Estimating the Population of Women Who Can Channel With the Spark Inborn

I somehow lost most of March to spending two weeks helping with my cousin's school play, so here's a cross-post of an essay I originally wrote for Tumblr. 

The White Tower estimates that 1-2% of the population has the ability to channel, but seems to have no firm estimate of the fraction of that 1-2% who will channel whether they try to or not. There are a few sets of information which offer possible formulae for working this out.

Wilder and "Sparker" Aes Sedai 
There are 15 or 16 named Aes Sedai known either to be wilders or to have had the spark inborn, although many "sparkers" who are not wilders are established only in the Companion. The 15 or 16 reflects the uncertain status of Saerin Ansobar, who is listed on the Wiki as a wilder, but may be so classified only because she was initially trained by the Daughters of Silence rather than by Aes Sedai. There are additionally four present-day Aes Sedai known or strongly suspected to be from Far Madding, who it seems unlikely could have discovered their ability to channel without possessing the Spark, given that they could not channel in Far Madding itself and would not have been encouraged to seek testing or try to channel on their own. For the purposes of our estimates, we will assume that Saerin Ansobar is a true wilder - with numbers so small and uncertain, any potential inaccuracy this introduces will be dwarfed by the potential inaccuracy introduced by the sheer volume of what we do not and cannot know. Results will be figured with and without the Far Maddingers for comparison.

If we assume that every Aes Sedai with the spark inborn is named and identified as such at some point in the series, this would give us 16 or 20 sisters out of roughly 950 living Aes Sedai at start of series. Estimated population with the spark inborn: 1.7 to 2.1% of women who can channel, 0.02 to 0.03% of the total human population.

If instead we assume these 16 or 20 named Aes Sedai with the spark are representative of the roughly 277 named Aes Sedai in the series, we instead have 5.8 to 7.2% of women who can channel, and 0.08 to 0.1% of the human population.

Watch Hill Novices 
In The Shadow Rising, Alanna and Verin report having found four girls in Watch Hill who can be taught to channel, and one who may have the spark inborn. If she does (they cannot tell for certain given her age), and if these numbers are in proportion to the general population, that would make for 1 in 5 women who can channel, 20%, and about 0.3% of people. This is, of course, a nice round number, and has fewer uncertainties than estimates based on Aes Sedai, but five is not a good sample size. Suldam and Damane There are 30 named Sul'dam in the series, and 22 named Damane from Seanchan. In the unlikely event that these numbers are in proportion, this would mean that 42.3% of women who can channel have the spark inborn. This is ridiculous on the face of it, especially as we are told explicitly that there are always "many" more sul'dam than damane.

The Shaido In The Fires of Heaven, the Shaido have about 160,000 spears, although some number of these are mera'din. Together, the forces of the other 11 clans seem to represent about 480,000 men and maidens, which would make for about 43,600 per clan. However, Couladin brought the entire clan across the dragonwall, while the other clans did not commit themselves so thoroughly. If we assume that each of the eleven non-Shaido clans committed roughly half their available forces, and that roughly five percent of the warriors of each non-Shaido clan were mera'din and thus among Couladin's men instead of their own clans', we might reasonably place the actual population of Shaido warriors at very, very roughly 100,000 spears. I believe it is established somewhere, that the Shaido are one of the larger clans (along with the Goshien and Taardad), so this feels pretty reasonable. (Number of septs has not been taken into consideration here, as the Shaido have more than 8 times as many septs as any other clan, and their population clearly is not that much larger. It is to be assumed that the Shaido have smaller septs for some reason.) This would put the adult population of the Shaido in the neighborhood of 200,000. (At least half again as many are children, but we can ignore them for these purposes since they cannot channel). Of course, we will need to divide this by two again immediately to get the population of women, taking us back to 100,000, assuming maidens of the spear are roughly balanced by blacksmiths, very old men, and other adult male noncombatants.

In Crossroads of Twilight, it is established that when the Shaido crossed the Dragonwall, they had "fewer than five hundred" (by implication, more than four hundred) Wise Ones who could channel, and perhaps 50 apprentices who could do so, making the total number of Shaido Wise Ones who can channel very close to 500. All Aiel women who have the Spark inborn are trained as Wise Ones, and as far as I can tell, no effort is made to identify girls who could learn but do not have the spark. This would indicate that 500 out of 100,000 Shaido Women have the spark inborn, making for about 0.5% of their population, and about one third of those who could learn to channel. I confess to a certain degree of surprise at this figure. Even if we assume that the mera'din do not contribute a significant portion of the Shaido forces in Cairhien, and that their real adult population is more like 320,000, making for 160,000 women, this makes those with the spark inborn about 0.3% of the population and almost 21% of those who can channel or learn to do so. Remarkably, this seems to corroborate the proportions implied by our laughably small sample of girls from Watch Hill.

Limitations 
The Aes Sedai figures are a bit of a mess. It is established in Beonin's perspective in Knife of Dreams that the Tower tends to focus on "bringing in girls born with the spark, and those already on the brink of channeling through their own fumbling". We know almost nothing about the personal histories of most Aes Sedai. This Beonin perspective is the only place in the text to firmly establish that some girls without the spark learn to channel without formal training, and there is nothing to tell us what their outcomes are like. Channeling sickness is endemic to the Westlands, and it is difficult to estimate how this has affected the population of Aes Sedai with the Spark inborn. That only about two thirds of women who can channel are strong enough to attain the shawl leaves another substantial number of women, some of them Tower trained, unaccounted for.

The 1-2% figure for the portion of the population who can channel (averaged in all calculations above to 1.5%) is from The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, and it is possible that this figure is simply incorrect. World of (or the implied author thereof), believes this number to have be consistent between the Age of Legends and the present day, but in the Rhuidean flashbacks, Coumin was passed over at age ten because he "lacked the spark". It is to be assumed that the Aes Sedai of the Age of Legends could accurately identify the ability to channel in children that young, perhaps using a ter'angreal as the Seanchan do in the present day, but the use of the word "spark" here suggests the possibility that those who did not have the spark inborn were not identified or taught in the Age of Legends, and not included among their estimates for the portion of the population who could channel. This would mean that, unless something has changed, 1-2% of the total population have the spark inborn, meaning that, at the highest end, it is possible that as much as 10% of the population could learn to channel. For a sense of the scale here, Andor has a population of roughly 10 million. Allowing that half of them are men, that 75% of those with the Spark inborn die (we will assume for mathematical tidiness that none of these are found and trained before it's too late), and that 37.5% are not strong enough to meet the Tower's criteria for the Shawl, if the White Tower found and trained all of them, this would produce a bit over 300,000 Aes Sedai from Andor alone, compared to the 950 Aes Sedai from the entire Westlands that actually exist. However, it is equally possible that only the da'shain Aiel needed the spark inborn to qualify for training (there is tenuous evidence for this in current Aiel practices), or that the Aes Sedai of the Age of Legends did not use the word "spark" the same way it is used in the present day.

