Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 17

Photo by Phoebe T on Unsplash

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. 

Photo by Yishen Ji on Unsplash

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. 

Photo by Condor Wei on Unsplash

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. 

Photo by Yuheng Ouyang on Unsplash

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

Photo by Serafima Lazarenko on Unsplash

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

Photo by Janosch Lino on Unsplash

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. 

Photo by Raisa Milova on Unsplash

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. 

Photo by Deepak Gupta on Unsplash

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!  

 

2025-2026 Eeveeyear Goals

So this year went pretty well, actually, especially compared to last year and the year before. It helps that, once again, I haven't had to move, and that some of my most intense freelance work has wound down. I hit at least 45% on every goal, which doesn't compare well to the first few years since I started tracking my work this way, but I have a lot more goals now than I did then.  It will come up several times throughout this post, but I really cannot emphasize enough what a difference it made not to have this huge, unending freelance project sucking up all my time. I think the format from last year worked pretty well, so we're gonna cover this in four sections: Core Goals, First Year Goals, Non-Core Goals, and New Goals. We've got a couple more things this year that have been around long enough that I could do graphs, but I'm not entirely sure whether they actually 

Core Goals

These are the goals that pertain directly to books, reading, and writing, since that's what this blog, and my career, are primarily about. The things in this section mostly either consist of or support those activities necessary for me to maintain this blog and make progress towards that whole "published novelist" thing I've been aiming for since adolescence. Fiction writing is still trending up, and seems likely to continue to to do. Books read is still trending down, but there is cause to hope that this will be corrected. 

So as not to bury the lede, this is the best year on record for fiction writing. Which is kind of the most important goal, so we're gonna call that an unqualified success, even though I still have yet to even really get close to where I'd like to be. Aligning the number of pages I try to read and the number of words I try to write really seems to be working here, and so does using a randomization tool to determine which writing projects to work on at any given time, rather than using a bunch of mental energy like, deciding. If I wanted to make decisions more than once a year, I wouldn't be doing all this with the spreadsheet. But actually having time to sit down and do it does make a difference - please assume that's a factor in basically everything this year. 

After two years of only 50 books read, I managed 83 this year, which is also what the target would be for the coming year according to the standard formula, but I'm still not comfortable allowing it below 100, so the actual target will be 119. I've gotten a bit more willing to just drop books if I'm not having a good time with them, even if I can't point to anything in particular they're doing wrong. I've never precisely been one of those "Oh, I always finish books once I start them, I have to" types, but I like to have a reason if I'm not going to finish something, and I've started to occasionally consider "I'm bored and annoyed" a reason. Honestly the high page count target has helped here as well, because like, I trust myself more not to capriciously abandon books when I know it will mean they don't count towards a pretty challenging target. Like I said, I don't like making decisions. 

This somehow isn't actually the worst year on record for rereads, but that says more about how awful I've been about rereading the past few years than it does about any particular triumphs for this year. I suspect this is why, despite keeping mynewreading up appropriately by entwining the target for pages read with the one for fiction word count, I've continued to feel somewhat under-resourced when drafting. I considered tethering rereads similarly, but I think for the time being we're going to take the much simpler route of just doubling what the standard formula says the target ought to be, putting it at 96 rather than either letting it be 48 or just pinning it at 75+1d10 like we did last year. I must note again that we could probably have avoided this entire mess had I just let it be 89 the second year rather than getting cute.

Honestly I think nonfiction writing is still kind of finding its level after the tumultuous circumstances of its introduction, but we did hit one exciting mile marker with it this year - my original nonfiction word count document is so long that Google docs will no longer allow me to add to it, so I was forced to start a second document.

26 blog posts written is a substantial improvement over 17 last year or 16 the year before, so I feel I've kept my word on that even if there's still substantial room for improvement. It's not yet enough that I can return to using the standard formula without letting the target fall below acceptable levels, but maybe I'll be able to in a few years if we keep heading in this direction. 263 and 45.66% is the most blog posts I've read in a year in absolute terms, although as a percentage of the target, it isn't as good as the year the goal was introduced. Honestly I'm starting to wonder why I even bother with the standard formula, since I end up having to drop it for everything important - assuming that there's a relationship between how many blog posts I read and how many I can write seems to have held up (more on this later) so the goal will once again be "pinned" at 593. The Light send there are enough blogs left in this world that are still blogs rather than podcasts. Also, I'm giving real consideration to having a subgoal for non-Series Reread posts, but I've got a whole year to think about that. 

