Six hours earlier, the problem had been the sleeves.
"The sleeves," Gerffron said to the tailor's assistant who was making marks on the lining of a charcoal evening coat with a piece of chalk, "are doing something I would describe as enthusiastic. I don't have enthusiastic sleeves in my daily life and I'm not certain I want them for the winter ball."
The assistant — a young woman of approximately nineteen who had been fitting people for two years and had developed the specific comprehensive patience of someone for whom the range of opinions available about sleeve width held no further surprises — looked at the sleeves.
"They are the current fashion," she said.
"I'm aware of that," Gerffron said. "But I'd like, if possible, to be the current fashion without the sleeves being more present in the room than I am."
From the chair near the fitting room entrance, Selfi said flatly: "He means make them smaller."
"I understood what he meant," the assistant said, and began making different chalk marks.
The boutique occupied a prime position on the capital city's main shopping street — the kind of establishment that had been dressing noble households for generations and had the specific quiet confidence of a place that did not need to display its credentials because its credentials were the building itself. The quality of the cloth. The unhurried expertise of the staff who moved through it with the ease of people in possession of all the time in the world because the people they served had always been willing to pay for that time.
Lady Elowen had commissioned this visit with the specific, compressed fury of a woman who had been publicly embarrassed and who had decided that the most effective response was to ensure that the source of the embarrassment was at least impeccably dressed for the next public occasion, so that no one could add badly turned out to the list of things being discussed.
She had intended to come herself.
Her arthritis had made the decision for her at the seventh bell of the morning, arriving in her hands with the comprehensive, unignorable quality it produced on cold autumn days. She had sent Gerffron with Selfi and two of the household's senior guards — large men named Pell and Orrath who had the expressions of people assigned to a task they considered beneath their professional dignity — and had given the boutique her detailed written instructions regarding cut, colour, and the specific nature of formal wear appropriate for a consort who would be making his second public appearance after an extended absence.
The fitting had been proceeding for an hour.
Four coats.
The first dismissed on grounds of colour. The second on the lining. The third in a silence sufficiently eloquent that the assistant had begun bringing the fourth before Gerffron had finished with the third. The fourth was the charcoal one with the enthusiastic sleeves, which were now being addressed.
"I'll step out," Selfi said, standing. "The front of the store has the formal waistcoats I wanted to look at for the estate's secondary staff. I'll be back in fifteen minutes."
"Take your time," Gerffron said, which was said to her retreating back as she moved through the fitting room curtain.
The assistant measured.
Gerffron stood still in the way that people stood still in fitting rooms, which was the particular patience of someone who had surrendered their autonomy to the requirements of the tape measure and was waiting for the requirements to conclude.
He heard the back door open.
Not the fitting room's main entrance — the specific sound of a different door, from behind the tall shelving unit at the room's rear, which he had assumed was a wall and which turned out to contain a door he had not been looking at because he had been looking at the enthusiastic sleeves.
The assistant had her back to it.
The sound was quiet. Purposeful. The sound of a door opened by someone who had assessed exactly how much noise its opening required and had applied exactly that amount.
He turned.
The two men who came through the back door were moving with the specific controlled speed of people who had done this before — not running, not announcing themselves, using speed and quiet together because they knew that speed and quiet achieved simultaneously were more effective than either alone.
The first man was carrying something in his left hand.
Gerffron saw this, processed it, and stepped back in the same motion — knocking into the assistant, who made a startled sound and dropped her measuring tape. The backward step bought him approximately one second of distance, which was not enough but was all that was available.
"What—" the assistant started.
"Get out," Gerffron said. He did not look at her. He looked at the two men. "Now. Through the front. Go."
She froze.
She was nineteen and had no frame of reference for this and the freeze was what people did when they froze, and he made the rapid calculation that she was not the target and that the two men were not paying attention to her and that the freeze was a complication and a temporary irrelevance simultaneously.
The first man reached him.
He was bigger than Gerffron — most people were bigger than Gerffron, this was a constant he had long since integrated into his physical calculus — and he moved with the specific competence of someone who had been trained rather than someone who fought from instinct. Trained was more dangerous in some ways and more predictable in others, and Gerffron had been paying careful attention to what was available in the estate's library during two and a half years of house arrest, which had included, among the histories and legal texts, a small but substantive section on the principles of unarmed defense.
He had read it.
He had practiced the applicable elements alone in the cedar bedroom during the long confinement months.
This was not the same as training.
It was considerably better than nothing.
He got his elbow into the first man's throat before the man's hands reached him — not a decisive blow, not something that ended the engagement, only something that changed its quality, that told the first man the person he was dealing with was not going to make this easy.