It is possible that some girls who become Wise Ones for other reasons (such as a Talent for dreaming) subsequently discover that they can learn to channel and are taught, but it is not clear whether such discovery would occur in the natural course of their training, nor whether the Wise Ones are aware that a girl without the spark even can be taught.

Figures for the Shaido adult population are, of course, somewhat imprecise. I don't think there's anything seriously wrong with them, but I could easily have missed something.

Conclusions 
The true percentage of people who can channel who have the spark inborn is almost certainly not less than 2%. Estimates using White Tower data would likely put it in the neighborhood of 5%. However, the Shaido figures call this into question, and it seems uncomfortably likely that the true figure is in fact around 20%. Certainly, it could not realistically be higher.

Dresden Files Rearead - Summer Knight Chapter 19

Photo by Bálint Szabó on Unsplash

As they try to find a way out of the store, Harry explains to Murphy that he thinks what they're dealing with is a mind fog, and roughly what it does. This is a nasty piece of spellwork, and what we know about how magic works, I think even at this point in the series, suggests that it's also a pretty substantial outlay of power. Presumably this kind of thing is easier with thaumaturgy, but at that point I think you'd have to get a circle up around an entire walmart supercenter, and that sounds both time consuming and impractical. He also says he's not sure, because he's never seen one before, since they're illegal. Murphy says he never mentioned anything about magical law, which is a bit puzzling if he actually told her the whole situation he's dealing with, since his own status as a former warlock is sort of central to why the White Council is treating him this way. 

Murphy tries the fire alarm, which doesn't work. Neither does trying to go out the back, indicating that whoever's behind this is not just trying to force Harry out an exit of their choosing, and likely means to kill or capture him right there in the Walmart. There's a little bit of discussion and banter here about Murphy's Colt 1911, how it's better in a magic-heavy environment than something newer, but Harry still thinks revolvers are more reliable. This gear comparison, people explaining the virtues of their loadout, criticizing other people's, happens a lot in Dresden Files, and either that's evidence that the series draws from a genre or medium I don't spend a lot of time with, or it's specific to Jim Butcher's work, because I don't think I've seen it anywhere else. Literarilly, it's a good tool - it gives the reader a picture of what resources everyone has ready to hand before they come into play, telegraphs that an action scene is coming up, can often tell us something about the nature of the setting or the particular threat they're up against, and establishes everyone involved in the conversation as equals who respect each other (most of the time - like when it happens in Blood Rites, it's actually partly about establishing that Kincaid has a lot more experience with this kind of fight than Harry or Murphy). Sometimes it also builds, introduces, or reinforces other aspects of the dynamic between the characters, but that's just the nature of dialogue. They retreat to the automotive section, decently far from the mist, and Harry uses the stolen salt shakers to put up a circle. He makes a protective charm for Murphy using some of her hair and a thread from his own shirt, string around her finger so she won't forget. I notice that a lot of Harry's best and most reliable magic is based on these little ingrained cultural ideas: follow your noise, flicum bicus, string around your finger so you won't forget, pocket full of sunshine. I'm curious if wizards from other cultures have similar results with different culturally significant images, ideas, and metaphors, or if this is specifically a Harry thing. He wraps his pentacle around his hand, preparing to use that for his own protection. Murphy is visibly kind of freaked out here, due primarily to her trauma at the hands of the Nightmare, although honestly this is the first time she's really seen Harry properly doing magic, and I think that might be kind of unsettling either way. She's pretty open with Harry about it when he asks, and when she expresses concern that she won't fully recover, he says that if she doesn't he'll make fun of her and...put aprons on her car? and call he a sissy girl in front of her coworker every day. This seems to calm her down. 

Harry drops the circle, and they step into the mist. Their protections hold, although Harry's takes some active upkeep, and they head for the garden center. Why they chose this over an exit that would take them more directly out of the store I genuinely have no idea. It's possible they just got turned around in the low visibility, but I kind of thought Harry had a better sense of direction than that. They stop briefly so Harry can help an old man sit down, because Harry has an affinity for old people and we have to be reminded about this every couple of books. They've just made it through to the garden center when a woman whom they mistook for an employee caught by the fog reveals herself to be the Tigress and attacks Harry with a pair of gardening shears. This causes Harry to fall and hit his head on the floor, "complete with a burst of phantom light", bringing this book's concussion count to 2. When we get closer to the wrap-up post for this one, I'm gonna do a quick reread of the first two books and count the head injuries there too so I can make a graph. When this doesn't immediately kill him, the Tigress pulls a gun, but Murphy gets her in a grapple and either breaks or dislocates her wrist, causing her to drop the gun. This is mildly interesting inasmuch as it suggests that while they're considerably stronger than humans, ghouls don't have much sturdier connective tissue than we do. If I remember correctly, they do have some pretty serious accelerated healing, so they may just rely on that to compensate for being strong enough to pull their own skeletons apart. Or maybe there's a magic thing related to their transformation abilities that protects their joints and tendons from being damaged by their own movements, but not by external forces. Murphy tries to arrest the Tigress, whom she likely doesn't realize is anything other than a hostile human, but the ghoul changes shape and Murphy panics and freezes. Unfortunately the Tigress decides to tease Murphy a little before going in for the kill, which is frankly surprising behavior in a contact killer, giving Murphy time to recover and empty an entire clip into the Tigress. As an aside, Harry confidently asserts that bullets rip through a human body "like lead weights through cheesecloth", and I find that a little puzzling because most of the cheesecloth I've personally interacted with has been pretty sturdy for how thin it is. Maybe if you, I don't know, dropped a lead weight on a taught piece of cheesecloth from high up it would go through, but that isn't specified, so I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be picturing here. Jim Butcher is just not at the top of his descriptive game these last couple of chapters. 

Photo by Me

Murphy reloads and seems to be considering putting a whole second clip into the Tigress since the first one failed to kill her, but Grum the Ogre, armed with a hoe and a gardening shovel, interrupts them. Harry taunts Grum and tries to lead in further into the garden center, away from Murphy. This is when he tries the thing with the marbles, which doesn't work at all because Grum simply crushes them. Murphy, meanwhile, has new problems of her own, because someone is covering the exit with a rifle. Exactly which exit, at this point I'm honestly not sure - maybe back from the garden center into the main body of the store? Again, Butcher isn't doing his best description here. Harry gets out into the open air area where they sell baby trees and thing, getting a substantial lead on Grum in the process, but Grum has twisted the latch out of shape so it can't be opened. He asks why Grum is doing this, but Grum just does this "guess you'll die not knowing" bit. Escaping into the Nevernever is a dubious option at best (I certainly wouldn't want to visit whatever's across the Veil from a Walmart garden center on a summer night, although Harry is more concerned about time distortion), so he forms the notion of piling stuff up to get over the fence. I have serious questions about how quickly he can really do this when Grum is "several yards away", but sure. He tells Murphy he thinks he has a way out, and to get herself to safety if she can, but she refuses to leave without him. He's just starting to actually climb the fence when the saplings and mulch he piled up physically grab him, as they start coming together into the chlorofiend. 

