“I can’t bear it,” said Gideon honestly. “It’s just such crap.”
“Life is a tragedy,” said Dulcinea. “Left behind by those who pass away, not able to change anything at all. It’s the total lack of control … Once somebody dies, their spirit’s free forever, even if we snatch at it or try to stopper it or use the energy it creates. Oh, I know sometimes they come back … or we can call them, in the manner of the Fifth … but even that exception to the rule shows their mastery of us. They only come when we beg. Once someone dies, we can’t grasp at them anymore, thank God!—except for one person, and he’s very far from here, I think. Gideon, don’t be sorry for the dead. I think death must be an absolute triumph.”
Gideon could not get behind this. Jeannemary had died like a dog while Gideon napped, and Isaac had been made into a big teenage colander; she wanted to be sorry for them forever. But before she could say anything to this effect, a great cough that filled up about two and a half handkerchiefs tore at Dulcinea. The contents of these handkerchiefs made Gideon envy the dead, let alone Dulcinea.
“We’ll find your cav,” she said, trying to sound steady and failing so completely she set a record.
“I just want to know what happened,” said Dulcinea drearily. “That’s always the worst of it … not knowing what happened.”
Gideon didn’t know whether she could get behind this either. She would’ve been devoutly grateful to live not knowing exactly the things that had happened, in vivid red-and-purple wobbling intensity. Then again, her mind kept flaying itself over Magnus and Abigail, down there in the dark, alone—over the when, and the how; over whether Magnus had watched his wife be murdered like Jeannemary had watched Isaac. She thought: It is stupid for a cavalier to watch their necromancer die.
Gideon felt hot and empty and eager to fight. She said without real hope, “If you want your keys back from Silas Octakiseron, I’ll deck him for you.”
The coughing turned into a bubbling laugh. “Don’t,” said Dulcinea. “I gave them up freely, by my own will. What would I want with them now?”
Gideon asked baldly, “Why were you trying to do this whole thing in the first place?”
“Do you mean, even though I’m dying?” Dulcinea gave a friable smile, but one with a dimple in it. “That’s not a complete barrier. The Seventh House thinks my condition is an asset. They even wanted me to get married and keep the genes going—me! My genes couldn’t be worse—in case they produced poetry down the line.”
“I don’t understand.”
The woman in front of her shifted, raising her hand to brush a few fawn-coloured strands away from her forehead. She didn’t answer for a while. Then she said, “When you don’t have it too badly—when you can live to maybe fifty years—when your body’s dying from the inside out, when your blood cells are eating you alive the whole time … it makes for such a necromancer, Gideon the Ninth. A walking thanergy generator. If they could figure out some way to stop you when you’re mostly cancer and just a little bit woman, they would! But they can’t. They say my House loves beauty—they did and they do—and there’s a kind of beauty in dying beautifully … in wasting away … half-alive, half-dead, within the very queenhood of your power.”
The wind whistled, thin and lonely, against the window. Dulcinea struggled to raise herself up on her elbows before Gideon could stop her, and she demanded: “Do I look like I’m at the queenhood of my power?”
This would’ve made anyone sweat. “Uh—”
“If you lie I’ll mummify you.”
“You look like a bucket of ass.”
Dulcinea eased herself back down, giggling fretfully. “Gideon,” she said, “I told your necromancer I didn’t want to die. And it’s true … but I’ve been dying for what feels like ten thousand years. I more didn’t want to die alone. I didn’t want them to put me out of sight. It’s a horrible thing to fall out of sight … The Seventh would have sealed me in a beautiful tomb and not talked about me again. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. So I came here when the Emperor asked me … because I wanted to … even though I knew I came here to die.”
Gideon said, “But I don’t want you to die,” and realised a second afterward that she had said it aloud.
The first finger and thumb of the hand ringed around hers. The dark blue eyes were luminous—too luminous; their lustre was wet and hot and bright—and Gideon pressed those fingers between her hands, very carefully. It felt as though even a little bit of pressure would crush Dulcinea to dust between her palms, like the very oldest bones kept in the Ninth House oss. Her heart felt sore and tender; her brain felt sore and dry.
“I don’t plan on it, you know,” said Dulcinea, though her voice was thinning out now, like water poured into milk. She closed her eyes with a gravelly sigh. “I’ll probably live forever … worse luck. Whatever happened to one flesh, one end?”
“I’ve seen those words before,” said Gideon, thoughtless of where she had seen them. “What do they mean?”
The blue eyes cracked open.
“They’re not familiar?”
“Should they be?”
“Well,” said Dulcinea calmly, “you would have said them to your Reverend Daughter the day you pledged yourself in the service of her cavalier, and she would have said them to you—but you never did that, did you? You weren’t trained in the traditions of the House of the Locked Tomb, and you’re nothing like a Ninth House nun. And you fight like—I don’t know. I’m not even certain you were raised in the Ninth House.”
Gideon let her head rest against the bed frame momentarily. When she had thought about this moment, she had expected to feel panic. There was no more panic left in the box. She just felt tired.
“Rumbled,” she said. “I’m sick of pretending, so yeah. Right on nearly all those counts. You know I’m the fakest-ass cavalier who ever faked. The actual cav had chronic hyperthyroid and was a serial limpdick. I’ve been faking my way through his duties for less than two months. I’m a pretend cavalier. I could not be worse at it.”
The smile she got in return had no dimples. It was strangely tender—as Dulcinea was always strangely tender with her—as though they had always shared some delicious secret. “You’re wrong there,” she said. “If you want to know what I think … I think that you’re a cavalier worthy of a Lyctor. I want to see that, what you’d become. I wonder if the Reverend Daughter even knows what she has in you?”
They looked at each other, and Gideon knew that she was holding that chemical blue gaze too long. Dulcinea’s hand was hot on hers. Now the old panic of confession seemed to rise up—her adrenaline was getting a second wind from deep down in her gut—and in that convenient moment the door opened. Palamedes Sextus walked in with his big black bag of weird shit, adjusted his glasses, and stared two seconds too long at their hands’ proximity.
There was something dreadfully tactful and remote and un-Palamedes-y as he said, “I came to check in on the both of you. Bad time?”
“Only in that I am officially out,” said Gideon, snatching her hand away. Everyone was mad at her, which was great, albeit they could not possibly be as mad as she was. She stood and rolled her neck until all the joints popped and crackled anxiously, was relieved to find her rapier still on her hip, and squared up to Palamedes feeling—terrifically dusty and guilty. “I’m going back to my quarters. No, I’m fine, quit it. Thanks for the ointment, it smells bewitchingly like piss.”