The vord Queen closed her eyes for a second and flinched from the words as she hadn’t from any of the blows. But when she opened them again, her voice was calm, eerily serene. “Odd. I was about to say the same thing to you.” She twisted her hips and casually ripped her foot from the earth, the rock screaming protest. “Enough,” she said quietly. “I should have dispatched you both at once.”

There was a blur in the air, and the two came together in a fountain of sparks amidst the chiming of steel.

Tavi ground his teeth. The feeling was starting to come back to his arms and legs, but it was apparently a slow, slow process. His head hurt abominably.

This wasn’t the answer. The Queen was simply too strong, too fast, too intelligent to be overcome directly. They’d had a small enough chance of killing her. Taking her alive, in order to prevent the great furies from being unleashed, was an order of magnitude closer to “impossible” than Tavi cared to attempt.

But how to beat her? With that added advantage, there was simply no way.

So, he thought, take that advantage away.

The Queen had begun to create a bond between herself and the great furies of Calderon, a task that Tavi felt was surely well beyond his own abilities. But in furycraft, like in everything else, it was far more difficult to create than it was to destroy.

“Alera,” he whispered. He had no idea if the great fury could hear him, or if she would appear if she did. But he pictured her intensely in his thoughts, and whispered again, “Alera.”

And then the great fury was simply there, appearing silently and without drama, the hazy shape of a woman in grey, blending into the cloud and mist, her face lovely but aging, weary. She looked around at the situation, her eyes pausing upon the motionless vortex longer than upon the spark-flooded battle raging between Kitai and the Queen.

“Hmmm,” she said calmly. “This is hardly going well for you.”

Tavi fought to keep his voice calm and polite. “Has the Queen truly bound the great furies to herself?”

“To a degree,” Alera replied. “They are both held motionless, fury-bound, and are... somewhat upset about it.”

“She can control them?”

“Not yet,” Alera said. “But the house of her mind has many rooms. She is accomplishing the binding even as she does battle. It is only a matter of time.” She shook her head. “Poor Garados. He’s quite mad, you know. Thana does all that she can for him, trying to keep your folk away, but she’s scarcely less psychotic than he is, the past few centuries.”

“I need to break her link to Garados and Thana Lilvia,” Tavi said. “Is it possible?”