Sonder went for the king first.
Not because he was the greater threat, though he was, but because he was the closest.
There was no rhyme or reason to it.
She came at him straight, the way he had come at her, and he read it as the same kind of attack and set himself to receive it the same way.
It wasn't the same kind of attack.
She feinted at the last moment, dropping low and appearing behind him, where his wings made it difficult for him to guard, and she opened a cut across his wings with the sword that was long and deliberate.
He rushed away from her, but she followed, like a shadow he couldn't shake.
He turned and swiped at her, and she ducked under it and cut again, shorter this time, across the forearm he had extended. He pulled it back and looked at it, at the dark line across it, with an expression that suggested the injury was something new to him.
She gave him no time to process it.
She drove him back across the dock in a sequence of exchanges that traded ground for damage, never letting him reset, never letting him find the stable footing he needed to use his full strength against her. Every time he planted himself, she moved him again, always another cut.
He was a fighter. She could feel that. Not trained the way she was trained but experienced, the kind of experience that comes from decades of never meeting anything that required him to be better.
He couldn't learn, no rhythm, because Sonder gave him something unadjustable.
Even if she didn't give him enough time to find it.
She caught his next swing on the flat of the blade. He slid past her, and she stepped into the space it opened to hit him with the pommel across the jaw, snapping his head back, then driving her elbow into his throat and sweeping his legs.
He fell down hard, and she put the sword to his throat.
He breathed. That was all. His chest moved and his eyes found her and stayed there.
Sonder put two barriers around him, squeezing him between them, giving him barely enough space to breath, but it would keep him in place.
He wouldn't have enough strength to break them.
She then turned to the queen.
The queen had been watching the whole thing with her wings half raised and her weight forward.
Sonder let her close the distance.
The first exchange was fast enough that the dock workers still in the shadows probably couldn't follow it, a rapid series of strikes and deflections that covered almost no ground and sounded like something being struck repeatedly with tremendous urgency.
The queen was precise. More precise than the king, the attacks narrower and more considered, aimed at the specific places that would matter rather than coming in with general force.
She got through twice.
Sonder felt both of them and noted them and kept moving.
But it was nothing more than play.
She caught the queen's wrist on the third pass and held it, and the queen twisted hard to break the grip.
As Sonder's grip was harder than steel, the only thing that was achieved was for the queen to break her wrist.
She had been so confident that she would escape and had enough strength that the idea of hurting herself during it never occurred to her.