“I want to see a match,” said Princess Corona. “Come—Gideon the Ninth, right?—why don’t you try Sir Magnus instead? Don’t believe him when he says he’s rubbish. The Fifth House is meant to turn out very fine cavaliers.”
Magnus inclined his head.
“Of course I’m willing, and the princess is gracious,” he said, “but I didn’t get to be cavalier primary due to being the best with a rapier. I’m cavalier primary only because my adept is also my wife. I suppose you could say that I—ha, ha—cavalier primarried!”
From the other side of the room, Jeannemary let out a long noise like a death rattle. Princess Corona laughed outright; Magnus looked extremely pleased with himself. The faces of the other two were patiently blank. Gideon made a mental note to write down the joke so that she could use it herself later.
Corona inclined her bright head in toward Gideon. She smelled nice, like how Gideon imagined soap was meant to smell.
“Will the Ninth honour us?” she murmured prettily.
Stronger women than Gideon could not have said no to an up-close-and-personal Corona Tridentarius. She stepped up to the dais, her boots ringing out on the stone: the older man opposite’s eyes widened when he saw that she was not going to take off her robe, nor her hood, nor her glasses. The air in the room thrilled, all except for the dreary scrape, scrape, scrape of the skeleton removing cobwebs. Even Jeannemary sat up from her posture of premature death to watch. There was a low murmur of amazement from Corona when Gideon twitched open her robe to reveal the knuckles latched to her belt; they glittered blackly in the sunlight as she slipped them onto her hand.
“Knuckle-knives?” said the Third’s cavalier in outright disbelief. “The Ninth uses knuckle-knives?”
“Not traditionally.”
That was the cavalier in the Cohort uniform, who had a voice as crisp as her collar. Naberius said with forced languor: “I simply can’t remember ever thinking knuckle-knives were a viable option.”
“They’re tremendously nasty.” （Gideon admitted to herself that the way Corona said it was kind of hot.）
Naberius sniffed.
“They’re a brawler’s weapon.”
The Cohort cav said, “Well. We’ll see.”
That was the strange thing about keeping mute, thought Gideon. Everyone seemed to talk at you, rather than to you. Only her erstwhile sparring partner was looking her dead in the eye—as much as he could through dark glasses, anyway.
“Does the Ninth, er—” Magnus was gesturing in a rather general way to Gideon’s robes, her glasses, her hood, which she translated to Are you going to take those off? When she shook her head no he shrugged in wonder: “All right!” and added the slightly bewildering, “Well done.”
Corona said, “I’ll arbitrate,” and they moved into position. Once again Gideon was back down in the half-lit depths of Drearburh, in the cement-poured tomb of a soldier’s hall. Cavalier duels worked the same way Aiglamene had taught her they would, which was very much the same way they did back home, just with more folderol. You stood in front of each other and laid your offhand arm across your chest, showing which main-gauche weapon you intended to use: her knuckle-knives were laid, fat and black, against her collarbone. Magnus’s sword—a beautiful dagger of ivory-coloured steel, the handle a twist of creamy leather—touched his.
“To the first touch,” said their arbiter, badly hiding her rising excitement. “Clavicle to sacrum, arms exception. Call.”
First touch? In Drearburh it was to the floor, but there was no time to contemplate that one: Magnus was smiling at her with the boyish, teacherly enthusiasm of a man about to play a ball game with a younger sibling. But beneath that excellent mask there was a note of doubt about his eyes, a tugging of his mouth, and something in Gideon rose as well: he was a little afraid of her.
“Magnus the Fifth!” he said, and: “Er—go easy!”
Gideon looked over at Corona and shook her head. The necromancer-princess of Ida was too well bred to query and too quick to mistake, and simply said: “I call for Gideon the Ninth. Seven paces back—turn—begin…”
There were four pairs of hungry eyes watching that fight, but they all blurred into the background of a dream: the lines one’s brain filled in to abbreviate a place, a time, a memory. Gideon Nav knew in the first half second that Magnus was going to lose: after that she stopped thinking with her brain and started thinking with her arms, which were frankly where the best of her cerebral matter lay.