I never have as much to say as I'd like about these action-heavy chapters. Maybe if I can find anyone, I'll try to get a guest blogger to come in and talk about what works and doesn't about the way Butcher writes fight scenes, because it's honestly a little out of my wheelhouse. As always, I'm gonna try to be faster going forward, but I still can't give this blog the kind of time it really deserves and still make enough money to eat and live indoors. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Potato Soup For People Who Can't Be Trusted With Perishable Ingredients (Or The Stove)

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 I was hoping you get you some more Dresden Files before doing another recipe post, but honestly this one is too good not to share. Also apparently my last recipe post was more than a year ago, so that makes me feel a little better. Technically, the title on this one may be a little misleading - it contains somewhere between 2 and 5 perishable ingredients depending on how fancy you want to get, and how you define "perishable", but they're things I always have around and that usually get used fast enough to avoid problems. Your mileage may vary, depending largely on how many coffee drinkers with different needs you have in your house. The only absolutely non-optional perishable ingredient here is butter. The version of the recipe presented here is how I actually made it, possible variations, substitutions, and improvements are discussed below. I made this one in the big 10 cup rice cooker, and I'm uncertain about scaling it down enough for the 2 cup model, but it could probably be adjusted for a medium sized cooker. As with the previous recipe, all measurements were done by eye or with a 2 cup Pyrex. 

Ingredients

• Potato Flakes - 3 cups
• Chicken Broth (from cubes or a box) - 8 cups
• 1 small yellow onion, chopped up fine
• Dried chives - a couple tablespoons
• Dehydrated chopped onion - a couple tablespoons
• Black pepper
• Salted butter, chopped up - 4 tbsp (half a stick)
• Whole milk - 1/2 cup
• Heavy cream - 1/2 cup 
• Salt

Directions 

1. Measure out the potato flakes and put them in the rice cooker.
2. Put the first 2 chicken cubes in 2 cups of water, if you're using cubes, and put them in the microwave for two or three minutes. 
3. While that's going, start cutting up the onion
4. Remove the chicken broth from the microwave and finish dissolving the cubes
5. Pour the chicken broth into the rice cooker
6. Start the next 2 cups of broth
7. Plug in the rice cooker 
8. Finish cutting up the onion and add it to the rice cooker
9. Add the next 2 cups of broth to the rice cooker (you're at four now), and start the next 2
10. Cut the butter into 1tbsp slices
11. Cut each slice into rough squares
12. Put the butter into the rice cooker and stir
13. Add the next two cups of broth to the rice cooker (you're at six now), and start the next 2
14. Add the chives (about enough to cover the surface of the liquid) and stir
15. Add the dehydrated chopped onion (about enough to cover the surface of the liquid), and stir
16. Add the pepper (about enough to cover the surface of the liquid, and then a little more) and stir
17. Add the last two cups of broth
18. Add the milk
19. Add the heavy cream
20. Stir it up real good
21. Set the rice cooker to "cook"

Nothing here really needs to be cooked in the conventional sense. If "let it run until you can smell it from two rooms away" does not work for you, give it maybe 30-40 minutes. My rice cooker did not recognize itself as "done" at this point, but the soup was boiling a bit. Makes about 4 servings, if this is your lunch, more if you're using it as a side dish. I forgot to add any salt before cooking it, except what was already in the butter and the broth, so add salt to taste after serving. 

Possible modifications and substitutions

• If you don't have an onion, you could probably use half a bottle to a whole bottle of dehydrated chopped onion instead
• You could also make up some of the difference with onion powder, but I almost never use onion powder so I'm not sure how much you'd want
• If you're using broth from a box or a can, rather than cubes, you don't have to microwave it two cups at a time. Feel free to add it all at once after the potato flakes, but put the seasonings (chives, dehydrated onion, and pepper) in before the butter. 
• Doing everything while the cubes are in the microwave is the fastest way, but if you want to sit down while the broth is microwaving, you can do everything except the spices first, mostly take a break while you do the broth, and then add the spices at the end. 
• There are a lot of different ways you could get the amount milk-stuff this recipe calls for. A cup of half and half is a perfectly good substitute for the milk and heavy cream. A cup of milk (any kind, although higher fat content is better) and 4 extra tablespoons of butter (another half cup) would work. A bit more than half a cup of heavy cream, and an extra half cup of broth, or even water, would probably be fine. If you have absolutely no milk or cream of any kind, even powdered, use five additional tablespoons of butter and it will probably be basically okay. 
• You will probably be okay without the chives, but consider adding a little more onion to compensate. 
• Unsalted butter is fine, but if you're not deliberately being low sodium, you'll want to add a couple teaspoons of salt.  

Possible improvements

• It's hard to go wrong adding more milk to a potato dish of this kind. You could probably replace up to half the liquid volume with milk. 
• If you have access to fresh chives (from the store or a window box) that would probably be great. If you're confident in your foraging abilities, or have access to someone who is, feel free to give wild chives a shot (I intend to as soon as the ground isn't covered in ice and snow), but if I remember correctly they have at least one poisonous lookalike in my area, so please be careful and don't poison yourself. 
• My version does not use any garlic, because I don't generally have fresh garlic on hand and lately garlic powder upsets my stomach. This would probably be good with garlic. 
• You could definitely add a couple teaspoons of salt to the cooker, rather than doing it all at the end. 
• This would probably be great with bacon, tvp-based "bacon bits", or anything bacon-y that you happen to have on hand. 
• This would also probably be great with cheese. 
• I'm almost sure there's a productive way to add sour cream to this, but I've been struggling to work out exactly how. If you have an idea, please let me know in the comments. 

Unlike the rice cooker chicken and rice that I make a hard minimum of once a week, this was an experiment that just went really well. I tried making mashed potatoes in the rice cooker a few weeks ago, and they came out kind of soupy, so I thought maybe I'd just lean into that and see how it went. The next Dresden Files post is happening as quickly as I can get it to, I promise. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 18

Photo by me.

