For a moment the lane was a tempest of limbs. Seraphine spun and parried, her blade an extension of the angles she calculated. She did not fight for show; she fought to break the will of the men around her. Her movements were clean, a sequence of twists, small displacements, and the violent, precise moments that convert effort into stoppage. A raider lunged with a short knife toward the princess's shoulder; Seraphine's hand found the attacker's wrist and snapped upward. The knife clattered uselessly into the cobbles.
Solis had the princess' back; he sheltered her, his body a human shield as he felt a man press from the flank. He struck, not with flair but with purpose, a palm into a throat, a shoulder that shoved someone three paces into a stack of sacks. A child cried in the distance; a woman covered her mouth with both hands.
And then the tide shifted.
From around a corner — an alley left unobserved — a cluster of raiders sprang like a wave. Two cut off the carriage's backside; another rushed the lane's center. Solis met them in the middle. He swung at one, the axe's dull heft catching the man's forearm like a question. Wood boomed against bone. The man spat and went down, face shocked and small in the dust.
But another one came in behind — fast, a blur with a long blade. He cursed Solis in a quick string of profanity — an almost admiring taunt at the sight of Solis's plain cloth — and Solis obliged the man with too slow a parry. He was in close quarters, fighting without space. The second blade landed with a hot, nauseating slap to his side: the edge nicked through fabric, stung the skin with fire.
Pain was a new teacher. He gritted his teeth and pushed through, but the hit had unbalanced his breath; his aura pinched and stuttered. He leaned, knees softening. Something in the world went fuzzy at the edges.
Seraphine, seeing him stagger, abandoned the containment she had set and lunged between Solis and a man coming in for a killing blow. She drove her blade across the man's knee — an ugly, surgical strike — and twisted him down, hard. Her breath was an engine. "Get the princess now!" she barked.
Solis hauled Lily toward the carriage; the crowd, the market's noise, everything funneled into an ache in his ribs. He heard Seraphine shout something and then the distinct metallic bark of men breaking into formation — the K.P.P. watchers unwrapping themselves from the drapery of the market and stepping into the lane.
They moved with a terrible, efficient grace. The raiders saw them and for a blink the world changed: the raiders' confidence faltered as they saw uniformed men in precise formation cutting off exits. Then the raiders began to withdraw — until one of them, desperate, turned and lunged toward the princess in a final arc.
Solis intercepted.
He took the blade for the princess, the tip slicing into his forearm in a white scream that lit up the nerve like a bell. He fell back, dropping the medallion from under his shirt; the token struck the cobbles and skidded into the gutter. Pain tore across his face and he bit down on the taste of copper. He tried to stand and could not find the center of himself. The edge of the world went dark and he slid to his knees.
The K.P.P. moved in at that moment like a tide meant to be seen: a disciplined line advancing in a choreography of containment. Men in steel stepped between raider and princess; a lance snapped, a man went down. For the first time the watchers who had been planted "at a distance" were in the light, pushing forward with the calm, rehearsed steps of those who perform rescues for effect as much as necessity.
Solis saw them move — those men who had been waiting, who had obeyed the order to hold — and something in him cracked. He had been the shield for a breath and then wrong-footed; he had expected praise or compersion or simple recognition, and instead he felt the bitter throb of being a pawn in something larger than himself. He watched a K.P.P. lieutenant approach the princess, bow to Lily, and then place himself between her and the stunned market with a ceremonious hand.
The raiders were being subdued; some were taken and bound; others slipped away in the bowels of the city, melting into alleys and into the seams of the stone. The crowd, shocked, began to clap and murmur the name of the K.P.P. as if blessing and authority could be stitched in one moment.
---
Hours later at the Inner Ring, near an infirmary
Solis, sitting on a bench, tasted blood in his mouth and cold in his chest. Ada had punched a man who had tried to scale a wall to leave. She crouched over him now, hands on his shoulders, steely and furious. Her voice in his ear was quick and command-level: "Solis, stay with the princess. Don't you dare go off dreaming."
