“I hate her even more than I used to,” Lady said. “Except for that heel and her scars she’s still looking just as sleek as she did on her nineteenth birthday. What’s wrong with her?”

I said, “I can’t tell from here. But I’m not getting any closer till I know it’s safe. Where’d Tobo and Howler go? Get them back here.” This remained a potentially explosive situation, even if no sorcery was active. Soulcatcher would be in a foul temper when she regained consciousness.

Lady mused, “The child must have a low opinion of our intelligence if she thought this would fool us.”

I wondered. Maybe we just showed up before the trap could be fully prepared.

When Tobo returned he told us, “Cat Sith just spotted Soulcatcher at the north edge of the woods. She has Goblin on a leash. She’s rallied some soldiers and has them building earthworks.” He became increasingly distracted as he stared at my sister-in-law.

Now was that not an interesting set of developments?

Sleepy blurted, “The Daughter of Night is pretending that she’s the Protector?”

Tobo almost reeled back when he realized that he was lusting after a woman five hundred years his senior.

Lady, always an advocate for swift and decisive action when she had been in command, insisted, “We need to press her. Whoever’s in charge. Every second she gets to pull things together will mean more casualties and difficulties for us later.”

Sleepy did not disagree. It was hard to argue with the truth. She went off to restore order and resume the advance. It was weird that the Taglians, already broken twice and neither well-trained nor motivated, would be rallying. But Tobo insisted that they were doing so and he was not subject to fantasies. Of that sort.

It seemed unlikely that the Taglians would be well-armed. Most of the Taglian soldiers had thrown down their weapons the first time they fled.

Lady gripped my hand for a moment. “Think we’ll ever really get to see her?”

“You begin to wonder if she’s any closer, or any more real, than Khatovar, don’t you?”

Willow Swan came bounding up. “Is it true? Have we caught Soulcatcher again?”

“News spreads fast,” I said. “Yes. That’s her. I’m pretty sure. You’re welcome to join me while I examine her. To make sure.” He had gotten closer to her than I ever had as her one-time physician and surgeon. He would have a better chance of spotting physical evidence that this was one of Soulcatcher’s elaborate tricks. If he remembered anything at all after five years away.

I did not believe this was a trick. There was something badly wrong with my honey’s little sister. I felt that before I got my close-up look.

Swan examined and grumbled. He had no happy recollections of the way Soulcatcher had used him way back when.

But he was not driven by any particular hatred of her, either. Sleepy said, “You keep what this woman did to you firmly in mind, Willow Swan. I don’t want to see it happen again. And if I do get a whiff, you can count on getting kneecapped before you score.”

Swan wanted to rage and protest that there was no damned way that witch was going to get inside his head again. But he did not. He was only flesh and he recognized that that flesh was incapable of rational thought around any female who shared Soulcatcher’s family blood.

His record spoke for itself.

“Then why don’t we just kill her?” he asked. Wounded pride burned through his cool. “Right here. Right now. While we’ve got the best chance we’ll ever get. End it all forever.”

“We won’t because we don’t know what Goblin and Booboo did to her,” I snapped when Lady seemed strangely reluctant to disappoint a fellow whose passion had fixed upon her originally. She would not be developing a sense of compassion at this late date, would she? Or of family? She and her sister were one another’s oldest surviving enemies. “Soulcatcher won’t help us more than she absolutely has to but she will help. For a while.”

Lady nodded. Her sister was insane but her insanity was pragmatic.

Sister Soulcatcher showed no signs of recovering.

I did not say so but my outburst was part whistling past the graveyard. I was increasingly certain that there was something gravely wrong with Soulcatcher. I feared she might be dying. This was the thing that had claimed Sedvod. And nobody else saw it.

The others were all too excited by the prospect of having her at our mercy.

Getting Soulcatcher awake and aware enough to understand and begin suffering because of her circumstances preoccupied Lady and Swan for some time. Murgen and Thai Dei, Sahra and Uncle Doj joined them. In time they meant to strong-arm Soulcatcher into assisting us but first they wanted to fatten up on a feast of gloating.

Soulcatcher did not cooperate. She remained steadfastly unaware, exactly the way Sedvod had done.

The racket of skirmishing rose and fell in the distance, never becoming intense. Our guys did not sound much more ambitious than were our enemies. I did not blame them for a disinclination to get killed when the battle’s outcome had been determined already.

Riverwalker jogged into sight. “The Captain’s compliments and could you all come up and help her? She has a situation. She’d like some advice.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Just when you think you’ve seen everything.”

“What kind of situation?” Murgen asked. He was not distracted by Soulcatcher. He understood that when the word “situation” was used this way it meant that his son was about to be asked to jump into something particularly hot.

“We’re having trouble coming to grips with what’s left of the enemy.”

I suggested, “Why not just leave them the hell alone now? They’re on the run.” Riverwalker ignored me.

“At about a hundred yards the soldiers start losing interest. The few who do manage to go on and get within fifty yards say they find themselves thinking how awful they are for interfering with Her and that they really ought to be helping Her fulfill Her holy destiny. ‘Her’ not being defined but they assume they’re thinking about the Protector because the Protector is the devil they know and the devil they thought they were supposed to be chasing.”

Lady waved me closer. She murmured, “I’ll handle this end. Take the carpet and posts up and bombard the Taglian command from outside spell range.”

“We’re almost out of fireballs again.”

“So drop rocks. Or burning brush. Or anything else that will make her concentrate on staying out of the way. Every time she moves a few more of her troops will drift outside the spell. Whereupon they’ll suddenly get smart and run away.”

Her confident prescription suggested that this was an effect she knew of old.

I told everyone, “First thing we do is load up on arrows. We’ll just drop them from higher than she can reach. From five hundred feet up they ought to be good and deadly.” My gut knotted. I was talking about bombarding my own flesh and blood.

But part of me was certain that the girl would avoid personal damage. And part believed that a confrontation had been inherent in the situation from the moment Narayan Singh had snatched our baby from Lady’s arms.

It did work. The girl, wearing her aunt’s costume, darted around, followed by Goblin. The last few fireballs and firebombs got spent. Their infallible lack of accuracy refreshed my cynical view of our chances of catching a break.

The pair tried to fight back. Whenever a flier descended below a certain level a string of urine-colored lights flung upward. But I kept them too busy skipping out of harm’s way to concentrate on their marksmanship. I could not tell which was the source of the deadly light.

I noted that the girl seemed unaware that the guy overhead in the ugly suit was her doting papa.