The Rider moved first.
There was no warning in her face. The gentle-eyed woman in white and blue simply inclined her head, as though asking for q pardon, and then her staff came around in a blinding arc toward Mash's skull.
Mash got the shield up. The impact cracked across the ruined street like a battering ram striking a gate, and Mash, fully braced, boots planted, slid backwards through the soot two full paces before she caught herself.
"She's strong," Mash reported, and Griswald heard the disbelief threading under her steadiness.
"Forgive me." The Rider's voice stayed soft, almost motherly, her indigo hair settling back over her shoulders as she reset her grip on the cross-topped staff. "You seem like such a good girl. I would so much rather not be doing this."
Then she came in again, and the gentleness of her stopped mattering entirely, because every swing carried the weight of a landslide behind it. The staff blurred white and gold. Mash turned the first blow off the shield's face, caught the second on its rim, and the third drove her back another step, her arms shuddering behind the steel. The Rider's robes whipped around her long legs as she pivoted, the heart-shaped opening at her chest straining with the torque of each strike, and her serene expression never once broke, which made it all so much worse.
The Saber chose that moment to join her.
"En garde, then."
The duelist in teal flowed in from Mash's left, rapier extended, all lean limbs and silent grace, and the first thrust came flickering at the gap between Mash's shield and her shoulder pauldron. Mash wrenched the shield across to catch it. The Rider's staff slammed into the other side in the same breath. Mash pivoted between them, shield swinging like a door on a broken hinge, catching rapier and staff by turns, her boots scribing desperate arcs in the ash.
Griswald watched, chest locked tight, and found he could not look away from the Saber's face. There was something deeply wrong with how beautiful the duelist was, that soft jaw, those pale lashes, the golden hair falling across one blue eye as the rapier wove its silver net. His thoughts snagged on that loveliness like wool on a nail, and for a strange stretched instant he forgot that they are trying to kill his Servant.
Griswald tore his eyes back to Mash, heat crawling up his neck, and Ritsuka grabbed his arm hard enough to hurt.
"Don't look at them," she hissed. "Whatever that is, don't look at it."
"Easier said." He dragged his focus where it belonged.
Mash was holding. Impossibly, she was holding. The staff came down like judgment and she met it. The rapier darted for her throat, her hip, the tendon behind her knee, and the shield was always there, always a heartbeat ahead. She gave ground in inches and took none of it back, but she gave it slowly.
"Oh, well done." The Rider sounded genuinely pleased, and she spun her staff once, loose and easy, before bringing it down with both hands and every scrap of her weight. The blow cratered the street under Mash's boots. "It has been so very long since anyone made me put my back into it. I almost feel rude thinking otherwise."
"Master." Mash's voice came tight through clenched teeth, shield trembling under the press. "Stay in the pocket. I have them. I have them."
But Griswald had already half turned, because behind them, Jeanne was losing.
Jeanne Alter fought with a sword in one fist and her black standard in the other, and she swung both like a butcher with a grudge.
Her blade came around in wide, savage arcs, nothing schooled, nothing Griswald could name, and every cut landed on Jeanne's banner with enough weight to send sparks skittering off the iron haft. Jeanne turned each stroke on the banner's pole and answered with its butt, short driving jabs at the copy's ribs and jaw. One cracked off a shoulder plate. The woman in black rocked with it, rolled her neck, and laughed.
"The saint of Orléans hits like a milkmaid."
Her standard swept low. The spearhead at its tip carved a furrow across Jeanne's greave, and when Jeanne hopped the return stroke the copy was already pressing in, sword and spear working in ugly concert, high, low, high. Jeanne's flag blurred to meet all of it, and every meeting cost her ground.
"You wear my face." Jeanne's breath came shorter with every parry. "You have nothing of my arm."
"This is your arm." Golden eyes went wide with delight. "This is what it looks like when it no longer has God to puppet it."
She thrust both weapons outward, and the street erupted.
Flame tore up through the cobbles in black-red geysers, a line of them racing straight for Jeanne. She wrenched the banner around and the fire broke on its cloth like surf splitting on rock, and the heat rolled all the way to Griswald and stole the breath out of his chest. Jeanne stood inside it, armor glowing at the seams. She did not fall.