I only finished one song translation this year, and that pretty early on, and I still managed to straight up exceed my fanfiction writing goal by 3, so I don't think we need a new category for those after all. The goal's only going up by 1, from 8 to 9, but I think this might be the first time since I started doing all this record keeping that my target for something has organically gone up just because I did such a good job. Most of the time even when I exceed the numbers from the previous year, the goal is still dragged down by some abysmal failure or other. I did start counting each subsequent chapter of fics I caught up on before they were finished as an additional fic, partway through the year, which somewhat accounts for my having exceeded this goal, but I should emphasize that some of this is the result of deliberately reading more fanfiction, because I'm writing and releasing more fanfiction, so reading and commenting is part of being a good community member. This target has also gone up modestly as a result of my just doing it a lot. 

I did not do well on reading short fiction, and the target slipped by another 5 short stories. I'm hoping this one can be fixed by trying harder, but if trying harder doesn't work it'll be getting doubled next year.

It looks like I spent more time reading this year, but it honestly may well be that I just did a better job of accurately counting reading time. I continue to be really bad about this. Writing time came in pretty high again, which I think is probably accurate to the amount of writing I did, what with a three year high on blog posts and a record high on fiction word count.  

First Year Goals

My patience for using the print button turns out to be pretty damn high. I could do math and make some kind of claim about the relationship between reading nonfiction and writing nonfiction, but so far no tidy, obvious ratio has presented itself, so for the time being we're going to let this goal do as it will according to the standard formula. Also, I read a lot more nonfiction in the course of a year than I thought. A little bit of this was books, but honestly most of those nearly 5000 pages was, so far as I can recall, just reading blog posts. The target for this year is probably too high, but since this is almost exclusively a derived stat, I'm not too worried about weirdness while it finds its level. 

The cleaning goal was not actually set high enough for what I need from it, as I was able to keep cleaning on track with everything else without actually getting any better about the laundry or at all on top of the things I need to organize. Since failures in this area have consequences in real life, I'm gonna just manually set it higher this year, rather than see what trying harder can accomplish. Cleaning time actually looks okay. It's also likely that both these goals were undercounted a little.  

Non-Core Goals 

I was worried that TTRPG Words had gone down every year since I added it, but for the first time since it's introduction, it actually went up this year, although not enough to stop the average, and consequently the target, from falling a little. The difference isn't huge, so we're just going to go with it for the time being, and reevaluate if it goes down again next year. Elements is in a similar spot - the goal is gonna go down a little, but not very much. It's mostly just how bad last year was, and I don't mind letting that take another year to get back on track, as long as back on track is the direction it's headed. Something went wrong with that metaphor. 

For the programming stuff, I did pivot, heavily, into romhacking. This has the dual advantages of occasionally being fun, producing tangible results that look cool within a timeframe I can tolerate, and being supported by a small and responsive community of other people who are, by definition, hobbyists, so there's less of this weird tech bro, startup kind of culture, even if programmers, as a group, continue to be kind of mean. To that end, I'm adding a target for programming tasks, because after a while, adding new guys to the Pokedex or whatever doesn't build any new skills, but you still have to do it for the game to get done. I strongly suspect programming time got at least a little undercounted this year, so since it's a time goal and the drop wasn't dramatic, I'm not gonna interfere with it, especially when I'm adding another thing that will work off of the same timer.  

Orbs and Video Game Time both got a substantial late boost from the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong, while basically every other goal likely took a commensurate hit. Silksong is great, by the way, you should play it. You should also play Hollow Knight but you're not gonna be much more confused if you play Silksong first. These games are Soulslikes, as well as Metroidvanias, so they're confusing by nature and also hard on purpose. At some point I should write a blog post about Soulslikes, games that are hard on purpose, and Bloodborne in particular. 

