thought about how she still managed to get a key—how am I being weird?”
“I don’t know,” said Gideon, heartily fed up with the whole thing. “I don’t know! Maybe it’s because whenever she’s mentioned, you effortlessly tick both boxes for jealous and creep?”
“If you looked in a dictionary you’d find it’s envious, and I’m hardly envious of—”
“No, it’s one hundred percent jealous,” said Gideon recklessly, “on account of how you’re always doing this when it looks like she’s taking up my time.”
There was a horrible pause.
“I have been lax,” said her necromancer, steadily ignoring this last statement like it was a dump Gideon had taken in the hallway. She took her gloves from Gideon’s awkward hands and slipped them back over her fingers. “I have indulged myself in apathy while you attached yourself to every weirdo in Canaan House.” (“You cannot possibly call anyone a weirdo,” said Gideon.) “No more. We now have less to hide, but more to lose.”
“She’s got nobody if that thing comes after her. It’s a death sentence.”
“Yes. She has no cavalier now,” said Harrow. “It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when. Let the dead reclaim the dead. You won’t take my word when I’ve proven my judgement before? Fine. You’re still barred from her sickroom.”
“No,” said Gideon. “Nah. Nope. Denied. That’s not me.”
“You’re not her bodyguard.”
“I never pledged to be yours either,” said Gideon. “Not really.”
“Yes, you did,” snapped Harrowhark. “You agreed to act as my cavalier primary. You agreed to devote yourself to the duties of a cavalier. Your misunderstanding of what that entailed does not make you any less beholden to what your duty actually is—”
“I promised to fight for you. You promised me my freedom. There’s a hell of a good chance that I’m not going to get it, and I know it. We’re all dying here! Something’s after us! The only thing I can do is try to keep as many of us as I can alive for as long as I can, and hope that we work something out! You’re the ignorant sack of eyeballs who doesn’t understand what a cavalier is, Harrow, you just take whatever I give you—”
“Melodrama, Griddle, never became you,” said her adept flatly. “You’ve never complained about any of our previous transactions.”
“My ass, transactions. What happened to ‘I cannot afford to not have you trust me, now I’m going to make awkward eye contact and act like you broke my nose just because you hugged me once’?”
An indrawn breath. “Don’t mock my—”
“Mock you? I should kick your ass for you!”
“I’m making a reasonable request,” said Harrowhark, who had taken her gloves off and on again three times and was now examining her fingernails as though bored. The only reason Gideon had not already tried to deck her was that her eyelashes were trembling in rage, and also because she’d never hit Harrow before and was tremendously afraid that once she started she wouldn’t stop. “I ask you to draw back and reprioritise the Ninth in what—as you’ve said—is a dangerous time.”
“I’ve got my priorities straight.”
“Nothing you have done in the past two days suggests that.”
Gideon went cold. “Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I didn’t mean to let Jeannemary die.”
“For God’s sake, I didn’t mean—”
“Fuck you,” Gideon added again, for emphasis. She found herself laughing in that awful, high way that was totally devoid of humour. “Fuck. We don’t deserve to still be around—have you realised that yet? Have you realised that this whole thing has been about the union of necromancer and cavalier from start to finish? We should be toast. If they’re measuring this on the strength of that—we’re the walking dead. Magnus the Fifth was a better cavalier than I am. Jeannemary the Fourth was ten times the cavalier I am. They should be alive and we should be bacteria food. Two big bags of algor mortis. We’re alive through dumb luck and Jeannemary isn’t and you’re acting like me letting Dulcinea die is all that’s standing between you and Lyctorhood—”
“Stop worshipping the sound of your own voice, Nav, and listen to me—”
“Harrow, I hate you,” said Gideon. “I never stopped hating you. I will always hate you, and you will always hate me. Don’t forget that. It’s not like I ever can.”
Harrow’s mouth twisted so much that it should have been a reef knot. Her eyes closed briefly, and she sheathed her hands inside her gloves. The tension should have deflated then, but it didn’t: