Free Fortune's Fool by Mercedes Lackey

up and weighing in on the side opposing her. The path was strewn with the apparently lifeless bodies of the Palace guards….
    Katya stopped dead in her tracks beside the first one and frantically felt for a pulse. To her intense relief, the man was still alive. So it was the usual trick of shutting the inhabitants of an entire area in sleep.
    She wouldn’t be able to wake them until the witch was defeated, but at least they were still alive.
    And there was this much. At least they wouldn’t be either at the command of the witch, or able to spring to their mistress’s defense.
    Katya hoped not, anyway.
    Up a flight of stairs to a stunningly beautiful wooden porch, she ran. The porch was strewn with flat, square pillows, and she guessed that it was a favorite place for the warlord and his family to spend time. Nothing in sight that she could use as a weapon, though, not even a chair or a stool.
    The doors were wide open, and she charged inside.
    Katya got only the vaguest of impressions of the place—that it was huge, that it was as barren of furniture as the porch—when her attention was riveted by the two combatants and their hostage.
    He had to be a hostage. The combatants wouldn’t have left him standing there unattended otherwise.
    His eyes were glazed over and he swayed a bit where he stood, which was off to the side of the room. He was in no danger yet , but it was possible that once the witch saw a new element enter the affray, she would cut her losses, kill the warlord, and vanish.
    So as her first act, Katya leaped across the room as she drew her sword out of the ether, and interposed herself between the warlord and danger. At the moment, she couldn’t tell who was who, except that the warlord was the only “innocent” here.
    Only then did she stop to really look at the two mages.
    Both were female. Both were stunningly beautiful. Both were clothed in more practical versions of the robes Katya had conjured when she’d first arrived; the brocades and embroideries were just as elaborate but sleeves, sash, and hemlines were nowhere near as exaggerated. One was all in blue; one was all in red. The one in blue had white hair, the one in red had red hair, and by now Katya knew enough to know that on a young woman, white hair was not an auspicious color, and for the uniformly black-haired people of Nippon, red hair on anyone was the sign of a something not of this world.
    It was entirely possible that not one, but two inhuman women had their sights on this particular warlord. That would make things…interesting.
    But it was also possible that the motives of one of these two were, if not pure, at least benign.
    When you don’t know, you wait.
    There were no other entities visible right now, and the witch, at least, had been reported as being served by demons. That could mean that the witch was withholding her demons for a later strike, or that they had all been defeated. It was possible that the witch had already lost that part of this battle. But in case they were in hiding somewhere, Katya needed to be alert for a possible attack.
    Meanwhile, although this might not have been one of the most spectacular mage battles that Katya had ever seen, some of which had involved the wholesale destruction of entire fortresses and villages, it was definitely one of the more colorful. The woman in red was using a fan to direct her powers. As Katya stood guard over the rigid and unresponsive warlord, the woman in red made an attack. A backhanded flip of her unfurled fan sent a wave of daggers of white light singing toward her opponent. The woman in blue hastily scrawled a glowing glyph in the air with both index fingers that deflected the daggers to either side, where they struck the wooden walls and vanished. The woman in blue cast something invisible at the one in red, and a moment later, a gigantic, transparent serpent formed out of the air itself, materializing in a loose coil around the feet of the woman in red. It reared