Water exploded up out of the tub as their impact crushed its nearer side flat against the other. The Queen let out a huff of expelled air. The pain he’d been holding off with metalcrafting until perhaps five or six seconds ago suddenly smashed into him in a wave, and he remembered that he had let go of the crafting that was slowing the toxin coursing from the agonizing wound in his belly.

She came rolling to her feet, never stopping her motion, bounding on all fours like something more feline than human. Fire-spheres charred half a dozen healers and two wounded survivors of Riva to so much meat. A young woman in healer’s garb and a silver discipline collar was the next target. But Foss threw himself in front of her, giving her a powerful shove that sent her tumbling head over heels away from him—and then he was enveloped in another blast that left little more than blackened bones and melted steel in its wake.

The vord Queen hissed and gestured again—but Tavi suddenly recognized the young woman Foss had died to protect as Dorotea, who, in another life, had been the High Lady of Antillus.

Collared by her own allies, commanded to do no harm, the woman had been serving as a healer in the Free Aleran since its inception. Her personal ambition had been a cancer that the collar had neatly amputated, and she had done more good in her months as a slave than she ever had as a Citizen. A watercrafter skilled beyond anything that a Legion could hope for, she had doubtless been called in to treat some difficult or delicate harm suffered by one of the survivors.

Her lips spread in a snarl as another sphere of fire bloomed practically upon her, and the earth itself heaved and bucked into a dome that shielded her from the blast. A second motion sent the contents of two healing tubs abruptly hurtling toward the vord Queen like two enormous, transparent stones. The blasts of water smashed the vord to the ground.

Dorotea cried out in sudden agony and clutched at the silver collar at her throat, her body contorting.

Tavi ground his teeth and forced steel into his limbs, his mind, dismissing the pain as something unimportant. The former High Lady had pushed the vord into an open, unoccupied space to one side of the tent. Tavi lifted his sword and sent a thunderbolt of seething fire, whiter than the light of the sun, writhing into the form of some vast and deadly serpent, lancing toward her.

The vord Queen’s smile was gone. Her glittering black eyes widened as the sun-fire streaked toward her. She crossed her forearms in front of her with another brassy scream, and the blast of fire struck her, burning again at Tavi’s vision with a furious light bright enough to blind him though he had closed his eyes to shield against it.