Lillian woke to the sounds of fighting. She was already out of bed, staff in hand, before she realized they were fainter than they would be if the sounds came from her rooms - the door would muffle them.

Her balcony doors were open. Celaena complained when they were, but Lillian had slept fitfully until she had given up and let in a breeze.

There wasn't anyone on her balcony though. Lillian slipped through the doors, keeping low, and realized that the sounds came from Dorian's rooms.

He has guards, she rationalized even as she bolted back through her bedroom and sitting room for the connecting door. It was locked and probably barricaded, as Chaol had promised.

The door connecting her to the hallway was locked too. She was going to have a stern talk with someone about not teaching her how to pick locks.

Back on her balcony, she could still hear people fighting. She stamped in frustration. Maybe she could get out through Kaltain's rooms? Too much time. Less time than standing uselessly on a balcony though.

Or -

She looked at the distance between her railing and Dorian's. It was considerable, or Chaol wouldn't have been so comfortable leaving her on the next balcony over, but Celaena said she used the windows and balconies to get all over. Surely that didn't only mean up and down.

If this worked, she was going to be so disappointed in Chaol's security.

Lillian ignored the little voice in her head that told her it was too far, she was going to fall and die, that wouldn't help anybody, she wouldn't help anybody, as she knotted her nightgown to the side and climbed to the top of the rail on the longest side. It was wide enough to place her feet easily, especially after all the practice with Chaol and Celaena.

Do it or don't, she thought, sounding like Celaena even in her own head, and ran.

She had expected to be terrified. She'd been wrong. The air lifted her hair and rushed against her face, and for all of the two moments she was airborne Lillian thought: nothing can touch me here.

Then she landed, foot catching the edge of Dorian's balcony rail and sending her sprawling. She knew how to fall, though: her parents had seen to that, so she ignored the bruise she could feel forming and rolled, fetching up against the opposite rail with an undignified 'oof', staff almost going out the side and over. She kept hold and staggered to her feet.

Two of the men in Dorian's rooms had noticed movement on the balcony and rushed her. She twisted, slamming her staff into the side of one's knee with a crack before he could get close enough to use his sword. He fell as she swung up, keeping the other man back. They wore light armor and she had on a nightgown, but she had a quarterstaff. There were reasons it was a woman's weapon in Eyllwe: she had reach, and she had sheer bludgeoning power on her side.

"I've never seen an assassin use a staff," the uninjured man commented.

Lillian didn't bother answering. She lunged, driving her staff towards his midsection, driving him back farther, and when she had breathing room she kicked the downed man in the face so he would stop trying to grab her ankle. Dorian liked to trip her up in practice. She'd never kicked the prince in the head, but she'd pretended to often in enough, and of course Celaena was a dirty fighter like no one else.

She herded the standing man back against the rail, where he had to stop and fight or go over, and when he tried to bull his way past her she tripped him and brought her staff down into his temple.

Inside was more fighting still. She charged through the doors instead of waiting to let anyone see that she had taken care of their friends, and paid for it by slamming directly into another intruder. Her momentum sent both of them to the floor and he grabbed for her wrists. She let him have her right one, finally dropping the staff as she took a gamble and got her left hand up between his legs. No codpiece. She yanked as hard as she could.

He shrieked, releasing her wrist, and she let him roll away from her as she went the opposite direction, rolling to her feet and backing closer to the wall so she could finally survey the room.

Several attackers were already dead, and some palace guards too, by the bodies on the ground. Chaol and Dorian were armed but in nightshirts, facing off with five more men. By Lillian's count, including the men she'd left on the balcony and the one writhing on the ground and excluding the two dead guards, that made eight men sent to kill Dorian.

It was a strange number, Lillian thought, but she had more pressing matters to attend to. She crouched and relieved the dead guard near her of his dagger. It wasn't weighted like her knives, but it wasn't bad either. She flung it and went for her staff, hoping to grab some of the attackers' attention.

It worked. She hadn't killed anyone with the dagger throw, but she had managed to graze the side of a man's face. It had clattered to the ground next to Dorian, who took a hasty step back.

"Lillian," Chaol said through gritted teeth, "Would you mind not throwing weaponry at the prince?"

"Sorry!" she said, and ducked out of the way of the two men who had come after her. She crushed one's foot despite his boot, whacked the other in the belly, and spun away from the man she'd left on the floor earlier, who looked sick and was trying to get up anyway. He wasn't successful, but she didn't want to take chances.

The two men facing her hesitated. She took the initiative, knocking one's sword aside and bringing the other end of the staff around into his head before he considered the other end a threat. The limping one staggered back to avoid a similar fate, and Chaol ran him through from behind. The last one had been killed by Chaol on the ground.

The three of them took a moment to breathe and ensure there were no other intruders.

"It isn't that I don't appreciate it," Dorian said finally, "but how did you even get here?"

"I jumped," Lillian said. She could feel herself starting to shrink and made her spine straighten. She had saved his life. She had nothing to be ashamed of.

"You j-" Chaol cut himself off and stalked out to the balcony as if it had moved magically closer to Lillian's in the night. "That is twenty feet. "

"I had a running start," she offered. She was starting to wonder if Celaena's expectations were unreasonable, between the knife hiding and the balcony jumping, but, well. She had jumped it, hadn't she?

Chaol came back inside, scrubbing his hand over his face. "Fine. I am going to get Philippa and Nesryn, and we are going to take these bodies and dump them where people won't find them for years, and then I will consider again your terrifying ability to murder us all in our beds if you chose to do so."

