way Aiglamene had taught her they would, which was very much the same way they did back home, just with more folderol. You stood in front of each other and laid your offhand arm across your chest, showing which main-gauche weapon you intended to use: her knuckle-knives were laid, fat and black, against her collarbone. Magnus’s sword—a beautiful dagger of ivory-coloured steel, the handle a twist of creamy leather—touched his.
“To the first touch,” said their arbiter, badly hiding her rising excitement. “Clavicle to sacrum, arms exception. Call.”
First touch? In Drearburh it was to the floor, but there was no time to contemplate that one: Magnus was smiling at her with the boyish, teacherly enthusiasm of a man about to play a ball game with a younger sibling. But beneath that excellent mask there was a note of doubt about his eyes, a tugging of his mouth, and something in Gideon rose as well: he was a little afraid of her.
“Magnus the Fifth!” he said, and: “Er—go easy!”
Gideon looked over at Corona and shook her head. The necromancer-princess of Ida was too well bred to query and too quick to mistake, and simply said: “I call for Gideon the Ninth. Seven paces back—turn—begin…”
There were four pairs of hungry eyes watching that fight, but they all blurred into the background of a dream: the lines one’s brain filled in to abbreviate a place, a time, a memory. Gideon Nav knew in the first half second that Magnus was going to lose: after that she stopped thinking with her brain and started thinking with her arms, which were frankly where the best of her cerebral matter lay.
What happened next was like closing your eyes in a warm and stuffy room. The first feint from the Fifth House was the heavy drowsiness that filled the back of her head, all the way down to her toes; the second the weightless loll of the skull to the chest. Gideon tucked her offhand behind her back, said to herself: Stop blocking every blow! and did not even bother to parry. She pivoted away each syrup-slow thrust without meeting it, bent back from the follow-up with the dagger like they had agreed beforehand where it would fall: he pressed his quarter, trying to force her, and she very gently folded his sword to the side with hers, contraparried. The point of her black rapier flickered like paper touched with a flame and came to rest, a quarter-inch away from his heart, making him stutter to a halt. She bumped the tip of her sword into his chest, very gently.
It was over in three moves. A mental haptic jolt bunted Gideon awake, and there she was: rapier held still to Magnus’s chest; Magnus with the good-natured but poleaxed expression of a man caught mid–practical joke; four sets of staring, equally blank expressions. Their very good-looking arbiter’s mouth was even hanging very slightly open, lips parting over white teeth, gaping dumbly until she caught up—
“Match to the Ninth!”
“Goodness me,” said Magnus.
The room let out a collective breath. Jeannemary said: “Oh my days,” and the Cohort cav of the Second sat up at least two inches taller than before, thumb pressed furiously hard into the soft part under her chin in thought. Gideon was busy sheathing her sword a heartbeat after Magnus had sheathed his, jerky with lag time in returning his bow, turning away. Her sweat had turned to adrenaline; her adrenaline was singing through her as fine, hot fuel, but her brain and heart had not caught up with the result. The only emotion she was feeling was a slow-to-saturate relief. She had won. She had won even though moving in a robe and dark glasses was so stupid. Aiglamene’s honour could go another day intact, and Gideon’s ass could go spiritually unkicked.
Conversations were happening around her, not to her:
A bit plaintively: “I’m not quite that out of form, am I?—”
(“Magnus! Maaaaagnus. Three moves, Magnus.”)
“—Am I getting old? Should Abigail and I divorce?—”
“I didn’t even see her move.” Corona was breathing hard. “God, she’s fast.”
Because they were in closest proximity, her first gaze after the fight fell on the overgroomed cavalier of the Third, Naberius: his eyes were taut, and his smile was unnerved. His eyes were blue, but this close she could see that they were stained through in places with a light, insipid brown that made Gideon think of oily water.
“Next match to me,” said Naberius.
“Don’t be greedy,” said his princess, good-naturedly and a trifle distractedly.