Chapter 17: The Valet

Haruka went down the ladder before Seraphine could finish the sentence.

She landed in the straw of the stable yard with a loaned sword in her fist, thirty feet from the valet.

He saw her, and the packet in his hand dropped.

"Captain Delamere," he said, in a thin voice. "You are supposed to be at the Prince's side."

"Funny. I thought you were."

He ran.

The innkeeper's man came out of the side door at the same moment, a big fellow in a leather apron, with a hay fork.

Haruka turned her shoulder to the tines and caught the shaft in her left hand.

She hauled him in by it, and drove her knee into his stomach, and he folded.

Then she put one boot behind his heels and shoved him backwards into the horse trough.

The water went up in a sheet.

A second man burst out of the barn with a lantern in one hand and a knife in the other.

Haruka took the lantern on her forearm.

The glass broke, and oil splashed, and the flame guttered out against her sleeve.

She put the flat of her sword against his wrist until the knife fell.

Then she drove her elbow into his jaw, and he sat down on the cobbles and stayed there.

The whole fight had taken less time than an ordinary warm-up set.

She turned around.

The valet had reached his horse, and he had one foot in the stirrup.

A woman in a brown cloak stepped out of the dark and took the bridle in her bare hand.

"I would not," Seraphine said.

The valet looked down at the hood.

Seraphine pushed it back.

What was left of the lantern light fell on a face he knew.

It showed walnut-stained hair, and a pair of green eyes with nothing kind in them at all.

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