She had the fire-iron raised like she was ready to use it, which she probably was.
The soldier was twice her size and had his hand out — not a weapon, a reaching hand, the kind of controlled grab that said I have been ordered to bring you undamaged and was about to discover that the girl had different opinions on the matter.
He’d gotten distracted by the fire-iron, which was the correct response to a fire-iron held by someone who was clearly willing to swing it, and so he hadn’t heard Adam come around the corner.
Adam had half a second before the soldier processed him and half a second before Ciri processed him, and neither half-second overlapped, which gave him one full second to act in the space between their attention.
He used it.
He inhaled — the Tell, the held breath, the habit he knew he had and had not fixed — and pushed.
Not a gust.
Something harder and shorter, the way the pressure-wall in Brennan’s courtyard had worked but faster, less sustained: a column of directed force, low and wide, aimed at the soldier’s center of mass.
The man’s feet lifted.
Not far, not dramatically, a ten-centimeter clearance that lasted half a second, and when he came down the landing was wrong because the balance had been wrong since the feet left the floor, and he hit the corridor wall sideways and his shoulder made a sound and he slid.
He did not get up immediately.
The recoil was instant — not pain, something colder than pain, a sliver of the thing the air was made of leaving him the way heat left a coal after you’d held it too long.
He’d used it against a person.
He’d known the cost was real, had read it in the powers-bible of his own memory, but knowing a cost and feeling it were not the same thing, and the sliver of lightness that went with the working was not replaceable in the same way that a caloric debt was not replaceable with willpower.
He breathed.
Ciri was looking at him.
The fire-iron was still up.
She was twelve, or near enough.
Ash-colored hair, cut short the way he remembered it, early, before the road and the rough life grew it out into something else.
Her eyes were green and currently doing the thing that eyes did when a mind behind them was moving very fast: assessing, discarding, reassessing.
The soldier was still breathing.
Ciri glanced at him, glanced at Adam, glanced at the corridor behind Adam.
“He’s the only one?” she said.
“Sweep-team,” Adam said.
“Behind me, probably sixty seconds.” He looked at the soldier.
“Don’t kill him.”
Her jaw tightened — the small, caught tightening of someone who’d been about to do exactly that and was now being told not to, which was not a response he’d expected.
He’d expected gratitude and received instead the very reasonable calculation of a twelve-year-old who had been alone in a burning castle for the past hour and had made certain decisions about her own survival. The source of this chapter is NovelPing.
“He’ll raise the alarm,” she said.
“He’ll raise the alarm from here or from the floor, and from the floor he raises it in thirty seconds instead of ten.” Adam was already moving, looking for the side door the chamberlain’s dying instruction had implied was there.
“We go, he raises it, we have a thirty-second lead.
That’s better than what we have now.”
He saw the door — servants’ access to the outer stair, iron handle, the kind of door that was meant to look like a wall panel and was not currently doing a very convincing job because someone had left it slightly ajar.
“Come on,” he said.
Ciri came.
Not because she’d been told to — the way she moved said she didn’t take direction from people she hadn’t decided to trust yet.
She came because the logic was right and she’d assessed it in the three seconds she’d had and reached the same conclusion he had.
They went through the panel door and onto the outer stair, which was cold — genuinely cold, the stone having never taken the fire’s heat this far out — and Adam shut the door behind them and heard the soldier on the floor beginning the slow process of remembering where he was.
They went down.
Four steps, then Ciri stopped and turned and looked at him, and the fire-iron was still in her hand and her eyes were doing the fast-assessment thing again, but this time the assessment was him, not the corridor.
“You knew where I was,” she said.
Not a question.
Not gratitude.
A voice that had understood this was the important thing and named it directly — the way people name a thing when they suspect the answer will not be the one they want.
Adam looked at her and thought about everything he could say and everything he could not say, and said: “I heard you.
From the scullery.
You were telling a soldier what you thought of him.”
“I was,” she agreed.
A pause.
“You came from the west.
The scullery’s east.”
He held her gaze.
“I know,” he said.
“I got turned around in the smoke.”
She looked at him for two more seconds.
The assessment went on.
Then she said, “The east stair’s going to be taken by now.”
“Agreed.”
“The servants’ postern.
Off the south courtyard.”
“It was overrun when I came up.”
“An hour ago.”
“Yes.”
She thought.
He watched her think — rapidly, practically, the way someone thought when they had been thinking about escape routes for the past hour and had more information than he did about the keep’s current state.
She was not waiting for him to lead.
She was deciding whether his read of the situation was worth incorporating into her own read of the situation.
“The laundry drop,” she said.
“There’s a shaft on the north face for dropping sheets.
It comes out in the lower courtyard.”
He had not known this.
His memory had not shown him this.
This was Ciri navigating a keep she had lived in for twelve years, and it was going to get them out.
“Lead,” he said.
She went down the stairs ahead of him, fire-iron in hand, and he followed, and the question she’d asked — you knew where I was — sat between them like a thing that had been put down for now but was not going to stay put.
He knew it.
She knew it.
They were both, for the moment, choosing the laundry shaft over the argument.