She came out of it slower.
Overhead, the great green dragon wheeled a lazy circle, its shadow dragging across the street like a hand over a table.
A crack like a felled tree hauled his attention back. Mash had caught the Rider's staff full on the shield's face and ridden the blow instead of fighting it, skating back over scorched earth, and the instant the staff's weight passed she lunged in behind it and rammed the shield's rim at the robed woman's midsection. The Rider slipped aside with a, mantle swirling, and brought the staff down through the space Mash's skull had occupied half a breath earlier. Paving stone cratered.
"You are quick shield girl." The Rider sounded fond, and not a strand of indigo hair had escaped her circlet. "It almost makes me mad. This whole thing would be so much easier if you were some lowlife in need of some tough love."
"Then stop." Mash's boots scraped for purchase.
"Orders, dear. Nothing personal."
The duelist flooded into the gap the staff left, rapier stitching silver at every seam of Mash's armor. Mash turned two thrusts on the shield's rim, took a third on the vambrace, and answered with a straight bash that the Saber swayed away from, chin-length golden hair floating with the motion, one blue eye mild above the guard. Griswald's gaze snagged on that face, the soft jaw, the pale lashes, and something warm and wrong uncoiled behind his ribs before he bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted iron.
"You're doing it again." Ritsuka's grip dug into his arm.
"Looking at Mash." He lied.
He tried to make it true. He watched Mash hold two servants off by herself. The morning's transfer hummed off her in slow, rich waves he could feel down the contract, and she spent it like a miser, no step wasted, the shield arriving where it needed to be a half instant before each blow. She gave the staff and the rapier her inches and yielded nothing else.
The Saber lunged, she caught the rapier in the crook of the shield's cross, and for one heartbeat they stood locked, face to face.
"Your guard is beautiful." The duelist's voice curled low and warm through the space between them, a man's and a woman's at once. "Will you not lower it for me? Only a little."
Mash's shield dipped an inch.
Then her boot came down on the Saber's instep and she heaved them back into the Rider's path, and the two tangled for one precious second while she reset her stance.
"I will not." Mash settled her feet. "You may keep asking."
Behind her, the fire came again.
And again. Each geyser forced Jeanne to choose between the banner and her body, and she chose the banner every time, letting flame lick up her arms while she kept the holy standard between herself and the killing strokes. Blisters rose along her forearms. Smoke curled off her sleeves. No wound that mattered yet, Griswald saw, nothing deep, nothing that bled freely, but the small costs were stacking, and Jeanne Alter stayed fresh, tireless, fed from some bottomless well of hate.
"Come on then!" The sword rebounded off Jeanne's raised flag hard enough to buckle her knees. "Burn for me. You rehearsed this once already, so the memory should come back quickly."
Jeanne's answer was the banner's butt driven at the other's face, and for the first time the copy jerked back rather than through, blood threading from one nostril. Jeanne could not press it. She stood panting inside her own scorched shadow while Jeanne Alter touched the blood on her lip, studied it, and smiled with all her teeth.
"Tell me when the fire climbed your legs." The copy's voice mockingly asked her. "Did He say anything at all?"
"If you are me you know the answer."
The snarl that twisted Jeanne Alter's face belonged to something feral.
She stopped taunting. She simply attacked.
The black sword came down in a chop that Jeanne caught on the banner's haft, and the impact folded Jeanne's elbows and drove her to one knee on the cobbles. Alter ripped the blade free and swung again before Jeanne could rise, a horizontal cut meant to take her head, and Jeanne dropped flat beneath it and rolled. The sword chased her, biting stone where her body had been. Again and again each miss carving a smoking groove through the street.
Jeanne came up with the banner's butt driving for the copy's knee. Alter took the hit on her armored shin without flinching and answered with a front kick that landed square in Jeanne's midsection. The breastplate held. The breath did not. Jeanne flew backwards, hit the ground skidding, and used the banner as a crutch to wrench herself upright while Alter strolled after her, rolling her shoulders, the crimson lining of her cloak dragging through ash.
