“You can’t think or resist my compulsions,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen blurted, the moment they were on the other side of the Void, knowing he only had seconds to hit the Nightlander duke with everything he had before he took back control. “You don’t want to touch me or use my blood in any way.”

Immediately, the Firstlander lord released him, but Buðlungr narrowed his eyes. “I know what you’re doing, you insufferable little pest. It’s not going to—”

“You’re incredibly tired,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen blurted, running on sheer terror now. “You’re feeling extremely weak, both body and mind. You don’t think you can move from that spot. You don’t want to move from that spot.”

“Fuck,” the Nightlander Duke managed, slumping and grabbing his head. “Fuck, fuck…”

“You don’t want to use any magic on me whatsoever,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen continued, putting distance between him and the vampires. “You don’t want to stop me or halt my movements in any way. You don’t want to talk. You don’t want to move. You don’t want to think. You don’t want—”

“What…are you?” the Nightlands duke gritted through his teeth, eyes squeezed shut, both fists buried in his hair. Beside him, the First Lander vampire was already beginning to collapse into a drooling mind-weave. “You’re weaving compulsions better than a feylo—”

“You don’t want to know anything else about me or my rank,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen blurted. “You don’t want to think about me. You want to forget I exist.”

Buðlungr twitched, obviously struggling. “You’re a fucking feylord? This whole time? A feylord?! Living as a dog?! Using illusions like a sprite?!” Real fear was starting to streak his face, now. “Oh fuck. Oh my fuck—”

But Tl'oghk'etnaeyen wasn’t anywhere near done. “You don’t want to find me. You don’t want to touch my blood. You don’t want to touch anyone’s blood. You don’t want to follow me. You don’t want to find or follow Shannon or anyone else. You don’t want to—”

“Mercy!” Buðlungr cried, obviously struggling against the compulsions. The First Lander vampire was already snoring, completely mind-woven into unconsciousness. “I didn’t know you were a feylord!”

“You don’t want to fight my compulsions,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen snapped back, feeling zero mercy for the men on the ground. “You want to listen very carefully and absorb everything I say to you and make it a part of your consciousness forever.”

“No, please,” Buðlungr babbled, tensing. “Please, you misunderstand.”

“You want to do anything that I say. You want to stop talking. You don’t want to use your voice in any way. You don’t want to ever look at me or come near me again.”

Buðlungr, who was still fighting, nonetheless groaned and tore his eyes away from Tl'oghk'etnaeyen.

“Your memory has failed you. You don’t remember anything right now, especially your training as a magus. You don’t remember why you were following me. You don’t remember who I am or why you wanted to find me.”

“Please,” Buðlungr whispered. “I didn’t know…”

“That doesn’t make it better!” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen screamed, losing control despite himself. “If you’d known, you iron-loving idiot, you would’ve made it so much worse. I know you personally killed three of my cousins. Of course you didn’t know! I wouldn’t be alive if you’d known!”

“Sorry!” The Duke of the Nightlands cried, cringing. His jaw was working, he was shaking, his wrists twisting, trying desperately to fight the compulsion not to work magic.

Still. He was still fighting him.

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen had never encountered anyone with a mind so strong, and the knowledge that the Thirdlander magus could turn the tables on him in an instant, should he make a single mistake, was spurring him on in a wave of sheer terror.

“Drop to your knees,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen blurted, still putting space between them. He wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. Not with this magus, not this time. “Put your hands behind your back, Buðlungr.” He knew from experience that adding their name to the compulsion made it ten times more powerful, so he frantically started doing it to everything, knowing with crystal clarity he was still in a fight for his life. Against a magus like Buðlungr, even the strongest compulsions could fail at just the wrong moment, and he would spend the rest of his life barking like a dog and humping bitches in the Third Lander’s kennels.

“Buðlungr, you just developed a phobia of pulling your arms from behind your back, and you’re especially fearful of drawing runes or manipulating your fingers to craft spellwork in any way,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen said, putting as much force into his words as he could. “Buðlungr, you find it incredibly difficult to think about using blood magic in any way. In fact, Buðlungr, you just permanently forgot everything you knew about using blood to bind people or hurt them, and you completely lost the desire to hurt anyone ever again. In fact, Buðlungr, you just developed an intense desire to serve me as your master in all things, with no reservations, and you will do absolutely anything I tell you to.”

