by Jim Butcher
“Like hell she isn’t,” I said. “She’s the Summer Lady.”
“But Titania is the Summer Queen,” Fix told me. “And if you’ll forgive me for pointing out something so obvious, it wasn’t so long ago that you murdered Titania’s daughter.”
“What does that have to do with anything,” I began, but snapped my lips closed over the last word. Of course. When Lily had become the Summer Lady, she got the whole package-and it went way beyond simply turning her hair white. She would have to follow the bizarre set of limits and rules to which all of the Faerie Queens seemed bound. And, more importantly, it meant she would have to obey the more powerful Queens of Summer, Titania and Mother Summer.
“Are you telling me that Titania has ordered you both not to help me?” I asked them.
They stared back at me with faerie poker faces that told me nothing.
I nodded, beginning to understand. “You aren’t permitted to speak officially for Summer. And Titania’s laid some kind of compulsion on you both to prevent you from helping me on a personal level,” I said. “Hasn’t she?”
Had there been crickets, I would have heard them clearly. Had my table companions been statues, I’d have gotten more reaction from them.
“You’re not supposed to help me. You’re not supposed to tell me about the compulsion.” I followed the chain of logic a step further. “But you want to help, so here you are. Which means that the only way I could get information out of you is to approach it indirectly. Or else the compulsion would force you to shut up. Am I close?”
Cheep-cheep. If it went on much longer, they’d have to worry about inbound pigeons.
I frowned a little and thought about it for a minute. Then I asked, “Theoretically speaking,” I said, “what kinds of things might prevent Winter and Summer from reacting to an incursion by another nation?”
Lily’s eyes sparkled, and she nodded to Fix. The little guy turned to me and said, “In theory, only a few things could do it. The simplest would be a lack of respect for the strength of the incurring nation. If the Queens considered them no threat, there would be no need to act.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Go on.”
“A much more serious reason would be an issue of the balance of power between the Courts of Summer and Winter. Any reaction to the invasion would alter what resources one would have at hand. If one Court did not act in concert with the other, it would provide an ideal opportunity for a surprise assault while the other had its strategic back turned.”
I rubbed my hands along my thighs, squinting one eye shut. “Let me see if I’ve put this together right. Summer’s ready to throw down. But Winter isn’t gonna help, because apparently they’d rather take a poke at you guys when you were focused on another threat.”
I took Fix’s silence as an affirmative.
“That’s insane,” I said. “If that happens, both Courts are going to suffer. Both of you will be weakened. No matter who came out on top, they’d be easy pickings for the Reds. Theoretically speaking.”
“An imbalance between Winter and Summer is nothing new,” Lily said. “It has existed since the time when we first met you, Harry. It continues today because of the fate of the current Winter Knight.”
I grimaced. “Christ. He’s still alive? After… what, almost four years?”
Fix shuddered. “I saw him once. The man was a psycho, a drug addict and a murderer-”
“And a rapist,” Lily interjected in a quiet, sad voice.
“And that,” Fix agreed, his expression grim. “I could break his neck and not lose a minute’s sleep. But no one deserves…” He swallowed, his face going pale. “That.”
“The moron betrayed Mab,” I said quietly. “He knew the risks when he did it.”
“No,” Fix said, with another shudder. “Believe me, Harry. He didn’t know what would happen to him. He couldn’t have.”
Fix’s obvious discomfort made a certain impression on me, especially given that Mab had displayed an unnerving amount of interest in me, and that I still owed her a couple of favors. I shifted uneasily in my chair and tried to blow it off. “Whatever,” I said. “There’s a Summer Knight. There’s a Winter Knight. What’s unbalanced about that?”
“He isn’t exerting his power,” Fix replied. “He’s a prisoner, and everyone knows it. He has no freedom, no will. He can’t stand on the side of Winter as its champion. So far as the tension between the Courts goes, the Winter Knight might as well not exist.”
