The servant's corridors, once a comforting byrinth of welcoming shadows and secluded cubbies, became a hellish maze. Ketch flung herself over support beams and ducked under low-hanging sconces, heedless of her orientation or direction. There was an attention on her, at the center of her spine, and it gnawed at her flesh like a carrion bird.

  Wood shattered in lightning cracks behind her, the wall torn apart as the third speaker ripped open the manor's wall. Ketch hooked a hand on a corner post and flung herself to the right, catching the barest glimpse of her pursuer as she did so.

  A wooden mask stared back at her. Opaque, featureless, without holes to breathe or eyes to see, set so firmly to the skin it looked ingrown.

  Then Ketch was sprinting down another corridor, uncaring of how her feet fell or how loudly she panted.

  "Come now!" A voice called, echoing unnaturally down the corridor. "Little one, might we come to an arrangement? The penalty for thieving will not be death, and should you return what you have taken, I assure you personally that your sentence will be lenient."

  A tempting offer, if Ketch had actually been stealing something. Unfortunately, the penalty for spying upon the private meetings of the King were far steeper.

  Just as Ketch ducked under another beam, it violently ripped from the wall, flung downward far faster than gravity could account for. Instinct sent her lunging forward, but not fast enough, and her left foot was caught beneath, pulverized into the wooden flooring.

  Ketch tore it free with a scream spitting between her clenched teeth, hobbling forward as she fumbled for her second healing potion. She downed half of it in one gulp, unable to wait for a smaller dose to do the trick, and tried to maintain her pace.

  The formless voice bounced off the walls once more.

  "Unless you are not a thief, of course. Little one, you have the scent of the Deepwaters upon you. An Azarketi, perhaps?"

  Ketch saw a gap in the ceiling above, a foot-wide slice open to the corridors above, and unched herself up the walls. Her nails audibly crackled as they expanded to spikes, her toes as well, painfully piercing the front of her leather boots. She scrambled up the wall, leaping forward, shimmying into the gap.

  "Not just the Deepwaters, though," the voice hummed, assaulting her from every direction. "There is something fresher, as well. Springwater, deep springwater, yet... tainted? A curious aura beguiles you, child."

  Ketch optimistically slowed her pace back to one of pure silence, crawling on her belly through the space between floors. She abandoned that when the boards around her began to creak and groan, dragged inward, jagged splinters creeping to impale her in pce. She heard their groaning intensify, a chilling creak that sent her heart thundering, and used all four limbs to throw herself awkwardly forward, sliding through another gap to the servant's corridor above. The space she had occupied a moment before imploded with a staccato series of cracks, brutal enough that she would have been pierced in a dozen pces.

  "Not a thief at all, then. Someone more interesting. I do so hope the King will not mind me capturing you in this manner. It is an abandoned property, after all."

  Ketch threw herself back to her feet, moving at a dead sprint through the pitch-bck corridors. This third floor was entirely abandoned, unlit, and she flicked open her third set of eyelids, revealing the faint outlines of wooden walls. She knew a human would not be able to see the faintest thing. She also did not know if the masked figure was human, or relied on sight at all to track her, but she could only pray.

  "A deft little thing, aren't you? Hard to pin down."

  Ketch felt a tingle off her right elbow and threw herself into a head-first dive, sliding forward on her stomach. A spear of wood erupted from the wall above and behind her, a foot thick, more than enough to kill her on the spot.

  "Well, hard to pin down and keep alive, at least. Do yourself a favor and take a rest, strange child, before I care more for picking over your corpse than your mind."

  Ketch most certainly was not going to do that. Only her deepest night terrors might equal what the devotees of a hidden god could release upon her, and she had been visited by some truly horrific nightmares before meeting Sellie.

  She came to a crossroads, a servant's door opening to her left. She followed her instincts and knocked it open with a shoulder, once more in the open hallway. She continued her sprint into the very center of the carpeted hall, where the walls and ceiling were farther away, so that any unched spikes would take longer to reach her.

  Save for the floor. One erupted directly ahead of her, curving as it rose to aim for her gut. With too much momentum to arrest, her mother's dagger appeared in her hand, ft of the bde meeting the wooden tip just before her stomach. The impact drove the wind from her lungs in a soundless wheeze, but she continued stumbling on, eyes locked onto the ground ahead.