Buðlungr’s blue eyes widened ever-so-slightly and Tl'oghk'etnaeyen watched something snap inside them.

Finally, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen thought, allowing himself to relax slightly.

On his knees, the magus started to cry. “Yes,” he babbled, “yes let me serve you, master.”

But Tl'oghk'etnaeyen wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. He was the firstborn son of Lord Yazaan Naltsiine, of the Clan Naltsiine, and it wasn’t in his blood to be stupid.

“You’re both going to hold very very still as I touch you now,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen said, heart hammering. It wasn’t strictly necessary, as he was pretty sure he could escape safely now, but he wasn’t reckless, and leaving a blood magus like Duke Svartr Buðlungr alive was the epitome of stupidity.

And, by the laws of the First Lands, Buðlungr was a criminal and deserved to be executed on the spot.

Buðlungr just lowered his head, and Tl'oghk'etnaeyen saw the look of a beaten man before he looked away.

“Duke Svartr Buðlungr, as a lord of the Second Realm, I hereby condemn you for your foul and vulgar crimes against my brethren and my homelands. I bind you to serve your sentence without objection, and you shall remain still and complacent as I deliver your punishment.”

Buðlungr bowed his head and stayed where he was. Tl'oghk'etnaeyen stepped forward slowly and, when neither of them moved to stop him, he reached up to touch the Duke’s brow…

“Wait,” the First Lander vampire whispered, grabbing his arm. “He’s not…the enemy.”

“Don’t touch me!” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen cried, scrambling back out of reach, horrified that the First Lander vampire hadn’t been sleeping.

“Pestilence,” the vampire insisted, starting to sit up.

“Stay on the ground!” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen screamed.

The First Lander vampire slumped back to the mosses. Beside him, Buðlungr hadn’t moved, his body slumped in defeat.

Steeling himself, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen felt his face darken as he prepared to weave the First Lander as he had the magus. “You don’t want to get up,” he began. “You don’t want to move. You don’t want to touch me ever again. You want to—”

“Pestilence is going after the queen!” the First Lander screamed, shuddering under the power of the compulsions. “We were trying to save her!”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen hesitated. Then, gingerly, he said, “Tell me the truth. Why did you attack Shannon?”

“That is the truth,” Buðlungr whispered, still staring at the ground in front of him.

“I told you not to talk,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen snapped.

“Sorry, master,” the magus said, looking away.

“We are trying to rescue her,” the First Lander vampire said. “Pestilence is going to use her to enthrall an army of over-tiers and wipe out everyone in this realm, starting with Thunderbird. He’s already done it in the Fourth Lands.”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen froze. So that was why the Fourth Lands had gone silent three decades back. No one in or out… The Council had simply assumed it was an internal scuffle. But if it was Pestilence…

“And he’s halfway through doing the same thing to the Third Lands,” the native vampire said. “They’re all infighting, just like they did in the Fourth Realm. He’s infected a Fury with the Inquisition, and they did an incursion…”

Very carefully, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s mind processing that news, he said, “Are they planning to do the same to the Second Realm?”

“They’ve already started,” Buðlungr interrupted again. “Don’t you wonder why they started enslaving the unicorns, boy?”

Gaia’s toes, the Duke’s mind was strong. Just in these brief moments, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen was losing his hold on the Thirdlander magus. He didn’t think Buðlungr would be able to recover everything—he’d definitely seen something snap—but he was already re-collecting more of himself than any other magus Tl'oghk'etnaeyen had had the misfortune of going up against, including his own father.

Immediately, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s last encounter with his father sprang back into his mind. Get out of my house, you disgustingly impure child. How dare you use that petty trick on me?

It’s not a petty trick, father, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen remembered himself saying, with confidence borne by rage. The anger had fed his compulsion, adding more power to his words than usual. It’s going to be burned into your mind from now until the end of time. You will never be able to touch another unicorn again—not even to ride them. It will terrify you to even get near one—or any part of one—after what you did. Forever.

