Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 33

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Content warning: Harry is violently attacked and sexually assaulted at the end of this chapter. The discussion of this in the book is vivid and disturbing, if not "explicit" in the conventional sense. The discussion of it in this blog post is frank and explicit.

Harry actually had a plan this time. On his cue, Thomas and Michael scatter boxes of aluminum nails at the feet of Lea's horse, causing her, the hounds, and, intriguingly, the horse, the recoil. However much we may be told that the fae don't think like people, their relationship with the evidence of their senses doesn't seem to be much different from ours, so for Lea to flinch when nails are thrown at her feet makes sense. The hounds were of course once human, and it's hard to know how they think, but like, sure. But the horse? Why does that horse know what a nail is well enough to know they're usually iron and shy away from them? Was the horse also once a person? Are fae horses just inherently people? It's not unprecedented for fae steeds to be former humans, and it borders on common for them to be preternaturally intelligent, but this does not strike me as a context where "intelligent" should mean "can be misled by tricks that play on essentially human expectations". Lea covers her fear with indignation, asking how Harry dares to bring iron here and wield it against here. Harry explains that he only needed a just needed to eat something, and starts talking about how he just had to eat something, but now he's ready to go with Lea, and can he choose what he looks like as a dog, can he have white fur and blue eyes? This, I'm almost certain, is a Tam Lin reference. "For I will ride a milk white steed / the nearest to the town / because I was an earthy knight / they gave me that renown". (This does not appear in every recorded version of the ballad, and this exact wording is my best recollection of how it was said in Seanan McGuire's An Artificial Knight). Lea's "night black steed" helps set this up - this phrase is less frequent, but appears in the Tricky Pixie version, which is probably the best known in urban fantasy circles, and is certainly the one I would reach for if I wanted my wording to evoke Tam Lin in an urban fantasy novel. This is a very clever piece of foreshadowing. In this very book, Harry takes Janet's role, venturing into the dark and the unknown to rescue a transformed lover, at great risk including from that lover (because of the transformation) and largely through simple unwillingness to let her go. Of course, in the longer course of the series, Harry is our Tam Lin - literally a mortal man, who, in the aftermath of a bad fall is taken up as a knight by a faerie queen. It is perhaps worth noting here as well that in some versions of the ballad, Tam Lin's only relative, at least the only one named or referred to, is his grandfather. 

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Lea stops Harry's tongue with magic, but she's figured out that something is up, and assumes Michael and Thomas are going to do something, but Michael swears on the blood of Christ that they're not, and she seems to take that seriously. She uses the lariat to pull Harry close to her, and recognizes the smell of the mushroom. He says it's Amanita virosa, but since he presumably got it in Illinois, not Europe, it is more likely A. bisporigera, the eastern destroying angel amanita (A. virosa and A. bisporigera, along with A. ocreata and A. verna, are all routinely referred to as "destroying angel" and produce similar fatal poisonings). The symptom progression he describes is accurate for all of the destroying angels, though. Including the part about his innards falling apart - there are anecdotal reports of being able to pour the victim's liver out of their body on autopsy with these kinds of mushroom poisonings. He's also correct that there's no specific antidote, although I can't verify the effectiveness of fairy magic in the treatment of multiple organ failure. Lea, can, though, and after she's satisfied herself that he's not bluffing, and she seems to share his assessment that her magic can't fix it. She says he's gone mad, which, y'know, this plan was definitely formed by a man who's had four concussions in the past several days and hasn't gotten much sleep. Michael volunteers that he has what he refers to as St. Mary's thistle (Sylibum marianum, better known as milk thistle) which is frequently used in Europe for mushroom poisonings of this type. Lea, whom I can only assume has already started to experience the first corrupting effects of the dagger, demands that Michael give her the extract, forgetting, until Harry reminds her, that she probably doesn't want to be in open-ended debt to a Knight of the Cross. If she wants Harry to live, she's gonna have to make a deal. Michael offers that he'll give her the extract (technically, he'll give it to Harry, but on her behalf) if she lets Harry go and agrees to leave him alone for a year and a day. Lea asks why he'd do this, why he'd die rather than be hers, and he says people need him, and while he can't help them if he's dead, he also can't help them if he's with her. She says, again, that he's mad, and that he must get it from his mother, that she had a similar mindset "near the end". This lends context and credibility to what Chauncy said in Fool Moon about Maggie having been involved with dark forces, although it's not a whole lot of new information. 

