The courtyard sound was wrong before he understood why.
It should have been the sound of fighting — metal, shouting, the specific crack of a Cintran levy holding a doorway.
It was those things.
Under them was something else: a voice counting.
Not high or panicked.
Flat, deliberate, the pace of someone who needed to keep track and had decided that the way to do that was to say each name out loud.
“Henryk.
Marta.
Lise.
The two Brant boys — Petyr, Ren.
Old Gwynna.
Ser—”
Adam came over the wall at the courtyard’s north end and dropped into a scene that his brain sorted before he’d finished landing: a sally-port in the south wall, maybe eight meters wide.
A group of children and older civilians pressed against the wall beside it, not running yet because running would take them through the fighting.
A half-circle of four Cintran levymen holding a doorway against five Nilfgaardians who were pushing through it with the unhurried pressure of men who knew they had weight and time and were content to spend both.
And in the middle of it — not fighting, not hiding — a man in a sergeant’s dented breastplate who was counting.
He had his back to the doorway and his face toward the sally-port and he was looking at the civilians while the fight happened behind him, and counting, and the counting was not a distraction from the fight.
It was the reason for it.
He was counting because he needed to know how many were left to move before he could let the line collapse, and until he knew that number, the line held.
The Cintran levyman on the left of the half-circle was losing ground.
Two inches, then four, a soldier’s slow irreversible arithmetic of fatigue versus fresh weight.
In forty seconds the left side gave and the doorway opened and the children at the sally-port were still not through it.
The air went out of him in a low, sustained push — not a gust, longer than that, the kind of working he’d been practicing on the tannery roof with chalk-dust and had managed directed once in seven tries, and that was a month ago with no one trying to kill him and a full stomach.
He felt the line in his sternum go hot and aimed it at the doorway’s open left side, not at the soldiers coming through it but at the doorway itself — the column of air between the lintel and the floor, thickened until it pushed back.
Not a wall.
A friction.
A door made of resistance.
The two Nilfgaardians who’d been stepping through the opening found the step didn’t complete.
Not dramatically — they didn’t fly backward.
They pushed and the doorway pushed back, not hard, just enough that the step cost twice what a step should cost, and a man already working didn’t have twice to spend, and the left side held for thirty-two more seconds.
Thirty-two seconds was enough.
The last of the civilians went through the sally-port.
The sergeant turned from counting and saw Adam, who was now on one knee behind the courtyard wall with his hands flat on the ground because the working had cost more than he’d budgeted and he needed the ground under his palms to stay oriented.
The sergeant looked at him.
Looked at the doorway, which was behaving oddly.
Looked back at Adam.
He did not ask.
He said: “Can you hold that longer?”
“No,” Adam said, honestly.
“Then hold it five more seconds.” And he turned and said something quick and flat to his remaining levymen, and the levymen moved — not retreat, a redeployment, the difference between men abandoning a position and men vacating it on purpose — and at five seconds the pressure at the doorway released and Adam let the working go and the Nilfgaardians came through the open doorway into a courtyard where the Cintran levymen were no longer standing.
The sergeant was already at the sally-port.
“Move,” he said, to Adam.
Adam moved.
On the other side of the sally-port was a service alley, narrow, running along the keep’s outer wall.
The levymen were already funneling the civilians north along it.
The children moved the way children moved in emergencies — fast and silent, because they were old enough to understand that silence was what the adults needed from them and they were willing to give it.
Nine names.
Adam could hear them under his breath as he checked each face.
“You’re with us now,” the sergeant said, not looking at Adam.
He was still counting.
“Wind-boy.
Whatever you are.”
“Adam,” Adam said.
“Brennan.” The sergeant — Brennan — looked up from his count and weighed Adam with the fast, practiced assessment of long command and was judging.
“You’ve got maybe thirty seconds before they figure out the courtyard is empty.
There’s a servants’ stair at the north end of this alley.
It goes up to the keep’s lower gallery.” He paused, half a second.
“The girl is up.”
Adam had not told him why he was here.
Brennan had not asked.
“The children,” Adam said.
“The children are going north and west with Henryk and Ser Ren.
They know the route.” Brennan’s voice was the same register for the children’s route as it was for everything else — flat, precisely informative, without drama.
“I’m going back in.”
Adam looked at him.
Brennan was already looking back at the sally-port.
“I’ll come back,” Adam said.
Brennan said nothing, which was his answer, and Adam filed it — the weight of a promise given to a man who didn’t believe in promises but had accepted it anyway, who was already turning back toward the fight, who was going to count his names into whatever came next and not stop counting until there were no more names left to count or he wasn’t able to count them.
Adam ran for the servants’ stair.