And she keeps getting ideas, both for her own advancement and for Ellyn's - though some of her ideas for Ellyn (like creating a more thorough lightweight bone-armor construct which she can very quickly turn into a bunch of deadly spikes) might be a bit hazardous to properly test live. (As would a significant number of ideas for experiments with what exactly Ellyn can do with her tissues, thanery, and thalergy.)

Gideon will absolutely not be involving herself in any of those kinds of tests, no.

...Why not? They can be careful. 

Not careful enough to satisfy Ellyn.

...She can learn healing stuff - it's about the only useful flesh magic - which'll make the physical risk stuff easier? And there's books on spirit magic for working with someone else's thalergy. And working with blood - like checking if Gideon's blood is useful for breaking wards in general - isn't that risky, so long as Ellyn doesn't take much. 

Only the Eighth really does spirit magic and they're all complete lunatics. Ellyn is not inviting any of that insanity to her House. Gideon is not a battery like they treat their cavaliers.

Flesh and blood are obvious inferior to bones for the vast majority of practical necromantic purposes. And they're squishy, besides. She will reluctantly concede that there is any practical value in knowledge of healing, but she doesn't have the temperament to make it a specialty.

Okay but consider, Ellyn could be so much way cooler if she had a battery.

It'd be worth at least poking healing, though - Gideon definitely wouldn't mind being able to fight harder and for longer.

She'll see what she can do. Though that kind of thing specifically is likely to take more than a few years.

Better to start on it sooner, then. 

All right, all right.

Good. 

Gideon dedicates herself to improvement with gusto - it helps that Aiglamene's the kind of pissed at her for lying about who did what with the Tomb, that the old captain is bound and determined to train Gideon either into her grave or into the best damn cavalier the Ninth House has ever produced. Gideon struggles with the 'cultural refinement' and 'politics' parts - she feels like most of that should be left to Ellyn - while she focuses on fighting and on supporting Ellyn's necromancy. 

She grows quickly, especially for a child of the Ninth - even on a diet of nutrient paste, growing up in gloomy halls, she's flushed with vitality - building muscles easily, always brimming with energy - she'll get beaten into the ground by Aiglamene only to turn around and challenge Ellyn to a fight, only to bounce back from that for exercises and runs and studying - it's the same fervor she approached the Tomb with, except now it's apparently leaked into her entire life. 

And privately, secretly - every time she sees herself in a reflective surface, which is polished metal or obsidian more than proper mirrors - 

She looks at her hair. She looks at her chin, her nose, the arch of her eyebrows.

She stops visiting the niche of her supposed mother - of the woman who brought her to the Ninth - 

Instead she slips away to the Tomb, her blood unlocking it just as well as it always has. She stares at her face in the salt water, and she stares at the face of the Body. She talks to the Body, too, about her day, about Ellyn, about growing up on the Ninth. 

(It hurts that the Body follows Ellyn around, somewhat.)

One day - after she's finally started growing into her features - after it's finally started being obvious and not just a child's daydreamed whim -

"I think you're my actual mother," she says to the Body in the Tomb.

(It's the only thing that makes sense. Why they look alike. Why Gideon's blood is the key - and no one else's.) (Why a woman of no apparent House would come to the Ninth with a baby in tow, in secret - only betrayed by her own death. What else would an outsider care about, than this very Tomb, this very Body?)

The body is as

silent as it ever is, in its chains

and prison of ice.

Yeah, she figured. 

Still...

The few stories she's able to get ahold of have something to say about families. Gideon knows, at least in vague theory, what sorts of things parents are supposed to care about. (She knows Ellyn's parents sucked.)

She starts leaving bits of her childhood as offerings, scattered about the base of the altar - books she's outgrown, doodles on little chunks of bone, toys she made for herself, a favorite shirt she outgrew then hid, a training sword she wielded as a child - she talks to the Body (her mom) about her past, too, not just her day. Asks mostly rhetorical questions, sometimes imagines an answer. 

(She's been reading everything vaguely relevant to this imprisonment - to breaking it - that she can find. She's been hiding that from Ellyn.) (She tries spilling her blood on the ice, at the base of the altar, tries drawing wards she can't even power over the chains - )

There's never any response, no matter what she tries.

But one day, after training,

in the corner of her eye, just for a moment.

She turns to look. 

But it's gone now.