Gideon the Ninth

“I trust Camilla. I trust that her reasons for ending someone’s life would be logical, moral, and probably to my benefit,” he said, sliding one fragile eyelid up an eyeball. “Your problem here is that you suspect that Harrow has killed people for much less.”

“She didn’t kill the Fourth or Fifth.”

“Conjecture, but we’ll leave it.”

“Okay, so,” said Gideon, putting her empty mug next to her mattress. “Um. You are now getting the impression that my relationship with her is more—fraught—than you might’ve guessed.” (“You shock me,” muttered Palamedes.) “But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve known her as long as she’s lived. And I thought I knew how far she’d go, because I will tell you for free she has gone to some intensely shitty lengths, and I guess she’s gone to some shittier lengths than I thought concerning me, but that’s the thing—it’s me, Sextus. It’s always me. She nearly killed me half a dozen times growing up, but I always knew why.”

Palamedes took off his glasses. He finally stopped molesting the head, and he pushed himself up and away from the desk; he sat down heavily on the mattress next to Gideon, skinny knees tucked up into his chest. “Okay. Why?” he asked simply.

“Because I killed her parents,” said Gideon.

He did not say anything. He just waited, and in the space of that waiting, she talked. And she told him the beginning stuff—how she was born, how she grew up, and how she came to be the primary cavalier of the Ninth House—and she told him the secret she had kept for seven long and awful years.

* * *

Harrowhark had hated Gideon the moment she clapped eyes on her, but everyone did. The difference was that although most people ignored small Gideon Nav the way you would a turd that had sprouted legs, tiny Harrow had found her an object of tormentable fascination—prey, rival, and audience all wrapped up in one. And though Gideon hated the cloisterites, and hated the Locked Tomb, and hated the ghastly great-aunts, and hated Crux most of all, she was hungry for the Reverend Daughter’s preoccupation. They were the only two children in a House that was otherwise busy getting gangrene.

Everyone acted as though the Emperor had personally resurrected Harrowhark just to bring them joy: she had been born healthy and whole, a prodigious necromancer, a perfect penitent nunlet. She was already mounting the ambo and reading out prayers even as Gideon began desperately praying herself that she might one day go to be an enlisted soldier, which she had wanted ever since Aiglamene—the only person Gideon didn’t hate all the time—had told her she might be one. The captain had told her stories of the Cohort since Gideon was about three.

This was probably the best time of their relationship. Back then they clashed so consistently that they were with each other most of the time. They fought each other bloody, for which Harrow was not punished and Gideon was. They set elaborate traps, sieges, and assaults, and grew up in each other’s pockets, even if it was generally while trying to grievously injure the other one.

By the time Harrow was ten years old, she had glutted herself on secrets. She had grown bored of ancient tomes, bored of the bones she had been raising since before she’d finished growing her first set of teeth, and bored of making Gideon run gauntlets of skeletons. At last she set her gaze on the one thing truly forbidden to her: Harrow became obsessed with the Locked Door.

There was no key to the Locked Door. Maybe there had never been a key to the Locked Door. It simply didn’t open. What lay beyond would kill the trespasser before they’d cracked it wide enough to go through anyway, and what lay beyond that—long before ever getting to the tomb—would make them wish they were dead long before their final breath. The nuns dropped to their knees at the mere mention of what was through there. It was the brief delight of Gideon’s life that the unnecessarily beatified Harrowhark Nonagesimus chose to ditch her sainthood and unlock it, and that Gideon had been witness to that fact.