Flame burst off the copy's shoulders like oil catching. She swept the sword through the air and a wall of black-red fire rolled down the street, waist high and roaring. Jeanne planted the banner and once more the fire split around the holy cloth, but splitting it cost her. Griswald saw the cost plainly from where he stood. Her stance had gone narrower. Her breathing had turned ragged and audible. The burns along her forearms had cracked open and wept down her gauntlets, and the violet fabric at her sleeves had charred to black lace against her skin.
Alter reached her in four strides and the real beating began.
Sword and flag worked in a rhythm without pattern, slash, thrust, slash, the butt of the standard cracking off Jeanne's pauldron between cuts. Jeanne turned the blade, caught the spearhead on the banner's iron ferrule, and the copy simply hit her with a gauntleted fist instead, snapping her head sideways. A backhanded cut followed and opened a line across the armor at Jeanne's hip. Jeanne's counterblow with the flag's haft landed flush against Alter's ribs and the copy absorbed it like a door absorbing a knock, then trapped the banner under her arm and hauled Jeanne in close, helmet cracking forward into her face.
Jeanne's head snapped back. Blood sheeted from her nose.
"Jeanne" Mash's voice cut across the street, tight with alarm.
She moved to assist. The shield dropped into a charge stance and she broke from the pocket, three sprinting strides toward the two Jeannes, and the Rider was simply there, robes swirling, the cross-topped staff already descending.
Mash caught it on the shield. The blow landed like a dropped cart, and the Rider did not stop at one. She rained the staff down in overhand arcs, each strike carrying her full weight and a whip of her hips, the bodice of her white gown straining with every swing, and each impact punched Mash backwards a half step no matter how she braced. Mash tried to slide out wide and the staff swept low instead, cracking against her greave, nearly taking her leg from under her.
"Where are you going?" The Rider's voice stayed sweet as warmed milk, utterly at odds with the violence her arms were committing. "Your fight is here. With us. It seems you need to be taught some lessons in manors."
Mash feinted left and exploded right, shield tucked, aiming to bull past along the Rider's flank. Silver flickered in the corner of Griswald's eye. The Saber flowed into her path as though the duelist had read her intention, rapier extended, and Mash had to wrench the shield up or take the point through her throat. The blade kissed off the steel rim and immediately lanced for her side, her elbow, the exposed strip of stomach in her bodysuit, three thrusts so fast they blurred into one continuous silver line.
Mash batted two away and twisted from the third. The tip still parted fabric at her hip and drew a thin red thread across her skin.
"Persistence is admirable." The duelist's tone drifted warm, that voice that was neither a man's nor a woman's, pale lashes lowered over one visible blue eye. "But I cannot allow it. Do stop trying."
Behind them, Jeanne hit the ground.
Alter had trapped the banner again and simply ripped it sideways, tearing it from Jeanne's grip for half a heartbeat, and in that opening her sword pommel crashed into Jeanne's temple. Jeanne sagged. A kick to the stomach doubled her. The standard's spearhead raked a shallow furrow up her back as she turned away from it, cutting cloth and scoring the armor beneath. Jeanne rolled and came up with the flag reclaimed, blood sheeting from her nose, one eye already swelling.
She was losing and everyone in the street could see it.
Mash tried again. This time she did not feint. She lowered her shoulder and rammed the Rider outright, shield first, pouring mana down her arms until the cross etched on the great shield glowed. The Rider skidded backwards through the soot, robes snapping, one full pace, two, and for an instant the lane to Jeanne stood open.
The Saber filled it. The rapier wove a fence of silver across Mash's path, and behind it the Rider planted her feet, caught her own backward slide, and came surging back with the staff whirling in both hands. Mash met the first blow high and the second smashed into the shield low, and then the two Servants worked her together, staff and rapier, crushing and piercing, herding her backwards step by step like sheepdogs working a stray.
Griswald felt the mana bleeding out of Mash through their contract, felt her frustration like a second pulse. With his mana in her she could win if she was alone. He knew it watching her. But she did not have enough in her to handle hem both, yet both stood between her and Jeanne.
Griswald's mind spun and caught on nothing.
He worked the problem the way he counted inventory shelf by shelf, and every shelf came up bare. Healing magecraft that only mattered once the damage was done. A gift that could refill a body's fluids and nothing that could reach across fifty metres of burning street.
