Gideon the Ninth

“I promised to fight for you. You promised me my freedom. There’s a hell of a good chance that I’m not going to get it, and I know it. We’re all dying here! Something’s after us! The only thing I can do is try to keep as many of us as I can alive for as long as I can, and hope that we work something out! You’re the ignorant sack of eyeballs who doesn’t understand what a cavalier is, Harrow, you just take whatever I give you—”

“Melodrama, Griddle, never became you,” said her adept flatly. “You’ve never complained about any of our previous transactions.”

“My ass, transactions. What happened to ‘I cannot afford to not have you trust me, now I’m going to make awkward eye contact and act like you broke my nose just because you hugged me once’?”

An indrawn breath. “Don’t mock my—”

“Mock you? I should kick your ass for you!”

“I’m making a reasonable request,” said Harrowhark, who had taken her gloves off and on again three times and was now examining her fingernails as though bored. The only reason Gideon had not already tried to deck her was that her eyelashes were trembling in rage, and also because she’d never hit Harrow before and was tremendously afraid that once she started she wouldn’t stop. “I ask you to draw back and reprioritise the Ninth in what—as you’ve said—is a dangerous time.”

“I’ve got my priorities straight.”

“Nothing you have done in the past two days suggests that.”

Gideon went cold. “Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I didn’t mean to let Jeannemary die.”

“For God’s sake, I didn’t mean—”

“Fuck you,

” Gideon added again, for emphasis. She found herself laughing in that awful, high way that was totally devoid of humour. “Fuck. We don’t deserve to still be around—have you realised that yet? Have you realised that this whole thing has been about the union of necromancer and cavalier from start to finish? We should be toast. If they’re measuring this on the strength of that—we’re the walking dead. Magnus the Fifth was a better cavalier than I am. Jeannemary the Fourth was ten times the cavalier I am. They should be alive and we should be bacteria food. Two big bags of algor mortis. We’re alive through dumb luck and Jeannemary isn’t and you’re acting like me letting Dulcinea die is all that’s standing between you and Lyctorhood—”

“Stop worshipping the sound of your own voice, Nav, and listen to me—”

“Harrow, I hate you,” said Gideon. “I never stopped hating you. I will always hate you, and you will always hate me. Don’t forget that. It’s not like I ever can.”

Harrow’s mouth twisted so much that it should have been a reef knot. Her eyes closed briefly, and she sheathed her hands inside her gloves. The tension should have deflated then, but it didn’t: like a pricked boil, it got full and shiny and hot. Gideon found she had swallowed six times in ten seconds and that the inside of her chest felt dry and bright. Her necromancer said evenly: “Griddle, you’re incorrect.”

“How—”

“Nothing stands between myself and Lyctorhood,” said Harrowhark, “and you are not a part of the equation. Don’t get carried away by the Sixth’s ideas. The tests are not concerned with some frankly sickening rubric of sentiment and obedience; they’re testing me and me alone. By the end, neither I nor the Ninth will need you for this pantomime. You may hate me all you wish; I still don’t even remember about you half the time.”

She turned away from Gideon. She did not walk away, but stood there for a moment in the simple arrogance of showing the other girl her back—of giving Gideon, with a sword in her scabbard, unfettered access to the back of her rib cage. Harrow said, “You’re banned from seeing Septimus. The quicker she shuffles off, the better. If I were in her position … I would have already thrown myself out the window.”

“Stand in front of a window now and I’ll do the hard part,” said Gideon.

“Oh, take a nap,” snapped Harrowhark.

Gideon very nearly did lay hands on her then, and probably should have.

“If you don’t need me, release me to the Seventh House,” she said, very slow and very calm, like she was reading at a service. “I’d rather serve—Dulcinea dying—than the living Reverend Daughter.”

Harrowhark turned to leave—airily, casually really, as though she and Gideon had finished a conversation about the weather. But then she inclined her head back to Gideon a little, and the fragment of her expression that Gideon saw was as wheezing and airless as a blow to the solar plexus.

“When I release you from my service, Nav,” her necromancer said, “you will know about it.” And she walked away.

Gideon decided, then and there, her betrayal.

Chapter 28

Half an hour later, Gideon Nav stood before the doors of the Eighth House quarters, in front of an extremely befuddled Colum the Eighth. In the misty red recesses of her mind this traitorous act was the correct thing to do, though she couldn’t yet quite decide why.

“Your uncle wanted me,” she said. “So. Here I am.”