“So nobody realises that we’re broke and nearly extinct, and that your parents topped themselves.”
“So nobody takes advantage of the fact that we lack conventional resources,” said Harrow, shooting Gideon a look that skipped warning and went straight to barrage. “So nobody realises that the House is under threat. So nobody realises that—my parents are no longer able to take care of its interests.”
Gideon folded the paper in half, in half again, and made it into corners. She rubbed it between her fingers for the rare joy of feeling paper crinkle, and then she dropped it on the desk and cleaned paint off her fingernails. She did not need to say or do anything except let the quiet roll out between them.
“We are not becoming an appendix of the Third or Fifth Houses,” continued the necromancer opposite. “Do you hear me, Griddle? If you do anything that suggests we’re out of order—if I even think you’re about to…” Here Harrow shrugged, quite calmly. “I’ll kill you.”
“Naturally. But you can’t keep this a secret forever.”
“When I am a Lyctor everything will be different,” said Harrowhark. “I’ll be in a position to fix things without fear of reprisal. As it is, our leverage now is that nobody knows anything about anything. I’ve had three separate communiques already from other Houses, asking if I’m coming, and they don’t even know my name.”
“What the hell are you going to tell them?”
“Nothing, idiot!” said Harrow. “This is the House of the Ninth, Griddle. We act accordingly.”
Gideon checked her face, and put down the paint and the wadding. Act accordingly meant that any attempt to talk to an outsider as a kid had led to her getting dragged away bodily; act accordingly meant the House had been closed to pilgrims for five years. Act accordingly had been her secret dread that ten years from now everyone else would be skeletons and explorers would find Ortus reading poetry next to her and Harrow’s bodies, their fingers still clasped around each other’s throats. Act accordingly, to Gideon, meant being secret and abstruse and super obsessed with tomes.
“I won’t have people asking questions. You’ll look the part. Give me that,” commanded Harrow, and she took the fat stick of black char from Gideon’s hand. She tried to turn Gideon’s face up to hers by force, fingers grasping beneath the chin, but Gideon promptly bit her. There was a simple joy in watching Harrow swear furiously and shake her hand and peel off the bitten glove, like in seeing sunlight or eating a good meal.
Harrow began fiddling ominously with one of the bone pins at her ear, so with extreme reluctance, as of an animal not wanting to take medicine, Gideon tilted her face up to get painted. Harrow took the black and stroked it beneath Gideon’s eyes—none too gently, making her anticipate an exciting jab in the cornea. “I don’t want to dress up like a goddamn nun again. I got enough of that when I was ten,” said Gideon.
“Everyone else will be dressing exactly how they ought to dress,” said Harrow, “and if the Ninth House contravenes that—the House least likely to do any such thing—then people will examine us a hell of a lot more closely than they ought. If you look just right then perhaps they won’t ask you any tricky questions. They may not discover that the cavalier of the House of the Ninth is an illiterate peon. Hold your mouth closed.”
Gideon held her mouth closed and, once Harrow was done, said: “I object to illiterate.”
“Pinup rags aren’t literature, Nav.”
“I read them for the articles.”
When as a young and disinclined member of the Locked Tomb Gideon had painted her face, she had gone for the bare minimum of death’s-head that the role demanded: dark around the eyes, a bit around the nose, a slack black slash across the lips. Now as Harrowhark gave her a little palm of cracked mirror, she saw that she was painted like the ancient, tottering necromancers of the House: those ghastly and unsettling sages who never seemed to die, just disappear into the long galleries of books and coffins beneath Drearburh. She’d been slapped up to look like a grim-toothed, black-socketed skull, with big black holes on each side of the mandible.
Gideon said drearily, “I look like a douche.”
“I want you to appear before me every day, like this, until the day we leave,” said Harrowhark, and she leant against the desk to view her handiwork. “I won’t cut you bald—even though your hair is ridiculous—because I know you won’t shave your head daily. Learn this paint. Wear the robe.”
“I’m waiting for the and,” said Gideon. “You know. The payoff. If you let me have my head, I’d wear my breastplate and use my sword—you’re an imbecile if you think I’ll be able to fight properly wearing a robe—and I could cavalier until the rest of them went home. I could cavalier until they just made you a Hand on the first day and put sexy pictures of me on a calendar. Where’s the and, Nonagesimus?”
“There is no and,” Harrow said, and pushed herself away from Gideon’s chair to throw herself back down on the sofa once more. “If it were merely about getting what I wanted, I wouldn’t have bothered to take you at all. I would have you packed up in nine boxes and sent each box to a different House, the ninth box kept for Crux to comfort him in his old age. I will succeed with you in tow and nobody will ever know that there was aught amiss with the House of the Ninth. Paint your face. Train with the rapier. You’re dismissed.”
“Isn’t this the part where you give me intel,” Gideon said, standing up and flexing her stiff muscles, “tell me all you know of the tasks ahead, who we’re with, what to expect?”
“God, no!” said Harrow. “All you need to know is that you’ll do what I say, or I’ll mix bone meal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut.”
Which was, Gideon had to admit, entirely plausible.
Chapter 6
If Gideon had worried that the next three months would see her in close proximity to the Reverend Daughter, she was dead wrong. She spent six hours a day learning where to put her feet when she wielded a one-handed sword, where to rest (what seemed to her to be) her useless, unused arm, how to suddenly make herself a sideways target and always move on the same stupid foot. At the end of each punishing session, Aiglamene would take her in a one-on-one fight and disarm her in three moves.
“Parry, damn you, parry!” was the daily refrain. “This isn’t your longsword, Nav, you block with it again and I’ll make you eat it!”
On the few early days when she had foregone the paint, Crux had appeared and turned off the heating to her celclass="underline" she would end up slumped on her tier, screaming with cold, numb and nearly dead. So she wore the goddamn paint. It was nearly worse than her pre-cavalier life, except that as a small mercy she could train instead of going to prayers and, as a bigger mercy, Crux and Harrow were nearly never around. The heir to the House had ordered her marshal to do something secret down in the bowels of Drearburh, where bowed and creaking Ninth brothers and sisters worked hour after hour at whatever grisly task Harrowhark had set.
As for the Lady of the Ninth herself, she locked herself in the library and didn’t come out. Very occasionally she would watch Gideon train, remark on the absolute lack of progress, make Gideon strip her paint off her face and command her to do it again. One day she and Aiglamene made Gideon walk behind Harrow, up and down the tiers, shadowing her until Gideon was nearly mad with impatience.