The dungeon was quieter than it had been the morning before, though no version of this room could be called peaceful. It was the quiet of a place where two bodies had been worked over for so long that the people working them had run out of fresh ideas.

The healer squad cycled through on rotation. They stitched what would hold and braced what wouldn’t, and left behind the bite of alchemical paste layered over old blood.

Myrasyn’s left eye was swollen most of the way shut. Her gold-and-silver robes were stiff at the collar and chest with dried red. Her braid had come apart somewhere around the sixth beating and nobody had put it back.

Black Fang’s hair was matted flat on one side where her skull had met stone one too many times. A thread of blood had crusted from her hairline down her throat into the hollow of her collarbone.

Neither had given in.

That was the part Ragnar could not accept.

The collars were functioning exactly as they had been designed to function. Rune by rune, the binding reached into each woman’s channels and tried to write. A properly cuffed prisoner had no counter. Her channels were empty, her spellcasting cut off the instant the device closed.

But a prisoner who had woven an active spell into her channels before the cuff closed had a counter.

Myrasyn’s [Sanctified Radiance] was still burning in her. Black Fang’s [Eternal Hunger] was still moving through hers. Both spells ate the binding faster than the runes could write, pulse for pulse, cycle for cycle. The only way to get the runes ahead was to break the caster’s concentration. Make her miss a pulse. Stutter a cycle. Drop a thread of focus long enough for the collar to catch a full inscription.

Pain was the lever.

Hours had gone into the lever. The lever was not working.

It was, however, doing other things.

A fragile mage who had lived four thousand years of court intrigue was being asked to sustain an active spell through the methodical breaking of her body. Myrasyn’s breath had gone shallow. The golden thread in her channels held, but it was harder won now.

Her hands trembled against the chain cuffs. Her one open eye kept wanting to close.

She could not let it close.

...

Black Fang had a different problem.

[Eternal Hunger] had not been built for sieges.

The spell had been forged for short, brutal work on the battlefield. Hours of being chained to a wall and fed a diet of dwarven binding-runes was not what it had been designed to endure, and it was letting her know.

It wanted flesh. It wanted souls. It wanted the dwarven king still in this building. It wanted the healer squad two doors down and the artificer bleeding on a workshop floor three levels up. It wanted everything inside the walls and it wanted all of it at once.

Black Fang was the cage.

She fed it what she chose to feed it. She starved it of what she chose to starve it of. She gave it the runes and nothing else.

It was costing her. Her channels had begun to scald where the spell was screaming to get out. A thin line of blood had begun to seep from her left tear duct and crust along the ridge of her cheek without her noticing or caring.

The discipline held.

For now.

...

"Awake?"

Black Fang’s voice was low and slow. There was little breath behind it.

Myrasyn tilted her head a fraction, which was as much as the chain allowed.

"Mmm," she managed.

It emerged musical despite everything, which was the one trick she had never lost in four millennia of court.

"Barely."

"Focus on circulation."

Myrasyn’s laugh was wet.

"Yes, yes." Her lips cracked wider as she smiled, and the smile opened the cut in the lower one, and a fresh bead of red rolled down her chin. "I would not wish to... disappoint my new best friend."

Black Fang’s eyes stayed closed.

"..."

Then footsteps sounded down the corridor.

...

Heavy boots and lighter ones. The lighter ones in front.

Aelindra pushed through the door first.

Her black hair was pulled tight at the nape, but a line of fresh red had dried on her upper lip where she had snapped at a healer and the healer had not been fast enough to clear the range. Her gauntleted fist hung at her side half-closed.

Ragnar followed behind her.

The dwarven king’s linens had been re-wrapped in the last hour, and finally real healing was showing. He was getting better at a rapid rate. But his eyes were veined, and fixed. He had not slept.

Every fortress that had fallen since dawn was sitting in the tilt of his shoulders. His shoulders were held upright only by effort.

He crossed half the floor, stopped, and looked at the two prisoners without seeming to see them.

"Black Fang."

The word left him on one breath. He had to catch the next before it would leave too.

"Where does he live."

Black Fang did not open her eyes.

"Where does he live," the dwarven king said again. His uninjured hand curled. "Where is his base of operations."

Silence.

The dwarf king’s fists tightened.

Every standing order Ragnar had issued since dawn had missed. The villain had been in Kharn Moldur at sunrise, in Brakkenvein before noon, in the next fortress before sundown, and no map on the continent could keep up with a man who opened his own doors through space. Ragnar could not catch a target that would not sit still to be caught. What he needed was a piece of that target that could not move. A home, a wife, a child, a lover. Anything fixed to a location, so that when he struck it, the villain had to come to him on Ragnar’s terms instead of his own.

His breath came ragged through his wrappings.

"Give me a coordinate, assassin, and I’ll let you leave alive and unharmed."

Black Fang opened her eyes.

Her purple gaze settled on him, taking in his measure, gathering everything she could read off of him.

Then she closed her eyes again.

Ragnar’s fist rose.

Aelindra stepped across the cell.

"You two are far too stubborn for your own good." Her voice was flatter than Myrasyn had ever heard it. "So be it. Let us begin."

The gauntlet drove into Myrasyn’s stomach.

The blow lifted the elven queen against the chains and pushed her into the wall. The golden thread in her channels flickered. The runes at her throat surged in the gap. Myrasyn wrestled the thread back into rhythm before the binding could write, but the push cost her a full second of vision, and the vision came back swimming.

Her teeth cut into her own lip.

She spat the blood between Aelindra’s boots. A wheeze rode the next breath out of her.

"Our poor, poor mother..."

A shaky exhale.

"...must be weeping for us in the Eternal Forest."

Another.

"How did it come to this, sister?"

Aelindra’s face twisted.

"Do NOT bring that bitch’s name up in my presence."

Her gauntlet closed on the chain above Myrasyn’s head.

"Name me successor, Myrasyn. Name me and this ends."

Aelindra struck again. The thread flickered a second time. Myrasyn pushed it back a second time. The push was slower than the first.

Aelindra saw that.

Her head turned a fraction toward Ragnar.

"She is close."

"Good. Keep it up."

The third blow landed. The fourth. Between them Myrasyn’s head had started thrashing against the chain above her shoulder. Her remaining eye had gone half-lidded. The thread in her channels was holding only because she was pouring every last reserve she owned into holding it.

"Name me," Aelindra hissed.

Myrasyn’s broken lips curved.

"No, dear sister," she managed, in a voice that was all strain and somehow musical. "I refuse to betray the millions of elves who voted for me... Even if it kills me."

Aelindra’s fist drew back for another strike.

Ragnar spoke first.

"Why is he attacking only dwarves?"

Aelindra’s fist paused half-raised. She blinked, looked at him, and for a beat her face gave away that she was still catching up.

"...what?"