We're doing the "double the standard formula" thing for the goal formerly known as Duolingo too, and changing the name to Language Learning since I'm using Mango now but like, who the hell knows what will happen with that anymore. Podcasts too, because I know I'm godawful at actually listening to them but that doesn't mean I don't want to. 

I honestly expected the amount of TV I watched to be higher this year, relative to prior years, given that I did a fair amount of TV watching while I had Covid back in January. It's possible this got undercounted a little, but I'm not too fussed about it. The actual goal here isn't shifting much from last year, and the goal for Movies is shifting at all, so I guess they're finding their balance, the way things are supposed to. The YoutTube target is going down, substantially if not dramatically - this is partly due to changes in the way I've handled reading blog posts over the past couple of years, but if it continues slipping I may have to pin it for a while, as part of the idea here is to get through the backlog of channels not yet on my RSS feed, and I can't do that if the goal is low enough to be met with only the RSS feed itself. Television rewatch also went up organically, which is probably also Covid related. I feel like I need to get more structured about when I rewatch what, but that's still in the planning stages, so watch this space. 

I thought that how badly I did on walking this year was mostly attributable to, y'know, the Covid again, both in the extended confinement and taking it easy after so I didn't do myself further harm, but apparently the goal was straight up set incorrectly. It was set at 761km, when it ought to ave been 1132km, and I honestly don't know what went wrong there. 

I appear to have no record, anywhere, of how many SCP articles I actually read in 2023-2024, although based on my 2024-2025 target it must have been in the neighborhood of 40. That's what we're going with for the purposes of setting this year's target, anyway, although this is another one that I'm vaguely considering pinning, even though it's non-core, if it slips much further than it already has. I appear not to have a tracker set up for it anymore. On the other hand, I do still have a tracker set up for handwritten pages, even though we got rid of that, so the former can pretty smoothly replace the latter this coming year. I am making an explicit note here that I did 40 this past year, since in the absence of a tracker I don't have any visual record of that either. 

Music ran into a new problem this year when Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist started throwing AI slop at me, so now I'm mostly working through the catalog's of artists I already like but haven't listened to like, comprehensively. That and the steep drop that so many goals experience upon hitting their third year are the bases on which I'm keeping this goal around for now, but honestly it's still on thin ice. 

Sewing time went down because I didn't spent as much time playing tabletop games, basically, and while there was originally some notion of doing it while I listened to audiobooks etc, in practice that hasn't mostly been what happened. Repairs is holding steady for the time being, because I started darning a lot of little holes in my socks, which just doesn't take that long. Both goals are in line for either pinning or doubling if this coming year isn't as productive as I want it to be, but I'm gonna give it another year to see how Trying Harder goes. 

The TCGO stuff has also really started to find its level, with this coming year's time goal being virtually identical to the past year's, despite some pretty broad fluctuation in the records. This is probably somewhat undercounted, and I do want to get better about that, but not so much that I'm gonna try and correct the targeting right now. New Cards is going up a fair bit, but that's largely due to changes in how I play, not how much I play. 

New Goals

So the big new thing here is that Admin is getting dropped, which is why we didn't talk about it earlier. And by "dropped", I mean split into 7 separate categories, several of which are getting the same initial target that Admin would have had this year if we weren't breaking it up. The new goals are:

• Sorting: Putting stuff were it goes. This includes organizing files on my computer and making some kind of sense of the things I tagged for later on Tumblr. Sometimes includes just going "y'know what, no, I don't need to keep this". 
• Sifting: Sorting through big piles of things I mostly don't need to keep, determining any that I do need, doing something with those. Includes dealing with emails. 
• Listing: Making and adding to lists, whether they're static lists for randomizers and the like or dynamic lists like my TBR. 
• Updating: maintaining the trackers and read list here, a couple other projects that we'll talk about if they go anywhere. 
• Data entry: Copying information from one place to another, without doing a lot more to it than maybe applying an Excel formula. If I do have to do more that's probably listing. 
• Transcription: This is technically a new word count goal, and covers trying to make searchable transcripts for things that don't have them, write down all the quotes and lore in Eternal pursuant to making a lore wiki, etc. 
• Correspondence: Getting back to people, reaching out to people, filling out forms and applications, mail. 

