“And here’s the thing,” she went on, turning to look at Ayabe and the others. “Did you never wonder why this stomp dance is going on for so long? It’s because Fat Ear needs the Court’s army to come to him. Here he’s got the numbers. Over there . . . well, what does he have? Forty flesh and blood warriors? Maybe fifty? Because you do know that spirits of the dead can’t do much of anything once they cross back over to the world Raven made, don’t you?”

Her gaze went back to Minisino and his army.

“Here,” she said, “he’s got a sure victory that’ll live on in stories told around the campfires for a hundred years. Over there he’s going to get his ass handed to him on the end of a fairy spear, because if you don’t think Tatiana can field enough fairy to deal with fifty buffalo warriors, you’re living in a whole other reality than I am.”

Damn, she was right, Joe realized. Why hadn’t anybody else figured that out?

It was such a basic thing—all, or at least one of them, should have remembered.

“Tatiana’s already promised to see that Anwatan’s murderers are punished,” Christiana went on. “And I’m sure she’ll be open to hearing any other concerns. But this is the kind of thing you deal with at a council table, not on a battlefield. Not unless you want your asses whupped. Or—” She fixed her steady gaze on Minisino. “—you’re out to make some kind of a name for yourself.”

There was an uneasy shuffling in the ranks of the buffalo army. Minisino turned to them.

“You don’t actually believe this crap, do you?” he asked. “Why are you even listening to her? She’s not one of us. What do you even know about her?”

“You tell us,” one of the buffalo warriors said.

“We don’t have to know anything about her,” another added. This one was a spirit of the dead, the holes in his chest where the bullets had struck him were plainly visible. “We can see through the lie to the truth she tells.”

A third buffalo warrior—another of the spirits—nodded. “We should have seen it from the first, but we were too eager to be avenged.”

“We still can be!” Minisino cried. “If we guard the entrances of the otherworld against the aganesha, they’ll have to meet us here or the dreamlands will be closed to them forever.”

“What do you have that needs to be avenged?”

“You’re my people. Your deaths weigh on me.”

The buffalo spirit who had last spoken slowly shook his large shaggy head.