Agnes’ eyes flew back to her opponent, but not quickly enough. A bolt of energy hit her, sending her staggering backward, and Rhea tore out of the time spell and pursued. Her face was grim and determined, and her hair was tumbling down around her shoulders as the fat bun gave up the ghost and began crackling with energy. Loose, it looked a lot like Agnes’.

Fair enough; daughters often favored their mothers.

I still found it a little hard to believe that Agnes, by far the biggest stickler for the rules that I had ever met, would one day have a daughter. Who she would then hide away from the supernatural community, because Pythias weren’t supposed to do the horizontal mambo with the head of the Silver Circle, the world’s leading magical authority. Or anybody else, for that matter.

Pythias didn’t have lovers, or so the story went, since that might compromise their neutrality. The arbiter of the supernatural world needed to be impartial, not favoring one group over the other, including whichever one her lover might come from. That was why Pritkin and I snuck around like a couple of teenagers trying to avoid a vengeful father.

In reality, Pythias often had partners, although children were far rarer as having them required sacrifices of both mother and child—sacrifices that only one of them had any say in. Rhea had a number of issues with her mother as a result, but couldn’t work through them in our time because Agnes was dead. It was one reason I’d requested that they start training together; the other being that Agnes was a better duelist than I was.

Or at least a more vicious one, I thought, as she shifted behind Rhea, and when my heir spun about, shifted back to where she’d started and cursed her—or tried to. But Rhea hadn’t fallen for it, and had just shifted herself behind Agnes. Ha!

I laughed in delight as she froze her mother, because Agnes very rarely had to endure the kind of crap she dished out. Rhea looked up at me again, her face shining with pride. Very short-lived pride.

“No!” I yelled, and Rhea started, remembering how this had all begun. She hit the floor, just in time to avoid a spell bolt that toppled a bust across the room, and then Agnes jumped her. The two girls started wrestling around the floor, Pythian training forgotten, with a whole lot of cursing, punching and kicking going on.

I sighed, just as Gertie shifted onto the landing beside me.

“She’s getting better, your girl,” Gertie said. She looked a lot like her sister, Hilde, only younger. But they had the same… hearty… figure and cap of curls, although in Gertie’s case, the latter were purple with gray roots instead of silver white.