The other two new goals are both reading articles, one for like, magazine articles the other for journal articles. The latter goal is called "Science" but does of course also encompass the humanities. 

We'll have the new trackers up in a little bit, probably not all at once. Next Dresden Files post should be in the soonish.  Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 14

Photo by Kevin Bonilla on Unsplash

Elidee leads Harry and Billy in more or less a straight line, rather than looking for the shortest route, at one point taking them over the top of a building. It's about a 30 minute walk, in the beginnings of a Chicago summer, so they're cranky and sweaty by the time she takes them to a door that will allow them into the pedway, which is apparently closed this time of day, and will be until six the next morning. I am once again having difficulty figuring the time here. Harry arrived at Murphy's apartment sometime between sunset and midnight. It's June 18th, so that's maybe 9 or 10pm. Too late to visit unannounced unless you're very close to someone, earlier than most adults go to bed of their own volition. Suppose he's there for a couple hours, gets home around midnight. Chapters 8 and 9 are mostly dialogue and should therefore play out mostly in real time - in the audiobook these come out together to 27 minutes 17 seconds, round up and call it half an hour, maybe 40 minutes to allow for Elaine's circuit of the room at the beginning of chapter 8 and then time Harry spends straightening the mantle and having feelings at the end of chapter 9, although the almost-fight with Morgan probably took longer to describe than it did to experience. So Harry falls asleep on the couch sometime between 12:30 and 1:00am. In chapter 1, Harry says he "hasn't slept", indicating that he may have been up for over 24 hours at that point, so it's possible he sleeps for as much as 12 hours here, although given the nightmares I honestly kind of doubt it. So let's say he gets up around noon. The conversation with Bob cannot be more than 23.5 minutes, since that's the full length of chapter 10, but showering, cleaning himself up, etc probably takes a while so let's call that an hour all-in, meaning he leaves the house at 1pm. Someone worked up a plausible looking approximate location for Harry's apartment, on the basis of which it should take 15, 20 minutes to get to the "southern edge of the Loop" where Reuel's apartment is. Call it 30 minutes to allow for traffic and parking (I may be underestimating Chicago traffic here, but it's not rush hour or anything). So he gets to Reuel's place around 1:30 pm. He wasn't actually in the apartment for that long, but he takes the stairs slowly and he's injured on the way out, so let's be really generous and call the whole thing an hour. He leaves for the funeral/viewing at 2:30. Now, unlike "midtown", River North is a real Chicago neighborhood, and at one time had the largest concentration of art galleries in the US outside of Manhattan, which may be why the changeling kids chose a funeral home there, I guess. Anyway. River North is pretty close to the Loop. Even coming from it's southernmost edge, this should be something on the order of a ten minute drive. Call it 15. So he gets Quiet Acres at about 2:45. Call it another 15 that he spends lurking around trying to spot the murderer among those in attendance before wandering into a back corridor. He overhears maybe a whole minute of discussion there before following the kids outside, has a quick scuffle, then gets thrown in the trash, and after "a minute", Billy shows up. By this time it is maybe 3:15. The pre-summoning conversation with Billy can't possibly have gone on for more than 10 minutes, it takes another 10 for Toot and his guys to arrive (this is specified), and then they have to negotiate, eat the pizza and get underway, let's say that all manages to take 45 minutes somehow, it's 4pm when they start following Elidee. It's "better than half an hour" to get to the tunnel entrance, making their arrival sometime between 4:30 and 5pm. The unfinished building is presumably the Heritage at Millennium Park, which finished construction in 2005. Now, pedway hours are a bit variable, and depend some on the businesses to which any given entrance connects. (I have looked at multiple maps in the last hour that said to assume Pedway hours were x to y "unless otherwise noted" but did not provide any notes. These maps did not agree with each other about the actual times either. I think the signs indicating pedway entrances are supposed to give hours, but like, they don't.) However, the earliest official closing time I've seen anyway is 5pm, that only appears to be after the start of Covid, and I cannot figure Harry getting there that late. He could have slept longer than I estimated, but given that he's sitting on the couch and got woken up by a nightmare, I think my guess is, if anything, overgenerous, and my estimates on the time he spent in Reuel's building and negotiating with Toot were deliberately so. On the other hand the impression I've gotten of the Chicago pedway from Reddit indicates it's possible their entrance just closed at 4pm that day for no particular reason. 

