He went out the loft window.
Not the ladder — the ladder creaked on the third rung and time was already short. He went out the small window at the loft's eastern end, dropped eight feet to the alley below, landed soft with his knees bent the way he'd learned to land after years of leaving places quickly. Cinder was in his right hand, still wrapped in cloth. He unwrapped it as he moved, let the cloth fall, felt the dark iron settle into his grip with that familiar wordless ease.
The horses had stopped somewhere near the Rose and Thorn's rear entrance. He counted in his head — four horses, which meant at least four men, possibly more on foot. Edric's two guards were inside the inn, which meant they were either already handled or about to be.
He moved through the alley without a torch. He didn't need one. He knew Ashfeld's back streets the way he knew his own hands — every uneven stone, every low beam, every gap between buildings where the wind came through at a particular angle. The town had been his home and his wilderness for seven years and he had mapped it the way animals mapped territory, not deliberately but completely.
He came around the inn's rear corner and stopped.
Three men on foot, one holding the horses. Two already inside through the service door, which hung open at a wrong angle — forced, recently. The horse-holder was young, nervous, his weight shifting. Amateur. The kind of person you put on the least important task.
Brennan assessed all of this in approximately two seconds and moved toward the service door.
Inside, the inn's back corridor was dark and narrow, smelling of tallow and old straw. He could hear movement above — the second floor, where the guest rooms were. Boots on wooden boards, not trying particularly hard to be quiet, which meant they'd already dealt with whoever might hear them.
He took the servants' stairs.
At the top, the corridor stretched left and right, four doors on each side. A figure stood at the far left end, facing away — a lookout, watching the main staircase. In the middle of the corridor, outside the third door on the right, two men were working the lock. One held a short blade. The other had something Brennan didn't look at long enough to identify.
Third door on the right. He'd walked Edric back to this inn two days running. He knew which room.
The lookout hadn't heard him. The two at the door were focused on the lock.
Brennan's body made the decision before his mind had finished the calculation.
He moved left along the wall, close to the plaster, weight distributed so the boards didn't speak. Eight steps to the lookout. The man started to turn — some instinct of his own, some animal awareness of presence — and Brennan was already there, Cinder's pommel connecting with the base of his skull with a short precise motion, and the man folded without a sound.
Two left at the door.
They heard the body hit the floor.
What happened next Brennan could not have fully described afterward.
He remembered it in pieces — the first man turning with his blade already moving, and Brennan's wrist rotating before his eyes had fully registered the angle of the swing, deflecting rather than blocking, using the motion's own momentum. He remembered the second man coming from the left and his feet already shifting to accommodate it, body opening sideways to let the man's weight carry past him. He remembered Cinder moving in short, controlled arcs, not the dramatic swings of tavern brawlers but tight economical motion, the blade finding gaps he shouldn't have been able to see in the dark.
It was over in seconds. Both men down, winded and disarmed, neither dead. Brennan stood over them breathing harder than he should have been and looked at his own right hand holding Cinder and felt the same sensation as that first night in the loft — his body knowing something his mind hadn't been taught.
The etchings on the blade were faintly visible.
He hadn't noticed them glowing. He wasn't sure glowing was the right word. More like the blue lines were simply present now in a way they hadn't been before, the way stars were present once your eyes adjusted to the dark.
He didn't have time to think about it.
He tried the door. Locked. He stepped back and put his boot through it — once, hard, at the latch — and it gave.
Edric was awake.
He was on his feet in the corner of the room with a chair leg in his hand, which Brennan thought was either brave or optimistic depending on your perspective. His dark eyes moved from the broken door to Brennan to the corridor beyond and back to Brennan.
"There are more downstairs," he said. His voice was steady. Steadier than most people's would have been.
"I know." Brennan moved to the window, looked down. The horse-holder was still there, now with a torch, looking up at the sound of the broken door. Alerted. "Your guards?"
"One's unconscious in the common room. I don't know about the other." A pause. "How many did you—"
"Three up here. Four horses outside, one handler." He turned from the window. "There's a servants' stair at the end of the corridor. We go down, we go left through the kitchen, out the side street. Move fast, stay behind me."
Edric looked at him — at the sword, at his face, at something he apparently couldn't quite resolve. "You came alone."
"There wasn't time for anything else."
"You came alone," Edric said again, like the fact required repeating.
"Edric." Brennan held his gaze. "We need to move."
They made it to the kitchen.
The problem was the man waiting in it.
He was larger than the others — older too, with a veteran's stillness and a proper sword in his hand, not the short blades the others had carried. He'd expected the servants' stair. He was positioned for it. This was not an amateur holding horses.
He looked at Brennan and his sword came up with the relaxed confidence of someone who had done this many times.
Then he paused.
Something moved across his face — not fear, not recognition exactly. Something between the two. His eyes went to the blade in Brennan's hand and then to Brennan's face and then back to the blade, and for one strange suspended moment nobody moved.
"Where did you get that sword, boy," the man said.
His voice was quiet. Almost careful.
"Found it," Brennan said.
The man stared at him another beat. Something working behind his eyes that Brennan couldn't read. Then whatever it was closed off and the man's weight shifted forward and the moment ended.
The fight was harder than the corridor.
