He was fighting two men at once and appeared to find this mildly inconvenient at most. No rage, no urgency, no wasted movement, just a cold and systematic efficiency that made the two men attacking him look clumsy by comparison.
He struck the first and was already turning to the second before the first had finished falling.
The torchlight caught him full for a moment. Broad through the shoulder, dark cloak, something carved and unhurried about his face.
Matilda realized her mouth was open.
She shut it.
She'd seen men fight her entire life. She'd watched her father's guards drill in this same yard every morning from her window above. She knew what fighting looked like, or she'd thought she knew what fighting looked like, but this was something she didn't have a word for.
It was almost like watching someone think. Quick and quiet and absolutely certain of itself.
She couldn't look away.
In the middle of an attack, with her father's men dying in the yard, she was standing completely still. That was what he had done — made everything else stop mattering.
Which was exactly why she didn't hear the man behind her until his arm was already across her chest.
The grip was hard and purposeful and dragged her backward toward the shadowed wall before she could get her feet under her.
She twisted, kicked backward, caught something solid with her heel, heard a grunt, but his grip only tightened and she felt the wall connect with her shoulder and then the ground connect with her knee and pain flared white and sharp up her leg.
She didn't scream.
She opened her mouth to, and then the man was simply gone.
Not stumbling, not retreating, gone, with a speed that took her a full second to account for.
There was a sound she didn't want to name and then a second man came from her left and was dealt with in the same unhurried, final way. Then the warrior was standing in front of her, not even breathing hard, looking down at her with black eyes that caught the torchlight and gave very little back.
She looked up at him.
He looked down at her.
"Can ye walk?" he said.
She blinked. Her knee was screaming. "Aye."
"Then walk."
He took her arm. Not roughly, but with the absolute certainty of someone who wasn't planning to be argued with, and moved her forward into the narrow corridor off the far side of the yard.
A storage room. She registered the shape of it, the low ceiling, the dark, and felt the first warning tightening in her chest before he'd even pulled the door shut behind them.
The latch dropped. The footsteps outside thundered past. And the darkness pressed in from every angle at once.
Matilda's breathing changed.
She couldn't stop it. She never could, not in the first seconds, not when the walls were this close and the light was this gone
Her hands found the nearest surface and pressed flat against it, and she counted the way she'd taught herself to count, one and two and three.
"Hey."
The door cracked open.
Two inches, maybe three, but enough. Torchlight spilled across the floor in a thin orange stripe, and the darkness stopped being absolute, and her lungs remembered what they were for.