Harry calls Murphy from the nearest payphone, and asks if they can meet, somewhere public but quiet enough to talk. Since it's pretty late at night, they end up at the "generic cafe" inside a Walmart supercenter in Wrigleyville. As best I can tell, while there was a Walmart in this area until 2023, it was a neighborhood market, which is almost the opposite of a supercenter. Neighborhood markets are grocery stores, not department stores, and considerably smaller, 40k or 50k square feet compared to a supercenter's 180k. Neighborhood markets also sometimes have gas pumps, which are uncommon at Walmart discount stores, and rarer still at supercenters. Chicago has two supercenters, but they're both farther out. Also the parking lot for the one near Wrigley field was on the roof.  I'm also having some trouble with "generic cafe" - first of all, it's a very odd phrase to use, especially from an author who's normally very competent at scene setting, and second, I could have sworn it was a McDonalds. This matters, a little, because I started reading these books when I was 17, and hadn't set foot in Walmart above a dozen times in my life until my late 20s. The first time I saw a McDonalds inside a Walmart, likely in Delaware (it may have been Maryland's eastern shore), I actually said, out loud "Oh, like in the Dresden Files", much to the confusion of my housemates. So I can't think of any reason I would have imagined this if it weren't the case, but my audiobook and ebook both say "generic cafe". Is it possible they go to a Walmart McDonalds in a later book? I actually went to some effort to try to find a Walmart that still had a McDonalds in it, to take a picture for this post, before I reread the chapter, but the one in Delaware (probably) has either switched theirs for a Subway or is just hiding from me, and the supercenters closest to my house and my parents' house both have Subways as well. The picture up there is of my local Walmart discount store. 

Anyways, Murphy asks Harry what's going on, and he tells her the shape of the thing, including how upset he is and how hopeless it feels. She asks why he called her, and he says he needs help, and the only backup he has is too inexperienced, that the list of people he trusts is basically just Murphy. She asks if he'll tell her what's going on, and he says he will, but warns her that knowing some of it could put her in danger, although part of why he's willing to do it now is that dealing with this stuff without the full picture would also be dangerous. He also tells her that if she tries to bring SI directly into the conflict, it will go very badly for her and everyone else involved, because bringing the mortal authorities into a supernatural conflict is the nuclear option, which I believe is the first time this comes up. Murphy agrees to these terms, if not enthusiastically, and Harry reads her in, including telling her about the White Council. She's gratifyingly pissed off at the Council on Harry's behalf, and spends most of the rest of the chapter asking clarifying questions. This is also what I would charitably describe as an odd writing choice. Her questions about Harry's potential suspects tell us something about how she thinks, including the level of intellectual caution she brings to ruling anything in or out, and her advice to focus on why Reuel was killed, and why Harry was attacked, in order to try and pin down who was responsible, is a valid thing to include, but a lot of this is repeating information the reader already has, much of which we didn't get that long ago, in a book that's not nearly long enough to require the kind of "recap episodes" that, for example, Derin Edala uses. The only new information we get is that the ghoul who attacked Harry committed several armed robberies on her way to Chicago, at each of which someone was abducted and probably eaten, that she's probably a hired killer who operates under the name "the Tigress", and that Harry is likely going to have to ask Lea for help talking to Titania and the Mothers. Probably the most significant thing that happens here is that Harry says he doesn't think Mab did it, but he can't put his finger on why, and Murphy says it's because if she had, she would have hired a less capable investigator. This gives us the beginnings of a sense of how Harry and Murphy work together when they're actually working together, which is important since this is the first book where they really do that. Harry trusts Murphy to check his reasoning, and she's often quicker to see the...structural elements of why people do things than Harry is. It's very X-files, actually, except she doesn't routinely overreach into ascribing specific psychological motivations to Harry being wrong about things. 

Harry says they need to get going, and is on the point of asking Murphy to do something, when the lights go out and a spooky fog comes up. Harry, naturally, pick up the salt shakers. 

Sorry for the very short post. A great deal of this chapter really is reiterating old information in ways that don't tell us anything new about it. The next one will likely be longer, and at the very least include fewer Walmart facts. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 17

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Elaine's arms are cut up, but the worst injury is a deep stab wound in her upper back. The symbolism could not be much less subtle here - someone has been, or is about to be, betrayed, although for the life of me I can't actually remember who in this particular moment. I think it's that Elayne's injuries were, if not self-inflicted, at least taken on voluntarily (stabbing yourself in the back is a steep logistical challenge at the best of times) as part of a ploy to get Harry to go to Aurora's court - which was his next stop anyway (why didn't he bring Billy for that?) - or possibly just to get him to trust Aurora, but I'm not at all sure. Please let me know if I've said this before but I'm starting to think I should reread each book in its entirety before I start the analysis, so that the details of the plot are fresh enough in my mind to usefully discuss how they interact with things like symbolism and foreshadowing. We're also told that the stab wound is just inside Elaine's left clavicle, but if you get stabbed from behind high enough that the clavicle is the most useful skeletal reference point, you've been stabbed in the back, not the shoulder, so I think either Harry or Butcher got this wrong and we're meant to understand that she's been stabbed just inside her left scapula. 

Harry wants to take Elaine to the hospital, but she refuses, insisting that "they" will find her there, even if Harry is present to keep an eye on her. Instead she directs Harry to Aurora's court, currently accessible at the Rothchild hotel. So far as I can tell, no such hotel exists in real life. Listening to the audiobook, I initially thought it was the Rothschild hotel, and was a little concerned, because naming the base of operations of the human-looking-but-inhuman woman engaged in a conspiracy to destabilize a major global power structure after a Jewish family that is the subject of multiple antisemitic conspiracy theories several of which include the idea that they have forced the start of, or can control the outcome of, wars, would be uh, not great, especially in a series that already has to treat carefully because it is a core aspect of the premise that the lives of regular humans are routinely affected by the interplay of powerful forces and factions some of which are simply imperceptible to them but many of which have been deliberately concealed, and moreover, in which many real world political and ecological events or circumstances, including global warming, World War 2, and the general political and economic messiness of south and central America, are attributed to supernatural causes rather than the mundane ones that caused them in real life. I'm not sure how much omitting the 's' even matters here, especially since this chapter was sufficiently poorly edited for the clavicle/scapula issue described in the previous paragraph to make it through intact, so I was really hoping this was a real hotel that Butcher just picked because it matched the location or aesthetic he was after, but it's not and now here we are. I have absolutely no idea how much to read into this. Anyway, Harry does take her there, and when he has trouble figuring out which entrance will get him to the elevator "in the back" to which he was directed, Elidee, who has not forgotten that this was Harry's next stop anyway, emerges from his hair to direct him to the appropriate breezeway. 