He reached for her hand with his free, sagging grip. She took it and squeezed.
Sirens — primitive whistles and the clatter of boots — rose as the inner ring gathered. Seraphine had a hand on Solis's shoulder and her eyes found his. They were a storm and a bruise. "Hold," she commanded, low so the K.P.P. did not pick it up as a complaint.
A K.P.P. captain swaggered forward, face polite, glossy. He placed himself in public view like a backdrop engineered to reassure. "Your Highness, are you unharmed?" he asked, voice perfectly public and concerned. He took Lily's hand in a way that announced rescue more than support.
Lily, shaken from the incident earlier but fierce, nodded. She looked at Solis then, really looked: a boy who had tried and bled and fallen, who had a string of dirt across his cheek and a look of terrible disappointment on his face.
"Thank you," she said, voice small toward him. "Thanks a lot for being vigilante there."
It was a decent phrase. But Solis felt the kindness as if it were distant — like a warm light behind glass. The K.P.P. captain took that chance as a moment for the cameras and the witnesses and made a small speech about vigilance and the fine seam between courage and the city's safety. Around him people murmured: "We thank K.P.P." The narrative was a net drawing taut.
Solis's world narrowed to the taste of iron on his tongue and the slow burn of a wound that would not be small. He watched the K.P.P. men lead the captured raiders away, handcuffed and shuffling, while the witnesses clapped and praised the K.P.P.'s decisive action. He felt Seraphine's fingers press once into his shoulder and then release. He heard Ada mutter curses and a laugh that was not joyful but bitter.
In the chaos a thought skittered through him like a small insect that would not be kept: the K.P.P. had been waiting. They had been planted, inert, until the moment their entrance could be turned into the narrative. Orsic's orders — wait until things got ugly — had been obeyed. The rescue had been made to look like salvation rather than intervention.
Solis closed his eyes. He did not weep, not for the cut and not for the bruised dignity. He was angry in a way that belonged to a child who had been tricked — proud but smaller for having believed himself more independent than he had been.
Lily stood and moved toward him; she knelt and took his hands. "Solis," she whispered, ignoring the K.P.P. captain who watched like a man whose business had been done, "you are the one who saved me. Thank you again."
Her fingers were steady and human. The lie that tightened his throat did not take place in her voice. She meant it. It was the honest coin he needed.
Ada, furious and fierce and practical, cut in then, face lit with a dangerous calm. "We will get him patched." she said to Lily and Seraphine and the K.P.P. captain all at once. "Then we will talk." Her voice left a small trail of promise and threat at the same time.
Seraphine met the K.P.P. captain's eyes and, for a flash, the two of them stood in the same room with a different sort of treaty — a hard and careful truce, an agreement that each would keep their side of the story. The captain's smile was practiced, but the angle of his jaw told his own calculation had changed: the day had gone according to the narrative plan he had been given.
As the carriage was readied to depart for the castle again — Lily wrapped in a borrowed anonymity of pale silk and smoke — Solis, on the other hand watched the K.P.P. men stand among the crowd, the very image of quiet authority. He thought of Razille's dark eyes in the market months ago, he thought of Orsic's absent presence that had been everywhere at once.
He let the carriage go without him.
Ada lifted him with the strength that had always both worried and steadied him. She carried him the short way to Dahlia's new inn (after the invasion Dahlia had changed the location, with the help of having some connections in noble families she managed to get a place in Inner Ring), where the wound would be cleaned and stitched, and where Cassandra would find him that night when the palace would have finished its public statements about "the decisive action of K.P.P." and "the brave local Postknight who acted valiantly."
Outside, the crowd still hummed, repairs were made to smashed stalls, and somewhere a vendor resumed the music of selling bread like nothing at all had happened. Inside the shadows, wherever Orsic's men drew breath, there were notes being made: who had been where, when, and how a rescue had been framed.