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She didn't trust her magic in the cottage. Not with the Lodamante she'd carved still half-singing in the walls, not with Lysander already bleeding from somewhere she hadn't seen yet. Pirates were pouring down from the broken roof now in a steady black rain. The Templars in the doorway gave ground because they had no other choice, and the fight moved into the square.

She came out behind it and the square was already a different place than the one she'd crossed an hour ago.

The Crows had brought the ship down low enough that its shadow swallowed the fountain. Ropes hung from her belly like the legs of an enormous insect. Pirates went up and down them carrying powder kegs, ropes, bound men. Safira was already in the middle of it, shouting in the brisk cheerful voice of a woman whose week had been improved by violence.

"Strip their steel! No teeth left to bite with!"

Behind Idonea, the terraced houses where the witches were sealed in shook with fists. She heard her name, muffled, from somewhere in the second one — Kitsa, she thought, but didn't let herself turn. The Templars first. The witches were behind iron and they would stay there until there was something to come out to.

A mace came at her ear. Her hand was up before she'd seen it. The claws had been waiting, eager, since the cottage; she caught the mace on the downswing and let the Current spool around her fingers, and the metal went hot, and then it went apart. The Templar holding it stared at his empty grip for the half-second it took for one of Safira's crew to put a pistol against his temple.

Across the square, Lysander and the Grand Templar had found each other.

She knew the sound of Lysander's sword the way she knew the sound of her own breathing now. It was the sound that was wrong. Each strike was landing harder than it should and rebounding further than it should, and she understood watching them that Marcin was not just bigger than Lysander. He was the same as Lysander, only further along. Whatever the Eitr made of a body, the Grand Templar had been making of his for decades.

A Templar came at her from the side. She put a wall of Current up between them and it dragged her sideways with the strain. She hadn't slept. She hadn't eaten. A pirate caught the Templar's temple with the butt of his pistol before she'd to think about it.

The Templars were organising. She saw it in the same moment Safira did, the loose knot at the centre of the square tightening into a formation, the ones with maces still in hand falling back into a wedge, and the pirates getting cocky, getting close, getting cut for it.

"Hold them," Idonea said, more to herself than to anyone. Then louder: "Hold them. I'm going to move the ground."

Safira moved instantly, asking no questions.

Idonea opened her palm again and put her free hand flat against the cobbles. The Current went into the stone. The square buckled in a slow ring around the Templars, not enough to throw them, enough to take their footing, enough to push them inward. They stumbled into each other. The wedge collapsed back into a knot.

"Crows! Net them!"

The nets came from somewhere. Hooks bit into pauldrons. Chains went around throats. The Templars bellowed and their maces rang against the chain and their maces did nothing, and every time one of them tried to push out of the press Idonea cracked the cobbles again and they stumbled back in.

All of them except one.

The Grand Templar was carving a path through the chain as though it were rope, and the pirates who came at him went down without slowing him. He took a man's arm off at the elbow with one stroke. The next pirate he simply stepped on. His cleaver came back up clean.

Lysander went in again.

The Grand Templar caught Lysander's sword with his gauntlet, and the impact threw Lysander into the half-collapsed wall behind him hard enough that the stone gave. Idonea was running before she'd decided to run. Lysander pushed off the wall before she reached him. His mechanical arm was wrong. She saw it from twenty paces. The shoulder hung lower than the other, sparks at the elbow, the hand opening and closing in spasms.

He didn't look at her. He raised the sword again.

Something in her chest broke open at the sight of him refusing to fall.

"Enough."

She stopped trying to hold back the Current. Every weapon in the square went red in its bearer's hand. Templars cursed and dropped them. Steel hissed in the snow. The pirates surged in to take what was being dropped, and chain went around shoulders, and within thirty seconds there was only one Templar still standing.

He turned to look at her, and the look was a hammer.

"You."

He came at her.

Lysander cut across him before he'd taken three steps. The cleaver met Lysander's blade and went through it into the mechanical arm, into the joint where the brass met the flesh, into the gears. The arm seized and sparked. A sound from Lysander that wasn't quite a cry. He stayed on his feet. He didn't let go of the sword.

The Grand Templar staggered.

Idonea was already throwing what was left of her Current up out of the cobbles. Chains of it came up around his arms mid-swing. He pulled against them. The strain went through her wrists, and she leaned into it and pulled back, and he came down to one knee, and the cleaver came out of his hand.

She didn't kill him. Alcaeus wouldn't have liked that. There was enough Templar blood in the snow already, and besides, she wanted to know what Marcin would say, when he'd no choice but to say it.