They crossed two days early.
That was the plan Nathan had settled on through the waiting week. He wasn’t going to move on the bar night itself, arriving blind with the hour already running out, but ahead of it, with time to learn the ground.
He’d have two days to find the tavern, walk its street, learn the lanes around it, the lamps, the watch posts, where a person could stand and see the door without being seen. He’d have Two days to find a corner to lie low in, so when Nolan’s night came, Nathan wouldn’t be hunting through a strange district against a clock.
’It isn’t good to rush a thing like this. You’re meant to get there early and then let it come to you.’
He’d thought about leaving Kira, and every time the thought crossed his mind, he put it down. Two days and more was far too long for a small girl alone in a ruined house.
The girl was quiet and quick, and she’d survived worse company than his.
So when the full breath of the dark came, they went together, down through the sleeping low quarter to the tannery row, through the brambles, into the culvert’s cold wet mouth, and under the wall into another country.
"Stay close," he murmured, as they came up out of the ditch into the shadow of the cooper’s yard. "We keep off the main streets. If I say run, you run and you don’t look back for me. I’ll find you."
Kira gave a solemn nod, her new tunic already smudged from the culvert.
The middle district at night was another country.
Lamps on iron posts, actual glass in the windows, streets wide enough for two carts to pass.
Even the air here smelled different. Of bread, pitch, and clean water instead of the low quarter’s smoke.
Nathan kept himself and Kira to the seams of it, lane to lane, working toward the tavern quarter.
Entering the place wasn’t even a crime. An irony. Literally anyone could walk through the district gates in daylight with a pass, and the pass cost money. That was the whole damn system: coin, or family already living inside, or a trade seal.
It was a wall built out of fees. And the low district stayed low because the toll to leave was set just past what the low district could pay.
Nathan had a dead slaver’s purse that might have covered one pass, once, with nothing left after.
But a boy buying passage with blood-money coin was a boy who attracted attention. And attention was the one thing Na that could never afford again.
See, being caught sneaking meant he was going to end up in a cell. And ending up in a cell meant a name. And his name, on a guard’s report, traveling up through the city’s spine toward the palace, meant men with knives finding out that the boy from the low district hadn’t stayed dead.
So he was left with only his limited options: culvert, shadows, and the seams.
And they were just two streets away from the tavern when it went wrong.
A door suddenly flipped open.
It wasn’t even a watch post. It was just a side door on an ale-house kitchen, spilling sudden yellow light across the lane.
A guard stepped out of it with a meat pie in one hand. It was obvious that he was off his rounds. He stole a bite, and stopped mid-chew, staring at the two hooded figures frozen eight feet away in a lane where no one honest had a reason to be.
For one heartbeat, nobody moved.
But then the guard swallowed his mouthful.
"Oi." He set the pie on the step unhurriedly. He seemed more bored than alarmed. "You two. Let’s see your passes."
’This is bad.’
Nathan’s mind spiralled through it.
He had pass. Hell, he didn’t even have a story. All he had was a scarred throat under this hood and a face that was supposed to be in a beast’s belly.
The guard took a step closer now, his hand drifting to his belt as he squinted his eyes, starting to actually look at them—
Nathan grabbed Kira’s hand and bolted.
"HEY!"
They tore down the lane. And behind them the whistle came in three short blasts, shrill as a kettle, and the night drowned it.
A came voice from the next street, followed by another whistle in the distance, relaying.
Then came the sounds of thumping boots.
"Runners! Two runners, tanner’s lane, heading east!"
Nathan gritted his teeth, clenching Kira’s hand.
’Faster.’
He cut them left through a gap between houses, right along a fence line, left again, building the turns.
Kira flew beside him lighter than he was, quicker through the gaps, her hand locked in his.
He could have gone alone, Wind-Strided clean away in three bursts. The thought had crossed his mind, but he killed it in the same instant.
The whistles multiplied.
It was the thing he hadn’t understood about the middle district until right now: it was organized. The low district watch was four men and a dog. This was a web, with posts every few streets, all of them pulling toward the whistles.
And with every turn Nathan took, another lamp swung into view ahead, another voice called a heading, another pair of boots joined the drum behind them.
"Cut them off at the cooper’s row!"
’They know the ground. It’s their ground.’
He doubled back through a stable yard, over a low wall as Kira scrambled and he hauled, moving down a lane that smelled of wet hides.
Torchlight bloomed at the end of it.
Nathan spun. Another torchlight behind, swinging around the corner they’d just taken, three men wide.
He looked left. There was a wall too high to climb with Kira there.
He looked right. There was a shuttered row with nowhere in it.
Nathan breathed out softly, pulled Kira into the last gap available, a cramped yard between a warehouse and the district wall itself.
And he knew, as his feet chose it, that his feet had chosen wrong.
There were stones on three sides.
The wall at his back, sheer and lamplit. One other mouth to the yard.
And the mouth filled as guards poured into it.
Two, five, eight, spreading into a line, torches up, blades out now, breathing hard and angry from the chase as more boots arrived behind them.
A sergeant shouldered through.
He was an older man. Flat-eyed. He took in the cornered pair with the unhurried satisfaction of a man whose night had just gotten interesting.
"Nowhere left, lad," he said with an amused voice. "Hoods off. Both of you."
Nathan put Kira behind him, against the stone.
His mind chilled to ice as he sorted it.
There were Eight men, and my were coming.
He had one dagger, a rock, a wolf in the dark of him, a skill that ate his life whenever he used it, and a body that could survive anything they did to it.
That was the exact shape of the trap. And he saw it close around him even as the guards did.
He could not die here. Because dying wouldn’t stop them. He’d wake up hours from now in a guard-house or a dead-cart with his name in a ledger, and that was its own disaster.
But the reason he couldn’t die was worse, far worse. It was something that turned his blood to water:
Kira couldn’t come back.
Every path out of this yard ran through violence. and violence in a box this small with blades this close meant her, caught in it, one stray thrust taking away her life for good.
His only advantage in all the world was worthless the moment they’d cornered someone he couldn’t lose.
The sergeant ran out of patience.
"Take them!"
The line came forward. Torches, steel, and eight men closing in on a boy and a girl with a wall at their backs.
Behind Nathan, small and clear in the shrinking space, for only the third time since he’d known her, Kira whispered:
"They’re going to catch us, aren’t they?"
Nathan frowned, staring at them.
Were they?