“All right,” I murmured. “Mab’s got a man in the penalty box. She wants to take the offensive before Summer pushes a power play, and she’s looking for ways to even the odds. If Summer goes running off to take on the Reds, it will give her a chance to strike.” I shook my head. “I don’t pretend to know Mab very well, but she isn’t suicidal. If the imbalance is so dangerous, why is she keeping the Winter Knight alive to begin with? And she must see what the consequences of another Winter-Summer war would be.” I looked back and forth between them. “Right?”
“Unfortunately,” Lily said quietly, “our intelligence about the internal politics of Winter is very limited-and Mab is not the sort to reveal her mind to another. I do not know if she realizes the potential danger. Her actions of late have been…” She closed her eyes for a moment and then said, with some obvious effort, “Erratic.”
I propped up my chin on the heel of my hand, thinking. “Mab’s a lot of things,” I said thoughtfully. “But she sure as hell isn’t erratic. She’s like some damned big glacier. Not a thing you can do to stop her, but at least you know just how she’s going to move. What’s the bard say? Constant as the northern star.”
Fix frowned, as if struggling with an internal decision for a minute, then let out an exasperated sigh and said, “I think many who know the Sidhe would agree with you.”
Which was neither a confirmation nor a denial-technically, at any rate. But then, Sidhe magic and bindings tended to lean heavily toward the technical details.
I sat back slowly again, thoughts flickering over dozens of ideas and bits of information, putting them together into a larger picture. And it wasn’t a pretty one. The last time one of the Faerie Queens had come a little bit unbalanced, the situation had become a potential global catastrophe on the same order of magnitude as a middling large meteor impact or a limited nuclear exchange. And that had been the youngest Queen of the gentler and more reasonable Summer, Lily’s predecessor. Aurora. The late Aurora, I suppose.
If Mab had blown a gasket, matters wouldn’t be just as bad.
They would be worse.
A lot worse.
“I’ve got to know more about this one,” I told them quietly.
“I know,” Lily said. She lifted her hand to a temple and closed her eyes in a faint frown of pain. “But…” She shook her head and fell silent again as Titania’s binding sealed her tongue.
I glanced at Fix, who managed to whisper, “Sorry, Harry,” before he too closed his eyes and looked vaguely ill.
“I need answers,” I murmured, thinking aloud. “But you can’t give them to me. And there can’t be all that many people who know what’s going on.”
Silence and faint expressions of pain. After a few seconds, Fix said, “I think we’ve done all we can here.”
I racked my brains for a few seconds more and then said, “No, you haven’t.”
Lily opened her eyes and looked at me, arching a perfect, silver-white brow.
“I need someone with the right information and who isn’t under a compulsion not to help me. And I can only think of one person who fits the bill.”
Lily’s eyes widened a second after I got done speaking.
“Can you do it?” I asked her. “Right now?”
She chewed her lower lip for a second, then nodded.
“Call her,” I said.
Fix looked back and forth between us. “I don’t understand. What are you doing?”
“Something stupid, probably,” I said. “But this is too big. I nee
d more information.”
Lily closed her eyes and folded her hands on her lap, her expression relaxing into one of deep concentration. I could feel the subtle stir of energy around her.
My stomach rumbled. I asked Mac to whip me up a steak sandwich and settled down to wait.
It didn’t take long. My sandwich wasn’t halfway done when Mouse let out a sudden, rumbling growl of warning, and the temperature in the bar dropped about ten degrees. The whirling ceiling fans let out mechanical moans of protest and spun faster. Then the door opened and let in sunlight made wan by a patch of dreary grey clouds. The light cast a slender black silhouette.
Fix’s eyes narrowed. His hands slid casually out of sight beneath the table, and he said, “Oh. Her”
The young woman who entered the bar could have been Lily’s sister. She had the same exotic beauty, the same canted, feline eyes, the same pale, flawless skin. But this one’s hair was worn in long, ragged strands of varying lengths, like a Raggedy Ann doll, each one dyed a slightly different color from frozen seas-pale blues and greens, as though each had borrowed its color from a different glacier. Her eyes were a cold, brilliant shade of green, almost entirely darkened by pupils dilated as though with drugs or arousal. A slender silver hoop gleamed at one side of her nose, and a collar of black leather studded with silver snowflakes encircled the graceful line of her slender throat. She wore sandals and cut-off blue jean shorts-very cut-off, and very tight. A tight, white T-shirt strained across her chest, and read, in pale blue letters stretched into intriguing curves, “YOUR BOYFRIEND WANTS ME.”
