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“If she satisfies you, you must let her go,” said Aiglamene firmly.
“Of course.”
“With all the gracious promises of the Ninth.”
“Oh, if she pulls this off she can have whatever she likes,” said Harrowhark easily—way too easily. “She’ll have glory squirting out each orifice. She can do or be anything she pleases, preferably over on the other side of the galaxy from where I am.”
“Then I thank you for your mercy and your grace, and regard the matter settled,” said Aiglamene.
“How is it settled. I have patently not agreed to this shit.”
Both of them ignored Gideon. “Getting back to the original problem,” said the old woman, settling painfully back down among the swords and the knives, “Nav has had none of Ortus’s training—not in manners, nor in general scholarship—and she was trained in the sword of heavy infantry.”
“Ignore the first; her mental inadequacies can be compensated for. The second’s what I’m interested in. How difficult is it for a normal swordswoman to switch from a double-handed blade to a cavalier rapier?”
“For a normal swordswoman? To reach the standard of a House cavalier primary? You’d need years. For Nav? Three months—” (here Gideon died briefly of gratification; she revived only due to the rising horror consequent of everything else) “—and she’d be up to the standard of the meanest, most behind-hand cavalier alive.”
“Oh, nonsense!” said Harrow languorously. “She’s a genius. With the proper motivation, Griddle could wield two swords in each hand and one in her mouth. While we were developing common sense, she studied the blade. Am I right, Griddle?”
“I haven’t agreed to stone cold dick,” said Gideon. “And I don’t care how bad-ass cavaliers are meant to be, I hate rapiers. All that bouncing around makes me feel tired. Now, a two-hander, that’s a swordsman’s sword.”
“I don’t disagree,” said her teacher, “but a House cavalier—with all her proper training—is a handsomely dangerous thing. I saw the primary cavalier of the House of the Second fight in his youth, and my God! I never forgot it.”
Harrow was pacing in tiny circles now. “But she could get to the point where she might believably, possibly be mistaken for a trained cavalier of the House of the Ninth?”
“The reputation of the Ninth cavalier primary has not been what it was since the days of Matthias Nonius,” said Aiglamene. “And that was a thousand years ago. Expectations are very low. Even then, we’d be bloody lucky.”
Gideon pushed herself up from the pillar and cracked her knuckles, stretching her chill-stiff muscles out before her. She rolled her neck, testing her shoulders, and unwrapped her robe from around herself. “I live for those days when everyone stands around talking about how bad I am at what I do, but it also gives me hurt feelings,” she said, and took the sword she had abandoned for trash. She tested its weight in her hand, feeling what was to her an absurd lightness, and struck what she thought was a sensible stance. “How’s this, Captain?”
Her teacher made a noise in her throat somewhere between disgust and desolation. “What are you doing with your other hand?” Gideon compensated. “No! Oh, Lord. Put that down until I formally show you how.”
“The sword and the powder,” said Harrowhark eagerly.
“The sword and the knuckle, my lady,” said Aiglamene. “I’m dropping my expectations substantially.”
Gideon said, “I still have absolutely not agreed to any of this.”
The Reverend Daughter picked her way toward her over discarded swords, and stopped once she was level with the pillar that Gideon had reflexively flattened her back against. They regarded each other for long moments until the absolute chill of the monument made Gideon’s teeth involuntarily chatter, and then Harrow’s mouth twisted, fleetingly, indulgently. “I would have thought you would be happy that I needed you,” she admitted. “That I showed you my girlish and vulnerable heart.”
“Your heart is a party for five thousand nails,” said Gideon.
“That’s not a ‘no.’ Help Aiglamene find you a sword, Griddle. I’ll leave the door unlocked.” With that languid and imperious command, she left, leaving Gideon lolling her head back against the frigid stone of the pillar and chewing the inside of her cheek.
It was almost worse getting left alone with the sword-master. An awkward, chilly silence spread between them as the old woman grumpily picked through the pile, holding each rapier up to the light, pulling rancid strips of leather away from the grip.
“It’s a bad idea, but it’s a chance, you know,” said Aiglamene abruptly. “Take it or leave it.”
“I thought you said it was the best idea we have.”
“It is—for Lady Harrowhark. You’re the best swordsman that the Ninth House has produced—maybe ever. Can’t say. I never saw Nonius fight.”
“Yeah, you would have only been what, just born,” said Gideon, whose heart was hurting keenly.
“Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you.”
Swords rattled into a leather case as Aiglamene selected a couple at hand, shaking a few of the knuckle-knives in to boot. The case creaked and she creaked as she had to tip herself forward, painful with dignity, getting on her one half-good knee in order to pull herself up to stand. Gideon moved forward automatically, but one look from the woman’s working eye was enough to make her pretend she’d just been getting back into her robes. Aiglamene hauled the case over her shoulder, kicking unwanted swords back into a niche, yanking the useless sword from Gideon’s nerveless hand.
She paused as her fingers closed over the hilt, her haggard face caught up in her consideration, a titanic battle apparently going on somewhere deep inside her head. One side gained the upper hand, and she said gruffly: “Nav. A word of warning.”
“What?”
There was something urgent in her voice: something worried, something new.
“Things are changing. I used to think we were waiting for something … and now I think we’re just waiting to die.”
Gideon’s heart sagged.
“You really want me to say yes.”
“Go on and say no,” said her captain. “It’s your choice … If she doesn’t take you, I’ll go with her and gladly. But she knows … and I know … and I think you damn well know … that if you don’t get out now, you won’t even get out in a box.”
“So what happens if I agree?”
Breaking the spell, Aiglamene roughly shouldered the leather case into Gideon’s arms, slapping it there before stalking back the way that Harrow had left them. “Then you hurry up. If I’m to turn you into the Ninth’s cavalier, I needed to start six years ago.”
5
THE SECOND LETTER THAT they received care of the Resurrecting King, the gentle Emperor, was somewhat less prolix than the first.
They were lurking in the personal Nonagesimus library, a stone-arched room packed tight with shelves of the musty and neglected books Harrowhark didn’t study and the musty, less neglected books that she did. Gideon sat at a broad, sagging desk piled high with pages covered in necromantic marginalia, most of them in Harrow’s cramped, impatient writing. She held the letter before her with one hand; with the other, she wearily painted her face with a piece of fibre wadding and a pot of alabaster paint, feeling absurdly young. The paint smelled acid and cold, and working the damn stuff into the creases next to her nose meant sucking globs of paint up her nostrils all day. Harrow was sprawled on a sofa spread with tattered brocade, robes abandoned, scrawny black-clad legs crossed at the ankles. In Gideon’s mind she looked like an evil stick.