Harry follows this unlit breezeway for longer than I suspect is entirely supported by the mundane physical reality of the building, carrying Elaine, who is probably starting to go into hypovolemic shock. It's almost completely dark, and he's on the point of setting Elaine down so he can get his amulet out to use as a light when the elevator opens right in front of him. As an aside, I feel like it would be in Harry's best interests to figure out a way to get light from his amulet that doesn't require an entire free hand, that seems like it should be possible. In any case, Aurora is in the elevator. We're not gonna find out she's Aurora for a while yet, but she is. She seems appropriately dismayed by Elaine's injuries, but assures Harry that the Lady will help her. Technically she says the Lady can see to her, which is gonna be mildly important in a minute. She also refers to Elaine as Ela, which could be a huge (unexplored) deal or could mean almost nothing. It's entirely possible that this is just supposed to establish that Elaine really does know these people, she has friends among them, spent time with them. On a writing level, making Harry deal with the fact that the Great Tragic Lost Love of His Life had an entire damn life of her own that had nothing to do with him, and that he knows nothing about, is a very solid choice even if that's all there is to it. But names can be Significant in faerie, in the supernatural world in general, and it's possible that we're meant to understand that Elaine never gave Summer even her whole first name, thereby significantly limiting their leverage over her, or at the other extreme that this is a Chihiro/Sen situation where they do have her Name and don't allow her to use it for herself. On the way up, Aurora realizes, or pretends to have just realized, that Harry is the Winter emissary. He explains that it's contract work, not any kind of permanent loyalty to them, but she doesn't seem convinced that this makes him safe or trustworthy. 

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The court of the Summer Lady presents itself as a small section of tropical rainforest. Harry specifically compares it to Borneo, but I don't know how specific that's meant to be. Borneo is a large island in the middle of Maritime Southeast Asia, southwest of the Philipines and northeast of Java and Sumatra, different parts of which belong to, in descending order of area, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, of which the lattermost exists only on the 2,226 square miles of Borneo it controls. (That's a bit smaller than Delaware). More significantly for our purposes, it sits almost directly on top of the equator, and home to some absolutely bonkers biodiversity, including 155 endemic species of Dipterocarpaceae, the largest tropical trees in the world, Rafflesia arnoldii, better known as the corpse flower, the reticulated python (longest snake in the world - if your elementary school class ever had a reptile guy come in and have the whole class hold a single Very Big Snake, it may have been one of these guys), the plain pygmy squirrel (tied for smallest squirrel in the world), and just, so many bat species. While it certainly wasn't the only viable choice, Borneo makes a very reasonable anchor point for our sense of what, physically and ecologically, Summer is about. I think that in its contrast this sort of diminishes Maeve, or at least her significance in Winter. There was no wind or snow in Maeve's court, no icy crystalline geometry, not much alive except people, but no marked absence of life either. No particular displays of the natural cycle of predator and prey, only some of its human-exclusive social abstractions, in sexual coercion and exploitative contracts, both of which are often described as predatory. There's not even much actual ice, outside of the Very Cold Water in the drinking glasses, which is a place humans also put ice, even if it takes a lot of effort or innovation to get it there. Not a lot of air and darkness in a well-lit underground ballroom. There are other physical and environmental aspects of winter as a season that don't really come up in the series, such that I'm not sure how much weight to give to their absence here - that sense of dormant potential in the seeds sleeping in the soil, the way freezing shreds the cells of most plants and animals, helping break dead things down into nutrients, the absolute silence of heavy snow. 

Harry follows Aurora through the forest to a clearing, where a variety of artists work, showcasing Summer's social and cultural aspect. Creation, collaboration, growth and healing. Here, I note, Maeve's court seems more closely matched with Aurora's. There's the cruelty and capriciousness, of course, but partying is very much within Winter's social sphere. So, to some extent, is sex. We don't see a lot of people drawing closer together against the dark and cold in Maeve's court, although I wouldn't say for certain that it's not happening - we don't see enough. The clearing also features marble statues, at least two of them of Lily, although Harry doesn't immediately catch this, a nice pond with benches and rocks to sit on, and of course Aurora's throne, shaped from the living wood of a gnarled tree. Harry immediately demands to know where Aurora is, and I'm inclined to give him a pass for not being polite here, on account of Elaine is actively bleeding to death in his arms. Korrick the centaur, who was working at a forge when Harry came in, is deeply offended that the Winter Emissary has come here. Which gives me some questions about what exactly an Emissary's job usually is in these situations. In this particular case, they're supposed to investigate and find evidence to support the conclusion that benefits their side (and it perhaps should have been a pretty big indicator that something was off that Elaine was tasked with proving Winter's involvement, rather than with finding the truth, or finding the mantle), but I don't know what they do when the issue isn't murder and theft, or even under precisely what circumstances they're a thing. But I don't know why the courts even bother choosing human emissaries if they're not to have greater freedom of movement, some amount of right to enter the other court's spaces so they can ask questions or deliver messages or whatever. Of course it's also possible that Korrick, specifically, is just a jerk who doesn't care if Harry can do his job, or is under orders from Aurora to perform these objections to slow things down and make everyone else (Aurora, Talos) look more reasonable in comparison. 

