Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 5

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With Simon dead, the Merlin is going to want "one of the Germans" to take his place on the senior council. McCoy points out that he has at least 50 years seniority on all of them, but Martha Liberty says it won't matter because the Merlin thinks there are already too many Americans on the Senior Council. By my count, there are two, Martha herself and Listens to Wind. We will revisit this in a little bit. 

On the way in, McCoy asks Harry how his Latin is, if he's going to need translation, and Harry says he's got it. I cannot readily determine whether it was previously established that Council meetings are conducted in Latin, although if it was, it wasn't in this book. It's an... interesting conceit. I believe we're told at some point, possibly in a later book, that they use Latin because with such a range of languages present among the White Council, it would be unreasonable to use anyone's native language, but it sure doesn't escape my notice that this is going to make full participation in the Council easiest for people whose native language is, or whose native or comfortable languages include, a Romance language like Spanish, French, and Italian, and to a lesser extent people whose native language or languages include English, which is a Germanic language but has a lot of Latin influence, and hardest for people whose native language or languages are off the Indo-European map entirely, like, oh, much of east Asia and a fair amount of Africa. (The latter is complicated - lots of people in lots of parts of Africa speak an Indo-European language as a first or fluent second language, largely, but not exclusively, because of colonialism and imperialism). Or, for that matter, older Wizards from Australia and the Americas. It does not escape my notice that five of the White Council's seven members definitely or probably have an Indo-European language as their first language, and that Ancient Mai is the only one who I would confidently say probably doesn't. (It's... really hard to say, with Listens to Wind. I'd need to know how old he was.)  Harry suggests that McCoy go in ahead of him, so they're not obviously arriving together, as this might cause problems for McCoy given Harry's reputation and the charges that are about to be leveled against him. 

When Harry does go in, it's dark and hot; with so many wizards in one place, the lights and air conditioning didn't stand a chance.  There's a security checkpoint with a pair of Wardens, both wearing red stoles. One of them, perhaps inevitably, is Morgan, whom we haven't seen since the end of Storm Front. The other Warden scans Harry with a crystal that lights up at each of his chakra points - no attempt is made to explain what or where these are - and detects nothing out of the ordinary. Morgan, of course, is not satisfied with this, and instructs the other Warden to get "the dogs", a pair of threat-detecting magical constructs modeled after Chinese guardian lions, and which Harry refers to as "wardhounds". They are, and I cannot stress this enough, not dogs. Like, I'm not wholly unsympathetic to the confusion here - their posture is often very canine, and if I'd seen like, a chow-chow or a Tibetan mastiff but had never been told that those statues are meant to be lions, I might guess that they were dogs, yeah? But it was not hard, in 2001, to find out that they're lions. Like, I readily buy Morgan not bothering to keep it straight, and that the term "wardhound" has too much traction to easily be replaced at this point, but either Harry or the other Warden could have told the reader that they're lions. Anyway, they circle Harry for a minute, and then one of them alerts on his hand. Morgan is very ready to take this as a reason to turn Harry away, but the other Warden points out that if Harry's bleeding, they could just be reacting to the magical power of his blood, especially if he's also upset. Morgan makes Harry unbandage his hand before he can go in, which hurts and makes it start bleeding again, after which the constructs lose interest. 

Once Harry's inside, we get a description of what the White Council, as a group, looks like. The emphasis here is meant to be on the diversity, but there's some truly unfortunate phrasing, most notably "canted Oriental eyes". Don't use "oriental" to describe people, please? If you're at all uncertain, maybe don't use it at all unless you're talking about like, oriental shorthair cats or something. The "variety of humanity" present is apparently "startling", which is a bit odd since Harry lives in Chicago, not exactly a bastion of heterogeneity. Chicago's population is almost 30% black and about 7% Asian. Not only has Harry seen black and Asian people before, he's seen both like, most times that he left the house, probably. More than 35% of Chicagoans speak a language other than English as their main language. This should not be a "startling" experience for Harry. Again, this could have pretty easily been addressed with a sentence to the effect of "I mean, I live in a city, seeing a lot of different kinds of people in the same place isn't exactly new territory, but this was on another level." if there was really a need to stress the diversity here. We also learn that there are gold stoles, in addition to the red, blue, and purple, although we still aren't told what this means, and that wizards are supposed to wear black robes, but apprentices wear brown, and apparently don't get to sit in chairs. The apprentices are also mostly around Harry's age, which by this point in the series approaches late 20s, which puts some context both on his own construction of himself as unusually advanced for his age and the tendency of older wizards to treat him like he's basically still a child. There's a roped-off section for representatives of the White Court's allies, but we get no details on who they actually represent, or even whether these are other groups of human practitioners or nonhuman powers within the supernatural world. 