  "So eager to leave, so eager to leave," the voice chided, omnipresent around her. "If your crime is not forgivable, perhaps you could be convinced to acquiesce in exchange for a gentler death? Most fear execution as a whole, but there is much to be weighed in the method of its rendering."

  "Stupid fucking cunt, I'll kill you," Ketch gasped, barely enough to breath in her lungs to proffer the retort.

  "Oh! An associate of the Champion. Very interesting." Another spear tore itself out from beneath the carpet, drawing a deep gash along Ketch's thigh as she dove to the side. "But not one with her penchant for violence, I gather."

  Ketch followed the crystal light to a stairwell, one which she felt Sellie abruptly tug her towards. Ketch leapt over the railing without hesitation, slowing her fall with a hand ripping through the wallpaper until she nded on the second story nding. Yet another spear smmed out of the wall, but she was already gone, leaping down the empty space between the center of another spiraling staircase.

  She nded hard, knees buckling. She was directly behind a line of eight guards, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder to block the way to the upper floors. Her nding had not been quiet, and several heads began to turn her way, affording her a single second of thought.

  Unlike Tulian, only a select few guards were afforded decent armor, usually those that personally guarded nobility. These, tasked to turn away drunk partygoers wishing to explore the estate, wore simple gambesons above their own personal clothing, a pin spear leaning against their shoulders. No armor covered them below the waist.

  Ketch lunged forward with her mother's dagger drawn, ripping it through the tendon of a guard's heel as she dove between his legs. He cried out in immediate agony, dropping, and the rest of the guards whirled every which way, shouting confusion. Ketch was around the corner as fast as she could manage, but not before several caught sight of her, giving chase.

  Ketch was now among the serving staff and guards of the party, and as she'd so fervently hoped, the voice and the magical assaults accompanying it were absent. Whatever or whoever the wooden mask was, it didn't wish to expose itself to the general public.

  Of course, Ketch was now sprinting through increasingly dense waves of servants and noble partygoers alike, the guards thickening with each passing moment. There may not be a need for the masked figure to pursue her. She was running into a snare of her own creation.

  Taking a risk that the masked figure had truly given up on magically gutting her, she returned to the wall, skittering her way up to the darkest corner she could find. It was slower going, upside down and on her hands and knees, but once she cleared the corner, far fewer would notice her.

  Unless, of course, the path she'd chosen at random ended in a massive sprawling emptiness, bright as daylight in the middle of night, hundreds of nobles dancing to the tune of beautiful harps.

  Ketch froze on the wall, looking for all the world like a lizard caught on the window when a midnight ntern was lit. For a brief, infinitesimal moment, she thought no one would notice her, despite the fact that she was a blue-skinned woman wearing a bck cloak, clinging to marble-white walls.

  Then she heard the first shout of surprise, a finger flung her way, and she dropped to the floor.

  A commotion rippled through the massive dance space, starting at the first man that had noticed her, then spreading as others registered the strange sight for what it was. Old habits had her pulling the hood of her cloak tight about her face, disguising her, as if that were anywhere near a priority at the moment.

  She barreled through the crowd, sliding under cloth-draped tables and weaving through pilrs, doing all she could to break up her outline to the increasing number of guards who were being directed her way. Unlike before, these guards were resplendently dressed head-to-toe in steel armor, and they carried shortened polearms with ornate metal heads, not wooden spears. Weapons meant for fighting Irregur opponents in close quarters, which was exactly what Ketch was.

  She'd never beaten Sara in a duel when the Champion used a polearm.

  Ketch continued her sprint through incredulously screeching nobility, bowling over doddering ancients and drunken brutes alike, doing everything she could to sow confusion in her wake. The dance hall had a door leading directly to the outside, she knew, and if she could reach the midnight shadows beyond, only a miracleworker would be able to track her.

  But she had to get there first.

  Ketch's preternatural senses were so overwhelmed by the eyes tracking her that she was reduced to relying on sight alone, which was why she saw the meaty palm plummeting towards her face at the very st second. Some noble partygoer was trying to grab her, to pin her down.

  She yanked her dagger up in the blink of an eye, tip pointed out. The hand's momentum shoved the meat of the man's palm down to the hilt of her dagger in an instant, the weight of her forward sprint combining with the now-wedged palm to sm the pommel of her dagger into the bone beneath her right eye.

  Ketch's neck snapped back, her feet continuing on, then the back of her head cracked against the tile flooring.

