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Harrow said, “He was—and I was by the door. I saw him only a few minutes ago.”
“I lost sight of him,” Camilla said. “I never lose sight of him.”
“Slow your roll,” said Gideon, with far more assurance than she actually felt. “He’s a big boy. He’s probably gone to make sure Dulcinea’s okay. Harrow says I’m a weenie over Dulcinea—” (“You are,” said Harrow, “a weenie over Dulcinea,”) “—but he’s six hundred per cent weenier than I am, which I still don’t get.”
Camilla looked at her and brushed her dark, slanted fringe out of her eyes. There was something in her gaze starker than impatience.
“The Warden,” she said, “has been exchanging letters with Dulcinea Septimus for twelve years. He’s been—a weenie—over her. One of the reasons he became the heir of the House was to meet her on even footing. His pursuit of medical science was entirely for her benefit.”
This turned all the fluids in Gideon’s body to ice-cold piss.
“She—she never mentioned him at all,” she said, stupidly.
“No,” said Camilla.
“But she—I mean, I was spending so much time with her—”
“Yes,” said Camilla.
“Oh, God,” said Gideon. “And he was so nice about it. Oh my God. Why the fuck did he not say anything? I didn’t—I mean, I never really—I mean, she and I weren’t—”
“He asked her to marry him a year ago,” said Camilla ruthlessly, some floodgate down now, “so that she could spend the rest of her time with someone who cared about her comfort. She refused, but not on the grounds that she didn’t like him. And they weren’t going to relax Imperial rules about necromancers marrying out of House. The letters grew sparser after that. And when he arrived here—she’d moved on. He told me he was glad that she was spending time with someone who made her laugh.”
Five people had died that day; it was weird how the small things ballooned out in importance, comparatively. The tragedy saturated the stiffening bones and static hearts lying in state at Canaan House, but there was also deep tragedy in the flawed beams holding up their lives. An eight-year-old writing love letters to a terminally ill teenager. A girl falling in love with the beautiful stiff she’d been conceived solely to look after. A foundling chasing the approval of a House disappointed with her immunity to foundling-killing gas.
Gideon lay on the floor, facedown, and became hysterical.
Her necromancer was saying, “None of this makes any sense.”
“Nope,” said Camilla heavily, “but it never has the whole time I’ve known them both.”
“No,” said Harrow. “I mean that Dulcinea Septimus twice spoke of Palamedes Sextus to me as a stranger. She told me that she didn’t know him well at all, after he had turned down her offer for the siphoning challenge.”
Gideon, facedown on the dusty ground, moaned: “I want to die.”
She was nudged with a foot, not unkindly. “Get up, Griddle.”
“Why was I born so attractive?”
“Because everyone would have throttled you within the first five minutes otherwise,” said her necromancer. Her attention was on Camilla: “Yet why her about-face, if it’s all how you say it was? I still don’t understand.”
“If I did,” said the Sixth cavalier restlessly, “my quality of life, my sleep, and my sense of well-being would improve. Ninth, get up. He doesn’t hate you. You didn’t ruin anything. He and she were always more complicated than that. He never even met her in person until he came here.”
Gideon emerged from her prone position and sprang to her feet. Her heart was a dry cinder, but it still seemed ridiculously important that Palamedes Sextus be okay with her: that at the end of this whole world, right before their divine intervention, all the little muddles of their personal lives be sorted out.
“I’ve got to catch up with him,” she said, “please give me a couple minutes alone. Harrow, go get my two-hander, it’s in the false bottom of my trunk.” (“Your what?” said Harrow, affrighted.) “Cam, please, do me a massive solid here and keep an eye on her. I’m sorry I’m a homewrecker.”
Gideon turned and sprinted away. She heard Harrow yell, “Nav!” but paid her no attention. Her rapier swung awkwardly into her hip, and her arm twinged in its socket, and her neck still felt weird, but all she could do was run as hard and as fast as she could to the place where she knew she’d find her last two living allies: the sickroom where Dulcinea Septimus lay dying.
She found the Warden standing at the midpoint along the long corridor, staring at the shut door to her room. The hem of his grey robe whispered on the ground, and he seemed lost in thought. Gideon took a breath, which alerted him to her presence. He took off his glasses, wiped the lens with his sleeve, and looked back at her as he perched them back on his long nose.
It seemed as though they looked at each other for such a long time. She took a step forward, and opened her mouth to say, Sextus, I’m sorry—
He folded his fingers together as you would a piece of paper. Her body stopped where it stood, as though steel needles had pierced her hands and her legs. Gideon felt cold all over. She tried to speak, but her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth and she tasted blood. She struggled—an insect pinned to its backing—and he looked at her, cold and dispassionate, unlike himself.
Palamedes surveyed his work, and he saw that it was good. Then he opened Dulcinea’s door. Gideon tried to flail against her invisible bonds, but her bones felt rigid in her body, like she was just the meat sock around them. Her heart struggled against her inflexible rib cage, her terror rising in her mouth. He smiled, and with that strange alchemy he was made lovely, his grey eyes bright and clear. Palamedes entered the sickroom.
He did not shut the door. There were soft noises within. Then she heard his voice, distinctly:
“I wish I had talked to you right at the start.”
Dulcinea’s voice was quiet but audible—
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was afraid,” he said frankly. “I was stupid. My heart was broken, you see. So it was easier to believe—that things had simply changed between us. That Dulcinea Septimus had been trying to spare my feelings—coddling an ignorant child who had tried to save her from something she understood far better than I ever could. I cared about her, and Camilla cared about us. I thought Dulcinea was saving us both the heartache of watching her fail, and die, during our task.”
There was silence in the room. He added, “When this started I was eight and you—you, Dulcinea—were fifteen. My feelings were intense, but for God’s sake, of course I understood. I was an infant. And yet I was shown endless tact and sympathy. My feelings were always taken as deadly serious, and I was treated as someone who knew what he was talking about. Does that run in the Seventh House?”
Gideon could hear the faint smile in Dulcinea’s voice. “I suppose it does. They have been letting young necromancers die for a very, very long time. When you grow up awfully ill, you’re used to everyone making those decisions for you … and hating it … so you do tend to want to take everyone’s feelings as seriously as yours aren’t.”