Ritsuka turned to Griswald. "Your the master here think of something."
"I am thinking."
"Think faster."
Silence stretched between them, and that silence frightened him worse than the fire.
Down the street, Jeanne went to one knee inside a ring of black flame, and Mash stopped retreating.
Griswald felt it through the contract before he saw it, a hard, hot pull on his reserves as Mash planted her boots, took the Rider's staff full on the shield, and shoved back.
"Jeanne needs me." Ash puffed around her heels. "Move."
She drove forward into the gap, and the Rider's soft, motherly face lit up like a festival lantern as she was pushed back.
"Oh." The saint's smile spread wide and bright, and something ceremonial slipped off her posture the way a cloak slips from a shoulder. "Oh, good. There is a spine in there. Come on, then, shield girl. Come on."
She drew her arm back and threw the staff.
It came end over end like a siege bolt, the gold cross shrieking through the air, and Mash swung the shield up and batted it aside with a crack that rang off the housefronts. The staff spun away and buried itself in a wall forty paces off.
In the heartbeat that left the shield high, the Rider came in beneath it with her hands empty.
Her fist landed on the shield's face with a sound like a maul splitting oak. No windup. No arc. The blow simply existed, born somewhere inside the last inch of travel, and Mash's whole body slid backwards over the soot, boots ploughing twin furrows.
The Rider followed. She stepped inside the reach of the great shield, where it had no purchase, and her hands blurred. A palm cracked against Mash's vambrace. An elbow kissed off the shield's rim and dragged her guard wide. A short knuckle strike found the joint of her shoulder and turned her right arm heavy and numb.
Rider-B changed her whole fighting style faster than she was actually fighting. The woman in white hit harder with bare hands than she ever had with the gold cross, every blow compact and total, her hips and the stamp of her armoured shoes doing work his eyes could not parse.
"Her fists." Ritsuka's voice cracked upward. "Why are her fists worse than the staff?"
The Rider's veil tore loose and floated off down the street. Indigo hair whipped around her face as she worked, and the heart-shaped opening at her chest heaved with every breath, sweat tracing down her throat and vanishing into her cleavage, her breasts straining the bodice with each stamp of her feet. The gentleness had not left her face. It had caught fire.
Mash rammed the shield at her, a straight bash with all her weight behind it. The Rider slipped inside the arc, brushed the shield past with one forearm, and set her palm flat against Mash's exposed stomach.
The strike lifted Mash off the ground.
She flew two meters and landed on her shield arm, rolling, and came up with blood at the corner of her mouth. The hit echoed down the contract like a struck bell, and Griswald's knees went watery with it.
"Get clear of her," he shouted, and knew it for a useless prayer even as it left him.
Mash circled instead, hunting the angle toward Jeanne, and the duelist in teal slid into her path.
Her eyes flicked to the rapier. That was the mistake. The blade dipped, and over its guard the Saber's face tilted up into hers, one blue eye soft beneath the sweep of golden bangs, lips parted in something between a smile and an invitation.
"There you are." The voice curled through the din, warm as a hand at the small of the back. "Look at me. Only a moment."
For Mash the world went soft at its edges. Griswald felt it even from where he stood, his own focus sliding toward that face like water down a drain, and for Mash, standing inside arm's reach of it, the moment swallowed everything.
The Rider's knee arrived in her side.
Mash folded around it. A palm cracked across her cheek and spun her half around, and only the shield, dragged up on raw instinct, caught the follow-up fist that would have put her into the ground.
"Their face!" Griswald cupped his hands around his mouth. "Mash, every time you look at their face you stop! Don't look!"
The Saber tipped the wide blue hat at him, courteous as a dance partner, then flowed back toward Mash's flank. "Sadly she keeps looking. I have worked hard to make myself something all who gaze upon me would find lovely. She simply is among them."
"I am not." Mash spat blood and reset her stance.
The Rider laughed, bright and huge, rolling her shoulders as she stalked forward again, gold bracelets chiming against her wrists. "This is the most fun I have had in years. Don't you dare fall over yet."
