This was their last chance. Eckhart set her jaw and closed her eyes for the space of a steadying breath. Of all she’d overcome on Fier’s behalf, they could not be blockaded here. Tonight would fall as it may; they could reassemble the pieces in the morning.

“Don’t touch me!”

The all-too-familiar words tore through the rustle of voice and fabric, and Eckhart’s attention snapped back to the dancefloor even as she stepped forward to intervene.

“I said don’t!” Louder this time. Guests fell silent, turned to look. The string quartet stuttered to a halt. Eckhart ducked and twisted between the slowing dancers.

“I barely even—”

“Just stop!” Fier’s voice lifted again in open, strident distress. “Why is it so hard to listen?”

There. As if at the center of a small explosion, Fier and his partner, a freckled redhead blushing as dark as her hair, stood in the middle of a ring of their increasingly alarmed peers. Fier stood with a shoulder hiked, one hand against the nape of his neck and the other arm hooked around his ribs as if he’d been stabbed. The young lady had stepped back and kept her hands tucked against her chest, evidently more perplexed than upset.

Eckhart wedged herself between the two and, as Fier recoiled as if struck, dropped a hand to the pommel of the sword at her hip. “What happened?”

“Nothing.” Fier shot a glance at his partner. “It was nothing.”

Eckhart caught the prince’s wrist, pried his arm away from his midsection. No blood – no injury. “Look at me.”

But the prince kept his gaze averted. He tried, in vain, to wrench his arm from Eckhart’s grasp. “Nothing happened. Let me go.”

“He said it was nothing,” the prince’s partner put in. Her face was still flushed, and her hands were still curled inward as if they were weapons to be held in check. “It was a– a misunderstanding.”

Nothing. Always nothing. Fier tried again to pull his arm free, and Eckhart let him go. “You need to—” Her voice was too clipped; she tried again: “Your Grace, please – none of this tonight. We need to--”

Fier jerked away – breaking free from the conversation as forcefully as he’d broken his keeper’s grasp – and, without preamble, stalked through the parting crowd. Eckhart would have been content, in some capacity, to allow Fier to disappear into his room, even if the diplomatic consequences of the prince’s dramatic departure caused far more ill than good. But Fier made no move for the staircase that led to the upper floors: he pushed his way toward the front door instead.