I woke up alone. I could have sworn Kendala and Valeria had been in bed with me, but the rest of the bed was cool, as if no one except me had been sleeping there for hours.

I fished a black bodycon dress out of my bag, and put it on so that I was decent-ish.

“Well,” Jill said, grinning at me as I walked from the annex into the crypt. “Look who had a nice sleep in while everyone else is working. You woke up just in time for break time. Very strategic.”

“The boss can sleep as much as she wants,” Kendala said.

The crypt was jammed full of stuff, most of it still in boxes. A lot of the boxes we’d been unpacking, because things took up less space that way. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Half past kissing time, time to kiss again,” Jill told me, and matched actions to words. Then Lesseth took a turn. She tasted of strawberries. Kendala looked wistful, but she didn’t make a move.

Kathy turned from the spreadsheet she was looking at on the computer. “One-thirty,” she told me.

“I slept twelve hours?”

“More like fourteen,” Jill said.

“As is your right and privilege,” Kendala said. “Really, you should let us do all the work.”

“Although,” Jill said. “if you could tell some zombies to do some carrying, I have a whole bunch of stuff I’d like to send to the orc village. Zargaza has given us a building to use as storage, and we need to clear out stuff as soon as we can.”

“Yes. Sure. Let’s do that. Then I better eat something, I’m starving.”

“I’ll bring you food,” Kendala said. “Kathy got burgers. We saved some for you.”

“They’re cold,” Kathy said.

“I’ll eat anything.”

“Mmm,” Jill and Kendala said at once.

“Get a room,” Kathy said. “Wait, they’re all full except the one you came from. We’re going to have to start putting boxes in the bedrooms, as soon as break is over. Fifteen minutes.”

“She’s a slave driver,” Jill said. Then she showed me the things she wanted the zombies to take. It was a nice clear day, so she’d stacked everything outside, protected with only a tarp. That kept it nice and simple for the zombies, and all I had to do was tell them to each pick up a box from the pile and take it to the trading post in the orc village. Hopefully orcs could bring it from there to whatever building Zargaza had given us; I couldn’t have them take it straight there because I didn’t know which building it was.

“Thanks, Abby,” Jill said.

“Where are the paladins?”

“Outside. Keeping an eye on the demons, I think. Talos blames himself for the fact that one got away. I think Val’s been focusing on Meta, and Talos on the guards.”

“Easier to watch one person than ten,” I said.

“Yes. You might want to tell Talos that you don’t hold him responsible. You might even want to tell him we need help with boxes, instead.”

I smiled. Jill was good with people, and I was glad she was with me. “I’ll go do that.”

Kendala brought me burgers. They were indeed cold, and the French fries limp. The cola wasn’t too flat, though, and if I washed them down fast enough, the food was edible.

“She should have waited until you were up to get lunch,” Kendala said. “Sometimes I think she doesn’t understand that you are the Queen.”

“Sometimes I don’t understand it myself,” I told her. “But you all have been working hard, and you needed to eat.”

I went off in search of Talos. I found him outside, not far from the demon tents, and gave him a little pep talk.

“The thing I can’t forgive myself for was getting distracted,” he told me.

“Distracted by what?”

He turned bright red. I waited. He said nothing.

“Kendala?” I suggested.

“No. Jill.”

“Oh.” I shrugged. “Well, just don’t create a lot of drama. Make sure that Kathy knows what you’re up to.”

“She says that I can do what I want, but I’m afraid – I’m afraid she’d stay behind if she felt I wasn’t –” He sighed, and trailed off.

“Faithful?”

“Yeah, that. And besides, I’m not married to Jill, so I shouldn’t be thinking about her that way. But she smiles at me like she knows I’m looking, and I get all flustered.”

“There’s no crime in thinking about it,” I told him. “Just be open with everyone before you act on those thoughts. Kathy – yeah, I want Kathy to stay with us, too, but she has a right to make informed decisions. If all you plan to do is look, then I suppose it doesn’t matter whether you talk to her or not. But if you’re thinking of changing the dynamic after the gate goes down, then I think that’s a very bad idea, and not fair to Kathy.”

“I don’t know what I plan,” Talos said. “But you’re right. I should – I don’t know how to talk to her about it.”

“Just like you did with me,” I said. “Truth is truth, right? It doesn’t change based on who you’re talking to.”

“Right.”

I turned to go ask Kathy and Jill what needed to be done next. Gren was usually in charge when I wasn’t around, but Gren was probably still on her way back from the orc village.

I got to the door of the crypt when I saw Xyla come running from the forest. I turned and met her halfway, resulting in a half-collision, half-hug that almost knocked me over.

“Hey, babe. What’s the rush?” I asked.

“There’s an army entering the forest.”

“Already?” I’d thought we had days before the demons could get here, if they even came. Could the Ritual Faction field an army without the Archfiend knowing, and stopping it?

“What do you mean already? You were expecting them?”

I shook my head. “Not exactly, but I thought it was a possibility. One of the demon guards ran away.”

