Fireguard!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 360 words. What a half-trained and severely traumatized apprentice witch can do, the Big Bad can have already done harder, smarter, and more devastatingly. Who'd have thunk it?

- Oh, Kate, dauntless in the mouth of hell! This was your great moment under the Grey Wolf's banner, all along. And this is why this tale can never hold the shape of any plot outline I make beforehand: you are more brilliant in your hour of inspiration, than all the clever ideas I can reason out in a month of not standing in your battered old boots.

I did not know. I could not see.

Can the Devil Abide to Be Laughed At?

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 800 words, finishing what turns out to be Kate's actual Crowning Moment of Awesome, and strongly suggesting the answer "Not hardly, no!" to the question - even for a devil which otherwise has a, well, diabolically telling sense of humour.

I can probably end up losing a lot of the less inspiring parts of Kate's earlier Speech now, and let her actions here do more than the same job in their place. A bit of tightening up all round, and that should work just fine.

Ow-wow-wow! Now to complete the Big Bad's increasingly ratty contribution to this chapter, and thence to the cadence material.