The first man coughed.
He did not stop.
He got his hands on Gerffron's collar and pulled, and the pull had the anchoring quality of someone who knew what they were doing with a grip, and Gerffron felt the balance shift and stepped into the pull rather than against it — which was worse in the short term and bought a fraction of a second in the longer one — and got his knee into something and felt the slight loosening that meant the something had registered.
"Stop moving," the first man said, through his teeth, and his voice had the flat professional quality of someone for whom the instruction was not a request but a piece of operational information being delivered.
"No," Gerffron said.
The second man had come around the shelving unit.
He was now between Gerffron and the fitting room's main entrance.
The assistant had, at some point in the past thirty seconds, made her decision about the freeze and had reversed it — he heard the curtain swing and her feet on the main floor and her voice calling something he couldn't parse through the noise of the engagement, and then those sounds were outside the room and the room had only the three of them.
He fought.
Not well — there was not a version of this fight that was going well for him, two trained men in a confined space against one person who had read a library book about defense and practiced alone. But he fought with the complete, unelegant commitment of someone who had survived the east tower and a fever and an assassination attempt and two and a half years of calculated degradation and had no interest whatsoever in being the person who gave up.
He got someone's finger.
He heard a curse — short, sharp, the involuntary kind.
The first man's grip tightened.
The second man moved behind him.
He felt the needle before he saw it.
The specific, point-accurate sting of something entering the side of his neck — so precise and so sudden that for a moment it had no meaning, was only itself, was only the sting, and then meaning arrived in a single word:
Drug.
He kept fighting.
He fought through the first thirty seconds of it with the stubborn, slightly desperate quality of a person who knows what is happening and cannot stop it but is not going to cooperate with it. The drug arrived in layers — first a warmth that had nothing to do with warmth, then a loosening of the precise edge of things, then the specific alarming disconnection between what he was telling his body to do and what his body was actually doing.
He fought until he couldn't.
The fitting room went sideways.
The back door opened.
He was carried through it.
The alley behind the boutique had the specific, utilitarian smell of service alleys everywhere — refuse and autumn cold and the backs of things. He was aware of it in fragments.
The cold of the stone through the thin fabric of the fitting coat. The sound of the two men — words, low, the specific murmur of a conversation with a plan. The narrow strip of autumn sky visible between the pressed buildings above him, the same gray sky he had been looking at for three years from the estate windows and from the garden and from the library's northern aspect, unremarkable and vast and familiar.
He tried to speak.
What came out was not words.
He tried to move.
The drug had comprehensive opinions about this.
He was lying against the alley wall and the two men were doing something at his periphery and the drug was doing its work and he was aware — in the specific, frightening, stripped-down way of awareness that arrived when the normal filtering layers had been removed — that the situation had a direction he did not want it to have.
He had survived the east tower.
He had survived the assassination attempt.
He had survived two and a half years of everything the household and the Crown Prince had arranged for him.
He had not done all of that in order to die in a boutique's service alley wearing a half-fitted charcoal coat with revised sleeve measurements.
This thought arrived with the clarity of something that was not entirely rational but was entirely true.
He tried to move again.
He heard something from the alley's far end.
A sound that was different from the sounds of the two men — arriving from outside rather than from within, carrying a different quality, the quality of something purposeful coming from a direction the two men had not anticipated.
He heard the compact, specific sound of impact.
He heard another.
He heard the sound of a large person encountering a wall at speed.
The weight against him shifted.
He heard nothing from the two men after that.
Footsteps approached — unhurried now, with the particular quality of someone who has resolved the urgent part and is moving through the aftermath.
Hands. Different from the hands before. Careful, checking, the hands of someone trying to understand the situation rather than impose something on it.
He tried to open his eyes.
He got them approximately halfway.
He saw a face.
The drug made the face unreliable — softened its edges, gave it the dreamlike quality of things seen through a substance not finished with him yet. But the face was — the face was—
He knew this face.
He had known this face for twelve years.
The face that had come through the dungeon bars with books and food and the quiet, revolutionary quality of someone who had decided to see him as he was rather than as the household's convenience. The face that had pressed two pebbles into his palm on the morning of the escape and held his hands closed around them for a moment before letting go.
The drug made his vision swim.
The face remained.
He thought: I am dreaming.
He thought: I am very drugged and I am hallucinating the thing I have wanted most because the drug produces what you want and this is what I want.
The face said something.
The words did not arrive intact.
He thought: even the voice is the same.
His eyes closed.
The alley was cold.
The hands that held him were not.