21

WHEN GIDEON WOKE UP later, Dominicus had made the room wet and orange with evening light. She was cramped from hunger. When she rolled over, she was assaulted with a series of increasingly aggressive notes.

I have taken the keys and gone to examine the new laboratory. DO NOT come and find me.

This was plainly unfair, even if the delights locked behind a Lyctoral door could only really be enjoyed by someone who gurgled over necromantic theorems, but anyway–

DO NOT leave the quarters. I will ask Sextus to look at you.

Willingly go to Palamedes? Harrow must have had a hell of a fright. Gideon reflexively checked her pulse in case she was still dead.

DO NOT go anywhere. I have left some bread for you in a drawer.

Yum.

“Go anywhere” in this case is defined as leaving the quarters to go to any other location in Canaan House, which you are banned from doing.

“I’m not eating your nasty drawer food,” said Gideon, and rolled out of bed.

She felt terrible—like she hadn’t slept for days and days—then remembered that she hadn’t, really, excepting last night. She felt feeble as a kitten. It took all her strength just to get to the bathroom, wash her scabrously painted face, and lap at the tap like an animal. The mirror reflected a haggard girl whose blood probably resembled fruit juice, with anaemia all the way up to her ears. She combed through her hair with her fingers, and thought of Dulcinea, and for some reason blushed deeply.

The water was fortifying. The bread in the drawer—which she ate, ravenously, like a wraith—was not. Gideon searched around in her pockets just in case she had left something there—an apple, or some nuts—and found herself startled when she found the note, and then wondered why she was startled. Her memory caught up a laggard step behind her comprehension: the piece of flimsy was still there, though the piece of flimsy had been there all the time, so there was a horrible possibility inherent.

There was a knock on the door. Nonplussed, unpainted, and hungry, she opened it. Nonplussed, much-tried, and impatient, Camilla the Sixth stared back.

She sighed, obviously tired of Gideon’s bullshit already, and raised a hand with three digits bent. “How many fingers?” she demanded.

Gideon blinked. “How many bent, or how many you’re showing, and do I count the thumb?”

“Vision’s fine,” said Camilla to herself, and retracted the hand. She elbowed into the room as though she had licence, and let a heavy bag drop to the floor with a thud, kneeling down to riffle through it. “Language is fine. Where are we? What did we come here for? What’s your name?”

“What’s your mum’s name,” said Gideon. “Why are you here?”

The compact, grey-clad cav of the Sixth did not even look up at this question. It was interesting to see her in the light: her fine sheets of slate-brown hair were cut sharply below her chin, giving a general air of scissor blades. She glanced up at Gideon without seeming very perturbed. “Your necromancer talked to my necromancer,” she said. “My necromancer said you should be a corpse. You breathing?”

“Yes?”

“Passing blood? In your piss?”

“Look, this conversation is all I’ve ever dreamed about,” said Gideon, “but I’m fine. H— My necromancer overreacted.” (This, at least, seemed to strike a chord with Camilla, whose glance softened with the understanding of someone whose necromancer was also prone to gross overreaction.) “I’m just hungry. Do I or do I not seem totally fine to you?”

“You do,” said Camilla, who had pulled a frankly upsetting bulbous glass object out of her bag. “That’s what I’m worried about. Warden said you’d be in a coma. Put this in.”

The bulb, thankfully, went in the mouth. Another one tucked up into her armpit. Gideon submitted to this treatment because she had gone a round with Camilla the Sixth before and had a healthy fear of her. The other cavalier looked at her toes and fingertips, and inside her ears. Whatever she found—plus her pulse, which the other cavalier took carefully—was noted down in a fat notebook with a stub of lead pencil. These numbers were scanned with due diligence, and then Camilla shook her head.

“You’re fine,” she said. “Shouldn’t be. But you’re fine.”

Gideon said bluntly, “Why didn’t Sextus want to do the spell?”

The tools were wiped and put back in the bag. For a moment, the other cavalier didn’t answer. Then she pushed a strand of hair away from her grim, oval painting of a face, and said: “Warden did the calculations. He and I could have—completed it, but. With caveats.”

“Caveats like?”

“My permanent brain damage,” said Camilla shortly, “if he didn’t get it right immediately.”

“But I’m healthy.”

“Didn’t say your brain was.”

“I’m taking that as a very witty joke and want it to be known that I laughed,” said Gideon. “Hey—Septimus said the Eighth could have done it easily.”

“The Eighth doesn’t train cavaliers,” said Camilla, even more shortly than before. “The Eighth breeds batteries. Genetic match for the necromancer. He’s been accessing his cavalier since he was a child. The Eighth probably does have brain damage. It’s not his brain they need. And Lady Septimus … is too willing to believe in fairy stories. Same as always.”

This was probably the longest speech she had ever heard Camilla give, and Gideon was deeply interested. “Are you two friends?”

The look in response wasn’t quite withering, but it would suck all the moisture out of anyone it was aimed at. Camilla said, “Lady Septimus and I have never met. Look, you should eat.”

This turned out to be an invitation. Camilla—obviously used to being someone’s cav-of-all-work—helped her sling on her rapier, and waited as she applied a very cursory amount of face paint. She wouldn’t have passed muster with a glaucomic nun in a room with the lights shot out, but it was enough to get on with. She didn’t quite have to lean on Camilla’s arm, but every so often was the recipient of a brusque shoulder press to get her standing straight. They kept mutual and pleasant silence, and the sunset bled through all the windows and gaps of the House of the First and made puddles of red and orange before them.

Every so often a white-belted skeleton crossed their path with an easy, arm-swinging gait. Each time a bonely figure appeared from a corner or clattered through a doorway, Gideon noticed Camilla’s fingers close on her rapier out of pure reflex. When they stopped at the threshold of the dining hall, the cavalier of the Sixth was poised like a waiting shrike: there were voices within.

“—Princess Ianthe has one. It’s not at all the same thing,” someone was saying.

A tall and golden figure was standing before the tables, her saffron hair unbrushed and sleep in her eyes. Her clothes looked as though she had slept in them. Coronabeth was still magnificent.

She was talking to Teacher, who was sitting at one of the long polished tables—there was Palamedes next to him with an uneaten meal and a piece of paper scribbled almost to holes, and some of the sizzling tautness surrounding Camilla went off the boil. Her shoulders relaxed, just a fragment.