by Butcher, Jim
The big furball made a huffing sound, an exhalation somewhere between a bark and a sneeze, but chewier. Heh. Chewie. I reminded myself to keep track of Mac and Sarissa as we went, but I felt better once Mouse was back there. Intellectus was handy as a reference guide, but not as an early-warning system. If either of them tried anything shady, the shaggy Tibetan guardian was probably the one most likely to notice first, anyway. Might as well have him close.
“Who’s up there?” Karrin asked, her voice low and tense.
“Faerie Queens, I think. Plural.”
“Whoa,” Thomas said. “Why?”
“Complicated, no time,” I said. “No one does anything until I do. Don’t even talk. If the balloon goes up, go after whoever I light up first. After that, improvise.”
Then I continued, increasing the pace a little. The trees near the crown of the island were older, thicker, and taller. The spreading canopy of their branches had shaded out most of the brush beneath them, and the ground was easier to move across, being mostly an irregular, soggy carpet of years and years’ worth of fallen leaves. The scent of molds was thick as we went through, disturbing them.
We emerged into the clearing at the top of the hill, and I stopped in my tracks six inches before I would have come out of the shadow of the forest. Thomas bumped into me. I looked partly over my shoulder with a little push of air through my teeth. He elbowed me in the lower back.
The hilltop had been closed in a circle of starlight.
I didn’t know how else to describe it. I didn’t know what I was looking at. Twelve feet off the ground was a band of illumination, glowing rather than glaring, something that filled the hilltop with gentle light, like an enormous ring floating above the earth. It was of precise width, as if drawn with a compass, and I knew that it was exactly one foot thick—twelve inches. The color was something I had never seen before, changing subtly moment to moment, holding silver and blue and gold, but it wasn’t any of those things and . . . and words fail. But it was beautiful, like love, like music, like truth, something that passed through the eyes and plunged straight to the soul. Gentle, softly glowing light slid from the outer edge of the circle like a sheet of water from an elegant fountain, falling to the ground in a slow-motion liquid curtain of pure light, hiding what was behind it.
I felt the grasshopper move up beside me, her eyes wide. “Boss,” she whispered. “This would make my mom talk in her church voice. What are we looking at?”
“Merlin’s work, I think,” I breathed. “That circle. I think it’s part of the island’s architecture.”
“Wow.”
“I . . . It’s beautiful,” Sarissa murmured. “I’ve never seen anything like it. And I’ve been looking at incredible things my whole life.”
I spoke something I was certain was true in the same moment that I understood it. “It had to be beautiful. It had to be made from beauty. There is too much ugly inside for it to be made of anything else.”
“What do you mean, ugly?” Karrin asked, her voice hushed.
“Later,” I said. I shook my head and blinked my eyes several times. “City to save.” I tried to find something about the circle in my intellectus, but I had apparently already learned everything I could learn about it that way. I knew its exact dimensions; I knew it was part of the structure of the massive spell that made the Well exist. And that was it. It was like the entire thing had been . . . classified, top secret, need-to-know only—and apparently I didn’t need to know.
Which, I supposed, made sense. We were talking about a massive security system.
Molly stooped and picked up a rock. She gave it a gentle underhand toss at the wall of light and it passed through without making a ripple. “Safe?” she asked.
“I doubt it. Give me something that isn’t a part of the island,” I said.
I heard her slip her backpack off her shoulder and open a zipper. Then she touched my arm and passed me a granola bar wrapped in plastic. I tossed it at the wall, and when it touched, it was destroyed. It didn’t go violently. It simply became a flicker of softly glowing light in the precise shape of the bar of “food.”
Then it was gone.
“That also was pretty,” Thomas noted. “In a completely lethal kind of way.”
“Look who’s talking,” Molly said.
“It’s not all that high,” he said. “Maybe I could jump it.”
“Molly,” I said.
She passed me another granola bar, and I threw it over the wall.
The wall destroyed it in midair.
“Maybe not,” Thomas said.
“Okay,” Karrin said. “So . . . How do we get through it?”
I thought about it for a second. Then I licked my lips and said, “We don’t. I do.”
“Alone?” Thomas said. “Sort of defeats the point of bringing us. Also, death. Bad plan.”
“I think it will let me through,” I said.
“You think?”
“Look,” I said. “Me and the island are . . . kind of partners.”
“Oh, right,” Thomas said. He looked at Karrin and said, “Harry’s a geosexual.”
Karrin arched an eyebrow and gave me a look.
“You can’t go alone,” Molly said, her voice worried.
“Looks like it’s the only way I can go,” I said. “So we do this Ulysses-style. I go in, I figure a way to let down the gate and then we sack Troy.”
“Can you do that?” Karrin asked.
I licked my lips and looked at the wall of light. “I’d better be able to.”
“You’re tired,” Molly said.
“I’m fine.”
“Your hands are shaking.”
Were they? They were. “They are fine also.”
I didn’t feel tired. Given how much magic I’d been throwing around this day, I should have been comatose with fatigue hours ago, but I just didn’t feel it. That wasn’t a good sign. Maybe Butters had been right: No matter how much juice I got from the mantle of Winter, bodies have limits. I was pushing mine.