  Stars whirled above her as thoughts fuzzed, the roar of the crowd dulling by degrees.

  And then she felt a weight on her legs.

  Then another on her face.

  Another on her chest, then above them another added, more and more attempting to pin her down. To trap her underneath their weight, to smother her.

  Ketch's heart smmed against her ribcage.

  Heralded by a terrible keratin screech, her cws sprung even further out. She began ying about herself randomly, spraying bloody tracks across anything and everything touching her. Her feet scrambled backward violently, toe-cws goring even more over-brave noble guests that thought themselves heroes, and as they collectively began to recoil, Ketch was suddenly free, light returning to her vision.

  She did not spare the bloody pile she had created a second gnce. Multiple sets of gleaming guards were colpsing into a skirmish formation behind and to her left, trying to herd her towards the wall. She sprinted forward, the only direction left to her, and sought out the exit.

  She gave up on weaving through the room, gave up on subtlety in any form. She just lowered her head and sprinted, pumping her arms in such a way that her blood-soaked cws flung innumerable droplets towards the richly dressed individuals in her path. They scattered. She could see the door, just ahead, so massive, so grand, so promising, and just as she heard the call for crossbows to be prepared, she breached the threshold, entering the receiving room.

  The massive doors smmed shut behind her with a camitous boom, the wind of such huge panels of wood moving so fast physically driving her forward. The receiving room for the nobility was darker than the fancy ballroom she'd exited, and she flicked her second eyelids away.

  The masked figure stood at the far end of the room, arms folded into their pin brown robes, the same unreadable mask set upon their face.

  They were surrounded on either side not by guards, but Knights.

  Ketch had never seen members of the Sporaton Knighthood dressed in all their splendor. With the full suit of armor encircling their bodies, they looked less like humans, more like living statues of steel. Glowing runes of every color pulsed across their uniforms, barely perceptible to a human eye, but vibrant to Ketch's second eyelids. As they shifted their stance, their armor moved with them, articuted joints gliding smoothly from position to position. There was not a single point upon them showing exposed skin, no gaps in their protection, save for the wire-grid slits affording them vision, which would've required a dagger thin as a sewing needle to pierce. Distractedly, Ketch abruptly realized just who that former sve at the meeting had spent her time preparing to kill. Each knight held a different weapon, simirly covered in enchantment runes, and they each wielded their unique tool with the easy confidence brought on by years of experience. There were eight of them, four on either side of the masked figure.

  Ketch was no match for any of the nine.

  The masked figure stepped forward, hands waving as if they were a conductor calling for the closing of curtains. Behind her, Ketch felt the strange prickle of spellcraft sweeping down the doors, bcking out the light from the ga within. None could see her, now. The empty mask turned to face Ketch squarely, body nguage projecting a mild frown.

  "Now, strange one, I hope that you may act a bit more unreasonable. Had I known you would do something so uproarious as all that, I would have killed you without warning."

  "Your... your fuckin'..." Ketch trailed off, panting too hard. She didn't know how Sara kept up the constant string of insults in the middle of a duel.

  "My funeral, perhaps? My mistake? Come now, finish the insult, so we may proceed. I would hate to be left wondering for all these years I shall live after your death."

  "Your fuckin–"

  Ketch had been intending to say 'funeral,' but since the figure already said it, she pivoted.

  "–balls on the line," she finished, straightening as she finally began to catch her breath.

  "My... balls on the line? As in, you will cut them off?"

  "Even if you don't have 'em. I'll nail them on, then rip them off."

  "Hm. Disappointing," a sigh, "but not in itself surprising. You're far from the Champion's caliber, even more so when under stress. I'd recommend you work on your verbal sparring skills, but..." The figure's arms fully emerged from their robes as they began pacing forward, gloved fingers readying themselves for spellwork. "There isn't much time. Now, before I eviscerate you, is there anything you might be so kind to offer? A tidbit of information, for a poor, confused mage?"

  Ketch said nothing. She simply let her left hand nd on Sellie's dagger.

  The figure paused in mid step, and at this, the knights behind them started, grips tightening on their weapons.

  "What have you there, strange one?" The masked figure asked, posture unreadable.

  Ketch remained silent. She scanned the room, the streets beyond the gss doors at the knight's backs, and felt out the shadows the mage's obscuring spells had created behind her. The figure, after their brief pause, resumed their movement forward, slower, which Ketch matched by stepping backward.