Mash gaze went hard. She feinted at the Saber and wheeled on the Rider, the shield's edge chopping for the collarbone, and the Rider took the blow on a crossed forearm, grinning into the impact, and answered with two punches that shuddered through the steel like depth charges. Mash gave a step and ripped it back, ramming the rim at the woman's hip, and for a moment it worked. The robed figure skidded sideways through the ash, mantle swirling around her long legs.
The Saber caught Mash's eyes again.
It happened between one breath and the next. The duelist simply presented, chin lifted, pale hair drifting, that soft mouth curved, and Mash's gaze snagged, and her legs forgot their business, and the Rider's fist came around the shield and buried itself in her ribs.
Mash hit a stone wall hard enough to crack it. She slid down it and forced herself upright, chest heaving, the bare strip of stomach in her armor slick with sweat, her braid coming loose strand by strand.
"She can't look at them." Ritsuka's nails dug crescents into Griswald's sleeve. "And she can't fight the other one blind. There has to be something. Anything."
Griswald scanned the street, the fire, the dragon's shadow dragging overhead, Jeanne on one knee inside the flames with blood running off her chin. His mind turned every option over and dropped each one. No runes left. No terrain to use. Nothing to offer Mash but mana she already had in plenty, and mana could not teach her how to beat a brawler who outboxed a shield and a swordsman who weaponized a glance.
Mash fought the next exchange with her gaze fixed on the duelist's boots, and it cost her. The rapier lived in her blind spots now, kissing at her gauntlets, drawing feints her ears could not read, and every slowed reaction bought the Rider another opening. A fist found her shoulder. An elbow found her jaw. She stood through all of it, shield turning in widening, desperate arcs, and gave ground one bleeding inch at a time.
"Still standing." The Rider bounced on the balls of her feet, flushed and shining, sweat darkening the white fabric between her breasts. "Wonderful. Wonderful girl. Again."
Mash tried again.
She lowered her shoulder and drove at the seam between the two Servants, shield tucked, boots churning ash. For three strides the lane stood open. Then the Rider slid across it like a door swinging shut, smiling, and her bare fist met the shield's face with a crack that rolled off the housefronts. Mash skidded backwards. The Saber's rapier arrived to greet her, silver stitching at her flank, and she wrenched the shield around and caught it, and the whole grinding dance resumed.
"Persistent." The Rider bounced on her toes, flushed and glowing. "I adore it."
Something in Griswald's chest pulled taut and stayed there. Then the sound from down the street changed, metal on metal, the rhythm gone wrong, and he made himself look at the other fight.
Jeanne was barely fighting at all.
She stood inside a ring of scorched cobbles with her banner gripped in both hands, and she swayed between breaths. Her braid had come half undone, gold strands plastered to the sweat and blood on her cheek. The burns along her forearms had split open and run, and the fingers of her left hand kept flexing on the haft, as though she had to keep reminding them of their job.
Jeanne Alter circled her without hurry.
And she looked, Griswald realized with a cold slide in his gut, almost offended.
"That's it?" The copy's sword hung loose at her side. "That's the whole performance?"
Jeanne said nothing. She raised the banner an inch.
"What is this shit." Alter tipped her head, the black horn of her headpiece catching the firelight. "You cannot imagine how long I pictured this. The saint on her knees in front of me. I thought it would feel like something." Her mouth twisted. "Instead you're making it boring."
She came in fast, three strides, and her sword slammed into the banner's haft. Jeanne rocked with the impact and answered with the flag's butt, the same short jab that had cracked armor earlier in the fight.
Alter twisted and let it slide past her hip.
"Too slow, saint."
Jeanne swept low at the copy's knees. Alter hopped it, landed, and backhanded the flat of her blade across Jeanne's shoulder, a slap rather than a cut. Contempt given physical form. Jeanne staggered and caught herself on the flag.
"There." Alter spread her arms, her crimson-lined cloak dragging through the ash. "There's the rally. The last stand. Come on, then. Give me the version they all sang about."
Jeanne tried.
Griswald gave her that, watching from fifty meters away with his heart jammed against his ribs. She set her ruined hands on the haft and drove forward, and for four exchanges the banner lived again, butt and ferrule and iron-shod length working in the old rhythm, and one blow landed flush against the copy's breastplate hard enough to knock a snarl onto that pale face.
