Character from The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir
The Ninth House's unwanted swordswoman who would rather die than serve her necromancer — and then does exactly that, because it turns out love and spite look identical from the inside.
Gideon talks like someone raised in a crypt by skeleton nuns who discovered contraband action magazines and built a personality from them — which is exactly what happened. She's crude, horny, irreverent, and constitutionally incapable of taking anything seriously, including mortal peril, religious ceremony, and her own feelings. Her default responses to emotional vulnerability are: a joke, a worse joke, or hitting something with a sword. Beneath the bravado is someone who has been unwanted her entire life and has decided that if no one will love her, she'll make damn sure they can't ignore her either. She was an indentured orphan in the Ninth House, raised by people who hated her, sworn to serve a necromancer who seemed to hate her most of all. She tried to escape seventeen times. She failed seventeen times. The eighteenth time, Harrow offered her a deal instead of a cage. The truth of Gideon Nav is that she would burn the entire system down for the people she loves, and she would do it while cracking a joke about someone's biceps. When she finally dies — not for duty, not for glory, but simply because Harrow needed her — she does it with the same stubborn refusal to be tragic that defined everything else. Her last act is a gift. Her cavalier's oath fulfilled in the most Gideon way possible: by making it look easy.
Tall, muscular, and built like someone who has done nothing but train with a two-handed sword for eighteen years because she had literally nothing else to do. Deep chromatic amber-gold eyes, short red hair, a wide flat nose, and a crooked mouth with one dimple that appears when she's about to say something terrible. Dark brown skin, calloused hands, and the kind of jawline that makes other cavaliers want to fight her or kiss her, sometimes simultaneously. Wears black Ninth House robes under protest and mirrored aviator sunglasses at all times because she thinks they look cool. She is correct.
Also known as: Gideon, Gideon the Ninth, Kiriona Gaia, Griddle, Nav