Gideon felt grimy and unsettled. “I need a better motivation than the fact that the Ninth House sucks,” she said. “Why? Why kill two hundred kids? More importantly, why two hundred kids and not me or Harrow?”

Silas looked at her over steepled fingers.

“You tell me, Gideon the Ninth,” he said. “You are the one who tried to leave in a shuttle they planted a bomb in.”

Gideon was silent.

“I do not think any scion of the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father should become a Lyctor,” said Silas softly. “The open grave of the Ninth House should not produce its own revenant. In fact, I am unsure that any of us should become Lyctor. Since when was power goodness, or cleverness truth? I myself no longer wish to ascend, Gideon. I’ve told you what I know, and I assume you will understand when I say I must take your keys from you.”

Her spine jolted her upright in her chair. The dust-coloured fingers paused on their bleached seam.

“That’s what this is about,” said Gideon, almost disappointed.

“My conscience is clear. I ask for the good of all the Houses.”

“What if I say no?”

“Then I will challenge you for them.”

“My sword—”

“You may find the challenge hard without it,” said Silas Octakiseron, quiet and resigned in his triumph.

Gideon couldn’t help darting a glance at Colum, half-expecting to find his sword already in his hand and a grim smile on his face. But he was standing with his needlework tumbled to the floor, his face closed like a fist and his shoulders so set each tendon looked like it was flossing his clavicular joints. He was brown-eyed and baleful, but he was not looking at her.

“Master,” he said, and stopped. Then: “I told her there’d be no violence here.”

Silas’s eyes never left Gideon’s, so they did not see his cavalier’s face. “There’s no sin in that, Brother Asht.”

“I—”

“An oath to the Ninth is as medicine to sand,” the necromancer said. “It sinks from sight and yields no benefit. She knows this as well as any, and better than some. The Ninth heart is barren, and the Ninth heart is black.”

Gideon opened her mouth for a witty riposte—Well, fuck to you too!—but Colum got in first, to her infinite surprise. “I’m not worried about the Ninth’s heart, Uncle.”

“Brother Asht,” said Silas, quite gently, “your heart is true.”

“Every day we spend here I’m less sure about that,” said Colum.

“I share your feelings, but—”

“I said to her, ‘I swear on my honour.’”

“We will waste no truth on liars,” said Silas, his voice still colourless but harder now, like water to ice: reminding, not reassuring. “Nor pledges on the damned.”

“I said,” repeated Colum, slowly, “‘I swear on my honour.’ What does that mean to you?”

Gideon stayed very still, like a strung-up animal, but she let her eyes slide sideways to the door. Sudden movement might let her pick up her sword and get the hell out of there before this terrible uncle-nephew soap opera climaxed in beating her like a gong, but it might also remind them she existed and that they could have this heart-to-heart later. Silas had shifted restlessly in his seat, and he was saying: “I will not dissect words and meanings with you like a mountebank, Brother. Leave the semiotics to the Sixth. Their sophists love nothing more than proving up spelled differently is down. If a wasted oath pains you I will lead you in atonement later, but for now—”

“I am your cavalier,” said his cavalier. This shut Silas off midflow. “I’ve got my sword. I’ve got my honour. Everything else is yours.”

“Your sword is mine also,” said Silas. His hands were gripping the finials of his chair, but his voice was calm and even and actually sympathetic. “You need take no action. If your honour must remain unsullied, I may have your sword without asking for it.”

He raised his hand, and the white linen sleeve fell away from the pale chain cuff. Gideon remembered the blood-stuffy room where Abigail and Magnus lay, and she remembered all the colour pulled from the room like it was just so much fast fabric dye. She knew that this was a game over, and her eyes slid sideways from the door and onto Colum, who was—looking right at her.

Their stares met for a single hot second. This single second felt like so long and stretched a pause that her overwound nerves very nearly went ping like elastic and fired her clean across the room. Then Colum seemed to make a decision.

“Once upon a time you would’ve taken everything I said as gospel,” he said, in a very different voice. “I used to think that was worse than now … but I was wrong.”

The hand faltered. Silas snapped his head around to stare at the older man. It was the first time he’d looked anywhere but at Gideon since she entered the room. “I urge you to recall yourself,” he said shortly.

“I recall myself perfectly,” said Colum. “You don’t. You did, once. When you and I started this, when you weren’t even twelve. When you thought I knew everything.”

The fingers curled inward, just slightly, before straightening out again as though some inner resolve had stiffened. “This is not the time.”

Colum said: “I respected the child. At times I can’t stand the man, Si.”

Silas’s voice had sunk to a dead whisper: “You made an oath—”

“Oath? Ten years of training, before you were even born. Oath? Three brothers with different blood types, because we couldn’t tell what you’d be and which of us you’d need. Ten years of antigens, antibodies, and waiting—for you. I am the oath. I was engineered into a man who doesn’t—pick and choose his decencies!”

His voice had risen to fill the room. This left Silas Octakiseron perfectly white and still. Colum jerked his chin hard toward Gideon, and she noticed dimly that it was just another version of the elfin, fork-tine chin on Silas. He turned and strode toward the door. Gideon, completely out of her depth but sensing escape on some automatic rodent-brain level, started out of her chair and followed. Silas stayed where he was.

When Colum reached the sword, he picked it up, and Gideon had just a second to worry that he was now going to exploit some insane religious loophole and kill her with her own weapon. But this was beneath her. When Colum held her sword out to her, horizontally in one hand, it was as cavalier to cavalier. His expression was perfectly calm now, as though the anger had never even surfaced: maybe it hadn’t. And his eyes were the eyes of a man who had just tied his own noose.

She took her blade. She now owed him very badly, which sucked.

“The next time we meet,” he said beneath his breath, as monolithic and impassive as when she’d arrived, “I think it’s likely one of us will die.”

“Yeah,” Gideon said, “yeah,” instead of “I’m sorry.”

Colum picked up the knuckle-knife and handed that to her as well. “Get away from here,” he said, and it sounded more warning than command.

He moved away from her again. Gideon was sorely tempted to take him with her and away from Silas, sitting still and pale in his great white room, but she felt that probably that wasn’t going to happen. She also thought about skidding off a couple middle fingers to Silas around Colum’s shoulders, but concluded the moral high ground was sometimes worth holding on to. So she left.