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Lord Talos overrides Korrick's objections, and has the pixies, who appear to just be around for this kind of
convenience in both courts, assemble a bed of leaves to put Elaine on, so Harry can finally set her down. Aurora and Talos try to convince Harry that Elaine will be fine for a while, and to sit down and have a snack, but he refuses until Talos does something to stabilize her. Since Aurora says he can "sustain" Elaine for a time, I think he's just feeding her some of his own strength, which is a little inelegant, as healing magic goes, but perfectly adequate to these purposes. Having been assured that someone is doing something about Elaine's condition, and granted safe passage under the Accords, Harry does accept the food Aurora offers him - a can of coke, a bag of potato chips, and a turkey sub. She says she hopes this is okay, and he says "marry me", which, Harry, are you perhaps very stupid? He thinks she's human at this point, but you do not, while standing in the actual, literal summer court, propose marriage to someone who is very clearly mixed up with the fae, unless you mean it and are prepared to live with the consequences, no matter how obvious it ought to be from context that you don't mean it seriously. As it happens, there don't seem to be any consequences from this, but I'm not at all sure that would have been the case if Aurora had survived past the end of the book. Anyway, Aurora asks what happened, and why Harry brought Elaine here rather than, I guess, leaving her to die, given that she's working for Summer and Harry's working for Winter, and he reiterates that this doesn't really put him on Winter's side. He asks if the clay bust she's working on is Lily, and she says it is, and points him to the two marble statues of her, one of which, of course, is the real Lily, holding the Summer Knight's mantle and turned to stone. He fills her in on Lily being missing, and asks if Aurora has any idea where she might be. Aurora once again (that's three times now, which is probably significant) expresses surprise that Harry would do something nice or helpful for an affiliate of Summer, this time explaining that Mab's other mortal agents are colder, crueler, and hungrier. Harry suggests that Mab wanted him because he has experience in murder investigations, and then his blood sugar hits the point where his brain starts working again and he realizes Aurora is, y'know, Aurora. She drops the glamour, making her nearly identical to Maeve, except that he hair is straight and not dyed, and Harry asks if she's going to stop being weird and help Elaine. She says, reluctantly, because she's stalling, that that depends on Harry. When pressed, she tells him that since she doesn't know why Mab chose Harry, she can't be sure his bringing Elaine to her for help, and her providing it, doesn't somehow serve Mab's ends, if only by making her expend power she'll need for something else. Harry says he's not trying to undermine anyone, he just wants help fro Elaine, to which Aurora replies that she believe him, but she doesn't trust him. Now, the most rational response to this would be "So what?" If she believes that his intentions in this situation are sincere, then whether she helps Elaine or not should be based on her best guess about whether and how someone else might be using Harry's good intentions to sabotage her, not on whether she trusts Harry. Unfortunately, normal, prosocial behavior, the kind we engage in when we're trying to be nice, or polite, or get something from someone, or just not be a jerk, generally discourages entirely rejecting the premise or relevance of what one's interlocutor said, so instead he asks "Why not?" She pulls out a lot of nonsense about how he, y'know, has a job, basically, and has occasionally made iffy decisions in order to not fucking die, all of which serves its only real purpose in leading up to pointing out that he's killed people, because her real aim here is to bring his painful emotions closer to the surface, make him easier to manipulate. Having thus put a stop to his objections, she circles back a little to his having made a deal with Lea, telling him that he was always meant to be a "destroyer", and that Lea taught him that the strong conquer and the weak are conquered, a philosophy which, I feel I must point out, Harry consciously and explicitly rejects at the end of the first book, not that he really seems to have subscribed to it in the first place. I mean, it's true up to a point - the strong do tend to conquer and the weak do tend to get conquered, that's a thing that happens, but that doesn't mean it's good or inevitable or even natural, and I note that even Aurora doesn't quite come out and accuse Harry of thinking that it is, because then he might notice that she's basically writing fanfiction about him. He says if she's not going to help he's taking Elaine to the hospital. She waffles some more, and but says she's already made up her mind, and what remains is for him to make up his. Harry once again asks for clarification rather than, y'know, noticing that she's fucking with him, which is understandable because her entire aim in this conversation so far as been to upset him enough that he doesn't realize he's being fucked with. 

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She says that Elaine's not the person most seriously hurt here, that it's Harry, who's been walking around with all this trauma and emotional pain, which apparently puts him at risk for turning evil. This might even be true, up to a point. I mean, it's definitely true that Harry generally doesn't notice how much physical and emotional pain he's in. It certainly does, as she says, make him vulnerable to "temptations that would normally be unthinkable", like the wolf belt in Fool Moon, and the vampire venom in Grave Peril. Based on Lara, Aurora herself, and at least one other person I think, it also means he's basically walking around wearing a sign that says "this guy is seriously hurting and will basically turn into a puddle for anyone who can offer him some respite", which is gonna make him a target for those in a position to offer those otherwise unthinkable temptations. Y'know, like Aurora is doing right now. Aurora asks him to let her "help" him, he asks how, and that's apparently all the permission she needs to do something that breaks all the internal barriers he has up against painful emotions he hasn't had time to deal with, and brings them right up to the surface, so painfully intense he actually gets some synesthesia about it, although for all I know that's a normal side effect of this spell or whatever it was. Maybe this is something the Summer fae do for artists to help them visualize their emotions so they can paint or draw them. This is followed by a sensation of warmth and relaxation, and I don't know if that's the natural endorphin rush following that kind of pain, or another thing this spell is meant to do. Aurora would certainly like Harry to think that it's the relief of having actually felt his feelings rather than suppressing them, but the way it all starts coming back after makes me think this is probably not the case. Whatever it is, he actually loses consciousness for a while, and wakes up with his head in Aurora's lap. 

Basically as soon as he's awake, Aurora tries to convince him to abandon his efforts to solve the case, and stay with her so she can keep doing that to him. Harry, reluctantly, refuses - he hasn't actually told her that his life is on the line if he doesn't do what Mab wants, and I'd be interested to know how her approach might have differed if he had. She might have been able to offer to secure the parts of the Ways controlled by Summer for the White Council, if Harry dropped the case, and that might have satisfied them, and certainly Harry would have at least looked into it, slowing down his progress on the actual investigation. But she may not have the authority to do that. In any case, Harry tells her he can't accept her offer, that he has a job to do. Aurora finally agrees, in so many words, to help Elaine, but first she explains to him that if the mantle isn't returned, Summer has to go to war against Winter, and they have to do it now, before the solistice, while the seasonal balance of power gives them enough of an upper hand to maybe win without their Knight. I cannot for the life of me figure out why she explained this to him. First of all, he didn't know his exact deadline before, and could have missed it without noticing if she hadn't pointed it out. Second, she makes it pretty clear, although Harry doesn't realize it right away, that this probably was not Winter's doing, because if they had just waited a couple of days, Summer wouldn't have been strong enough to retaliate, and they could have, should they have been so inclined, just hung out until December and then absolutely crushed Summer. She asks Harry to promise to do whatever he can to stop Winter, which I'm not really sure what she thinks she's getting out of that either. He says he can't make that promise, but will find the killer and sort things out, before the summer solstice. 

So here we are. I'm still only getting posts done about half as fast as I need to to really stay on track, but progress is progress and all that. Remember that if you want to see more of this blog, the easiest thing you can do is support me on Patreon (there's a button up top), although commenting, directly on posts or on Facebook when I share them, would probably also help. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 16

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Harry calls Billy off, and Meryl sets him down, although she left bruises holding him up by his neck that way. She wanted to apologize for hitting him and throwing him in the trash earlier, although as Harry points out, ambushing someone in a dark alley is not the usual way one delivers an apology. She also needs his help. And the thing I want to draw attention to here is that Harry seriously considers refusing. When Harry initially sees her picture, Meryl is described as "homely", and "muscular" with a "heavy brow". I don't think we're ever given her height, but she's tall enough to physically hold Harry, who's, what, 6 foot eight?, off the ground, which even with supernatural strength still requires that your arms go up pretty high, especially since it takes more effort to hold something (or someone) up above your head than at shoulder level or lower. She speaks softly, but her voice is described as contralto, which assuming that's accurate, puts her in the same basic vocal range as a baritone - in other words, her voice is about as deep as Harry's (established as baritone in , although the timbre is likely very different. And it very much seems that neither Harry nor the text itself really consider Meryl a woman, and that seems, idk, kinda transmisogynistic. Like, I don't think we're meant to read her as transfeminine, exactly, but this is a young woman with a lot of stereotypically masculine physical features, and we were reminded of Harry's "involuntary" chivalry reflexes just on a hundred pages ago by my copy, maybe a bit less in hardcover, but apparently they just don't come into play here. I went back and checked Storm Front, because he did come close to refusing to help Monica as well, but the "I can't resist a lady in distress" thing is explicitly invoked there. Same with Lydia in Grave Peril. So, yeah, this feels...not great.  