Photo by Julien on Unsplash

In any event, they take the pedway to a section that's gated off with a sign reading "DANGER KEEP OUT". For the life of me I cannot figure out where this is supposed to be. The only reference to any abandoned section of the pedway that I could find anywhere, and I looked, is to a tunnel connection what is currently Chase Tower with 70 W Madison, but that isn't connected to the "main tunnels of the pedway" in the first place. Based on the description, this should actually mark a connection between the pedway and the old freight tunnels. If you're aware of where the heck this closed off section is supposed to be, or could be, you are welcome and encouraged to let me know in the comments. A short way in, the tunnel walls become rough and uneven. I don't know if I'm supposed to be picturing natural stone or crumbling brick here, although if they're in the freight tunnels it should be the latter. Harry pulls out his pentacle for light, and we're given an explanation of what it represents (to him), the five elements held within a circle of human will and intent. Elidee leads them to an apparently blank wall panel which Harry starts fiddling with to find their way into Undertown. When Billy says he doesn't know what Undertown is, Harry explains that Chicago was built on a swamp and that initially, buildings and even streets would gradually sink into the mud, and they started building streets and building entrances a story up, so they would be at ground level after sinking, creating an entire level of the city that was underground and mostly buried in mud. This is... not entirely accurate. Chicago was, an in fact still is, slowly sinking into the swamp upon which it was built, but I can find no evidence that buildings were constructed to sink a full story into the muck, and the buried streets, while real, have a more complex origin and are not still down there somewhere waiting to be walked. Due to constant, lethal outbreaks of typhoid, dysentery, and cholera, Chicago implemented the first comprehensive sewage system in the US. This process involved moving a lot of central Chicago about four feet up, which required the existing streets to be covered with several feet of soil and relaid higher up to correspond with the new entrance level of the surrounding buildings. Those old streets presumably still exist under the new ones, but they don't connect to anything and the space between them and the surface is about four feet high and full of dirt. Seattle actually did end up with an undercity in parts of downtown as part of a similar "we're too close to the water level" regrading process, but as they did it after their big 19th century fire, rather than before, renovation was able to be a little more comprehensive. You don't have to elevate buildings that are currently smoking piles of rubble. I'm skipping over some of the absolutely bonkers feats of engineering involved in both the lifting and the management of its aftermath because they have no bearing on the story we're trying to talk about here, but you can find most of this on Wikipedia - start with the Raising of Chicago and maybe take a look at the one for the water cribs as well. According to Harry, the undercity created by this sinking process was, for a time, home to both vermin and criminals. Again, there was a lot of crime in Seattle's undercity for a while there, and if I remember rightly there were some speakeasies and things in Chicago's freight tunnels, but Chicago never had a secret undeground level of the city proper the way this book describes, although a lot of its rat population is contained in its various tunnels. He asserts, accurately, that there are a lot of tunnels under Chicago, and that the Manhattan project was housed there at one time, which is...complicated. Chicago Pile-1, the first artificial nuclear reactor, was in Chicago, was part of the the Manhattan project, and was underground, but it was housed in a squash court at the University of Chicago, by whose Metallurgical Laboratory it was developed, not in the city's tunnel system(s). It's also hard to say that the Manhattan project was "housed" any particular where - it was a multi-site operation, and work at the Metallurgical Laboratory continued at least through 1944, well after Los Alamos was established, although Pile-1 was eventually dismantled and reassembled in Argonne forest preserve, where the Argonne National Laboratory continues energy research operations to this day.  At some point, vampires and other... Things moved in and ate a lot of the humans and rats down there. A lot of what lives in Undertown are strictly subterranean creatures that don't have a lot of contact with humans, even wizards, in the usual course of things, and about which Harry therefore doesn't know a whole lot. Apparently there might be "wyrms" down there, although I don't think it's ever established what that means in this setting. Billy is less than enthusiastic about this proposition, but Harry reminds him that he wanted to come along. He also runs Billy through the basics of dealing with the sidhe - no gifts, no bargains, be careful of sensual temptation. Billy is a little impatient, leaving Harry uncertain whether he's gotten his point across, but he recognizes that it's hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it. 

