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The bolt clipped Ivy's neck a half second before Victor's sword came down where the hood used to be. She didn't scream. She grabbed my collar and hauled me sideways into the dark.
"Move," she said.
I moved.
Behind us the tunnel turned into a slaughterhouse of sound—steel on steel, someone screaming about royal guard, the hunters still ramming the door we'd come in through. Victor's voice cracked over all of it, ordering nobody in particular to hold the line, and none of it mattered because Ivy had her hand fisted in my shirt and she was dragging me toward a crack in the rock I hadn't even seen.
"There's no exit there," I said.
"There's an exit everywhere if you stop talking."
There was. A gap barely wide enough for my shoulders, freezing water at the bottom of it, and then night air and stars and the sound of the fight going muffled behind twenty feet of stone. We ran until my lungs gave out and hers didn't, which told me something about her I filed away for later.
We didn't get far enough.
A lantern swung up out of the dark maybe a quarter mile on, four of Victor's men on the road, spears low, and one of them already shouting for us to stop. I had blood on my sleeve that wasn't mine and a girl next to me who could've put a knife through my throat twenty minutes ago. Explaining any of that was going to get us both killed.
So I grabbed her.
"What are you—"
"Trust me for one minute," I said, and kissed her temple, sloppy, loud, the way a drunk merchant kisses his wife when he's had four ales and no sense. "Evening, gents. Rough patch back there, my wife's a little rattled, we were just—"
"Nobody's out past curfew," the lead spearman said, but his eyes had already gone soft the way men's eyes go soft when they think they've stumbled on somebody else's marriage instead of somebody else's crime.
Ivy caught up faster than I did. She leaned into my shoulder, hand flat on my chest, and made her voice do something small and embarrassed. "He gets like this when he's had a few. I told him the shortcut through the ravine wasn't safe."
"You're bleeding," the spearman said, squinting at her neck.
"Briar bush," she said. "Ask him. He picked the shortcut."
They laughed. Actual laughing, four armed men who'd have gutted us both an hour ago for being anywhere near that tunnel, and it worked because her hand was still on my chest and mine was still around her waist and neither of us had let go yet, even after the danger had technically passed.
They pointed us to a barn a half mile up, told us to get off the road before something worse than briars found us, and went back the way they came.
We didn't move until the lantern light was gone.
"You kissed my hair," she said.
"You put your hand on my chest like you meant it."
"I did mean it. I was checking for a second knife."
That was the last either of us said until we got to the barn.
Inside, straw and cold and one lamp she lit off a flint she pulled from somewhere I hadn't seen her hide it. She sat across from me on an overturned crate, knife back out, resting flat on her knee like it had never left her hand at all.
"So," she said. "Victor's dead men are going to remember a merchant and his wife. Not Ryan Ashe. Not a spy. That buys us maybe a day."
"You're welcome."
"I'm not thanking you. I'm telling you what it bought." She turned the knife over, once, slow. "What I want to know is why a man with a box full of forged stamps had that box ready to hand to Victor Lane like he'd rehearsed it."
"Because I had. Rehearsed it. I knew someone like him would come sniffing around Frosthollow's books eventually."
"That's not an answer, that's a dodge."
"It's the truth wrapped around the part I'm not giving you yet."
She stood up. Not fast, not dramatic, just enough that the knife came level with my throat before I'd finished the sentence.
"Here's my problem," she said. "Three thousand crowns says I bring back proof you're worth watching. Five thousand says Victor kills you tonight and calls it done. I don't know which one you're worth yet, and every minute I don't know is a minute I'm standing this close to a man who might be buying time to put a knife in me first."
"You've had two chances to do that to me tonight and you didn't."
"Doesn't mean I won't."
"Doesn't mean you will either."
She was close enough now that I could feel the cold coming off her sleeve, feel her breathing faster than she wanted me to notice, and neither of us moved for a long, stupid stretch of time that had nothing to do with the knife anymore.
"You want truth," she said finally, low, and let the blade drop an inch from my throat to her side, "then stay alive long enough for me to figure out if you're worth trusting. That's the only truth I've got tonight."
"Then tell me something true right back," I said. "Whose side are you on, Ivy? Mine, Victor's, or whoever's paying you?"
She didn't answer. Not because she didn't have one—because someone was already knocking on the barn door, three slow raps, deliberate, the kind of knock that isn't asking permission.
Ivy's whole body changed in half a second, knife gone from her side back into her sleeve, voice pitched to carry through the wood.
"Who's there?"
"Lord Lane's compliments," a man's voice said, easy, almost friendly. "He'd be pleased if the two of you came and watched the barn unsealing before you're on your way. Won't take but an hour."
Ivy grabbed my wrist under the cover of the lamp going dim, leaned in like she was about to kiss my jaw again, and instead put her mouth right against my ear.
"Go with them," she breathed, so quiet it barely moved air, "or you're dead where you're standing. But there's a dozen of them out there, Ryan, not four."
The knock came again, harder this time.