She moved before he could take a breath to answer.
The stroke was short and precise and over almost before it began, and the scarred man howled and dropped his sword and clutched at his own upper arm, and blood came through his fingers.
"Your reaction time is too slow," Natalia said, stepping back out of range. "That's all it's ever been. You're strong and you're fast in a straight line and you cannot change your mind quickly enough to be dangerous."
She flicked the blood off the blade.
"I've cut the muscle in that arm. Not the artery — you'll live, and you'll live with two working hands. But you will never hold a sword properly again, so I'd start thinking about a trade."
The man looked down at his arm, and then up at her.
And grinned.
It was a wide, red, delighted grin, and it stopped her heart for one full second.
"You think you've won," he said. "Little girl. Naive little girl. You've been very impressive, and you have got exactly nothing, because you haven't been counting."
Natalia's expression changed.
"TAKE THE PINK ONE!" the scarred man bellowed. "Now — all of you — grab the girl!"
The rest of them moved at once.
They were not going for Natalia and they were not going for Klaus. They were going around them, in a rush, toward the small figure standing alone by the broken door — because you cannot fight anyone who has to stand still, and a hostage costs nothing and ends everything.
"Don't underestimate grown men, children," the scarred man said. "That's the last lesson you get."
A hand came out toward Lilian's hair.
Lilian screamed.
It went up the length of that stone room and rang off the ceiling, high and raw, and she shut her eyes and threw her arms up over her head.
Nothing touched her.
Nothing touched her, and nothing kept touching her, and after a moment Lilian lowered her arms and opened her eyes to find out why.
Every man who had rushed her was on the floor.
Natalia stood over two of them with the stolen sword still moving; Klaus stood over three more with the shadow curling back off his hands, blood on his chin, upright, and entirely awake.
"Don't forget I'm here," Klaus said to the ones still standing.
Natalia looked around the room at what was left of them and let out a bored breath.
"That wasn't even a warm-up."
The scarred man stood alone in the middle of his own groaning men.
Monsters, he was thinking, quite seriously. They aren't children. Nobody's children do this. What in God's name have I put my hands on—
He dropped what was left of his weapon and raised both palms, and one of them was bloody.
"I yield," he said. "I'm done. I yield."
Klaus and Natalia turned around together.
Lilian was still standing exactly where she had been, wide-eyed, frozen, with both hands at her mouth.
They put out their hands to her — one on each side, small and filthy and steady.
"Lilian? Are you all right?"
Lilian looked at the two of them, and her eyes filled and spilled over, and it was not from fear this time.
"Yes," she said, taking their hands. "Yes. I'm all right."
And she smiled — properly, brilliantly, the whole of her face.
"There it is," Natalia said, and felt something ease in her chest. "That's better. That's much—"
She stopped, and turned, and scanned the room.
The broken doorway was empty. So was the passage beyond it, and the long room, and every space between the cells where a man in a good coat might have been standing.
"He's gone," she said. "He slipped out while they were fighting. Of course he did."
She stared down the black corridor with the sword still in her hand.
"Then we go after him."
The priest was running.
He went down the corridors of his own dungeon with his coat flying and his shoes skidding on the wet, taking corners he had built himself, and his mind was one long howl of disbelief.
How? How is this happening? Why is this happening to me?
He stopped at a junction with his hands on his knees and dragged air in. Sweat ran off his chin. He was not built for running; he had not needed to be, for years.
Everything had been going beautifully. That was the thing. Every part of it had been arranged and oiled and quiet. The parish, the allocation, the shipments, the men — years of good, steady, profitable work.
And then a girl in a green dress had stood in front of him and demanded to know what he had done.
Her, he thought. Her. That's when it started. That's exactly when it started.
Because before her there had been nothing to fear. He had bought his safety, the way he bought everything else — he could see himself doing it, counting notes into the hand of a very well-fed official who had laughed and told him not to worry, that nobody in the province was going to look twice at a church. And the great house above them all had been the easiest part of the arrangement: an acting head who never inspected anything and a boy heir who would grow up spineless, taking orders, exactly as everyone said.
Now the acting head was in a cell awaiting a murder trial. Now the boy heir had awakened, and had blown a door out of a wall.
She joined that family, the priest thought viciously, and everything went wrong. All of it. Every single piece.
He straightened up, wheezing.
Change of plan. Get out — out of the district tonight, out of the province by morning. There's money in three places she doesn't know about and the men can rot. Lie low a year. Two. I have enough to be a nobody in a nice town.
He came round the last corner and saw the stairs going up, and nearly sobbed with relief. Far enough. Deep enough. They were somewhere back there in the dark with the merchandise and by the time anybody—
A board creaked above him.
There was a pair of feet at the top of the stairs. Then another.
"You're late," said Klaus.
The priest's legs stopped working.
"How," he said. "How— you were— that's not possible, I came directly, there's no route that—"
"There's a shortcut," said Natalia. "Well. There isn't. But shadows go where they like, and he can see through them, and this stairwell has been dark for about eleven years."