Photo by El khalil EL ARFAOUI on Unsplash

After a little more walking in the dark, the tunnel opens out into a low-roofed cavern, and Harry almost
immediately picks up bad vibes. Grimalkin has arrived to guide them to Maeve's court. This is the first time in the series that we encounter a malk, and I don't think we actually see Grimalkin here, just hear his voice and watch his glowing footprints on the floor. He's initially reluctant to introduce himself, although it's not clear if that's the result of nefarious intent, the natural fae reluctance to answer direct questions, or a personal desire to be a butt. Harry explains, for Billy's benefit and the reader's, that the fae are bound by anything they say three times, so if Grimalkin was lying when he initially expressed his intent to get them to Maeve unharmed, he's stuck with it now, but that they don't like being bound that way, so if you do it to a faerie who was actually trying to be helpful, they might reasonably get upset. I'm not actually sure why this was necessary. Elidee hides in Harry's hair when Grimalkin shows up, but she's still there, and the bargain with Toot was for her to guide Harry to Maeve, not just to someone who could. If Grimalkin tries to lead him off a cliff or into an ambush, presumably she would know they were going the wrong way and communicate as much. Granted, this has failure modes, but so does seriously infringing on the autonomy of a virtual stranger who hasn't yet done anything worse to you than sound creepy in the dark. Grimalkin, still apparently invisible, leads them by means of glowing footprints deeper into Undertown, where the stone begins to look like it's been...swirled? "Smoothed into place like soft serve ice cream". I'm only like, 70% sure that I understand what I'm supposed to be picturing here, but it's sufficient to illustrate the level of control that a Faerie Queen has over a place she's claimed as her own. 

They reach a set of tall wooden doors, which initially seem to depict a garden scene, but on closer examination... I mean, it is a garden, but it's a garden with a lot of human corpses and skeletons, and people having sex, and the fae watching from between the branches. This vaguely evokes Mab's ice garden from Proven Guilty, although there were fewer obvious corpses there, and more human ice sculptures. Slightly more tasteful than a big sign that says "Beyond these doors lie beauty, sex, and death, not necessarily in that order", but it conveys the same information. There's a little bit of an audiobook glitch here, where the description of the doors opening is repeated, apparently because James Marsters stumbled a little over a word and redid it, and then the earlier version wasn't removed. Inside, they find big band music, a 1920s ballroom tilted slightly on its side, with a creepy pond at the lower end and a throne on the higher, and about 40 of the sidhe, dancing in period accurate World War 2 era dresses and military uniforms. The description here is very good, but it's also, and I suspect this is deliberate, distracting. We spend as much time on one young woman's hair being sapphire blue, somewhat inappropriate to the setting, than on the period outfits. We're told that the sidhe are in "dress uniforms of both the army and the navy that looked authentic to the month and year". No one speaks of "the army" or "the navy" when they're not referring to to the army or navy of their own country, and uh, not to put to fine a point on it, if any of the Winter Sidhe were in Nazi uniforms, Harry would have said. This pretty much tells us that no one in Winter killed Reuel or stole his mantle, that they didn't initiate hostilities and that to the extent that there are good guys and bad guys here, they are not among the latter. Also, I suppose, that despite their not having picked this fight, a victory here could give Winter a substantial and lasting boost to their power and prestige within the supernatural world. Which, in the event, is pretty much what happens. 