She prowled across the room to us, all hips and lips and fascinating eyes, looking far too young to move with such wanton sensuality. I knew better. She could have been a century old. She chose to look the way she did because of what she was: the Winter Lady, youngest Queen of the Un-seelie Court, Mab’s understudy in wickedness and power. When she walked by the flowers that had bloomed in Lily’s presence, they froze over, withered, and died. She gave them no more notice than Lily had.
“Harry Dresden,” she said, her voice low, lulling, and sweet.
And I said, “Hello, Maeve.”
Chapter Twenty
Maeve stared at me for a long minute and licked her lips. “Look at you,” she all but purred. “All pent up like that. You haven’t had a woman in ages, have you?”
I hadn’t. I really, really hadn’t. But that wasn’t the kind of thinking that a professional investigator allowed to clog up the gears in his brain. I could have said something back, but I decided that if I ignored the taunt, maybe she’d get bored and leave me alone. So instead of taking up the verbal epee, I rose and drew out a chair for her, politely. “Sit with us, Maeve?”
Her head tilted almost all the way to her shoulder. She stared at me with those intense green eyes. “Just boiling over. Maybe you and I should have a private talk. Just the two of us.”
My libido seconded the suggestion, and heartily.
My libido and I generally don’t see eye to eye. Dammit.
“I’d rather just sit and have a nice chat,” I said to her.
“Liar,” Maeve said, smiling.
I sighed. “All right. There are a lot of things I’d love to do. But the only thing that’s going to happen is a nice chat. So you might as well sit down and let me get you a drink.”
Her head tilted the other way. Her hips shifted in a kind of counterpoint that drew the eye. “How long has it been for you, wizard? How long since you sated yourself.”
The answer was depressing. “Last time I saw Susan, I guess.”
Maeve made a disgusted sound. “No, not love, wizard. Need. Flesh.”
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” I said.
She waved that off with an expression of contempt. “I want an answer.
“Looks to me like there’s all kinds of things you want that you aren’t going to get,” I told her. I glanced at Fix and Lily, throwing a mute appeal into it.
Fix gave me an apologetic shrug and Lily sighed. “You might as well indulge her, Harry. She’s as stubborn as any of us, the only one who might give you the answers you need, and she knows it.”
I looked back at Maeve, who gave me that same eerie, intensely sensual smile. “Tell me, mortal. When was the last time flesh, new and strange to your hand, lay quivering beneath you, hmm?” She leaned down until her eyes were inches from mine. I could smell winter mint and something lush and corrupt, like rotted flowers, on her breath. “When was the last time you could taste and feel some little lovely’s cries?”
I regarded her without any expression and said, in a gentle voice, “Technically? When I killed Aurora.”
Maeve’s expression flickered with an instant of uncertainty.
“You remember Aurora,” I told her quiedy. “The last Summer Lady. Your peer. Your equal. When she died, she’d been cut several dozen times with cold iron. She was bleeding out. But she was still trying to stick a knife in Lily. So I tackled her and held her down. She kept struggling until she lost too much blood. And then she died in the grass on the hill of the Stone Table.”
Dead silence filled the whole place.
“It sort of surprised me,” I said, never putting any particular emotion on the words. “How fast it happened. It surprised her, too. She was confused when she died.”
Maeve only stared at me.
“I never wanted to kill her. But she didn’t leave me any choice.” I let the silence fill the room for a moment and stared at Maeve’s eyes.
The Winter Lady swallowed and eased her weight a tiny bit away from me.
Then I gestured with one hand at the chair I still held out for her and said, “Let’s be polite to one another, Maeve. Please.”
