“Parry, damn you, parry!” was the daily refrain. “This isn’t your longsword, Nav, you block with it again and I’ll make you eat it!”
On the few early days when she had foregone the paint, Crux had appeared and turned off the heating to her cell: she would end up slumped on her tier, screaming with cold, numb and nearly dead. So she wore the goddamn paint. It was nearly worse than her pre-cavalier life, except that as a small mercy she could train instead of going to prayers and, as a bigger mercy, Crux and Harrow were nearly never around. The heir to the House had ordered her marshal to do something secret down in the bowels of Drearburh, where bowed and creaking Ninth brothers and sisters worked hour after hour at whatever grisly task Harrowhark had set.
As for the Lady of the Ninth herself, she locked herself in the library and didn’t come out. Very occasionally she would watch Gideon train, remark on the absolute lack of progress, make Gideon strip her paint off her face and command her to do it again. One day she and Aiglamene made Gideon walk behind Harrow, up and down the tiers, shadowing her until Gideon was nearly mad with impatience.
The only dubious advantage to this was that she would sometimes hear snatches of conversation, standing motionless and rigid-backed with her hand on the pommel of her sword and her sightline somewhere beyond Harrow’s shoulder. Gideon was hungry for intel, but these exchanges were never very illuminating. The most she got was the day Harrow, too fretful to modulate her voice, said outright: “Naturally it’s a competition, Captain, even if the wording…”
“Well, the Third House will naturally be the best equipped…”
“And the Second will have spent half their lives at the front and be covered in Cohort decorations. It doesn’t signify. I don’t care about soldiers or politicians or priests. It’s a greyer House I worry about.”
Aiglamene said something that Gideon did not catch. Harrow gave a short, hard laugh.
“Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.”
Otherwise Harrow stayed with her books and studied her necromancy, getting leaner and more haggard, crueller and more mean. Each night Gideon fell into bed and was asleep before she could tend her blistered feet and massage her bruised body. On days when she had behaved very well Aiglamene let her train with her longsword instead, which had to pass for fun.
The last week before they were due to leave came all at once, like startling awake from a half-remembered and unsettling dream. The marshal of Drearburh reappeared like a chronic disease to stand over Gideon as she loaded her trunk, all of it with old hand-me-downs of Ortus’s that could be hastily remade into three different Gideon-sized articles. These reclaimed robes were like her normal clothes, dour and black, but better made, dourer, and blacker. She spent a significant amount of time boring slats into the bottom of the trunk so that she could squirrel away her beloved, deserted longsword, packing it like precious contraband.
Aiglamene had found and reforged the sword of Ortus’s grandmother’s mother, and presented it to a nonplussed Gideon. The blade was black metal, and it had a plain black guard and hilt, unlike the intricate messes of teeth and wires that adorned some of the other rapiers down at the monument. “Oh, this is boring,” Gideon had said in disappointment. “I wanted one with a skull puking another, smaller skull, and other skulls flying all around. But tasteful, you know?”
She was also given knuckles: they were even less ornate, being obsidian and steel set in thick and heavy bands. There were three black blades on the back of the gauntlet, rigidly fixed in place. “But for God’s sake don’t use them for anything but a parry,” said her teacher.
“This is confusing. You made me train empty-handed.”
“Gideon,” said her teacher, “after eleven ghoulish weeks of training you, beating you senseless, and watching you fall around like a dropsical infant, you are on a miraculous day up to the standard of a bad cavalier, one who’s terrible.” （This was great praise.） “But you fall apart as soon as you start to overthink your offhand. Use the knuckles to balance. Give yourself options if someone gets inside your guard—though better yet, don’t let them get inside your guard. Keep moving. Be fluid. Remember that your hands are now sisters, not twins; one executes your primary action and the other supports the move. Pray they don’t watch you fight too closely. And stop blocking every blow.”
On the final day the entire House of the Ninth filled the tier of the landing field, and they left room to spare: it was sad to watch their eagerness, their kissing Harrowhark’s hem over and over. They all knelt in prayer with the godawful great-aunts as their Reverend Daughter stood and watched, tranquil and bloodless as the skeletons ploughing in the tiers above.