Lea agrees, and Harry takes the milk thistle. He talks about needing to go to the hospital as well, but honestly the only things a hospital can do are provide intravenous silibinin (the active constituent in milk thistle) and keep an eye on whether he needs a new liver. Also like, intravenous fluids and other supportive care, but that's not really gonna make the difference in whether you die or not. You should, to be clear, you should go to a hospital if you ate, or think you might have eaten, a destroying angel mushroom, but Harry took milk thistle extract within minutes of eating it (you will not be able to do this because you did not make a whole plan to eat and then survive this mushroom) and premedicated with pepto-bismol, so the usefulness of a hospital is like, relatively lower in his case. He may also, in the long run, be able to recover more thoroughly from damage to his liver and other internal organs, but he won't enjoy the process. Thomas expresses surprise that Harry really did eat the mushroom, he'd assumed it was a bluff, because Harry's idea was, objectively, bonkers.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, Harry forgot something when putting together a deal with one of the Sidhe. Lea agreed not to pursue him, but she didn't agree not to send anyone else after him, and many things in faerie are under her command or owe her favors she can call in. So now they've got everything but Lea coming down on their heads. Now, I'm not actually entirely sure this holds up - she agreed to let him go, and not to pursue him as long as he remained in the moral world, and this doesn't really feel consistent with "letting him go", but given that, again, she has presumably already been affected by the dagger, her agreements may not bind as tightly. It's about two miles to their exit, and Michael can't make that with broken ribs, it's just not happening. Thomas proposes they leave Michael behind, but Harry insists on leaving them both behind, to hold the bridge, while he runs for it on his own. There's merit to this plan, inasmuch as it maximizes the chances someone will get to Bianca's mansion, and Harry's the only one of them who can open a door back out of the Nevernever. On the other hand, while Harry's right that this is a stealth-dependent plan and extra people hit diminishing returns pretty fast, going in alone is never the best idea. The difference between having someone else with you and not is always significant. Michael also doesn't especially want Harry to be alone with Thomas, which is fair, since as far as he knows Thomas's only motive here is that he needs their help to get Justine back. 

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So Harry runs, and the pretty fairy-tale woodland quickly turns to dark, spooky forest. (Possible Red Riding Hood callback, given what's coming). Bob finds the spot, in the trunk of a hollow tree. Harry starts gathering his will, which still hurts on account of getting his magic eaten, and is further complicated by physical exhaustion and either the beginnings of amantin poisoning or anxiety about having eaten an extremely poisonous mushroom. The first symptom of amantin poisoning is "unease", so either is legitimately possible here. Bob tries to get his attention a couple of times while he's opening the portal, but he blows him off so he can focus. This, unsurprisingly, turns out to have been a mistake. The veil was weak here, because it's been opened in this spot recently - Bianca had people watching this entrance as well, and when Harry comes through, the Red Court have him surrounded. Yeah this is, this is it guys. The monsters get him. I hadn't actually remembered until I went through this chapter to take notes that in addition to the fairly transparent analog to sexual assault in all that touching and licking and helplessness, Bianca herself does also very literally rape him here. Like, that happened. He's physically attacked, restrained, forcibly stripped, drugged, and raped. A couple of things come out of this. First of all, no more little bits of homoeroticism after this. Harry remains, as he puts it in White Knight, secure in his heterosexuality, but he stops, y'know, having thoughts about how warm and calloused  Michael's hands are. Harry's got the normal amount of internalized homophobia for a man of his era and cultural background, but he was maybe getting close to being able to start exploring some things and that just...stops, never to be picked up again. This is also, obviously, just an immense trauma, and a major factor in his headspace during the very end of this book and the entirety of the next one, as well as the time between. Everyone thinks his fairly obvious breakdown is because of Susan turning into half-vampire and then leaving, and obviously that didn't help (neither did the repeated assassination attempts at the very beginning of the war), but I think this may be the bigger factor. Also harder to process. Men aren't given frameworks for understanding that they've been raped, let alone how to think about it, how to start healing from it. I don't think he ever tells anyone, except Ivy, sort of indirectly in Small Favor. A lot of the obsession with finding a way to turn Susan fully human again may honestly be as much about wanting to reverse what happened to him, just turn the clock back on the whole thing. In Small Favor he observes in narration that he "never really got over" this, specifically in connection with being tempted by Mab's offer, and I think there's a more general theme there. As I said when we talked about Chapter 26, Harry is much less afraid of his own power, his own capacity for destruction, after this, but he's also a lot more tempted by the offer of more power. This is going on our list of things to keep an eye on - seeing how the sexual trauma here plays out across the rest of the series, especially in terms of Harry's relationship to violence, sexuality, and his own power. 

That's what I got for now. The freelance project that's been eating my life since the spring is for realsies over, and I genuinely have reason to hope that posts will be more frequent, perhaps even more consistent, going forward. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!