  "Is that the springwater upon you? No, no, it hasn't the aura of the living. The taint is upon you. But what is it, I wonder? Will it be destroyed with you? That would be a shame, I think." He cast a gnce over his shoulder. "Loyal knights of Sporatos, if you find yourself engaged with this girl, I ask that you avoid damaging the dagger she presently holds. I will reward you most handsomely, depending on the yield. Of course, do not prioritize the dagger over your own life, but if possible, I would greatly appreciate its retrieval."

  Like the first step onto warm beach sand, Ketch felt her ankles sinking into comfortable shadows. She was in the light, but behind her was shadow. She twisted the grip on her dagger, pulling it ever so slightly from its sheath, exposing the barest sliver of iridescent metal.

  The figure halted once more. Their hand snapped up, colorless energies crackling from it. "I would not recommend you draw that dagger, girl."

  Ketch ignored the man's words, preparing to slide it free of the sheath, but was stopped by something she didn't expect. The familiar tugging of her body, but this time at her wrist, an urging instruction to all but shove the dagger back into its sheath.

  Ketch froze.

  She didn't know what to do.

  This had never happened. The dagger Sellie had given her, wrapped in as many threads of themselves as their souls could bare to lose, and Sellie was telling her not to use it?

  Shit.

  At the very brink of disaster, Ketch may not have been able to match Sara's acidic wit, but even with panic pulsing waves of adrenaline through her veins, it wasn't beyond her ability to let her hood fall back, exposing the front rows of her glittering, saw-toothed smile.

  Then she fell back into the shadows, bck cloak snapping closed around her, and rolled to the side.

  That was all it took. For the briefest instant, they lost sight of her, Ketch's blue figure blurring into bck on bck, and then she cracked open a single eye, staring at a shadow through the window above them.

  Energy pulsed from the undrawn dagger. Color fell from the world like water spshing off a wall, all reality wrought in shades of bck and grey as Ketch's body flung forward. She felt the gss of the great door ripple harmlessly across her skin, then cold tiles were beneath her feet, a brick chimney pressed against her front.

  A roar followed her an instant ter, the doors to the Eliah estate's ballroom shattering in a detonation beyond imagination. Starlight turned to glittering rainbows as light was cast through gss, multicolored shards sprayed hundreds of feet into the air while wooden shrapnel pitter-pattered into waiting carriages across the exterior courtyard. The Knights sprinted out, their helmeted heads pivoting to scan in all directions. A robed figure swept forward behind them, and then Ketch turned away, looking to another deep shadow on the roof across the street from her.

  Color bled, Ketch flew forward, and in less than a blink she was sixty feet farther away from the enraged mage, the sounds of his randomly flung spells dulling.

  Ketch stumbled woozily. Immediately upon her arrival she felt parched beyond belief, a pounding headache beginning at the base of her skull, but she didn't stop. She crouched low in the deepest shadow she could find, looked for the most distant rooftop that she didn't think would kill her, then unched herself forward again.

  This time, when color returned to the world, she didn't nd. The spell sputtered out at the st second, transferring her impossible momentum to the real world.

  Ketch went skidding face-first across jagged tiles. She barely felt the way her skin and scales were cut, because her head roared with pain. Some vital reserve of her body she'd never recognized, much less trained or used, was utterly and completely spent. It was an alien, unknown pain, a new sensation she had no reference for.

  She managed to cw herself to a stop just before sliding off the roof to the cobblestones three stories below, her chest heaving unevenly.

  She allowed herself a brief moment to catch her breath.

  A bell began to ring somewhere far away, and after a brief dey, another began to chime.

  It was time to go. Time to go, go, go. All the way back to Tulian, if she had to, but for right now, she needed to be gone.

  Ketch shoved herself to her feet, forcing down the rebellious rising of bile in her throat, and oriented herself amongst the city rooftops.

  Gods, Tagrensi was going to be furious.

  Why had Sellie stopped her? Was the mage that powerful? The threat too great? Or was it too little, a waste of the dagger's energies? She didn't know. Couldn't know, until she could commune with her girlfriend again, and of the untold uncertainties eating at her in that moment, that question seemed the greatest.

  Wait, no.

  There was something worse.

  Oh, gods. How the hell was she going to take Noctie on public roads?