Lily is missing, and Meryl want Harry to help find her. They live together, because Lily isn't very good at taking care of herself, and would you believe me if I told you this was the first read during which I considered that there might have been something gay going on there? Anyway, she hasn't contacted the police because the supernatural elements would be a little too difficult to either explain or extricate, and, I suspect, although she does not say this to Harry, because Lily works as a nude model, and is therefore likely to be written off as a sex worker or similar, and therefore disposable, by the mortal cops. Realistically, the response is likely to be "are you sure your girlfriend, who routinely gets naked for other people, and who you yourself acknowledge is not overburdened with survival skills, didn't just run off with a man?", and that's no help at all. It's also established in this conversation that all four of the kids are changelings whose fae parents are in the Winter Court, and that they're under Reuel's protection because Maeve was hurting them for fun, and no one in Winter, or at least no one with propensity for that kind of petty cruelty, was willing to cross the Summer Knight. Oddly, at some point, Maeve also told Lloyd Slate, who had it out for Lily specifically, to back off, which if I have the timeline right may have been part of the impetus for his betrayal. Meryl thinks Slate might have come after Lily again now that Reuel's gone - someone broke into their place, and there were signs of a struggle. At one point, Billy interjects to ask whether Meryl's fae father couldn't have done something, which is interesting inasmuch as it implies that Billy is the kind of person who expects parents to be both present and useful. 

Despite this being, in ordinary course, exactly Harry's kind of case, he's on the point of refusing and walking away when Meryl says she can pay him. A thousand up front, which she has on her person, and triple his fee, although she may not be able to pay that right away. So now I'm thinking maybe Reuel did have life insurance or some other arrangement for these kids, but it's being held up by legal nonsense, which is not a huge surprise when a high-profile figure leaves substantial money to four random young adults that aren't related to him. What eventually makes the call for him is that he's very hungry and won't otherwise be able to afford food, and that while Meryl may not meet his criteria for "lady in distress", Lily certainly does. He gives her his card, telling her to call his office and let him know how to get in touch with her. He doesn't ask if she has anything of Lily's that he could use for a tracking spell, which strikes me as an odd oversight, but he's been having a bit of a day. 

Harry and Billy head back to the funeral home, since that's where Harry left his car. He's going to call Murphy and see what she knows about Lloyd Slate, presumably whether he has a mortal-side criminal record, and he wants Billy to start calling morgues and see if any unidentified women with green hair have shown up. Billy complains a little about not doing something more exciting, but Harry points out, not too harshly, that this is a lot of what private investigation is. He's almost back to his car before he notices the blood. Elaine is curled up, mostly unconscious and actively bleeding out, on his passenger seat. 

Sorry I don't have more like, thoughts, about this one. It's a short chapter. I'll get you the next post as son as I can. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 15

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Harry initially refuses to deal with Maeve, despite a) having just asked what her price is, and b) having
approached her for information. Maeve responds by threatening him, which is a little excessive, but honestly I can understand being annoyed by this kind of performative show of uncooperation. Billy suggests they leave, and Harry says they can't until they get answers, confirming that he was never actually in a position to refuse, They sit down, and Maeve says Harry isn't as untameable as "he" claimed, but won't answer when Harry asks who, although it becomes clear later that it was probably Lloyd Slate.

Harry tells Maeve he doesn't have much to trade. Maeve makes a show of thinking, indulging in a little performative time-wasting herself since she already as good as admitted she had a price in mind, before asking for Harry's firstborn. This feels like it's obviously too high a price, which leads me to suspect it was meant to be a strong opening bid, not what she actually wanted, except that she pushes for it really hard. The other possibility is that she honestly really wants Harry's kid for something, but for the life of me I can't think what. It's a couple of days before the summer solstice, so a child conceived now would be born right around the spring equinox, so maybe that has something to do with it? Maybe Jenny Greenteeth wants a new child to replace Lily, and this is about Maeve clearing a debt with Jen for something unrelated? Maybe a child of Harry's, specifically, would be special or significant for some reason we haven't found out about yet because it's gonna matter for little Maggie's storyline later. Maybe Elaine was pregnant when she fled to Summer, and there's a little Harry + Elaine baby running around there somewhere (or maybe not so little, but time moves weird in faerie) and Maeve wants a Dresden baby too because she doesn't like Aurora having anything she doesn't have. Maeve acts as though she agrees that Harry doesn't have any children, but we don't know if she's already been infected by Nemesis at this point, so it's possible she can lie, and in any case "naturally not" is the kind of meaningless noise of agreement that could probably be twisted as just politely acknowledging what Harry said without actually confirming it, given that the rules preventing the fae from lying here are loose enough to allow Mab to refer to Bonea as a parasite. 

Jenny Greenteeth comes up out of the pool at the low end of the room, entirely naked, and immediately starts trying to glamour Harry. I'm sure she is, as Harry says, pushing it, but given that it hits Billy too, and given what we know about Lily, I suspect she can't ever actually turn this glamour all the way off. Pixies or something of the sort help "dress" her as she comes up the steps. draping her in a length of silk that doesn't really cover anything, doing up her hair and putting on her jewelry. I know this doesn't matter at all, but I do wonder how much practice it took for them to get that right reliably. When she reaches the top of the stairs, she introduces herself, and Harry is beset with some vividly sexual intrusive thoughts. When he maintains his reluctance, Maeve offers that perhaps she could join in as well and make it a threesome. I am... genuinely curious whether that would work. We know now that the Winter Lady can't do anything that would get her pregnant - the mantle won't allow it. But if there's another person involved, can she get busy without triggering those defenses, as long as no one's planning to put their penis inside her? Inner Harry points out that this is not exactly an unpleasant way to get the information, which he does need after all. Maeve offers that if Harry wouldn't be satisfied with her and Jen, they could bring in more women, which honestly like, I know there are people who enjoy group sex, but that just sounds tiring and logistically awkward. 