I passed the Winchester to Thomas and took off my new duster. At his lifted eyebrow, I said, “Not of the island. Hold ’em for me.”
He exhaled and took them. “No reruns, okay?”
“Pfft,” I said. “Be like sneaking into the movies.”
Karrin touched my arm. “Just don’t say that you’ll be right back. You’ll jinx it.”
“I am a professional wizard,” I said. “I know all about jinxes.”
Having said that, I checked to make sure my shirt wasn’t red. It wasn’t. Then I realized I was putting this off because if I was wrong, I was about to go join Yoda and Obi-Wan in blue-light country. So I took a deep breath and strode forward into the beautiful, deadly barrier.
Chapter
Forty-seven
I lived.
Just in case anyone was wondering.
I stepped through and the liquid light poured over me like warm syrup. There was a little bit of a tingle as it passed over the surface of my body, and then it was gone.
As were my clothes. Like, completely.
I had sort of hoped that they would stay—the way Superman’s unitard stays mostly invincible because it’s really close to his skin. Plus I hadn’t felt like stripping in front of everyone for something so relatively trivial as preserving my garage-sale wardrobe and, more important, I didn’t think I had time to start playing Mr. Rogers while someone screwed around with my island. City to save. Check out my focus.
Of course . . . going into battle full commando could be problematic.
On the other hand, every single time Mab had come at me during my recovery—every time—I’d been just like this, without resources of any kind except what I carried within me. I wasn’t a big believer in coincidence. Had she been trying only to strengthen me generally? Or had she been preparing me for this exact situation?
Could Mab see that far ahead? Or was this simply a case of superior preparedness proving itself in action? What was it I�
�d heard in a martial arts studio at some point? Learn to fight naked and you can never be disarmed. Which is fine, I guess, as long as there aren’t mosquitoes.
I got low and stayed still and opened my senses.
First thing: I was inside a ritual circle, one that was currently functioning, being used for a spell. It wasn’t the cheap and quick kind I was used to, I guessed, or it would have been broken when I crossed it. Maybe it had kept its integrity because as part of the island, I already existed on either side of the circle. There were certain creatures who could move back and forth across boundaries like that without disturbing them in the slightest—most notably the common cat. It was one reason practitioners so often kept cats as house pets. From a technical standpoint, they are very magic-friendly. Maybe I hadn’t broken it because it had been set up in such a way as to consider the island’s Warden one of those creatures. Or maybe it was the continual, rippling, liquid nature of the circle itself.
Whatever the case, I was standing inside an active circle. Possibly the most active circle I had ever seen. Magic hummed through the air and the ground, so much that I felt my hair standing on end, and some primitive instinct-level awareness from the Winter Knight’s mantle, the same part that had given me so much trouble all day, started advising me to get the hell out of there along with the rest of the island’s animals. That was why my intellectus hadn’t been able to tell me what was happening here. As a form of magical awareness, an active circle had blocked my intellectus out. Now it worked just fine for what was inside the circle—it was everything outside of it that it could no longer touch.
I learned all of that at the same time my regular old five senses registered what was happening: I was not alone. The crown of the hill was covered with faeries.
All right, that wasn’t literally true. There were twenty of them, plus one other mortal.
And Demonreach.
The island’s spirit made manifest stood in the ruins of the lighthouse, in the opening in the wall that led to the entrance to the stairs down to the Well. Its vast form was planted, braced like a man standing against a strong wind, hunched, bent forward slightly, but not in a stance of battle. The spirit did not exist for such things. Instead, I realized, it did only what it always had: It endured. But even as I watched, I saw bits of Demonreach flying backward, away from its mass, but slowly, as if a current of thick syrup flowed past the spirit, slowly wearing it away.
The spirit stood at one point of an equilateral triangle.
At one of the other points stood Lily, the Summer Lady. She stood with her right arm, the arm that projects energy, upraised. She wore the same simple dress I’d seen her in earlier. It was pressed against the front of her body, and her silver-white hair was blown back as if in a strong wind. There was no visible display of energy coming from her other than that, but the ground between her and Demonreach was covered in fresh green grass, and I could feel that she was pouring out power against spirit.
Behind her stood a pair of Sidhe of the Summer Court, each with a hand on her shoulder. Behind them were three more, and four more were behind them, each with their hands on the shoulder of someone in front of them, forming a pyramid shape. They were all projecting power forward, focusing it through Lily, making her even stronger than she already was.
Maeve stood at the third point of the triangle, with her own pyramid of supporters. She wore leather short-shorts, military boots, and a bikini top, all of midnight blue. She stood in the same stance as Lily, the same unseen power flaring from her outstretched hand, but her face was set in a wide, manic smile, and the ground between her and Demonreach was covered in a layer of frost.
The Redcap stood at her right hand, one hand on her shoulder. The massive rawhead from my birthday party was there, too, and its bony claws, drenched in and dripping fresh blood, rested on her other shoulder. Eight other Winter Sidhe were behind them, forming a power pyramid of their own.
