“Oh, very good!” said Dulcinea, and she clapped like a child seeing a firework. “Perfect … just like a picture of Nonius. People say that all Ninth cavaliers are good for is pulling around baskets of bones. Before I met you I imagined that you might be some wizened thing with a yoke and panniers of cartilage … half skeleton already.”
This was bigoted, assumptive, and completely true. Gideon relaxed her sword and her stance, at her ease—and saw that the fragile girl engulfed by her chair had stopped playing with her frivolous hat. Her mouth was quirked in a quizzical little smile, and her eyes said that she had calculated two plus two and ended up with a very final four.
“Gideon the Ninth,” said Dulcinea, slowly, “are you used to a heavier sword?”
Gideon looked down. She looked at her rapier, pointed skyward like a black arrow, her off hand cupped and supporting what should have been more grip but now was the long knob of pommel, the way you’d hold—a fucking longsword.
She sheathed it immediately, sliding it home to its scabbard in a tight iron whisper. A cold sweat had broken out beneath her clothes. The expression on Dulcinea’s face was simply bright-eyed, mischievous interest, but to Gideon it was the Secundarius Bell chiding a child already ten minutes late for prayer. For a moment a lot of stupid stuff felt very ready to happen. She nearly confessed everything to Dulcinea’s mild and denim-coloured gaze: she nearly opened her mouth and begged wholeheartedly for the woman’s mercy.
It was in this moment of charged stupidity that Protesilaus turned up, saving her bacon by dint of being very large and ignoring her. He stood with his muddy hair and bleary skin and blocked the shaft of sunlight that was pattering over his adept’s hands, and he said to her in his dreary, rumbling voice: “It’s shut.”
No time to figure out that one. As Dulcinea’s eyes flickered between her cavalier and the cavalier of the Ninth, Gideon took the opportunity to turn tail and—not run, but slope extremely fast in the direction of anywhere but there. There were cracks in the plex and the wind was coming in hot and salty, rippling her robes and her hood, and she had nearly escaped when Dulcinea called—“Gideon the Ninth!”
She half-turned her head back to them, dark glasses crooking down over her eyebrows. Protesilaus the Seventh stared at her with the empty eyes of someone who would watch with equal heavy disinterest if part of the wall were kicked out and she were punted down into the sea, but his adept was looking at her—wistfully. Gideon hesitated by the door for that look, in the shadows of the archway, buffeted by the wind from the water.
Dulcinea said: “I hope we talk again soon.”
Hell! thought Gideon, taking the stairs blindly two at a time. She didn’t. She had said too much already, and all without speaking a single word.
11
THOSE EARLY DAYS AT Canaan House spaced themselves out like beads on a prayer string, dilated. They consisted of big, empty hours, of eating meals in unoccupied rooms, of being alone amid very strange strangers. Gideon couldn’t even rely on the familiarity of the dead. The skeletons of the First were too good, too capable, too watchful—and Gideon didn’t feel truly at her ease anywhere except shut up in the dim rooms that the Ninth had been given, doing drills.
After nearly giving everything away she spent two days almost entirely cloistered, working with her rapier until the sweat had smeared her face paint to a leering, staved-in mask. She stacked a rusting stool on top of the sagging ebon dresser and did chin-ups into the iron wedge that ran across the rafters. She did press-ups in front of the windows until Dominicus limned her with bloody light, completing its sprint around the watery planet.
Both nights she went to bed sore and furious with loneliness. Crux always had said that she was at her most unbearable after confinement. She fell into a deep, black sleep and woke up only once, the second night, when—in the very early morning when the night outside seemed more like the lightless Ninth—Harrowhark Nonagesimus shut the door behind herself, very nearly silently. She kept her eyes mostly closed as the Reverend Daughter paused before the makeshift bed, and as she watched the robed black figure drifted over to the bedroom. Then there was no more noise; and Harrow was gone again, in the morning, when Gideon awoke. She didn’t even leave rude notes.
It was in this abandoned state that the cavalier of the Ninth House ate two breakfasts, starved of both protein and attention, dark glasses slipping on her nose as she drank another bowl of soup. She would have killed to see a couple of haggard nuns tottering around the place, and was therefore 100 percent vulnerable when she looked up to see a Third House twin stride into the room like a lion. It was the lovely one; she had the sleeves of her gauzy robe haphazardly rolled up to each golden shoulder and her hair tied back in a tawny cloud, and she looked at Gideon with an expression like an artillery shell midflight.