Boots sounded in the corridor.
Kavie turned before the figure reached the door.
Lieutenant Marrek entered with a short sword in one hand and blood covering the left side of his uniform. He had served as Saughtrick's second-in-command for eleven years. Valerie remembered him teaching Mira to cheat at knucklebones, carrying both sisters home after their mother's funeral because Saughtrick had been unable to carry anything except grief, and laughing too loudly whenever a room became solemn.
He was not laughing now.
"Step away from her," Marrek said.
Kavie looked him over. "Lieutenant. You ignored the hunt order."
Kavie turned the stolen sword in his hand, inspecting the blood. "I read it differently."
Marrek shifted between him and Valerie. "There was very little room for interpretation."
The lieutenant's damaged shoulder sagged, but his point remained steady. "I've never been much of a reader."
The old joke sounded exactly like Marrek, which made the room more unbearable.
His eyes found Mira. Something inside his face broke, but his sword remained steady.
"Valerie," he said, "left pocket."
She could not move.
"Val. Look at me."
She did.
Marrek's left pocket gave off a faint amber light. The paired crystal. Its other half belonged to the Gauntlet contractor he had recruited that afternoon.
Kavie noticed it too.
"Interesting," he said.
Marrek attacked.
He was a capable soldier. Against another man, his opening might have ended the fight. Kavie took one step, caught his sword at the guard, and drove a fist into the wound beneath his ribs. Marrek folded but did not fall. He seized Kavie's mantle and held on.
"Now, Valerie."
She reached his pocket.
Kavie struck Marrek across the face. Bone cracked. Marrek stayed between them, both hands locked in the knight's clothing, purchasing fractions of a second with pieces of himself.
Valerie pulled out the crystal.
It was no larger than a coin, pale and nearly clear. Hair-thin lines of amber ran through it toward a dark centre. Not Kureirr. Not a bonded flame. Something engineered from the same impossible principles as the arena breach, though smaller, damaged, and made for a single use.
"Where did you get that?" Kavie's pleasantness vanished.
Marrek smiled through bloody teeth. "Found it."
"That device belongs to neither crown nor church."
"Then losing it shouldn't trouble you."
Kavie drew his sword.
Marrek threw Valerie the crystal.
It struck her shoulder and broke.
Cold passed through her bones. The room narrowed to a line, then folded around a point she could not see. Mira vanished first. The floor disappeared beneath Valerie's hands. Marrek remained for one final heartbeat, standing crookedly between her and Kavie.
"Find K," he said.
Then the world tore her away.
The room reassembled without Valerie in it.
Marrek released Kavie's mantle and staggered backward.
The Holy Finger touched two fingers to the blood at his cheek. His expression had become thoughtful.
"A paired displacement," he said. "Crude. Illegal. Very rare. Someone wanted the captain's daughter alive badly enough to spend it."
Marrek spat blood onto the floor. "Perhaps you're unpleasant company."
Kavie looked toward the broken crystal residue. "The other half determines the destination. A person, not a place. A Gauntlet signature, unless I mistake the binding." His pleasant smile returned by degrees. "You have made this more interesting than the king's order required."
"Happy to help." marrek moaned.
Kavie moved.
Marrek blocked the first strike. The second opened his sword arm. He changed hands and attacked again because Valerie needed time to wake wherever the crystal had sent her, and because Saughtrick had once trusted him with two little girls after their mother died, and because there were some orders a man obeyed long after the person who gave them was gone.
He lasted eleven seconds.
Kavie lowered him beside Mira.
Marrek's final sight was the surviving breakfast cup at the edge of the broken table. Its handle pointed west.
He laughed once, though there was no breath in it.
Then Kavie the Brilliant ended him, a knife to his neck.
IV. The Distance Between Places
Valerie awoke with both palms pressed into wet grass.
The position was the same. The world was not.
There was no ceiling above her, only a clear autumn sky crowded with indifferent stars. Wind moved through a field of knee-high grain. Far away, a dog barked twice and received an answer from another dog. The air smelled of soil and approaching rain rather than blood.
She stayed on her hands and knees.
Her mind supplied pieces without order. Mira's eyes opening. Her father's sword. Marrek at the door. The crystal breaking. Kavie watching her face.
She tried to stand and vomited into the grass.
Afterward she sat back on her heels and waited to feel something that matched what had happened. Nothing came. Grief had not yet become pain. It was an absence too large to perceive from inside, like trying to understand the shape of a country while buried beneath it.
Lights glowed beyond the field. A village. Six clustered streets, perhaps seven, built around a road leading east toward Erenora. Valerie knew the road markers well enough to guess she was near Drierie, half a night's ride from the capital.
The displacement crystal had not carried her to a chosen refuge. It had carried her toward its other half.
Toward K.
She searched the grass for the broken device and found only three clear fragments already fading to grey. Each crumbled when touched. Whatever power had moved her was spent.
Valerie walked toward the village.
She did not remember crossing the first street. She remembered a woman drawing her child indoors after seeing the blood on Valerie's clothes. She remembered a shrine lamp burning green behind coloured glass. She remembered discovering that Saughtrick's spare sword had travelled with her because Kavie had left it beside her hand.
The blade was still wet with Mira's blood.
Valerie dropped it in the road.
She made it five paces before turning back.
Leaving it felt like abandoning her sister. Carrying it felt worse. In the end she wrapped the blade in her cloak and held it at arm's length, an object both sacred and ruined.
The village tavern was called the Stopped Wheel. Its painted sign showed a cart wheel held by a wedge in a way that suggested the artist had never seen either object working. Warm light filled its windows. People laughed inside.
Valerie stood across the road and hated them for it.
Not individually. They had committed no crime except continuing. Yet their ordinary evening seemed impossible. Her sister was dead. Her father would be executed in less than three days. Marrek had almost certainly died buying her escape. No room should contain laughter while those facts existed.
She entered anyway because the paired crystal had brought her here for a reason, and reasons were the only things holding her upright.