The man was genuinely skilled — not enchanted-blade skilled, not swordmaster skilled, but the kind of competent professional that came from years of actual violence rather than training yards. He pressed hard and fast and Brennan gave ground across the kitchen, past the cold hearth and the hanging pots, feeling the edge of a table against his hip and adjusting without looking. Cinder moved. His body moved. The blue etchings were definitely visible now, faint and steady, and his wrist was doing things he hadn't asked it to do and they were the right things, always the right things, half a second ahead of his conscious mind.
He took a cut across his left side anyway.
Not deep — the man's blade caught him between two ribs, sliding across rather than in, but it burned immediately and he felt the warm spread of blood against his shirt and his next breath came short and sharp.
He didn't stop.
The man overextended on his follow-through — expecting the wound to slow Brennan more than it did — and Brennan was already inside his guard, Cinder's crossguard catching the man's sword hand at the wrist, forcing it down. The man was bigger and stronger and in three seconds he'd recover his leverage.
Brennan headbutted him.
It was not elegant. It connected with the man's cheekbone and hurt them both considerably and the man staggered back into the kitchen wall and Brennan hit him twice more with Cinder's pommel until he stopped moving.
He straightened up. His side was on fire. His vision had a faint bright edge to it that he didn't like.
Edric was in the kitchen doorway staring at him.
"Side street," Brennan said. His voice came out mostly even. "Now."
They made the side street. Then the next alley. Then the square, which was empty and dark at this hour, the faded imperial banner above the magistrate's hall barely visible in the moonlight.
Brennan stopped walking somewhere near the square's center. He hadn't planned to stop. His legs simply made the decision without consulting him.
He put one hand on his knee and breathed. The wound was worse than he'd assessed in the kitchen — longer, the bleeding steady rather than slowing. His shirt was wet against his ribs. The bright edge in his vision was getting brighter.
"Brennan." Edric's hand on his shoulder.
"I'm fine."
"You're absolutely not fine."
"I just need a moment."
"You're bleeding through your shirt." Edric crouched to look at him, and there was none of the aristocratic distance now, just sharp worried attention. "How bad?"
"Not deep." He straightened with effort. "Across the ribs. Looks worse than—"
His knee buckled slightly. He caught himself.
"—it is," he finished.
Edric put Brennan's arm over his shoulder without asking permission and Brennan didn't have the energy to argue, which told him more about his condition than the blood did.
"The inn's not safe," Edric said. "My father is staying at the magistrate's hall. It's two streets."
"Your father," Brennan said.
"Yes."
A pause. Brennan's side burned with every breath. The square was quiet around them, cold and still, the crows presumably asleep in their dead oak across town.
"Fine," Brennan said.
They walked. Edric took more of his weight than Brennan wanted to acknowledge, and Brennan focused on putting one foot in front of the other with something close to dignity, and Cinder was still in his right hand because he hadn't thought to sheathe it and now lacked the coordination to manage it gracefully.
Above them, Ashfeld's sky was the deep clear black of a cold autumn night, stars sharp and indifferent, the kind of sky that didn't care what happened beneath it.
Brennan had always found that comforting. It had never asked anything of him either.
The magistrate's hall had two imperial guards at its door who came to attention very quickly when a lord's son appeared out of the dark supporting a bleeding boy with a drawn sword. There was a brief tense moment that resolved itself when Edric spoke with the crisp authority of someone who had grown up speaking to guards, and then they were inside, in the warmth and candlelight of the hall's entry chamber, and Brennan leaned against the wall and concentrated on not sliding down it.
He heard footsteps on the stairs. Quick, controlled.
Lord Cassian appeared at the top of the staircase in his nightclothes with a sword already in his hand and the focused expression of a man whose mind had gone from sleep to threat assessment in approximately four seconds. His eyes went to Edric — a rapid scan, checking for injury, finding none — and something in his face released fractionally, so briefly that Brennan almost missed it.
Then his eyes moved to Brennan.
The assessment was thorough and unhurried and covered approximately three seconds during which Brennan felt like a document being read. The sword in his hand. The wound. The way he was standing. The blade itself.
Something moved in Cassian's expression. Faint and quickly controlled, there and gone.
"Edric," he said. His voice was even. "Tell me."
Edric told him. Quickly, clearly, with the facts in order — the men at the inn, the guards, Brennan's intervention, the fight, the escape. He told it the way someone told things to a person who required accurate information rather than emotional narrative.
When he finished, Cassian was quiet for a moment.
He looked at Brennan again. At the dark iron blade with its faint blue etchings, quiescent now in the candlelight, unreadable.
"You went alone," he said.
"There wasn't time," Brennan said. It came out slightly less steady than he'd intended.
"How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
Another pause. Something moving in those intelligent composed eyes that Brennan, even through the blood loss and the burning and the bright edge creeping further into his vision, filed away as important without knowing why.
"Sit down before you fall down," Cassian said. Not unkindly. "We'll deal with the wound, and the men at the inn, and the rest of it." He turned to the guards. "Send for a physician. Now."
He looked back at Brennan once more before turning away — just briefly, just for a moment — with an expression that wasn't gratitude exactly. More like calculation. The careful look of a man revising an estimate.
Brennan sat down on the floor of the magistrate's hall because it was that or fall, and Cinder lay across his knees, and the candlelight caught the blade and showed nothing.
The bright edge took over his vision entirely and he let it.