“Oh, yes, he did. Ran toward the orc village.” She shrugged. “I worry about people coming in, not about them leaving.”

It made sense, but I realized that if I had thought about the possibility, I could have told Xyla to stop any of them from leaving like that. Too late now. “So,” I asked. “How big is this demon army?”

“Demons? Who said anything about demons?”

“Wait. It’s not a demon army?”

She shook her head. “Humans. And I’d say a thousand or so. Very organized, and armored, too. Too many for me to stop, but I’m overgrowing the paths they are using and making it as hard for them as possible.”

A thousand humans, in armor. I could probably raise an army nearly that size, mostly orcs, but some trolls and of course my merry band, and a couple hundred zombies. We didn’t have hardly any armor at all. I could have set up a smithy to provide my people with sixteenth-century armor and weapons, but it hadn’t been a priority.

“Headed here? Where are they?”

Xyla drew a map in the dirt. They were coming from the southeast, and it was hard to tell what they were aiming for, whether it be the orc village or the crypt. She estimated it would take a week for them to get as far as either, because the forest was hard going for an army that size.

“We could pick them off one at a time, like last time,” she said.

Last time, meaning with the orcs. I nodded. “We need to talk to them. Find out what they want. Tell them to go someplace else, if we can.” I paused. “Valeria and Talos came from that direction, didn’t they?”

Xyla nodded.

“And they were sent by people who knew our location through divination,” I added. A thousand armored people were bad enough. A thousand paladins? I didn’t know that we could handle that. Xyla was probably right, that the thing to do was to start picking them off as soon as possible, but I couldn’t justify doing that until I knew for sure that they meant us harm.

Which might be too late.

We’d beaten the orcs because Kathy had donned the dragon crown. Even if I was willing to risk her losing her mind, like she almost had, it wouldn’t work in the forest. The dragon would start a forest fire if it used its breath, and fighting with claw and bite in the cramped quarters wouldn’t be very effective.

But I had just the barest glimmering of a plan.

“So, that’s what we’re facing.” The people I trusted were all there, inside, although Xyla was fidgety. I wanted to hold our council away from the guards and the exdoorcists, though.

Gren had come back just in time to be part of the conversation. “Maybe if we ambush them a few times, they’ll turn around and decide it’s not worth the effort.”

Valeria shook her head. “We can’t do that. They aren’t bad people. They just don’t understand what’s going on.”

“They may not be bad people, but I doubt they’ll hesitate to kill me,” Lesseth said.

“I won’t let them do that,” Valeria replied. “You’re my sister-wife.”

“Thanks, but how are you going to stop them?” Lesseth asked.

“Abby could just mind control them,” Lysandra said. “Trust me, people are very happy when she does that. I don’t miss my free will at all.”

“You can mind control me anytime,” Kendala said, as she refilled Lesseth’s water. It was important for a slime demon to stay hydrated.

“Uh, thanks, Kendala,” I said. “Anyway, I can’t do anything like mind control a thousand people.”

“You just need to get to their leadership,” Lysandra said.

“I should go talk to them,” Valeria said.

“Will they listen to you, a straying saint?” Gren asked.

“Probably,” Valeria said, at the same time that Talos said, “Probably not.”

“Honestly?” I asked Valeria.

“Okay, probably not. But if there’s a chance, I have to try. You see that, don’t you?”

“I see that,” I said. I also saw that there was a very good chance that the only result of sending Valeria to talk to them was that we would be down one of our best fighters if the time came for a fight. Which meant that I had to come up with ideas for avoiding a fight. I had a few, anyway.

“Then let’s start with that,” Valeria said.

“Alright. That’s our first line of defense. Kathy, I want you to do some printing. Xyla, we need fast transit, so I need you to open direct paths so that Valeria, Gren and I can bike close to the army. We need to find out if this works as fast as possible, so we have time for plan B, C, and D.”

“I can carry Valeria faster than you can bike,” Kathy said. “But I can’t carry all of you.”

“I can take care of the printing,” Jill said. “You tell me what you need. I can’t fight or do anything cool magically, but I can stay here and help coordinate everything.”

“Right.” I told her what I had in mind. “Use an Earth printer if you like. Hundreds of copies. If we still have money, buy us a better printer for here, too.”

“That’s part of plan B?”

“I think it’s more like C. But who knows. As to coordinating, you’ll have to share that responsibility, because you can’t do it while you’re doing things for us on Earth. Plan D, fighting, means getting Zargaza and Gavabar to ready troops. They might all have to come here, at which point everyone will know where our home base is, and I don’t doubt that information will travel eventually from the orcs and trolls to the rest of the world. But it can’t be helped, and we were going to shut the gate down anyway.”

A few hours later, Kathy sprouted wings and lifted Valeria into the air, and Gren and I rode our bikes down paths Xyla had cleared. Best case, Val would talk them out of their march, and Val would ride with me on the way back.

I had the feeling it wasn’t going to be that easy.