“Begin!” called Corona.
In the first ten seconds, Gideon had known that the fight with the Fifth House was hers to lose. It took her twenty seconds to come to a very important discovery about the House of the Third: it valued cleanliness. Each twitch of the sword was a masterpiece of technique. He fought like clockwork: inevitable, bloodless, perfect, with absolute economy of movement. The first time the black sword of the Ninth flicked into action, the line of his rapier slicing hers to the side—a simple semicircle arc with the blade, bored, contemptuous, exact—would have brought an expert to tears. His advance and retreat were like lines from a manual, fed directly into his feet.
Stop blocking every blow, her brain told her. Her arm ignored her brain, and sparks glittered as Naberius’s sword clanked against the obsidian glass of her defending knuckle-knives; the force of the blow reverberated up Gideon’s arm and shuddered into her spine. Her sword sang forward in what she knew to be a perfect thrust, aimed true and hard at his side; she heard an oily shnk!, and then another blow quaked its way into her elbow and up to the base of her skull. The blade she had taken for a dagger had separated into three, trapping hers neatly: a trident knife, which was so hopelessly obvious that she probably had to offer to save time and kick her own ass for him. Naberius smiled at her, blandly.
It was the most irritating fight she’d ever had. He wasn’t as fast as she was, but he wasn’t wearing robes, and anyway he didn’t have to be as fast as she was. He just had to keep her at arm’s length, and he was a master at it. This to the touch nonsense was pissing her off. If she had been wielding her longsword she would have simply smashed through him like a brick through a windowpane. But she had a needle in one hand and a handful of black glass in the other, and had to skip and hop around like he was wielding poison; and he had been a cavalier probably since the day he was born. At some points he could stand there completely still, completely bored, his sword held in perfect form as though he were doing dressage. The light beat down on her robes and her head. She couldn’t believe she was being held at bay by someone who had eaten every cavalier manual and chewed dutifully twenty-five times.
Naberius toyed with her languidly—he had a trick where his sword licked out like a cat’s claw, immediate, before pulling back again with a measured half step—and he kept her at sword’s length, never letting her enter his space. He kept up his litany of parry; quick attack for space; pressure the sword with the offhand until she was sick to death of it.
Gideon ran her rapier down the length of his—lightless black on silver—with a shrill squeal, but he circled it deftly down and away. She thrust again, high, and found that the upper breadth of her blade was caught neatly within the fork of that goddamned trident knife: he used the leverage to push her down.… down … and she found that his rapier was sliding forward, over her arm, through the tuck of her elbow. Aiglamene had taught her to anticipate a death blow. She flinched to the side immediately, letting it press tight against her, swearing mentally all the way: in a real fight he’d be able to slice a hot ribbon over her chest and shoulder, but couldn’t kill her either way. And he couldn’t touch her with the point, just the edge. She was still in the duel.
But then he did something perfect. It was probably recorded in some shitty Seventh-style swordplay book as TWO CROWS DRINKING WATER or THE BOY STRANGLES THE GOOSE. He pivoted her sword downward with his three-bladed knife, jerked the wrist of his rapier-hand forward, and flicked the black blade of the Ninth from her grip. It clattered to the worn-out flagstones and was still. Jeannemary gulped off a yelp in the background. Her heart trickled like prayer beads sliding down a string.
Naberius stepped out of his lunge and smiled that irritating smile again.
“You cut too much,” he said.
He did not smile when Gideon unwound her sword-arm from his rapier in a swift wheel of movement, ducked forward, and punched him in the solar plexus. The breath wheezed from his lungs like he was an open airlock. Naberius crumpled backward, and she kicked her robes aside to touch one booted foot to the place beneath his knee: he staggered, spat, and fell. She dropped for her sword and backpedalled for space, as he thrashed like a fallen animal trying to rise. Gideon fell into stance, raised her sword, and let it come to rest at his collarbone.
“Match to the Third,” said Coronabeth, which startled her.
Her sword was shrugged away; Naberius, furious and wobbly, was finally up on both feet.
“Babs,” his princess said hurriedly, “are you all right?”
He was coughing throatily. His face was a dark, velvety red as he sheathed his sword and squeezed down on his knife, causing some mechanism to snockt the side blades back into place. When he bowed to her, it was amazingly scornful. Gideon slid her own sword back into her scabbard, somewhat discombobulated, and bowed in return; he tossed his head back haughtily and coughed again, which somewhat ruined the effect.
“She’s not some Nonius come-again, she’s just a brawler,” he said in throaty disgust. “Look, idiot, when I disarm you, match is over, you bow, all right? You don’t keep going.”
The sharply dressed Cohort cavalier said: “You let your guard down, Tern.”
“The match was over the moment I got her sword!”
“Yes,” she said, “technically.”
“Technically?” He was getting even redder-faced now. “Everything’s the technicals! And that’s Prince Tern to you, Lieutenant! What are you playing at, Dyas? I held her at bay the whole time, I won, and the cultist fouled the match. Admit it.”
“Yes,” said Dyas, who had relaxed into an arms-behind-the-back at ease position. It looked more at home in a military parade line-up than at an informal fitness match. She had a neat, mellifluous voice. “You won the bout. The Ninth is the less able duellist. I say she is the better fighter: she fought to win. But, Ninth,” she said, “he’s right. You cut too much.”
The cavalier from the Third looked like he was very close to violence: this, for some reason, had made his eyes bulge with sheer resentment. He looked as though he were about to unsheathe his sword and demand a rematch, and backed down only when one golden arm was slung about his shoulders and he was pulled into a half embrace from his necromancer. He submitted to a hair ruffle. Corona said, “The Third showed its stuff, Babs—that’s all I care about.”
“It was a convincing win.” He sounded like a huffy child.
“You were brilliant. I wish Ianthe had seen you.”
Jeannemary had risen to stand. She was a brown, bricklike young thing, Gideon had noticed, seemingly all corners: her eyes were alight, and her voice was piercing when she said:
“That’s how I want to fight. I don’t want to spend all my time in show bouts. I want to fight like a real cavalier, as though my life’s on the line.”
Naberius’s expression shuttered over again. His gaze met Gideon’s briefly, and it was somewhere beyond hostile: it was contempt for an animal that had crapped indelicately in the corner. But before any more could be said, Magnus coughed lightly into his hand.