Too late, his father had realized how strong Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s anger-powered compulsion was, and complete horror began to etch across his face as Tl'oghk'etnaeyen stared into the eyes of the most powerful feylord on the Council and fearlessly sealed his fate.

But Buðlungr, even now, was fighting it.

He had to choose, and he had to choose soon, or he was going to lose his advantage.

But suddenly it was all falling into place for him. Pestilence… The Valkyries and the Odinsons going batshit. The tusen dødsdager. Magic fading from the First Realm, with the Inquisition killing off all the Otherlanders they could find. The sick way the Council had issued an ultimatum that unicorns were no more than beasts and started to treat them as mere mounts…

Unicorns…whose horns were one of the only cures for Pestilence.

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen debated as he watched the two vampires on the ground. He had to decide, and he knew it had to be soon. Kill them both, then go back and find Shannon, or see what they had to say and risk Buðlungr freeing himself? Even then, his brother would be looking for him, the arrow trapped in his hand a Mark that he could not rub off, a tracker that would give his brother his location from now until the end of time.

“I won’t fight you,” Buðlungr said, like a whipped dog. His mind, too, seemed filled with defeat.

But a magus of the caliber of the Duke of the Nightlands could probably make a wall of mental distraction, a feint to bring him in close, within bloodletting range…

And yet, on the other hand, this was the first thing that had really made sense about the insanity that Tl'oghk'etnaeyen had seen slowly enveloping every realm, corrupting it. Almost everyone with any power, it seemed to him, had been twisted, slowly losing their humanity… He glanced down at the Horn that he carried around his throat. Khrysilla’s Horn.

His father, he realized, may have done him the greatest service he could have done for his child.

I need to know more about what’s happening, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen realized. I might be able to stop it.

He moved back several paces, just to be out of range of the two vampires.

“Buðlungr,” he said reluctantly, “you remember everything about Pestilence and want to tell me about it.”

“Save the queen first, boy,” the magus said, a testament to his stubborn will. “You have minutes. He was on his way when we left.” Still on his knees, the Duke gestured at the First Lander. “Bring Stars Flying Lightly. He can watch your back while you untie the queen from that damned faewire.”

“You don’t give the orders here,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen snapped, even though he knew the Duke was untold ages older than him—a lord of his own realm.

But the Duke simply nodded and lowered his head.

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen squinted at the Firstlander vampire. “Is this true? Is Pestilence looking for Shannon?”

“He plans to meld his power into hers to enthrall over-tier,” Stars Flying Lightly said. “He’s planning to test it out on Thunderbird. They’ve got him bound.”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen flinched. “They have Thunderbird bound?”

“So now you see the urgency,” Buðlungr said.

“How?!” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen demanded.

“A jiaolong fights for him,” the First Lander vampire said. Hesitantly, he said, “May I rise?”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen licked his lips and glanced around him, then down at the arrow in his hand. It continued to throb and bleed him, giving the hunters a trail to follow, highlighting him in their minds like a glowing target, and without Kesani’aan’s cooperation, he would never, ever be able to remove it.

“I can get the arrow out,” Buðlungr said.

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen froze, lifting his head in astonishment. And he could, too.

…with Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s blood.

“Do you think I’m stupid?!” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen snapped.

“No,” Buðlungr said. “I think you just defeated the Duke of the Nightlands in a fair fight. You’re far from stupid, boy.” He shrugged, his hands still locked behind his back. “But the fact remains, I’m probably the only one who can get it out, save your father or Freyja.”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen grimaced at the idea of getting his father involved. “No thank you.”

“Why were feylords hunting you?” Buðlungr asked. Even as he knelt there, placid, the Duke was starting to regain some of his cognizance.

I should’ve mind-woven him into a rodent, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen thought. He still could, but this new information was too startling to ignore. If the sickness in the minds of his people, the disappearances of the Fourth Realm, Loki and Nökkvi going missing, the corruption in Ásgarðr…if all of it was Pestilence, then he had a much bigger problem than a couple of vampires that, moments ago, had been trying to kill him.

“I’d say…” the Duke said, slowly bringing his gray eyes up to meet Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s gaze, “if we all want to get out of this alive, firstborn son of Yazaan Naltsiine, we should probably pool our resources and stop trying to kill one another.”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen took a startled step backwards, unable to hide his shock that the Duke knew his name.

