They came through the barrier like it wasn’t there.

That was the first thing the leader — Bearfang, the older woman had called him, and the name arrived in the confrontation with the specific weight of a name that carried history behind it — registered when the older woman stepped across the rest stop’s perimeter with her iron-suited men spreading behind her and Lady Ankerita at her side.

His eyes went to her face.

Something moved in his expression. His jaw tightened. The pleasant certainty of the last several minutes developed a crack.

"Bearfang," she said again into the crack.

She smiled at him across the rest stop with the smile that was all edge.

He looked at her for a long moment.

Then at Ankerita beside her.

Then, at the iron-suited men spreading through the rest stop with the practiced efficiency of people who had been briefed and needed no further instruction.

"Ankerita," he said. The name came out level and controlled, the tone of a man choosing how to say a thing very carefully.

"You’re a long way from the Solhani territories."

"So are you," Ankerita said pleasantly.

"A long way from Roakan. A long way from whatever arrangement you made that let you bring a Tianlan across three borders without the Council knowing."

She tilted her head slightly. The silver at her temples caught the afternoon light.

"I’m curious about that arrangement. We can discuss it after."

"After what?" Bearfang said.

Ankerita looked at Jake.

Her eyes moved to the cauldron — to the orange light, to the tendrils wrapped around his arms and legs, and to the deep, rhythmic pulse that the bowl had developed in the last several minutes, a slow contraction and expansion of the light that had not been there when it first activated and that everyone in the rest stop was pretending not to have noticed while very much noticing it.

"After you let the boy down," she said.

Bearfang looked at her with the expression of a man who found a request reasonable in its phrasing and completely unacceptable in its content.

"The Tianlan is active," he said.

"Interrupting an active cauldron mid-extraction is—"

"I know what it is," Ankerita said.

The pleasantness dropped from her voice cleanly, the way a mask came off when the occasion for it had passed. Underneath it was something that had the quality of old iron — not heated, not agitated, simply present and very, very hard.

"Remove him from it. Now."

"I don’t think," Bearfang said, and his hand moved.

-

As soon as his hand moved, something happened in their surroundings.

The signal brought them out of the ground.

Or that was what it looked like — figures rising from positions of complete concealment in the grass, from behind the stone wall, from hollows in the earth that shouldn’t have held a person but apparently had, the eastern group’s reserves materializing out of the landscape with the coordinated suddenness of something that had been planned for exactly this contingency.

They came in hundreds.

Not a figure of speech.

They came pouring from the treeline on both sides of the road, from over the valley’s low ridge to the east, and from the concealment of the hill’s shoulder—organized, armed, and moving into formation with the mechanical precision of a force that had drilled this specific deployment until it required no conscious thought.

Eskar, standing at the rest stop’s edge, looked at them and arrived at the conclusion that he had significantly underestimated the scope of what was happening at this road rest on this valley road on what had begun as a reasonably ordinary afternoon.

Ankerita looked at the hundreds of men spreading through the valley, and her expression did not change.

She raised her right hand.

The air around her fingers moved.

Not visibly — not in any way the eye could follow — but the space around her hand developed a quality that the eye slid away from, the way the eye slid away from things it wasn’t equipped to process directly. Something deep blue and resonant, the color of ocean water in the deepest places where light changed its nature.

Class II Mage, Talent Rank 4.

The designation existed in the guild’s classification system as a number and a category. What it looked like, in actual practice, in the valley afternoon with hundreds of Eastern fighters spreading into formation, was something else entirely.

The wave of force she released was not loud.

It was the opposite of loud — a compression, a negation of sound, that moved outward from her raised hand in a visible ripple through the air and hit the first line of the eastern formation like a wall of still water. Men went backward. Not violently, not chaotically, but with the clean, total decisiveness of a force that had assessed resistance and found it insufficient.

A gap opened in the eastern line.

Ankerita’s iron-suited men moved into it before it closed.

-

Bearfang moved like his name.

He came in low and fast, both daggers drawn, the twin blades catching the orange light of the cauldron as he closed the distance to Ankerita with the committed momentum of a man who had calculated that offense was better than the alternative.

Class II, dual daggers, Talent Rank 3 — not her equal on paper, but close enough in practice that paper meant less than it usually did, and he moved with the specific efficiency of someone who had spent a lifetime compensating for every marginal disadvantage through technique.

The first dagger went for her throat.

She stepped — Ankerita’s step, the same lateral precision, the same committed geometry, the same family in the movement — and the dagger found air, and her left hand came around in a motion that trailed deep blue and produced a concussive impact that Bearfang took across the forearm and absorbed with a grunt, rolling with it, already repositioning.

"You’ve gotten slower," he said.

"You’ve gotten optimistic," Ankerita said.

The second dagger came in from below.

She raised a barrier — the blue deepened, sharpened, a plane of compressed force that the dagger hit and deflected at an angle — and Bearfang used the deflection’s momentum, spinning, the other blade coming around in the follow stroke that the deflection had set up, and Ankerita moved back and sideways, and the tip of the blade drew a line across her forearm that she looked at with the expression of a woman noting a minor inconvenience.

They separated, taking in a breather.

Ankerita was already in the fight — had been in it from the first moment, her short blade and hook-weapon working the space around her with the adaptive, opening-finding style that Jake had watched in the Greyswood and the rest stop’s chaos confirmed was not circumstantial but fundamental, the actual architecture of how she fought.

She was cutting through the eastern fighters between herself and the cauldron with methodical focus, her hook-weapon clearing space while her blade found the specific openings the clearing created, and the iron-suited men were spreading through the rest stop, engaging the eastern formation’s interior while Ankerita and Bearfang occupied each other’s complete attention.

Eskar had found a position behind the stone wall.

He had his crossbow and he was using it with the careful precision of a man who understood that he was the least powerful thing currently operating in this valley and was compensating through accuracy and target selection.

He looked at Jake every few seconds, thinking that he should just get rid of him in this chaos.