After the guild sale, Thomas left his father and Arthur and went to find the others.
He located them in the outdoor market three streets over, which took about thirty seconds because the outdoor market had a current running through it that was easy to follow — people looking in one direction, turning as they passed, the specific pattern of a crowd that has noticed something worth noticing.
The something worth noticing was his mother, sister, and Maren.
Three weeks of dragon meat and bone broth had been working on everyone in the household, but the household had not been in public since it started, and Thomas had adjusted to the changes gradually and therefore had not fully accounted for what the cumulative result looked like to someone seeing it fresh. He accounted for it now.
Mira had always been pretty. What she was now was something that required a different word. She stood taller — half an inch, maybe more — with the posture of someone whose frame had finished becoming what it was built to be. Her hair was the blonde it had always been but with a shine that the tired version had not had. Her skin was the skin of someone twenty years old who had slept well every night of those twenty years. She moved through the market in the dragon leather coat she and Clara had made— deep brown, perfectly fitted, the material sitting with a quality that no tanner in Thornwick had ever produced — and people got out of her way before they had consciously decided to.
Clara beside her was a smaller version of the same fact, twelve years old and already carrying the specific promise of what Mira's bone structure and Edric's height and three weeks of dragon did when combined in a child who had also been receiving pit session energy for eighteen months. Her hair had gone lighter than it had been in autumn, almost sand-colored, and she had Kiiro on her shoulder and the expression of someone who was enjoying the market thoroughly and was also tracking everything in it simultaneously.
Maren had grown in the months since arriving — not just taller, though she was that too, but the specific growth of someone whose body had been given what it needed after a period of having been given very little.
They were looking at a merchant's display of worked copper goods — Maren had paused at a set of kitchen implements with the eye of someone who understood what good tools looked like — when Thomas felt the shape of the situation change.
He had his father's awareness for that. The way a space shifted when the people in it had reorganized around a purpose.
He looked up.
Both ends of the alley between the copper merchant and the cloth stall beside it. Four men at the far end, three at the near. Not merchants. The knives came out without much ceremony — these were men who had done this before and had assessed the group as rich, unguarded, and an easy proposition.
'Purses,' the nearest one said. 'And those fancy rings. And the bags. Nice and simple.'
Kiiro dropped from Clara's shoulder to the ground.
Bella, who had been on Mira's shoulder doing what Bella usually did when in public which was observe everything with the grey eyes that missed nothing, sat up straight.
Clara looked at the men. She looked at Kiiro. 'Hang on,' she said to Kiiro. 'I've got these.'
She reached into her dimensional storage.
◆ ◆ ◆
The staff had been a winter-long negotiation.
Clara had wanted a weapon since October, which she had communicated to Arthur with the persistence of someone who had identified a need and was not going to let it go unaddressed. He had built it over two weeks in December, between other projects, and given it to her on a morning when she had not been expecting it: a staff in dark hardwood, her height, balanced for her current reach and weighted to account for the growth he had enchanted it to accommodate. The tip was set with a small enchanted crystal that delivered an electrical discharge on solid contact — calibrated, he had told her, to incapacitate. Not to kill.
She had spent the rest of December practicing with the dummies in the basement.
She cast the boost spell first — the accelerant Arthur had shown her, a weaker version of his full acceleration working, enough to push her speed and strength and reaction time above her already-upgraded baseline. The world slowed slightly at the edges the way it did when the spell settled in.
She looked at both ends of the alley and picked the far group first because there were four of them.
The nearest bandit saw her move and then did not see anything else for several seconds. She had crossed the distance before he could take notice and the staff had connected with his sternum with a crack that sent him into the stone wall behind him hard enough to dent it. The electrical discharge hit simultaneously. He was unconscious before he reached the ground, with the specific thoroughness of a body that had received more information than it could process at once.
Clara looked at the dent in the wall. She looked at the man on the ground.
She needed to work on her control. Arthur had said this. She was beginning to understand what he meant.
