They circled another couple of steps. The Prince jabbed again; Camilla’s knife went ching again, up near her heart this time. The Prince exuded the dispassionate curiosity of a child poking a dead cat with a stick. Camilla was focused, like the Prince was the only thing she’d ever been interested in.
“If this is all some dreary attempt at stalling,” the Prince began, “I’m going to be annoyed—”
She tried another jab, this time with a hint of petulance. It went clang, not ching, because Camilla hit the Prince’s sword hard with one of her knives; the tip of the sword swung wide and Camilla lunged with the other knife aimed at the Prince’s belly. The Prince seemed to flex to the side, making her body flat, and simultaneously snapped her sword-hand inward so it caught Camilla in the side of the head. Camilla staggered and backed hurriedly away as the sword-tip came slicing down past her shoulder. She kept stepping back until there were several paces between the two of them. Nona understood innately that this was not a good sign.
“You’ve got better,” said Camilla. “You’ve been training with someone who knew what they were doing.”
“You’ve gone to pieces,” said Prince Ianthe Naberius. “Oh me, oh my. The locals not much good for sparring?”
Nona squeezed her eyes shut and tried to control her breathing, tried to ignore the horrible glove clamped over her mouth. She wished she could get one good deep lungful of air that didn’t smell awful. She felt as though if she could stay calm, that would somehow make Camilla calm, and if Camilla could stay calm everything could still be okay. There was another ching, another clang, then a scuffle of steps on carpet and a huff of breath that sounded like Camilla’s. Nona’s eyes flicked open: they were still facing each other, closer now, Camilla crouching a little with her knives crossed, the Prince regarding her with that same dead-cat analytical gaze.
“No,” the Prince said, “no, this is a bore, I’m afraid … a disappointment all round. How like the Sixth to take the fun out of suicide.”
Camilla flipped the knife in her left hand so she was holding it backward, which under normal circumstances Nona would have found enormously exciting and cool. She slashed upward with the other knife, and as the Prince stepped back disdainfully, Camilla rose up to her full height and swung her right arm back over her shoulder like she was going to try to chop something in two pieces. The arm whipped forward: there was a blur of confused motion and a wet thud as a knife grew out of the chest of a dead soldier; the Prince had moved rapidly to the side so the knife didn’t hit her, and Camilla had ducked the same way and was driving inward and upward, left hand first, blade flashing back round into a normal grip as she came.
For a moment Nona could see the shape of it, like the shape a mouth made right before the sound came out. Camilla had put herself behind the Prince’s sword, so there was no way the Prince could get the blade round into a position where it could hit her; her hand was swinging round toward the small of the Prince’s back, and the knife-flip meant that her arm was going to end up longer than the Prince would be expecting. It wasn’t quite clear how Cam was going to get the handkerchief, but presumably she could think about that once the knife was safely stuck in the Prince’s body.
Then the Prince did some sort of complicated dance-step back, bringing her sword in close against her chest, and she kicked out with her front leg. Not like when Honesty tried to kick a tin can off a fence post, just a little sharp shove with her foot, down low, like she was scaring off a stray cat. Camilla’s leg folded and her lunge collapsed in on itself: she dropped to her knees and started to roll backward, landing awkwardly on her left arm, still holding the knife. She braced one foot against the floor to push herself off and up, and the Prince simply turned to follow her motion, flicked the sword up, and struck decisively downward.
Nona stared. Camilla sprawled on the carpet. Her empty right hand was grasped round the Prince’s right wrist; the Prince’s right wrist turned into the Prince’s right hand and then into the Prince’s lovely thin sword, which ran all the way down into Camilla’s belly. The point was somewhere quite far inside Camilla, and Nona couldn’t see it anymore.
“You really don’t know when to throw those things, do you,” said the Prince a little sadly.
Camilla said, “Match to the Sixth.”
Ianthe said, “What?” and then her eyes rolled backward in her head and she fell.
24
EVERY ZOMBIE SOLDIER IN the room crumpled up like Kevin had tipped them out of the soft play box onto the classroom floor. Nona fell with hers and suffered the incredibly disagreeable experience of two big, dead people landing very hard on top of her, and in no way becoming less heavy or less dead.