Sasha is having a romantic dream involving John Courage, the beach, and warm tropical breezes when he begins to talk to her a bit more rationally than is called for in the situation. He tells her that Gravla is going to have some sort of dangerous leadership change, dangerous to her, and she should get out of there. Before he can really elaborate though a giant cup-cake chases him out of the dream, and Sasha wakes up.
At the same time, others are also awakening as a man in black slips out of their rooms. Ivar, Gaius, and Lucia are quickly in hot pursuit of the black-clad ninja who is apparently carrying their two bottles of extremely good wine. The first ninja is killed by Ivar's axe, but a companion takes up his burden and flees into the sewers. Which aren't finished yet, so they're very nice - big, wide, dry tunnels under the city. They chase him to a doorway, and into a storage room, where Gaius runs him through (and recovers their wine). Spotting yet another ninja at the top of some stairs, they then chase that one up through a wine cellar and into an immense kitchen... and realize they must be in the palace! Rather than pursue further they opt for an abrupt about-face. They do spend a little time checking the wine cellar for the minted wine they are looking for, but some searching and a little divination seems to say it isn't there, and the guards are threatening to beat down the door despite all the barrels that Ivar has stacked in front of it.
Meanwhile, Sasha and Baba and Buntrian have packed up and headed to a place where Ivar had days before hired horses and supplies for them, just in case. When the others catch up, they briefly consider sticking around, but decide that this wouldn't work out well (the ninjas killed their guards, for one thing). As dawn breaks, they flee south to the forests, finding an excellent hiding place after a hard day's ride.
They hole up there overnight and for much of the next day, listening to horns in the forest (presumably people searching for them, but since they're sneaky we'll never know). It is decided to go back and find those ninjas by tracking the unicorns, since it seems likely that the unicorn riders and the ninjas are one and the same. The next night they move to a hiding place near where the unicorn hair was recovered, and the next day brings some virtuoso tracking by Ivar and locates the unicorns and some people in a deserted peasant village. Again, our heroes hole up in a great hiding place nearby, leaving Sasha to scout.
She finds three men who are dressed like Gravlan peasants outside a rundown barn, conversing in Elvish. They are talking about having run our heroes out of town, but worried about a possible backup plan. They want to locate the minted wine and ensure its safety, while presuming that the Daran spies want to get rid of it. Clearly they're going to go back into the capital in the morning to do more scouting.
So Section Unicorn lays in wait for them where the path to town goes through a bit of a gully. Early in the morning, two ninja do in fact head to town, and get jumped. One of them goes down relatively quickly to Gaius with some assistance from Baba's arrows.
The other manages to avoid a leaping overhead head-splitter from Ivar and then blinds him with some sort of stinging powder. He then catches Baba's incoming shot and plants the arrow into Ivar's throat, taking him out of the fight. Gaius, trying to lend a hand, is disarmed, but the ninja's luck finally runs out and arrows and fireballs and a dagger thrown from Sasha take care of him. Ivar's throat is bound up, leaving him very raspy but whole, and the two ninjas are restrained.
JC, on seeing the romantic dream: "I'm flattered, really, but I have
something important to tell you."
Sasha: "Oh, John, how can you think about business at a time like this?"
Sasha: "You came all this way, to warn me?"
JC: "It would be terrible for the flower of Daran womanhood to be
crushed under the boot of Gravlan tyranny."
Sasha: "Well, yeah."