The second man swung at her. She stepped inside it and the staff came up and around and the result was the same as the first — the bone crack, the wall, the dent, the unconscious heap at the base of it. She was moving before he had finished falling.
The third had the sense to back up. She followed and he went into the wall the same way the others had, slightly harder because she was still calibrating, and the wall had an opinion about this that it expressed by cracking in a vertical line from the impact point upward.
The fourth ran. She let him go because four was enough and because Arthur had told her there was a difference between necessary and excessive and she was working on understanding where the line was.
She turned.
Bella had already handled the three at the near end with the specific efficiency of a grey and white cat sith who had been waiting patiently for the humans to finish and had then done in forty-five seconds what would have taken a trained soldier longer. Two of them were on the ground. The third was pinned against the wall by a paw on his shoulder with an expression of someone who had genuinely not understood until this moment what a cat sith was.
Bella looked at Thomas.
Thomas stepped forward and took the man from her with a grip on the collar, the way you accepted something from someone who was handing it over. He was not injured because he had put himself between Maren and his mother and the three men and had stayed there the entire time.
◆ ◆ ◆
The city guards arrived four minutes later. Clara gave a brief account. The guards looked at the men on the ground — three of them showing the specific combination of wall-shaped injuries and electrical burns that the staff produced — and then at Clara, who was a beautiful teenage girl holding the staff and looking at them with the patient expression of someone who had finished what she was doing and was waiting for the administrative portion to conclude.
They arrested the men.
Mira had already returned to the copper goods stall. The merchant, who had watched everything from behind his display, gave her a price on the kitchen implements that was approximately forty percent below what he had been planning to ask. She thanked him and paid and moved to the next stall.
Word had moved through the outdoor market. The merchants, they passed for the rest of the afternoon looked at the group with both respect and fear. The prices they offered were good. Nobody in the outdoor market of Vareth that afternoon found it difficult to give the blonde woman in the dragon leather coat a very reasonable deal.
◆ ◆ ◆
They found Arthur and Edric near the river gate at the appointed time.
Edric looked at Clara, who was putting her staff back into her dimensional storage with the air of someone returning a tool to its correct place after a job.
He said nothing. He put his hand briefly on top of Clara's head, which was his version of several things, and she accepted it with the specific composure of someone receiving a verdict that was satisfactory.
Then Clara opened her mouth.
'So,' she said, 'I've been thinking about what to call it, and I think the Battle of the Alleyway Thieves is accurate while also capturing the — '
'Clara,' Lyra said.
' — the specific nature of the conflict, which was that they were in an alley and they were thieves, so it's really a very precise — '
'Clara.'
' — description, and I think when we tell this story later — '
'We're not going to be telling this story later,' Arthur said.
Clara looked at him. 'I single-handedly protected the princess and defeated six men.'
'Four men. Bella defeated three. You did protect the princess though.' Arthur said as he looked at his mother.
'Bella and I defeated six men, two of whom required wall surgery afterward, in the Battle of the Alleyway Thieves.' She looked at the group. 'I think that's worth at least a name.'
Saya had her hand over her mouth. Maren was looking at the cobblestones with the expression of someone who was not going to laugh and was working very hard at it.
'Wall surgery,' Lyra said.
'They hit the wall quite hard,' Clara said. 'The wall needed attention afterward.'
'The wall — ' Lyra started, and then stopped, because she was losing the battle with the laugh and she knew it.
She lost it. Maren lost it at the same time. Saya had already been gone for thirty seconds. Even Thomas's jaw had done the thing it did.
Clara stood in the middle of it with the dignity of someone who had named a battle and would not be moved on this.
'Dimensional storage,' Arthur said, to the group. 'Everything in, then we leave.'
They loaded their purchases into their respective dimensional storages — Lyra's books, Mira's fabric and copper implements, Saya's spice package, the various smaller purchases that had accumulated through the afternoon — and walked to the mill shadow at the river's edge, with Clara providing a detailed tactical breakdown of the Battle of the Alleyway Thieves that nobody asked for and everyone was too occupied with not laughing to interrupt.
Arthur pulled the transit open.
They went home.