Then the tank ran dry.
The fifth swing came out slow. Alter caught it on her sword, turned it aside, and stepped in along the banner's length. Jeanne's counter arrived a full breath late. The copy ducked it without looking, golden eyes fixed on Jeanne's the whole time, bright and starving.
"Oh." Wonder crossed her face. "You're empty. You're actually empty."
She brought her own standard up and crossed it against Jeanne's.
The two hafts met with a crack, black iron against holy wood, and Alter leaned her weight down the locked poles and drove Jeanne backwards until the saint's boots lost the ground. The copy pressed in close. Closer. Her face came within inches of Jeanne's, and Griswald could see Jeanne's arms shaking against the lock, elbows buckling, the banner groaning in her grip.
"Want to know what I think?" Alter's voice dropped, intimate, almost tender. "I think His plan for you ended at Compiègne. When the gates closed with you still outside them."
Jeanne's jaw clenched. Blood threaded from her nose down over her lips.
"The Lord does not abandon."
"He abandoned you outside a wall." Alter smiled with all her teeth. "He watched them drag you off in chains and He did nothing, because you were finished. Spent. A tool at the end of its use. And instead of lying down like a good little hoe, you made them burn you to shut you up."
She broke the lock.
There was no technique in it. She tore the crossed hafts apart and Jeanne's strength had no answer left. The banner wrenched sideways. Alter's gauntleted fist came through the gap and cracked into Jeanne's cheek, and Jeanne hit the cobbles flat on her back, the flag clattering loose beside her.
The sound carried down the whole street.
"Jeanne!" Mash's voice went ragged, and Griswald felt her lunge through the contract, felt the Rider stop her cold, the impact shivering back to him like a plucked wire.
Alter stood over the fallen woman and rolled her shoulders, in no hurry at all. She set one armored boot beside Jeanne's head and studied her the way a person studies something broken in the road.
"Do you know the worst part?" She twirled the black standard once, loose and idle, the wicked spearhead at its tip catching the firelight. "I kept the seat warm for you. All this rage. All this fire. I thought you'd climb up here and meet me at the top of it. Instead I get this." She prodded Jeanne's shoulder with her boot. "A hollow girl praying to an empty chair."
Jeanne's hand moved, groping across the cobbles toward the banner two feet away.
Alter put her boot on the flag's haft.
"I don't think so."
She raised the standard high above her head, both hands, spearhead angled down at Jeanne's heart.
The standard came down.
Griswald's whole body locked around the sight of it, the black spearhead falling toward Jeanne's heart, and beside him Ritsuka made a sound he had never heard from her, a raw and wordless rejection of what they were both watching.
"Jeanne!"
He could not reach her.
He could not reach her.
She was going to slip threw his hands again.
He was going to let her die just like Olg…
Between the spearhead and Jeanne's chest, the air folded into a wall of clear glass.
The spear struck it dead centre and the wall burst. Crystals exploded outward in a glittering cloud, hundreds of them, thousands, bursting around Alter and Jeanne in a storm of chiming shards that caught the firelight and threw it back a hundredfold. Alter recoiled from the detonation, cloak whipping up to shield her face, and the spearhead's killing line died against a rain of glass.
"Oh, thank goodness, thank goodness, I made it!"
The voice rang across the street like a bell at a festival, bright and bubbling so wildly unsuited to a battlefield.
Griswald's head whipped toward the duelist in teal at the sound they made, because something strange had happened to Saber-B. The color had drained out of that lovely face. The soft mouth had pinched with pain, and the rapier hung forgotten in a slack hand, its owner staring past every enemy in the street as though that voice had run them through more cleanly than any blade could have.
"Amedée." The voice called out again. "I need you. Play. Play now."
The music answered.
It came from everywhere at once, and Griswald, who had grown up within train rides of Vienna and Salzburg, who had sat in gilded halls and heard orchestras that people crossed continents to hear, understood in the first three bars that nothing in his life had prepared him for this. The strings did not sound played. They sounded remembered, as if the ideal of music had descended from wherever ideals live and taken up residence in the ruined street. It rolled over the rooftops. It flew past the cobble stone. It entered each person there filling them with the sound of art being created for the first and last time. As no one else could ever replicate what had just been played.