Then I heard footsteps, and a second later Fix, the Summer Knight, stepped around the corner of my partially completed cottage and walked toward me. He was wearing faerie mail, gleaming, draping over a wiry, hard-muscled frame, and he carried his sword in his hand. Fix stopped between me and the triangle at the top of the hill.
“Hey, Harry,” he said quietly.
“Hey, Fix.”
“Cold?”
“Not so much. You know what’s happening here?”
“What must happen,” he said.
“According to whom?”
“My Lady.”
“She’s wrong.”
Fix stood there for a time, quiet. Then he said, “Doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“Because she is my Lady. You will not raise your hand against her.”
I stared at Fix, who had suffered under the office of Lloyd Slate, and behind him at Lily, who had been Slate’s frequent victim. I wondered how many times, back then, Fix had ached to be able to save her, to have the power to stand up to the Winter Knight.
And now he did.
There comes a time when no amount of talk can change the course of events—when people are committed, when their actions are dictated by the necessity of the situation their choices have created. Fix had put his faith in Lily, and would fight to the death to defend her. Nothing I had to say would change that. I could see that in his face.
“Go back,” he said.
“Can’t. Stand aside?”
“Can’t.”
“So it’s like that?” I said.
Fix exhaled. Then he nodded. “Yeah.”
And for the first time in a decade the Winter Knight and Summer Knight went to war.
Fix hurled a bolt of pure Summer fire that scorched the ground beneath it as it flew at me.
I didn’t have time to think, but some part of me knew this game. Dodging the bolt wouldn’t be enough—the bloom of heated air coming off that fire would burn me if it even came close. That was why Fix would have the advantage in this match if he kept the distance open and just threw bolt after bolt. So I called upon Winter to chill the air around me as I ducked to one side. Fire and cold met, clashed, and filled the air with mist—mist that would give me the chance to close to grips with my foe.
Part of me, the part of me that I was sure was me, viewed these tactics with alarm. I was freaking naked and unarmed. Fix had the mantle of the Summer Knight, and it made him just as strong and fast and tough as I was. He was armored and toted a freaking sword, and he’d had ten years of training with the Summer Court to learn how to fight and use the mantle. Plus, he presumably hadn’t spent all day pushing his abilities to the limit.
But the Winter mantle didn’t care about that. It simply saw its enemy and wanted to destroy it. The best way to do that was to get in close and rip out Fix’s throat.
Except that wasn’t how the last Winter Knight had killed the last Summer Knight. Lloyd Slate had iced the stairs underneath the other guy’s feet and pushed him down. And Slate had been young and in good shape, whereas the other Summer Knight had been an old man. So I thought it would be smart to assume that the instinctual knowledge of the Winter mantle, while it could be handy, was basically that of a starving predator, a wolf in winter—it wanted blood, lots of it, now.
And if I played it like that, Fix was going to leave my guts on the ground.
Instead of charging ahead, I veered to one side for several steps and then froze. An instant later, another bolt of fire lit up the mist, right through where I would have been if I’d followed the mantle’s instinct.
Of course—it had to be that way. Winter’s Knight was the mountain lion, the wolf. Summer’s was the stag, the bison. Winter was oriented to stalking, hunting, and killing prey. Summer to avoiding a confrontation until an advantage could be had, then savagely pressing that advantage for all it was worth. Fix would have a wealth of instinctive knowledge to draw on if I went after him Winter’s way, and would be at his most dangerous the same way as, for example, a student of pure aikido. He wo
uld use the strength of an attack to assist his own defense, turning it back on the attacker. But if I didn’t give him that kind of aggressive assault, I would rob him of his instinctive advantage.
Screw being the Winter Knight. Before everything else, I was a wizard.
So I flicked my wrist, whispered, “Obscurata,” and vanished behind a veil.
My veils aren’t much good compared to the grasshopper’s, or almost anyone else’s, really, but when you’re standing in a giant fog bank they don’t need to be very good to make you effectively invisible—and I know how to move very quietly. I wouldn’t have trusted them against one of the Sidhe, but Fix wasn’t one. He was a changeling, with one mortal parent and one fae one, but except for the Summer mantle, he was as human as the next guy.
I prowled ahead, Listening, sharpening the acuity of my ears to a far greater level than that of which they were normally capable, and heard Fix’s smooth breathing before I’d taken a dozen steps. I froze in place. I couldn’t locate him exactly, but—
I kept myself from making an impatient sound and consulted my intellectus. Fix was standing thirty-six feet, four inches away, about twenty-two degrees to the left of the way my nose was facing. If I’d had a gun, I was pretty sure I could have shot him.
Fix had frozen in place, too.
Bah. His mantle was probably advising him to be patient, just as mine was screaming at me to stop waiting, stalk him, and pounce. I took advantage of it for maybe a minute, consulting my intellectus and moving fifty feet to one side, where I could pick something up off the ground. Then I went back and waited—but he still hadn’t stirred.
This wouldn’t work if he stood his ground. I had to make him move.
I retreated a few more steps into the mist and spoke away from him, hoping the lousy visibility and my veil would confuse the exact origin of my voice. “I get Lloyd Slate a little better now, you know,” I said. “The mantle. It drove him. Made him want things.”