She took a slow breath, soulless, inhuman eyes on mine, and then said, “I know now why Mab wants you.” She straightened and gave me an odd little bow, which might have looked more courtly had she been wearing a gown. Then she sat and said, “Does the barkeep still have those sweet-lemon chips of ice?”
“Of course,” I said. “Mac. Another lemonade for the Lady, please?”
Mac provided it in his usual silence. As he did, the few people who were in the place cleared out. Most of the magical community of Chicago knew the Ladies by reputation, if not on sight, and they wanted nothing to do with any kind of incident between Winter and Summer. They were safer if they were never noticed.
Hell, if I could have snuck out, I would have led the way. When I’d defeated Aurora, there had been a healthy chunk of luck involved. I caught her with a sucker punch. If she’d been focused on taking me out instead of finishing her scheme, I doubt I would have survived the evening. Sure, I might have stared Maeve down, but ultimately I was bluffing-trying to fool the oncoming shark into thinking I might be something that could eat it. If the shark decided to start taking bites anyhow, things would get unpleasant for me.
But this time, at least, the shark didn’t know that.
Maeve waited for her lemonade, wrapped her lips idly around the straw, and sipped. Then she settled back into her seat, chewing. Crunching sounds came from her mouth. The lemonade had frozen solid when it passed her lips.
Which made me feel pretty damned smart for avoiding the whole sexual temptation issue.
Maeve looked at Lily steadily as she chewed, and then said, to me, “You know, my last Knight often dragged this one before the Court for performances. All kinds of performances. Some of them hurt. And some of them didn’t. Though she still cried out prettily enough.” She smiled, her tone polite and conversational. “Do you remember the night he made you dance for me in the red shoes, Lily?”
Lily’s green eyes settled on Maeve, calm and placid as a forest pool.
Maeve’s smile sharpened. “Do you remember what I did to you after?”
Lily smiled, a tired little expression, and shook her head. “I’m sorry, Maeve. I know how much pleasure you take in gloating, but you can’t hurt me with that now. That Lily is no more.”
Maeve narrowed her eyes, and then her gaze shifted to Fix. “And this one. I’ve seen this little man weeping like a child. Begging for mercy.”
Fix sipped at his lemonade and said, “For the love of God, Maeve. Would you give the Evil Kinkstress act a rest? It gets tired pretty fast.”
The Winter Lady let out an exasperated breath, put down her drink, and folded her arms sullenly across her chest. “Very well,” Maeve said, her tone petulant. “What is it you wish to know, wizard?”
“I’d like to know why Mab hasn’t been striking back at the Red Court after they trespassed on Sidhe territory during the battle last year.”
Maeve arched a brow at me. “That is knowledge, and therefore power. What are you prepared to trade for it?”
“Forgetfulness,” I said.
Maeve tilted her head. “I can think of nothing in particular I would like to forget.”
“I can think of something you want me to forget, Maeve.”
“Can you?”
I smiled, with teeth. “I’d be willing to forget what you did at Billy and Georgia’s wedding.”
“Pardon?” Maeve said. “I don’t seem to recall being present.”
She knew the score. She knew that I knew it, too. Her legality pissed me off. “Of course,” I replied. “You weren’t there. But your handmaiden was. Jenny Greenteeth.”
Maeve’s lips parted in sudden surprise.
“I saw through her glamour. Didn’t you know who shut her down?” I asked her, lifting my own eyebrows in faux innocence. “That was petty cruelty, Maeve, even for you. Trying to ruin their marriage.”
“Your wolf children did me a petty wrong,” Maeve replied. “They killed a favorite hireling of the Winter Court.”
“They owed their loyalty to Dresden when they killed the Tigress,” Lily murmured. “Even as did the Little Folk he used against Aurora. They acted with his consent and upon his will, Maeve. You know our laws.”
Maeve gave Lily a dirty look that was almost human.
“For what happened that night, they were mine.” I put my hands flat on the table and leaned a little toward Maeve, speaking with as much quiet intensity as I could. “I protect what is mine. You should know that by now. I have lawful reason for a quarrel with you.”