Klaus came down two steps and raised his hand.
The dark took the priest off his feet and put him on the floor of his own dungeon so hard that the flagstones cracked, and the scream that came out of him bounced all the way back up the stairs.
"Wait — wait!" He scrabbled inside his coat and dragged out a purse and held it up in both hands, spilling gold across the stone. "Is that it? Is that all this is? Take it! Take all of it, there's more, I can have three times this brought to you by morning—"
Klaus closed his hand.
The magic hit, and blood sprayed the wall, and the priest's scream went up into a register that no longer had any words in it.
"Do you think," Klaus said, walking down the last of the stairs, "that I would take money made from selling children?"
He stopped over him.
"Shall I give you a taste of your own medicine? That's a fair offer, isn't it? Everything you did to them, in order, starting with the kicking. I could keep you alive for a considerable time."
"Please— " The priest was crying now, hands over his face, curled up on the stone in exactly the shape he had put a hundred children in. "Please, my lord, don't kill me, don't kill me, I'll say anything, I'll tell you everything, don't kill—"
The dark came down.
Blood went across the wall, and the sound the priest made rolled away down the black hallway and died out in the cells.
Klaus stood over him.
"I'm not going to kill you," he said. "You needn't have wasted the breath."
The priest lay in the mess of his own gold with one eye open.
"The military police will collect you tonight," Klaus said. "After that there is a judiciary in this empire, and there are courts, and they will do it properly — with your ledgers, and your buyers, and every name you are about to give them. You'll be sentenced by the law of Eding. I'm not going to be the thing that lets you off with an ending."
Upstairs, the shadow snapped a padlock off a cell door as though it were a twist of wire.
The door swung open, and nobody came out.
Inside, a huddle of children pressed themselves back against the far wall, watching the doorway with their arms around each other. Two little girls at the front had their heads down and their eyes shut, listening to the footsteps come closer, because footsteps had never once meant anything good.
Natalia knelt down in the doorway so that she was smaller than they were.
"It's all right," she said. "It's over. I've beaten all the bad ones — every single one of them, they're on the floor back there, and the man in the good coat is going to prison tonight."
Nobody moved.
"My name is Natalia," she said. "I'm the wife of the head of this family, and this is his land, which means all of you are ours to look after now. Food first. Then baths, and beds, and a doctor for anyone who needs one, and after that we're going to find somewhere proper for every one of you. I'm taking responsibility. That's a promise from the Nelt family and it doesn't come off."
One of the little girls lifted her head.
"Is it really finished?" she said. "Nobody's going to hurt us any more?"
"Nobody." Natalia stood up and put her fists on her hips and grinned at them all. "And if any villain is stupid enough to try, my husband and I will simply beat him too. We've had a great deal of practice this week."
There was a silence.
Then the whole cell erupted — cheering, all of them at once, thin voices going up together into that horrible ceiling — and children came out of the dark and grabbed at her skirt and her hands, and Klaus stood back and watched it without saying anything at all.
"They're safe," Lilian said, wiping her eyes. "They're actually safe. I keep waiting for it to stop being true."
"Klaus?" Natalia looked around. "Klaus, are you—"
He was rubbing at his temple with the flat of his hand, and his face had gone grey.
"Fine," he said, and let out a long, weary breath.
He was not fine. Natalia could see the shape of it now that she was looking: he had picked two locks, blown one stone door apart, fought a room full of men, and then held a running man down at the bottom of a stairwell — and shadow magic was not a thing you simply poured out. It took concentration. Every separate shadow he moved wanted a separate piece of his attention, and there was a limit to how many pieces a person had, and he had spent all of his.
"I can still walk," Klaus said, before she could say it. "Let's keep going."
They turned back to Lilian together.
"Right," said Natalia.
Lilian looked from one of them to the other, wide-eyed.
"There's one more thing that has to happen tonight," Natalia said. "The most important one, actually."
Above them, somewhere beyond all that stone, the evening had gone gold at the edges.
We finish it, she thought. All of it. Tonight.
The three of them stood together in the corridor with the cheering going on behind them, and none of them sat down, because there were still duties.
The Felino manor stood enormous and silent under a sky full of stars.
The guard on the gate looked up at the sound of feet on the gravel and had the shock of his professional life.
"My lady—?"
He was already running. "MY LADY! It's her — it's the young lady, she's here, she's—"
Lilian walked up the drive toward her own front door with her chin up and her filthy dress dragging, and stopped when he reached her.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'll apologise to everyone properly. To you, and to the household, and to my father, tonight, for all of it — I know what I've put this house through."
She turned and gestured behind her.
"These are my friends. Natalia and Klaus Nelt. They're the ones who saved my life."
Inside, a servant knocked on a heavy office door.
"My lord. They've arrived."
"Send them in," said Enrique Felino, without looking up from the papers in his hands.
Natalia stepped into the room after Lilian, and the door closed behind them, and Lilian's father sat at his desk with his face like a shut window.