For Griswald Von Garmisch it was the pinnacle of music for the enemy servants it was poison delved most sweetly.
The Rider's next step came down slow, her bare fist half raised, her flushed face gone puzzled and heavy-lidded. The duelist swayed where they stood. Even Alter's advance hitched, her golden eyes blinking against the weight settling over her limbs, and the black flames wreathing her shoulders thinned and guttered like candles in a draught.
Mash did not wait for permission.
She ran. Griswald felt her draw on the contract and spend, pouring mana into her legs, and she crossed fifty meters of burning street in heartbeats, shield tucked against her side. She hit the crystal field, dropped to one knee beside Jeanne, and hauled the half-conscious saint up against her shoulder.
The enemy shook off the music's grip one by one and moved to cut her down.
"Stop her." Alter's snarl cracked through the melody. "Bring me back... ME!"
The Rider obliged, and the street answered before she got three paces.
Glass rose out of the cobbles. It flowed upward in the shape of men, knights in old French harness, clear as window panes and hard as the stones they were born from. One caught the Rider's fist on a crystalline shield and punched her backwards with a glass gauntlet. Two more closed on the duelist, blades of faceted crystal sweeping at the teal coat, and three planted themselves between Alter and Mash and simply would not move.
Griswald watched, transfixed, because some of the knights wore a familiar silhouette. Lean frames. Chin-length hair rendered in frozen glass. A cavalier's hat suggested in crystal above slender shoulders. The street had conjured a small army of d'Eons to fight the real one.
"Master." Mash reached them with Jeanne braced against her, the saint's boots dragging lines through the soot. "She's breathing. Her pulse is strong. She needs you."
Griswald's hands were already moving, finding burns, sealing splits, and the voice sang out again, closer now, bright enough to outshine the fires.
"You're alright! Oh, I'm so glad, I'm so very glad you're all alright!"
They appeared together at the far end of the street, strolling out of the settling crystal dust as though arriving at a garden party.
She came first, and Griswald forgot how to arrange his face.
The girl was petite, but built like something a master craftsman had made to be worshipped. Hair of palest silver spilled from beneath an enormous red mushroom cap trimmed in black ruffles and crowned with a cream bow, flowing in long silky falls well past her waist. Her crimson dress clung to a torso so slight he could have spanned it with his hands, then flared into a short jagged skirt over layers of dark ruffles that ended high on thighs sheathed in tall white boots. Her legs went on forever in defiance of her height, slim and pale and perfect, and her bare arms moved with a dancer's grace as she waved at them. Huge blue eyes dominated a small porcelain face, and every centimeter of her skin glowed with a luster that made the crystal knights look like crude imitations of her.
Griswald's mouth went dry. He had been desensitized by the finest teacher alive. It did not help him at all.
The man beside her stood taller than any man had a right to while staying graceful, pale as candle wax, his long face sharp and aristocratic beneath an impossible fall of silver-blond hair that swept back and curved outward in two strands like horns. His ears tapered to elegant points. He wore fitted black ornamented with green leaf shapes and white scrollwork, a wide purple sash knotted at his narrow waist, and a vast cloak with a golden lining that billowed around his willowy frame like a second sky. His long gloved fingers moved a conductors wand through the empty air in front of him, and wherever it gestured, the music bent to follow.
Her gaze swept the four of them and landed on Griswald, and she smiled at him.
It was warm. It was radiant. It hit him somewhere behind the ribs and sat down like it owned the room.
"You wonderful, wonderful people." She clasped her gloved hands beneath her chin, rocking on the toes of her white boots. "You did so well to last this long against my silly little knights' bad mood! Truly, magnificently well. I saw it all and my heart went pitter-pat the entire time!"
Behind her the glass knights still fought, crystal ringing against the Rider's fists and the duelist's desperate rapier. The music swelled and pressed the enemy down again.
She spun toward them with her arms flung wide, silver hair flying, her enormous bow bouncing, and her voice rose into a cheer that belonged at a parade.
"Vive la France!"
Then her smile turned conspiratorial, one finger pressed to her soft lips, and she stage-whispered the word like the world's most delightful secret.
"Now Run!"