“The Ninth just fought. Why don’t you go toe-to-toe with Jeannemary?”
But it was clear that he did not want to go toe-to-toe with Jeannemary, and judging by the look on her face she was no keener on the idea. Naberius shrugged his shoulders back, rolling up the sleeves of his fine cotton shirt to each elbow. He did not drop his gaze from Gideon. “You didn’t even break a sweat, did you?” he said. “No, you’re ready to go again. Try me.”
“Oh, Babs.”
“Come on.” His voice was much softer, more coaxing and appealing, when he was speaking to Corona. “Let the Third show what it can do, my lady. I know you’d rather watch your own.” There was a peculiarly nasal lilt to his voice, a sort of posh elongated vowel that made it rathah. “Put me in. Dyas can get another look at me.” (Next to him, the Cohort cavalier who was obviously hight Dyas raised her eyebrows the exact one-eighth of an inch to indicate how much she wanted to get another look at him.)
“The Ninth?”
Gideon’s heart was still ricocheting around her chest. She raised her shoulders in an expression that the brethren of the Locked Tomb would have recognised immediately as the precursor of Gideon about to do something particularly daft, but Corona took it as acceptance, and said mock-indulgently to her cav: “Well, then, my dear, go off and make yourself happy.”
He beamed as though he had just been bought a new pair of shoes. Gideon thought: Shit.
The Cohort cavalier, Dyas, was saying: “Your Highness. The adept shouldn’t officiate for their cavalier.”
“Oh, pff! Surely just this once can’t harm, Lieutenant.”
“You can’t call yourself a disinterested arbitrator, Princess,” Magnus was saying.
“Nonsense: I’m harder on him than anyone else. To the touch; call!”
In a very short space of time she was standing face to face with another cavalier, and there was a juddering in her ears that she recognised as the beating of her own heart. The glass of her knuckle-knives felt black and cold and silky all the way through a layer of robe and her shirt, and her tongue felt thick in her mouth. She hadn’t been this overstimulated since that one time when training had consisted of Crux, a repeating crossbow, and two skeletons with machetes. The Third’s main-gauche dagger was as gorgeously wrought as his hair: chased silver and Imperial violet, the arms of the hilt curved and hugging inward in a way that tugged on her memory but did not grasp the right file. The blade was thin and bright and flared at the top. She was so busy looking at it that she barely heard Naberius say:
“Naberius the Third.”
And very, very quietly, just for her:
“Ninth cavs are necro suitcases. Who’re you?”
It was good that she had already practised how to be quiet, because the traditional Nav response would have been one of any number of pieces of crude backchat. She resented the contempt with which his mouth rounded over Ninth; she resented suitcases; she resented his hair. But Coronabeth was singing out, “I call for Gideon the Ninth!” and they were marking five paces—six—seven.
She had only a moment to size Naberius up. He was about an inch shorter than her, with a frame that had been whipped within an inch of its life into perfectly sculpted muscle. He was narrow shouldered with long, long arms, and she was beginning to believe that he was not simply a douchebag who used lip balm, but a douchebag who used lip balm and had a very long reach. He stood perfectly: more perfectly even than her teacher, who had partially fused her spine with standing to attention. His rapier was a froth of silver wire and tracery at the loop of the hilt, and the blade shone notchless, perfect as the line made from his shoulder to its tip: her answering stance felt slouchy and half-assed, and the black knuckle-knives brutish, unsurgical. The hard moue of his mouth told her that he was used to making people feel that way, but also that he definitely used lip balm. Her heart sped up: slowed: renewed, arrhythmic with anticipation.
“Begin!” called Corona.
In the first ten seconds, Gideon had known that the fight with the Fifth House was hers to lose. It took her twenty seconds to come to a very important discovery about the House of the Third: it valued cleanliness. Each twitch of the sword was a masterpiece of technique. He fought like clockwork: inevitable, bloodless, perfect,