Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)

by Tamsyn Muir

But Gideon was experiencing one powerful emotion: being sick of everyone’s shit. She unsheathed her sword. She slid her gauntlet over her hand, and tightened the wrist straps with her teeth. And she looked over her shoulder at Harrowhark, who was apparently breaking out of a blue funk to experience her own dominant emotion of oh, not again. Gideon silently willed her necromancer to put her knucklebones where her mouth was and, for the first time in her life—for the first real time—do what Gideon needed her to do. And Harrowhark rose to the occasion like an evening star. “The Ninth House will represent the Sixth House,” she said, sounding cold and bored, as though this had been her plan all along. Gideon wanted to sing. Gideon wanted to dance her up and down the corridor. She broke out in a broad, unnervingly un-Ninth smile, and Naberius Tern—who had gone from greasy villainy to aggrieved caution—was having to force his smirk.