said the necromantic teen, emptily. They turned to look at him. “Out of the corners of my eyes … when it’s nighttime. I keep waking up and hearing something moving … or someone standing outside our door.”
He trailed off. Jeannemary put her arm around his shoulder and pressed her sweat-streaked brown forehead to his, and both sighed defeated sighs in concert. The solace they were taking in each other was the bruising, private solace between necromancer and cavalier, and Gideon was embarrassed to be audience to it. It was only then that they seemed at all grown-up to her. They looked worn down to stubs, like ground-down teeth, greyed out of their obnoxious vitality and youth.
The cavalier of the Fourth House looked up at Gideon and Corona.
“I wanted you two because Magnus liked you both,” she said. “So you get the warning. Don’t say I didn’t tell you.”
Then she led Isaac away, him looking like an expectant prey animal, her like dynamite, ushering him back through the salt-warped door. Gideon was left alone with Coronabeth. The princess was closing the huge grate to the incinerator and sliding the handle down to lock it. They both beheld it silently: it did seem big enough to heave a person through, down into what—when set—would have been roaring flames. Clouds passed overhead, plunging what had been dazzling brightness into relative gloom. The clouds were fat and bluish, which Gideon had learned meant that they would soon explode into rain. She could taste it on the air, washing the prickle of smoke off her tongue. When the storm broke, it would break hard.
“This isn’t just Fourth House theatrics,” said Corona. “I don’t think they’re being reckless here. I think we’re actually in trouble … a lot of trouble.”
In the newfound dimness Gideon took off her glasses and nodded. Her hood fell back, sliding down in heavy folds of black to her shoulders. The exquisite eyes of the necromancer of the Third were upon her, and the doleful expression turned into a radiant smile, violet eyes crinkling up at the corners with the hugeness of the grin.
“Why, Gideon the Ninth!” she exclaimed, mourning banished. “You’re a ginger!”
* * *
The clouds broke later that afternoon. The rain beat at the windows like pellets, and the skeleton servants scurried around with buckets, catching the worst of the sleeting drips, putting matting down for the puddles. Apparently Canaan House was so used to this that their response was automatic. Gideon was familiar with rain by now, but the first time she couldn’t get over it. The constant pattering drove her mad all night, and she’d had no idea how anyone who lived in atmospheric weather could ever put up with it. Now it was only a murmurous distraction.
To the noise of the storm she had gone back to check on Harrowhark, suddenly paranoid—convinced that she had dreamt up the arms flapping out of the duvet, the short spikes of dark hair visible from under the pillow, that maybe the Reverend Daughter had made Gideon’s youthful dreams come true by spending all night in an incinerator—but Harrow hadn’t even woken up. Gideon ate lunch next to a skeleton servant carefully balancing a bucket on the table, into which fat drips fell from the windows, ploing … ploing … ploing.
The numinous dread hadn’t really left her since that morning. It was almost a relief to see the shadow of Camilla Hect fall over her bowl of soup and bread-and-butter. Camilla’s grey hood was wet with rain.
“Duel’s off,” she said, by way of hello. “Seventh never turned up, and they’re not in their quarters. Let’s move.”
They moved. Gideon’s heart hammered in her ears. Her rapier swung against her leg as persistently as the rain peppering the walls of Canaan House. By instinct Gideon led them through a row of dark, dismal antechambers, door handles slippery with rain, and out into the storm itself: the conservatory where Dulcinea liked to sit. It was stultifyingly hot and muggy in there: like walking into the jaws of a panting animal. Rain sleeted off the plex in sky-obscuring sheets. Beyond the conservatory door—under an awning that had long since tipped into the rain—was Dulcinea.
She was sprawled across the wet flagstones. Her crutches lay on either side of her, as though they had slipped from her grasp. Gideon’s insides interlaced, lungs into kidneys into bowels, then rubber-banded back with a twang. It was Camilla who first dropped to her knees beside her and rolled her over