The dungeon was quieter than it had been the morning before, though no version of this room could be called peaceful. It was the quiet of a place where two bodies had been worked over for so long that the people working them had run out of fresh ideas.
The healer squad cycled through on rotation. They stitched what would hold and braced what wouldn't, and left behind the bite of alchemical paste layered over old blood.
Myrasyn's left eye was swollen most of the way shut. Her gold-and-silver robes were stiff at the collar and chest with dried red. Her braid had come apart somewhere around the sixth beating and nobody had put it back.
Black Fang's hair was matted flat on one side where her skull had met stone one too many times. A thread of blood had crusted from her hairline down her throat into the hollow of her collarbone.
Neither had given in.
That was the part Ragnar could not accept.