"She is an assassin," Dorian pointed out.

"Dump them?" Lillian asked blankly. "But this was an assassination attempt on the crown prince. Shouldn't we call the royal guard?"

"I am the royal guard as far as you're concerned," Chaol snapped, but he closed his eyes and sighed when Lillian looked away.

"Those two weren't here to help," Dorian said, gesturing at the two dead guards as he sat on the bed. "I don't want anyone to know they were close to killing me, and I don't want more guards I don't trust here."

"But you trust me," Lillian said. "I mean, Chaol is planning to leave us alone together."

Both men blinked as if they hadn't considered it.

Chaol recovered first. "Should I not? We saw tonight - again - that you could have tried to kill him whenever as long as you've been here."

"Tried?"

He shrugged. "Well. I'm here."

Lillian considered doing something that looked like she would charge Dorian, just to test them, and was immediately ashamed. That was a Celaena kind of thought.

"I don't want to hurt Dorian," she promised.

"So that's settled!" Dorian said, clapping his hands. "Body moving, unless you think your love taps left one of them alive."

Chaol snorted. "She kicked one's face in with bare feet."

Now that he mentioned it, her toes started to throb on the foot she'd used for that. From extensive experience in Endovier, she knew the toes were broken.

As if that was a signal, the rest of her body started registering pain, from the foot that hit the rail on the way in to her back where she'd hit the rail at the end of her roll to her arm, where when she looked she had a cut across her bicep. When had that happened? She'd torn a nail at some point too, which wouldn't have mattered except that she was passing as a noble lady.

Well, she wore gloves most of the time anyway, and it wasn't like she hadn't walked around with broken toes before.

"Can I have keys?" she asked. "Since we've decided that I'm not going to kill Dorian."

"Fine," Chaol said. "Does anyone have more questions, or can I go get our backup?"

Dorian waved him carelessly off.

"You don't make him sleep on the floor, did you?" Lillian asked after another long moment of silence. There wasn't anything like a pallet or cot in the room, and she didn't think even Chaol would have been able to move fast enough through multiple doors to get to Dorian's room without ten men killing Dorian.

Dorian, looking more amused than she thought the question warranted, said, "No, Lillian, I do not make him sleep on the floor."

She didn't ask anymore questions, and neither did he. He didn't protest her pacing the room and checking entrances, either.

Philippa and Nesryn arrived, Nesryn as sleep-rumpled as the rest of them, Philippa devoid of her usual facepaint but hair as impeccably placed as always - probably it didn't dare misbehave, Lillian thought with envy - and all of them, Dorian included, slung a body over their shoulders.

She should probably feel something more for killing these people, Lillian thought as she followed Nesryn out of the bedroom, but frankly she was tired and they had been trying to kill Dorian in the first place. She'd said she would be his killer.

In the sitting room Chaol leaned heavily against the wall that should have seperated Lillian's rooms from Dorian's, but she realized something was off about it just before it swung open.

"Do I have one of those?" she asked. Had Celaena missed something? Had she lied about her balcony leaps to keep her mystery?

"You very purposefully do not ," Chaol replied, lighting a torch just inside the door. Lillian was impressed with his ability to multitask. "Careful with the door. It doesn't open from the other side that we can figure."

Philippa propped it open with a chair to save anyone accidentally bumping it closed, and they followed Chaol down a set of narrow stairs.

"I keep saying we should set up a room down here and just have Dorian sleep in it," Nesryn told Lillian. "Chaol disagrees."

"I disagree," Philippa said. "Some page comes for him in the middle of the night and he doesn't report to his father and all hell breaks loose."

"I could get away with it once," Dorian agreed, "but not these days."

"How often does the king call for you in the middle of the night?" Lillian asked.

Chaol muttered something under his breath. Dorian said, "His philosophy is that if he's not asleep I shouldn't be either."

"He does sleep though," Lillian said. It sounded halfway to a question even in her own ears.

"I can't prove it," Philippa replied. The ring of authority in her voice was impossible to miss, and Lillian remembered Philippa saying not being in control of the court hadn't stopped her, and realized why it had sounded not quite right to Lillian at the time: Philippa had been responding to Chaol's remark about Georgina. Chaol had said anymore, and Philippa was who they turned to for knowledge of the king even over Dorian, who was the king's eldest son.

She didn't know why she was surprised that the king had had a commoner mistress, and she didn't know why she was surprised he had assigned her as his child's nurse.

What was Philippa now? On Dorian's side, certainly, and so was Georgina. It probably said good things about him that both his stepmothers - of a sort - wanted him in power.

Though to be fair, neither woman had a child who could inherit. Betting on the option who liked you seemed like the best way to go about it.

As Lillian considered it, Chaol led them to a room with a hole directly in the center of the floor.

"Don't ask me why we have a drop prison easily accessible from the crown prince's rooms," Dorian said. "I don't know, and I don't want to know."

Chaol pitched his burden in with a grunt, and the rest of them followed suit. When Lillian looked, she couldn't see the bottom.

"Next load," Nesryn said grimly. They trooped back up.

Since they had also had to clean the floors, it was some time before Lillian returned to her rooms. Chaol let her through the dividing door with a stern look, but by this point she was used to them. She smiled at him, feeling smug when his face went blank, and went to bed.

Nightmares plagued the little bit of sleep she managed, but then, they always did.