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Harry pours a glass of ice water down his pants, which calms everything right down. He tells Maeve he's not giving her a child, his or anyone else's, and that she was stupid for not knowing that. While she's still recovering from being called stupid, he adds that she violated guest right by throwing glamour at him. Maeve actually seems impressed by this far more meaningful display of defiance. Lloyd Slate, who apparently just got here, says that he told her this wouldn't work on Harry, and that she should have been polite. I would love to know how Slate knows this much about Harry - my best guess is that he's getting his information from Mab, who would have gotten in from Lea, either in the usual course of Winter's affairs or as part of the handoff of his debt to Lea. I notice here that while Mab isn't exactly polite, her opening move is to try to make him want to help her by implying that he can't, rather than trying to push him into it. She only resorts to threats when this fails, and never makes any effort to tempt him or affect his mind. We get a description of Slate, of which the only really important parts are that he's got blood on him, his face has been burned recently, and he has a brand on his throat in the shape of a snowflake. Slate kneels in front of Maeve, and offers her a carved box. It says "the box" when he does it, but this box has not been mentioned before he gives it to her. I assume the introduction of the box as an item in Slate's possession was accidentally removed when revising his description. Maeve accepts it somewhat impatiently, and Slate says getting it wasn't as easy as she said it would be. Harry, who's also pretty impatient at this point, asks Slate if he killed Reuel. Slate says that not only did he not do it, he's not sure he could have, since Reuel has been the Summer Knight a lot longer than Slate has been the Winter Knight. This is actually sort of interesting, because a minute ago when Harry asks Slate to confirm that he is Winter's Knight, he says "So far, yeah", which implies he hasn't been doing this very long. See, looking at Slate, and looking at Harry, and in light of a discussion Harry has in Cold Days with... Fix, possibly, in which he says he's not Maeve's toy, and whoever he's talking too agrees that no, he's not, he's Mab's weapon. It seems tolerably obvious that Maeve chose Slate, and I strongly suspect that she got to do so because it was like, her turn to pick. Which since Mab chose Harry would imply that the status quo up until pretty recently included a Winter Knight chosen by Mother Winter, and I just really wish we'd had a chance to meet that guy, or knew like anything about him. Slate having had a relatively short tenure as Winter Knight is also sort of confirmed by, also in Cold Days, Harry telling Lily he's not Lloyd Slate, and Lily saying "neither was he, not at first". Now we don't know exactly how old Reuel's changeling kids are, and we do know that changelings who never Chose can be considerably older than they look, but I don't get the impression that this set are much older than the very young adults they appear to be. So for Lily to have had the opportunity to see Slate changing, I don't think he can have been around for very long. Anyway, Harry points out that Reuel was old, and Slate points out that a lot of wizards are old too. Without being able to listen to Reuel say this aloud, I can't be certain if he's implying that Reuel actually was a wizard. Difference between "So are a lot of wizards" (like a lot of wizards, Reuel was formidable despite his age) or "So are a lot of wizards" (Reuel was a wizard, so it's not surprising that he was formidable despite his age). The emphasis in the audiobook kinda favors the latter, but I don't necessarily set a lot of store by that, and I think there's something somewhere about Harry being the first wizard, or the first wizard in a long time, to be the Winter Knight. Maybe just the first one who was actually a member of the White Council, though, I honestly don't remember. I do also want to draw attention here to the characterization of Slate himself. We learn later that Slate is a rapist, as the Winter Knight he's almost definitionally a murderer, and he someways betrayed Winter although just at present I honestly don't remember how. But he's the most pleasant and reasonable person Harry talks to here. He's likeable. He's willing to admit there are things he can't do. And it's pretty rare for fiction to acknowledge that violent rapists can also be likeable, reasonable, pleasant, etc, without either downplaying the rape or presenting the likeability as a deliberate deception. 

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Maeve opens the box, and promptly kicks Slate down the stairs, although the timing and description are such that it's not immediately clear that this wasn't prompted by his saying he couldn't have killed Reuel. The box contains "what looked like a military issue combat knife" covered in something black and gelatinous, and apparently it's not useful to Maeve for whatever she wanted it for. I don't remember if we ever find out what this was about. For a second there I thought it might be the dagger Bianca gave Lea in Grave Peril, but the description doesn't match. In any case, she throws the knife at Slate, it bounces off his shoulder, and he picks it up and starts back up the stairs, apparently intent on killing her with it, which I would normally consider a pretty reasonable reaction, but she's a faerie queen and he works for her and both of those factors make this attempt both impolite and inadvisable. Maeve calls up her power, making the room considerably colder and lighting up the brand on Slate's throat, paralyzing him. I note with interest that Harry never receives such a brand, and now I'm immensely curious if they just haven't gotten around to it yet, if doing without it was a courtesy on Mab's part (or a response to the threats he made at the end of Ghost Story), or if Slate did something specific to get branded this way. I mean, it's Slate, so I'm leaning towards the lattermost, but I don't discount the possibility that at some point in the next couple books Mab's gonna be like "Yeah we gave you additional freedom while you were adjusting, but it's brand time now". Jenny wraps herself around Slate and starts doing something, presumably another glamour, to "calm" him at Maeve's instruction. She takes off his jacket, revealing track marks, and shoots him up with something from a syringe given to her by one of the pixies. 

Harry tells Billy to get up because they're leaving. Maeve insists that their bargain isn't complete, but Harry says he doesn't need her answer anymore. It took a considerable portion strength for her to deal with her own Knight, and she's sloppy and reckless besides, making it unlikely that she did this. She tells Harry she didn't give him permission to leave, but he doesn't really need permission. The second they're out of the room, the doors slam shut and disappear. Harry figures they were never really there to begin with, just a temporary, if very stable, portal to somewhere in the Nevernever, or somewhere else on earth. Billy is impressed by Maeve's display, but Harry says again that she was sloppy, leaking enough power to change the temperature, and he pretty quickly moves on to being impressed that Harry is so critical of her, and that he could have done the same thing. Harry reiterates his reasoning for Maeve's not being the killer, but says he can't rule out Slate, since Slate is human and can therefore lie outright. He's also increasingly troubled by how pressed for time everyone seems to be. It's unusual for the fae to care much at all about time on the scale humans are usually interested in, so this suggests something big and serious is coming very fast. 

Elidee leads them back to the surface, where they pretty much immediately trip over Reuel's changeling kids. Billy gets in one good his against... I think Fix, given that he was small enough to hide in a trashcan, before Meryl picks Harry up by the back of his neck. 

This one took a few days, largely because in some ways there isn't much to say about it. A lot of the page space is dedicated to Harry thinking about how much he wants to have sex with Jenny, which is interesting enough I suppose but doesn't really provide a lot of material for analysis. I'll try to be a little faster on the next post, but I'm still kind of settling into the new routine, especially with the more complex breakdown of administrative tasks. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!