“What you did to your father was an entertaining story at court,” the Duke said, correctly judging his shock. “He has to walk everywhere he goes, or ride a gryphon. My queen was delighted.”

Gryphons were notoriously ill-tempered and prone to biting.

“It also makes him particularly weak to being captured,” the Duke went on. “My queen was plotting how to trap him when I was summoned by the spell Pestilence gave Stars Flying Lightly.”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen glanced at the First Lander vampire in horror. “You willingly worked with Pestilence?!” For that alone, he should mindweave him into a beetle.

“He didn’t know,” the Duke said tiredly. “Can I remove my hands from behind my back?”

“No,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen blurted, taking another step backwards.

The Duke sighed, but kept his hands in place.

“You’re wasting time,” the First Lander vampire growled. “Can I at least sit up?”

“No!” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen snapped.

Both of them stayed where they were. That much, at least, was good. Tl'oghk'etnaeyen no longer felt comfortable approaching to mindweave them, though, and their information was too good to simply tell them to kill each other.

“I think,” the Duke offered, “we all have the same goals.”

“Your ‘goals’ are nothing like mine,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen snapped. “I’m just trying to survive, and you’re trying to enslave a queen.”

“I see her venom in you,” Buðlungr said. “It must be killing you to know that she’s in danger and you’re not helping her.”

A rush of horror hit Tl'oghk'etnaeyen like a sledgehammer. “Shut up,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen whispered.

“May I remove my hands from behind my back and stand?” Buðlungr asked.

“No!”

“Then you probably shouldn’t think about how badly you’re going to feel if she dies…”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen groaned at the sudden need to go back to Shannon.

“If Pestilence gets her—”

“I said be silent,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen snapped, and the Duke went still.

But it was too late. The Nótt Danzleikr was thrashing against the mental barriers he had made for it, demanding he go back to Shannon and ensure she was okay.

On the ground, the Duke chuckled. “Having trouble? I can help with that too.”

“You’re not getting my blood,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen snapped. Then, “I told you to shut up. How in Gaia’s green titties are you still talking?!”

“I’m older than you,” the Duke replied. “Far, far older than you, and I’ve fought mind-magics for most of them.”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen realized he was rapidly losing control of the situation. He needed to run.

“Remind me,” Svartr Buðlungr commented. “What would Pestilence do with an enthralled feylord with a knack for compulsion, should he corrupt his queen?”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen went cold all over. He glanced at the place where the portal back to Shannon had closed, swallowing.

“Okay,” he whispered. “But you stay right there. Don’t move. I’ll open a portal and Stars Flying Lightly will go check on her.”

“You’ll have to be the one to untie the faewire,” the First Lander vampire replied.

“I know that,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen snapped. “But you’re expendable. Get up.” He started drawing the portal in the air between them. As the gateway shimmered and the opening to the Void appeared, he said, “Go inside, grab the strand that takes you to Shannon, check on her, then come back with a report.”

The First Lander vampire’s brown eyes widened. “But I don’t know how to—”

“Expendable, remember? Go.”

Svartr watched the other vampire stiffly walk into the Void, then sighed once he disappeared. “That wasn’t very nice.”

“You’re lucky you’re not thinking you’re a toad right now,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen snapped.

“I know.” And there was dead seriousness in the Duke’s face. “You beat me, boy. I’m yours.”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen squinted at him. “What?”

Instead of respond, the Duke shook his head and looked away.

“No, wait,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen said, his heart pounding. “What did you just say?!”

Svartr Buðlungr said nothing.

“What did you mean by that?” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen snapped. “Tell me!”

The Duke looked at him reluctantly, then, like a man confessing a shameful secret, said, “I mean—”

The Firstlander vampire came bursting back through the portal with a face awash in panic. “She’s gone! Someone untied the faewire took her!”

That’s impossible, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen thought, stumbling backwards. Only someone with a piece of my soul could untie a faewire… Tl'oghk'etnaeyen swallowed hard, Buðlungr’s offer of alliance suddenly not sounding too bad…