Alarm bells were sounding all over the city; if the Prince had thought he was going to be able to carry this off quietly, he was going to get more than one rude surprise. At least the alarms had the effect of clearing the streets entirely. Kantor somehow redoubled his speed, and they shot through the gates going at such a rate that even Alberich was dizzy. And he was not going to think about what would happen if any of them tripped and fell—

There was no finesse in this. Down the road, in at the gates of the Home Farms, riders clutching their weapons in grim silence, hooves pounding like thunder—so loud they couldn’t hear the fighting ahead of them—

—so loud that the ambushers surely thought it was thunder—

And they didn’t even pause as they sighted their target. Just as the team had been taught, just as they had practiced for moons and moons, they crashed in among the milling ambushers, exactly as if it was a Hurlee skirmish. They broke into the mob around Selenay, and their sticks went to work.

In that first and last glimpse, Alberich got the sudden, heart-sinking realization that there were more of them than he had thought there would be, or than he had Seen. A lot more. The odds were roughly two-to-one, in fact.

Hard on the heels of that realization was another—he hadn’t heard about this down in the rough parts of Haven because the Prince hadn’t needed to recruit anyone for this plan. He’d brought them with him, in the guise of servants, of hangers-on, of sycophants.

And last of all—even as he raised his stick and Kantor ran straight into the horse of one of these pseudo-servants, he looked up and saw Selenay lose her sword—

—to Norris. Norris, who had regarded women as mere objects of convenience, and would no more hesitate to kill her than he would hesitate to kill a fly.

There was a bulwark of fighters three deep between him and her. There was no way he could fight his way to her in time.

And that was when he saw the incredible, the miraculous, the totally insane.

Eloran, coming in at full gallop from the side, where there was no one in the way; crashing into Norris’ horse.

Just as Mical rose in his stirrups, pushed off, and with the momentum of Eloran’s charge behind him, flung himself out of his saddle at Norris. Somehow he wrapped his arms around the actor when he hit, pinning Norris’ sword to his side as they tumbled out of the saddle to the ground. Somehow he managed to stay uppermost. They went over the side of the horse and out of sight.