"You were not the target."
The raven-haired boy's voice carried no particular emotion not relief, not apology, not anything that suggested the distinction mattered to him beyond accuracy.
The kid's eyes were wide and fixed on Emerion, who was slowly pulling his palm away from the flat of the blade.
The cut across it was clean and already bleeding, but his hand had done what it needed to do.
"Why--" the kid started. Then stopped. He looked between the sword and the person who had stepped in front of it the same person who had called his father a fraud twenty minutes ago.
"Why did you do that?"
"I don't need a reason to do the right thing," Emerion said simply.
He turned to the raven-haired boy. Up close the boy was younger than the weight of his presence suggested perhaps fourteen, perhaps less. Long dark hair reaching his shoulders.
Green eyes that held the particular stillness of someone who has learned to keep everything behind them.
"That child was coming for me," Emerion said. "Not you. I hope the misunderstanding is clear."
"The misunderstanding," the boy said, quietly enough that it almost wasn't a statement, "is yours. Not mine."
Emerion's brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"
One of the guards stepped forward, pulling back his hood. Brown hair. A grin that had decided it was in charge of the situation.
"House Corvus has a rule,"
the guard said, with the casual authority of someone who enjoys explaining things. "When the blade is drawn toward a target, the blade finishes it. No exceptions."
The second guard removed his hood as well curly hair, a smirk sitting permanently on his face like it had moved in and stopped paying rent.
"If you think Mui is backing down because of a misunderstanding, peasant, you have badly misjudged the situation."
"I told you not to use that name," the raven-haired boy said. His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. Both guards straightened almost imperceptibly.
Two ravens facing opposite directions, Arlienne thought, studying the crest on their armor with the quiet attention of someone filing information away for later.
House Corvus. And a fourteen-year-old boy they call lord. She looked at the boy at the sword still in his hand, at the absolute absence of hesitation in his posture. Dear brother. You really do have a gift for walking into the center of things.
Her expression remained more curious than concerned.
"You have placed yourself between me and my target," the boy Anathema, the crowd had called him said, his grip tightening on the sword. "Therefore I shall finish you first."
"My, my. Mui" Arlienne stepped forward, addressing him directly and meeting his eyes without difficulty.
"You seem very eager. Surely we could find a way to resolve this through conversation."
Anathema's gaze moved to her. Something in it darkened slightly.
"You are interfering as well," he said. "So I shall finish you too." A pause. "And you used that name."
Arlienne read the room in approximately one second and concluded that conversation was not, in fact, going to resolve this.
She extended her hand.
Her trident materialized in her grip blue mana running through its length, the edges catching the light in gold. She rolled her shoulder once, settling into her stance.
"So she can use magic," the brown-haired guard said, looking between her and Emerion with the satisfaction of someone who has just confirmed a suspicion.
"Doesn't matter. You're still outnumbered. This ends before it starts."
"It'll be over in an instant," the curly-haired guard agreed, moving to position.
Emerion prepared himself. No staff. That fact was sitting at the front of his mind with the persistence of something that refused to be ignored. But the kid was still standing between all of them, and that was the more immediate problem.
Anathema moved first.
He came at Emerion with a speed that was cleaner than it had any right to be for someone his size fluid, economical, no wasted motion. The strike would have landed cleanly if Arlienne hadn't been already moving.
Her trident caught his sword with a sharp ring of metal on metal.
"You forgot about me," she said pleasantly, using the leverage to push him back several feet. "That was rude."
Anathema recovered his footing without stumbling. His expression flickered the briefest register of surprise before settling back into that detached calm.
On Emerion's side, his hands had begun to glow blue. Arlienne caught it from the corner of her eye.
"Don't," she said.
Emerion glanced at her.
"Zaltreign identifies you," she said quickly. "The moment anyone recognizes the spell, our cover is finished."
He shut it down. She was right and he knew it, which made it worse.
"Distracted?" the brown-haired guard said.
He appeared at Emerion's left without crossing the distance between them no wind-up, no approach, simply there.
His hand closed around the kid's collar and then he was gone again, reappearing a few feet away with the child under his arm.
Emerion turned, already calculating.
That speed. I tracked him for less than half a second. He covered ten feet and I missed most of it.