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

The human musicians are exhausted, underfed, and shackled, but they seem unbothered by this and entirely focused on their music. They're also very good. As Our Heroes watch, the trumpeter goes into a very impressive solo, while the other musicians just kind of collapse, until he suffers, I'm not sure, a heart attack or something, and dies, right there on the stage. The Sidhe dancers, who stopped to watch as well, part to allow Maeve through. She looks like a younger Mab - maybe 17 if I'm reading this right, with dreadlocs in the white, lavender, pale blue, and green that comprise Winter's signature colors. Now, the idea that white people shouldn't mat their hair into an approximation of dreadlocs was not anything like as well known, at least to white people, in 2002 as it is today, and certainly I don't think Maeve is above committing a little cultural appropriation, but this is once again making me wonder how the Mantles of the Queens interact with the bearers' racial features. We know the Mantles change the color of the Queens' hair and eyes (the Mantle of the Summer Knight turns Fix's hair white eventually as well, but he was already a changeling, and taking up the Knight's Mantle presumably constituted Choosing - which raises all kind of questions about the nature of the damn thing since Knights are supposed to be mortal, but we'll get to that in later books when it actually matters - I don't think Harry will undergo the same physical changes). We also know it changes skin color at least a little, since the Queens are all somewhere on the spectrum from very pale to inhumanly pale. So like, Maeve could be black, or at least mixed? We've seen her twin sister, and Sarissa's skin tone is described as as a "medium olive tone", which could mean almost anything. "Olive" is what writer's say when they don't want to commit to anything. Sarissa also seems to have fairly straight hair, but that can happen. Obviously, given that Maeve is, y'know, violent, predatory, and hypersexual, I really hope she's not supposed to be black, since that would be super, super racist, like, well out of parameters for what we usually see in this series, which is already pretty racist. But I've been thinking about how the Mantles would work with people of color since the second time I read Cold Days. Anyway, speaking of being predatory and hypersexual, Maeve straddles the trumpeter's corpse, kisses it on the lips, and makes a remark about how he said he'd die to play like that, which probably does more to clarify for Billy the hazards of making deals with the Fae than anything Harry could say on the subject. The other Sidhe applaud, for the death or Maeve's remark or both, which is kinda unsettling, but like, unsettling applause seems to be part of Winter's Thing. 

Maeve announces that they have a visitor, then resumes her throne so that Harry can approach. They go through the absolute minimum formalities, and then Harry just up and asks her whether she arranged the murder of Ronald Reuel. She says she can't just tell him something like that, he'll have to pay for it. He correctly reasons that she wants something in particular or she wouldn't have sent Grimalkin to escort him. She tells him to sit down so they can make a deal. 

Okay, so what happened was, I made a mistake on my spreadsheet and spent a lot of the past week trying to get caught up to where I thought I already was on fiction writing. Needless to say it's unlikely that you'll see another Dresden Files post before the end of the month, which also marks the end of the year in which I track my progress. In the next little bit here I'll be getting all the trackers and things up to date so everything will be tidy and ready to go for the Goals post sometime in the first few days of October. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 13

Photo by Jordon Kaplan on Unsplash

Billy holds the pizza while Harry sets up a circle trap. When we talked about Storm Front Chapter 6, I mentioned that referring to "magic circle theory" makes it sound like it's a whole field of study, and how that reading is at least somewhat supported by the variety of circles, and the variety of uses to which they're put, throughout the series. We learn in Dead Beat that literally anyone can put up a basic protective circle - you don't have to be even a minor practitioner, and it's sort of implied in Fool Moon that Kim's difficulty in setting up and maintaining the Greater Circle she uses to help MacFinn is more because she doesn't understand it properly than anything to do with raw strength. So now I'm wondering whether anyone with the right training can create the kind of circle trap Harry uses here, and snare something in it if they have that thing's Name. Regular humans trapping faeries or similar and coercing them or making deals with them is a pretty old and widespread idea, and it sometimes even goes the humans' way, so I think it's within the realm of possibility, given that the Dresden Files is functionally an All Myths Are True setting. 

Harry asks Billy to keep an eye out in case anyone tries to sneak up on them, and Billy complains that he wanted to do more to help than just bringing the pizza. He points out that he could get the scents of Reuel's changelings, to which Harry agrees, acknowledging, although not out loud, that he's forgotten Billy could do that. There's some tasty nuance happening here. Harry did underestimate Billy, again, and didn't consider either his abilities or that he would have more idea about what to do with them than Harry would. Billy, for his part, is being a bit impetuous. He wants to do something more interesting, more exciting, than the legitimately helpful thing he's been asked to do. Hard to say what he would have done if Harry hadn't signed off on his getting the kids' scents; I honestly don't think he'd have wandered off, but I'm less sure than I'd like to be. 

