The enslaved Citizen dropped dead in his tracks, his head attached to his body only by a scrap of muscle and flesh. Varg continued the motion, never stopping, his blade coming up to a guard that stopped a fraction of a second before becoming an attack directed at Tavi.

“Where?” Tavi demanded, in Canish.

Varg pointed with one clawed finger, then whirled and threw his great curved blade with a smooth contraction of what seemed like every muscle in the Cane’s lean body. It tumbled twice and buried itself in the back of one of two enemy earthcrafters attacking his son, Nasaug. The thrown weapon struck with so much force that it pierced the chitin-armor, but even if it hadn’t, Tavi saw the target’s head snap back at the violence of the strike, and clearly heard the brutal impact break the enemy’s collared neck.

Tavi looked in the direction Varg had pointed and spotted the vord Queen, vanishing into the mists that still surrounded the camp, courtesy of the ritualists. Kitai was pursuing her. That much Tavi had expected. He just hadn’t expected to see the two of them running along the tops of the standard Legion white canvas tents.

Legion tents were mostly of the northern design, made to shed water and snow. Two upright poles at either end supported a long cross-pole, which held up the line of the roof. The cross-pole was perhaps an inch and a half thick.

Kitai and the Queen sprinted along them as though they were as wide as the avenues of old Alera Imperia.

Tavi leapt into the air and roared aloft on a column of wind. Though Kitai and the vord Queen were moving more swiftly than any human could have without crafting, flight was faster still.

“Stay with the Princeps!” someone bellowed behind him, maybe Maximus.

A second roar of wind joined his, and Tavi glanced over one shoulder to see Crassus soaring after him, fresh blood dripping from his wetted blade.

Kitai bounded from one tent to the next, took a half stride from one end of the tent to the other, and leapt to the next tent, following the vord Queen. As Tavi began to close in, she narrowed the Queen’s lead to only feet, and their next leap between tent poles came at nearly the same instant. Kitai’s sword, seething with amethyst fire (how the bloody crows had she done that? Tavi’s fire always looked like... fire.) licked out and struck the vord Queen low on one calf—only a last-second convulsion of the limb prevented the blow from striking the tendon at the ankle. Kitai had gone for a crippling blow to slow the Queen and allow the rest of the First Aleran’s skilled furycrafters to catch up.