"Let him go," Emerion said.
"Come and get him," the guard replied.
Emerion moved. The guard smiled and threw the kid forward, and Emerion adjusted, reaching and the guard was already there again, the kid back under his arm, and his elbow connected with Emerion's stomach with a force that lifted him slightly off the deck before depositing him against the ship's wall with a sound that turned several nearby heads.
Emerion slid down the wall and stayed there for a moment, reassessing.
"Did you actually think I'd hand him over?" the guard said, holding the struggling child at arm's length with complete ease. "I'll keep playing with you while my lord takes his time with your sister."
"Let me go!" The kid twisted and kicked at nothing useful. "Let go of me right now"
"Nebelschlag," Emerion said.
Barely a whisper. He hadn't been sure he could manage it without a staff, not at this level of exhaustion but the mana responded, thin and unsteady at the edges but present, and dark smoke rolled out across the deck in a spreading wave that swallowed everything within thirty feet.
Inside the smoke, only the caster saw clearly.
The guard's grip loosened instinctively the particular response of someone whose primary advantage is speed and who has just lost the ability to see.
Emerion was already moving, closing the distance in four steps, pulling the kid free with one arm and driving his fist into the guard's face with the other.
The guard's head snapped back.
Emerion didn't stop to admire it. He turned and moved through the smoke toward the interior door, one hand on the kid's shoulder.
"You okay?" he asked quietly.
"I--yeah." The kid's voice came out unsteady, confused. The smoke was total around him. "I can't see anything."
"I know. Follow my voice. Keep moving."
He guided the kid through the door and into the corridor beyond, where the smoke thinned. The kid blinked, adjusting.
"Go find somewhere to hide," Emerion said. "Inside, away from the deck. Don't come back out until you hear nothing happening."
The kid looked up at him with an expression that had cycled through several things and landed somewhere between uncertain and something more complicated.
"Aren't you coming?" he asked.
"My sister is still out there," Emerion said.
He didn't say anything else. He turned and went back through the door.
On deck, the smoke was already thinning at the edges. Through what remained of it, Arlienne and Anathema were still moving neither giving ground, neither finding an opening, the fight having settled into the particular rhythm of two people who have taken each other's measure and are now looking for something the other hasn't shown yet.
Arlienne was good. She knew she was good. But Anathema was something she hadn't fully calculated, and she was aware of that fact with the focused attention she gave anything that surprised her.
His footwork is too clean for fourteen, she noted, deflecting a strike and redirecting rather than blocking. Trained from very young. Probably before he could hold the sword properly. And his mana
She felt for it automatically, the way she did with every opponent.
Nothing. A faint trace where the sword had been, nothing more.
He suppresses his mana signature. Actively, deliberately. That's not a natural ability that's a trained discipline that takes years to maintain in combat conditions.
"You're not bad," she said, meaning it. "But how long can you keep this up?"
"Ask your brother," Anathema said, with the closest thing to expression he'd shown. He glanced once toward where Emerion had been. "Not me."
Arlienne didn't look. She trusted her peripheral awareness and what it was telling her which was that the situation on that side of the deck had not improved. She kept her eyes on Anathema and her tone easy.
"I'll deal with your guards after I've finished with you," she said. "My brother can last a little longer." A beat. "Probably."
"Your confidence is excessive," Anathema said. "It's irritating."
He raised his sword toward the sky.
The mist came from nowhere not weather, not atmosphere, but generated, spreading outward from him in a ring that crossed the deck in seconds and wrapped around Arlienne with the completeness of something designed specifically for enclosure. Her vision blurred at the edges, then further.
He cast that, she thought, turning slowly, tracking sound and air movement where sight had failed. But I felt nothing. No mana discharge. No signature. How does someone cast without leaving a trace
The deck was silent.
Anathema was gone from where he'd been standing.
She turned again, faster this time, her trident up
"Game over."
The voice arrived from directly behind her.
She felt the edge of the blade at her neck before she completed the turn cold, precise, positioned with the calm confidence of someone who has done this before and found it sufficient.
Her eyes widened.
Not with fear, exactly.
With the specific expression of someone who has just encountered a problem they don't yet have an answer to and finds the experience, despite everything, genuinely interesting.