Ianthe’s throat in one fine-boned, delicate hand. Ianthe’s eyes bulged, and her hands flew up to clutch at the other woman’s wrist.
“Just like a child … all your best moves first,” said Cytherea.
Ianthe squirmed. A thread of blood coiled in the air around her, uselessly, and then spattered to the ground. The ancient Lyctor said, “You aren’t completed, are you? I can feel him pushing … he’s not happy. Mine went willingly, and it hurt for centuries. If I’m old news … you’re fresh meat.”
She tightened her grip on Ianthe’s throat, and the dreadful, bone-deep suction of siphoning sent an icy ripple throughout the sheltered terrace. The trees and trellises shook. This was soul siphoning as Gideon had never felt it before. Colourless at the best of times, Ianthe was now as blank and tintless as a sheet. Her eyes rolled back and forth in her head, and then there was no eye to roll: she jerked and squealed, pupils gone, irises gone, as though Cytherea had somehow had the ability to suck them out of her skull.
“No,” cried Ianthe, “no, no, no—”
The great wound in Cytherea’s thigh was starting to weave itself back up: so too were the burn marks all over her arms and her neck. Her charred hair was growing back in—rippling out in pale brown waves from her skull—and she sighed with pleasure as she shook her head.
“Okay,” said Camilla in carefully neutral tones, “now she’s healing.”
The thigh wound closed up, leaving the skin smooth as alabaster. Cytherea dropped Ianthe dismissively to the ground in a crumpled-up heap.
“Now, little sister,” she told the grey-lipped Third princess, “don’t think this means I’m not impressed. You did become a Lyctor … and so you’ll get to live. For a while. But I don’t need your arms and your legs. So—”
She rested one delicate foot on Ianthe’s wrist, and Gideon rose to her feet. The sharp shank of bone extended from her knuckles, a long butcher’s blade with a wicked heft. Cytherea sliced down. Bright red blood sprayed in the sunshine as Ianthe’s right arm came off just above the elbow. Ianthe, too weak even to scream, made a keening sound.
By this point Gideon had already lurched forward two steps and regretted it. Her kneecap was absolutely not where it should have been. She tottered to the side, letting her sword drop one-handed, pressing her other over the knee and cursing the day she had been born with kneecaps. Cytherea was shifting to the other side, the other limb, judging the distance with her bloody spar—