But swift and terrible as the young queen might have been, the match was not an even one. Where claws struck the elder Queen, sparks flew from her seemingly soft flesh, turning the attack aside. But where the younger queen was hit, flesh parted, and green-brown blood flew in fine arcs. The vord queens fought a spinning, climbing, leaping duel at a speed too swift to be seen clearly, much less interfered with, and Invidia found herself tracking the motion simply to know when she might need to leap out of the way.

Then the elder Queen made a mistake. She slipped on a slickened spill of the younger queen’s blood, and her balance faltered for a fraction of a second. There was not time enough for the young queen to close in for a more deadly blow—but it was more than time enough for her to dart behind the elder Queen and seize the fabric of the dark cloak. With a twisting motion, she wrapped the cloak around the elder Queen’s throat and leaned back, pulling with both frail-seeming arms, tightening the twisted fabric like a garrote against her mother’s neck.

The elder Queen bent into a sinuous bow, straining against the strangling cloth, her expression quite calm as her dark eyes fell with a palpable weight upon Invidia.

The Aleran woman met her eyes for a pair of endless seconds before she nodded once, rose, lifted her hand, and with an effort of will and furycraft caused the air within the nose, mouth, and lungs of the young queen to congeal into a nearly liquid mass.

The response was immediate. The younger queen twisted and writhed in sudden agony, still holding on desperately to the twisted cloak.

The elder Queen severed it with a slash of her claws, slipped free, turned, and with half a dozen smoothly savage movements tore the younger queen open from throat to belly, removing organs along the way. It was calmly done, the work of an old hand in a slaughterhouse more than the intense uncertainty of a battle.

The young queen’s body fell limp to the floor. The elder Queen took no chances. She dismembered it with neat, workmanlike motions. Then she turned, as if nothing at all had happened, and walked back to the table. Her chair remained in its place though the table had been ruined.

The Queen sat down in her chair and stared forward, at nothing.

Invidia walked slowly over to her side, righted her own fallen chair, and sat down in it. Neither of them spoke for a time.

“Are you hurt?” Invidia asked, finally.

The Queen opened her mouth, then did something Invidia had never seen before.

She hesitated.

“My daughter,” the Queen said, her voice a near whisper. “The twenty-seventh since returning to Alera’s shores.”

Invidia frowned. “Twenty-seventh... ?”