Tamsyn Muir - Gideon the Ninth

“You wouldn’t know fealty if it—”

“Don’t hypothetically shove stuff up my butt again,” said Gideon, “it never does any good.”

The lopsided old woman took a scabbard off her back and wearily handed it over. It was Gideon’s. Her sword had been sheathed safely inside it. Aiglamene tossed her the abandoned suitcase, to boot. This would be the closest to an apology she would get. The woman would never touch her, and she would never give her a word that had no edges. But this was nearly tender for the captain of the guard, and Gideon would take it and run.

Determined footsteps sounded down the centre aisle, alongside the sound of ancient lace rustling over slick obsidian. Gideon’s gut tightened, but she said: “How the hell are you going to get out of this one, Nonagesimus?”

“I’m not,” said Harrow, surprising her. The Reverend Daughter’s sharp-angled, foxy chin was thrust out, and she still had a thick rime of blood circling each nostril, but with her burning black eyes she looked exalted as a bad bone saint. “I’m going. This is my chance for intercession. You couldn’t comprehend.”

“I can’t, but I also couldn’t care less,” said Gideon.

“We all get our chances, Nav. You got yours.”

Gideon wanted to punch her lights out, but she said instead, with forced jollity: “By the way, I worked out your nasty little trick, jackass.”

Aiglamene did not cuff her for this, which was also some sort of apology; she just jabbed a warning finger in her direction. Harrow cocked her chin up in genuine surprise, hood falling away from her dark, short-cropped head. “Did you?” she drawled. “Really?”

“Your mother’s signature on the commission. The sting in the tail. If I come clean,” she said, “that renders the signature null and void, doesn’t it? It buys my silence. Well played. I’ll have to keep my mouth shut when I hand that one over, and you know it.”

Harrowhark cocked her head the other way, lightly.

“I hadn’t even thought of that,” she said. “I thought you meant the shuttle.”

Alarm bells rang in Gideon’s head, like the First and Second Peal all mixed together. She could feel the heat drain from her face, and she was already backing out of the pew, into the aisle, wheeling away. Harrowhark’s face was a painted study of innocence, of perfect unconcern. At the expression on Gideon’s, Aiglamene had put a hand on her sword, moving herself between the two with a warning stump of the leg.

Gideon said, with difficulty: “ What—about—the shuttle? ”

“Oh, Ortus and his mother stole it,” said Harrowhark. “They must be gone already. She still has family back on the Eighth, and she thinks they’ll take them in.” At her expression, Harrow laughed: “You make it so easy, Griddle. You always do.”

Gideon had never confronted a broken heart before. She had never gotten far enough to have her heart broken. She knelt on the landing field, knees in the grit, arms clutched around herself. There was nothing left but blown-out, curly patterns in the pebbles where the shuttle had passed. A great dullness had sunk over her; a deep coldness, a thick stolidity. When her heart beat in her chest it was with a huge, steady grief. Every pulse seemed to be the space between insensibility and knives. For some moments she was awake, and she was filled with a slow-burning mine fire, the kind that never went out and crumbled everything from the inside; for all the other moments, it was as though she had gone somewhere else.

Behind her stood the Lady of the Ninth House, watching her with no satisfaction.

“I got wind of your plan only last week,” she admitted.

Gideon said nothing.

“A week before,” Harrow continued. “I wouldn’t have known at all, if I hadn’t gotten the summons. You’d done everything right. They said I could put my reply on the shuttle I had previously scheduled, if I wanted to write in paper. I will give you your due: there was no way you could have accounted for that. I could have spoiled it before, but I wanted to wait until now to do anything. I wanted to wait … for the very moment when you thought you’d gotten away … to take it from you.”

Gideon could only manage, “Why?”

The girl’s expression was the same as it was on the day that Gideon had found her parents, dangling from the roof of their cell. It was blank and white and still.

“Because I completely fucking hate you,” said Harrowhark, “no offence.”

It would have been neater, perhaps, if all of Gideon’s disappointments and woes from birth downward had used that moment as a catalyst: if, filled with a new and fiery determination, she had equipped herself down there in the dark with fresh ambition to become free. She didn’t. She got the depression. She lay in her cell, picking at life like it was a meal she didn’t want to eat. She didn’t touch her sword. She didn’t go and jog around the planter fields and dream of what days looked like to Cohort recruits. She stole a crate of the nutrient paste they put in the gruels and soups fed to the Ninth faithful and squirted them in her mouth when she got hungry, listlessly leafing through magazines or lying back on her bed, crunching her body into sit-ups to make time go away. Crux had snapped the security cuff back on her ankle and she rattled it when she moved, often not bothering to turn on the lights, clinking around in the dark.

A week’s grace was all she got. The Reverend Daughter turned up, as she always goddamn did, standing outside the locked door of her cell. Gideon knew she was there because the shadows in front of the little peephole changed, and because it would be nobody else. By way of hello she said, “Fuck you,” and switched to push-ups.

“Stop sulking, Griddle.”

“Go choke on a dick.”

“I have work for you,” said Harrowhark.

Gideon let herself rest on the apex extension of her arms, staring down sightlessly at the cold floor, the sweat frosting on her back. Her rib still hurt when she breathed, and the cuff was heavy on her ankle, and one of the nuns had jammed her tooth back in too hard and it was like the woe of the Emperor every time she sneezed. “Nonagesimus,” she said slowly, “the only job I’d do for you would be if you wanted someone to hold the sword as you fell on it. The only job I’d do for you would be if you wanted your ass kicked so hard, the Locked Tomb opened and a parade came out to sing, ‘Lo! A destructed ass.’ The only job I’d do would be if you wanted me to spot you while you backflipped off the top tier into Drearburh.”

“That’s three jobs,” said Harrowhark.

“ Die in a fire, Nonagesimus.”

There was a rustle from outside; the light scrape of a pin being pulled from a stud before it was pushed through the mesh of the peephole. Belatedly, Gideon scrambled up to toss it back, as one did a grenade; but the bead of Harrow’s earring had landed in her cell, and from that tiny mote of bone sprang humerus, radius, and ulna. A skeletal hand groped blindly at the key in the lock and turned it even as Gideon swung her boot around to smash it into splintery bits. It crumbled away to dust, including the stud. Harrowhark Nonagesimus swung open the door, haloed faintly in the electric lights from the tier, her acerbic little face as welcome as a knee to the groin.

“If you want to do something interesting, come with me,” she commanded. “If you want to wallow in your shockingly vast reserves of self-pity, cut your throat and save me the food bill.”