We're briefly reintroduced to the idea of Names, and to how this kind of summoning is a bit of a gray area under the Laws of Magic, which Harry tries to be diligent about obeying since the Council has it out for him. The description of Toot-toot when he arrives is so similar to the one from Storm Front that I had to check whether the wording was identical in a couple places - it's not, quite. In Storm Front he's described as having a "form that echoed the splendor of the fae lords" and in Summer Knight we get "his beauty a distant echo of the lords of Faerie, the Sidhe". Toot is wearing a helmet made from a plastic bottle cap, and carrying both a spear (consisting of a straight pin secured to a pencil) and a plastic cocktail sword. He does his very best to perform a perimeter check of the pizza, then gives a whole cloud of similarly equipped small fae the okay to land. They set upon the pizza, but of course as soon as anyone takes a bite, the circle closes, trapping them inside. Toot initially thinks Harry is there to make them join Winter's side in the impending faerie war, and says he can't make them since they haven't been Called yet. Having extracted extensive assurances that Harry is not there to do any such thing, he and his people return their attention to the slice of pizza, devouring it in seconds. 

Once the all-important business of eating pizza is taken care of, he explains that the "drawing of the wildfae" has begun, and that usually fae who do nice things are called to Summer, while those who do mean thing are called to Winter, but he's not sure which side he'll be called to. Harry offers them the rest of the pizza in exchange for information about the whereabouts of the Summer and Winter ladies. Maeve is in undertown, and has been since last fall when all the local turbulence in the spirit world naturally attracted her attention. Best I can tell, every major city has at least a few spooky underground tunnels. I haven't done a comprehensive survey, but New York City, Paris, and London are all known for theirs, and Seattle has a respectable network. Baltimore is the least tunnel-y city I've ever personally looked into, with only a small set of tunnels under a single neighborhood. So Chicago isn't special in having an undercity, but it is perhaps notable in the depth and diversity of tunnels down there. You got the pedway tunnels, underground streets, sewers, some amount of abandoned subway tunnels, and of course the freight tunnels. Public facing information indicates that the lattermost are wholly inaccessible to the public, after flooding in the early 1990s, but I would be the opposite of surprised to discover that humans had found their way in, because I've met humans. Since Maeve is in Chicago, so of course is Aurora, and since Maeve is underground, Aurora is of course up on top of a "big building", although Toot is not usefully able to describe which building, and eventually agrees to send a guide with Harry - he doesn't want to go himself and miss out on the pizza. I do wonder what Harry would have done if Maeve and Aurora weren't both in Chicago - the urgency of the situation doesn't really allow for travel at the speed Harry can manage it, unless he wanted to use the Ways, which would be like, spectacularly unsafe under the circumstances. 

Photo by Vladyslav Tobolenko on Unsplash

Toot introduces Harry to Elidee, a red-glowing faerie so small she resembles a spark from a campfire. I don't know if she's a dewdrop faerie like Toot or if she's some other kind of small, glowing, winged fae. She can understand Harry, but is too small to speak in a way he can hear, instead communicating largely by flashing twice for yes and once for no. Harry offers to let her grab some pizza before they leave, in which context I'm not sure why they couldn't have just waited for Toot to grab himself some pizza, and had a guide who they'd met before and who can actually speak to Harry and Billy with like, words. Maybe it would have taken him longer to eat, since he's like six inches tall, I don't know. While Elidee is eating, Billy returns from scent-getting, reporting, to absolutely no one's surprise, that the kids don't smell entirely normal. Harry warns him not too spend long watching the faeries eat pizza, as looking at faerie lights can be disorienting, which helps establish their relative knowledge levels about the fae, and begins to set the tone as to just how many hidden dangers you can trip over when dealing with faeries. Elidee returns from her pizza and starts drifting in the direction of their first objective, the Winter Lady, and Harry tells Billy to stay alert and watch his back, something Billy is considerably more willing to do now that it involves going somewhere and doing something. He asks, almost hopefully, whether Harry is expecting trouble. 

Got my computer back in working order, but I'm having what feels like more than the usual amount of difficulty getting my shit together to put in the burst of extra work I usually do in September. Still have more done than I did this time last year, although we'll talk more about that at the beginning of October. Realistically I'm hoping to get maybe two more post done between now and October 1st. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things.