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The blade sang an inch over his skull and Ivy's palm slammed him face-first into the dirt.
Steel bit stone where his head had been a half-second before. Chips of rock stung the back of his neck.
"Move." She already had his collar, hauling him up by it like a sack of grain.
He didn't argue. Three staggering steps and the tunnel spat them both out into torchlight, and torchlight meant people, and people meant this wasn't over.
Four of them. Victor Lane stood dead center, cloak somehow bone-dry despite the rain outside, three swordsmen fanned out behind him in a corridor barely wide enough for two men shoulder to shoulder. One blade was already up, point hovering level with Ryan's throat.
"Lord Lane." Ryan's voice came out steadier than his knees felt. "You really don't sleep, do you."
"Neither do debts." Victor held up a small lacquered box between two fingers—Ryan's box, lifted off his belt sometime in the scramble, the stamp pad and seal rattling inside. "This is cute. You carry your little merchant toys into a knife fight."
"Give it back and I'll show you a trick." Ryan grinned like the sword wasn't there. "I re-stamp that inheritance filing right now, right here, and you walk home holding a legal claim instead of a corpse. Corpses don't inherit anything, my lord. Learn that one for free."
Victor's jaw ticked once.
Behind them, fists hit the door they'd come through. Wood groaned. The hunters chasing them through the stable hadn't given up—they'd just gone around.
"Kill him." Victor said it almost bored, like ordering wine. "Five thousand, right now, and I'll throw the box in after."
Steel scraped and Ivy's knife was already there, crossing the nearest swordsman's blade a hand's width from Ryan's collarbone. Somewhere between the door and this second she'd put her body in front of his. He hadn't asked her to. He felt it anyway—the heat off her shoulder pressed near his chest, her breath gone flat and even, fight-ready, nothing like the woman who'd pressed a knife to his throat an hour ago and meant it a different way.
"He's not free anymore." Her eyes never left the swordsman's blade. "I paid three thousand for him."
"So I'm raising the offer." Victor didn't blink. "Five thousand for the same corpse. Take it or die matching it."
Three swords. One knife. A door about to give behind them. Ryan did the math the way he did everything—fast, cold, no room for the part of him that wanted to throw up.
The sword tip an inch from his throat drifted down, half an inch, Victor's men waiting on a word that hadn't come yet.
Ivy still hadn't sheathed anything. She asked it low, close enough that he felt the words more than heard them. "I paid three thousand for you. Prove you're worth more than what he's offering."
Ryan looked past her shoulder, at the box sitting in Victor's fist.
"I can't prove it." He said it plain, no grin left in it. "But you're short a signet ring, my lord. Which means you can't file the challenge yourself. Which means if I die tonight by anyone's hand but your own sworn witness, the filing on Frosthollow goes to arbitration and every creditor in three counties gets first bite before you do. Kill me for free, and you bankrupt yourself proving you did it."
"Liar." But the boredom had gone out of Victor's voice.
"Check the ledger office in the morning. I'll wait." Ryan spread his hands, slow, empty. "Or don't, and find out the hard way, same as everyone else who's called my gift useless."
Ivy's grip on the knife didn't ease. "That's not proof."
"No." Ryan admitted it. "It's not. It's just true enough that he can't risk somebody else's blade finishing what he can't sign for." He tipped his chin at the three swordsmen without looking away from Victor. "His lordship needs a name attached to this kill, not a hunter cashing in behind his back."
Victor's fingers whitened on the lacquered lid.
Then the steps came.
Not hunters—hunters moved loose and quick, boots skidding on wet stone. These came heavier, matched, four sets of feet landing together in the dark end of the tunnel like a drumbeat somebody had rehearsed.
Every sword in the corridor swung toward the sound.
A hooded shape stepped into the torchlight, hands already at the fabric, like whoever it was had been waiting for exactly this audience to gather first. Ivy's knife stayed up but her eyes cut sideways, once, toward Ryan, a question with no time left to ask it out loud.
"You can all stop pricing him." The figure pulled the hood back an inch, then another, voice pitched to carry down stone. "The heir named in Margaret Stein's will isn't—"
The name broke off.
Armor came clattering up the far end of the tunnel, torchlight flashing off plate, and somebody behind it bellowed a word that turned every hunter's face white.
"Royal guard!"
A hunter's finger closed on a trigger out of pure panic. The string cracked. The bolt left low and wrong, grazing a hot line across the side of Ivy's neck before it buried itself in the wall behind her.
She didn't have a second to touch it.
Because Victor's sword was already swinging backhand—not at Ryan, not at Ivy—at the stranger standing there with the hood still caught halfway down a face nobody in that tunnel had gotten to see yet.