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The space the Council rented out for this meeting is a dinner theater, so most of the assembled wizards
are sitting around small tables, while the Senior Council does their thing from the stage. At the moment, the Merlin is saying, in Latin, that he moves to skip many of the usual formalities and go straight to talking about the war with the Red Court. I would very much like to know what those formalities usually are, but I don't think we ever find out. There's a general murmur of assent, and no direct call to see if anyone is opposed. This general assent with no request for opposing voices comes up repeatedly in this chapter, and I don't know if they've got something magical set up to actually count the "aye"s, or if they're just going off of "eh, sounds about right" and assuming someone would speak up if they were really opposed. When he sees Harry, the Merlin calls him out for being late and wearing a bathrobe. Harry resists the impulse to be snippy, and attempts to apologize and explain that he meant to have his other robe. When the Merlin doesn't understand, or pretends not to, he tries again to apologize for his lateness and appearance. I gotta note here that while Harry's Latin is in fact pretty bad, the Merlin is apparently fluent, and is definitely a native English speaker, so unless what Harry said was a lot less grammatical than McCoy's translation makes it sound, it shouldn't have been that confusing. Like, "a long, sad day held me" is an unusual way to express that it's been a long, stressful day, but not unclear, and while "I need me a new laundress" is grammatically incorrect and doesn't mean what Harry meant to say, if someone said that to me, especially in a language I knew they didn't speak very well, I would figure they meant there was a mistake at the dry cleaner, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to bring up in this situation. Which leads me to conclude that the Merlin's confusion here is at least partly feigned, in order to make Harry look stupid and give him a chance to say something even more embarrassing while trying to clarify. That's just mean. I'd also love to know more about how exactly the power dynamics of the Council actually work, that the Merlin gets to be as rude as he initially was to Harry here. This is not the only time he does that, and he pulls something similar with Ramirez in Proven Guilty, but we don't see any other wizard try it in a formal setting, even when they're talking to Harry, and the Merlin and McCoy both use English when they insult each other a little later in this chapter, so he's clearly not just like this with everyone. I also think it's worth observing here that Harry doesn't point out that he got needlessly held up at security. Maybe he just doesn't have the Latin for it, but he's being more professional than the Merlin here, bad Latin notwithstanding, and that's interesting. Harry finally accepts McCoy's offer to translate, and he apologizes on Harry's behalf, which calms everyone down.  

While the Merlin informs the Council as a whole about Simon's death, and how it's an escalation by the Red Court, McCoy explains that the Merlin will want to fill the open seat on the Senior Council with someone who will reliably vote with him, and that he'll have three plans for taking Harry down: a plan, a backup plan, and an ace in the hole. Moments later, the Merlin does in fact move to appoint Wizard Schneider to the Senior Council. Martha and Listens to Wind both object, Martha to the lack of debate, Listens to Wind to Scheider's age. McCoy moves that the appointment of a Senior Council member is too important to leave to consensus, and they begin going through the registry in descending order of age. This is also where we get out first sight of Wizard Peabody, here using magic to sort through his files to find the wizards who have first refusal on the newly opened seat. The first one called is Wizard Montjoy, who's apparently on a research trip in the Yucatan. That's... not a very safe place for a wizard of the White Council to be right now. Like, that's where Chichen Itza is. White Council intelligence on the Red Court is apparently piss poor right now, because it's established a little later that they believe the Reds' center of power to be "somewhere in South America" but have apparently not been able to narrow it down any further, but I sure did notice that Wizard Montjoy, who is never mentioned again in the series so far as I can tell, is on a "research trip" in Red Court territory during an important Council meeting about the war with the Reds. (In my efforts to confirm that he doesn't come up in a later book, I found a pretty compelling Reddit thread suggesting that Cowl is Wizard Montjoy). They spend 15 minutes going through senior wizards, most of whom are not in attendance, before getting to McCoy, and shortly thereafter, to Klaus Schneider, who declines the nomination, saying that McCoy will serve the Council more ably. This refusal suggests to me that the Merlin's preference for Scheider in this position is less a question of alliance or political agreement than of patronage. Prematurely elevated to a position he could not have hoped to reach on his own for decades at least, Wizard Schneider would have been forced by existing social norms to vote with the Merlin, and he doesn't much like the idea of being used that way. The Merlin asks if anyone else would like to put themselves forward, but no one does, and McCoy joins the rest of the senior council on the stage. 

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Morgan reports next on the status of the war, using a crystal to project an image of the earth marked with
the locations of attacks. They're clustered in Western Europe, where secrecy norms still carry a lot of weight. While no one says it explicitly, this means that in addition to the obvious concerns about loss of life, the Reds are threatening that secrecy, and that the wizards being targeted may be reluctant to use all available options to defend themselves. The attack on Archangel gets particular attention, not only for being recent and relatively largely scale, and involving the death of a Senior Council member, but because their ability to get through Simon's defenses indicate a greater understanding of magic than the Reds are believed to have possessed. Additionally, there have been attacks on or harassment of wizards using the Ways though the nevernever. Wizards can't easily use things like airplanes, or even cars, to travel quickly, but vampires can, putting the White Council at a serious disadvantage, so securing access to safe passage is a priority. Unfortunately, Titania intends to remain neutral, as is apparently usual for her, and the courier sent to Winter did not return, although history suggests that Mab will choose to involve herself eventually. The Merlin stresses the need to maintain good diplomatic relations with Winter until she does, or until the conflict is "resolved", which makes Harry all kinds of uncomfortable since he annoyed her like, this afternoon. Martha Liberty doesn't much like this either, but her issue is with the word "resolved". The Merlin seems to think this can be resolved without open aggression, and that the Reds will sue for peace without serious hostilities, because the cost of victory would be too high. Martha thinks they won't sue for peace as long as they're, y'know, winning. They're both wrong, but the Merlin is like, completely wrong, whereas Martha is only a little bit wrong. As long as the White Council basically isn't fighting back, it makes sense for the Reds to keep poking at them, strengthening the position from which they will eventually negotiate the Council's surrender, but they will want to negotiate eventually. The Merlin's "stand there and take it" strategy is not going to credibly establish that the cost of attacking the Council is too high to bear... kinda the opposite. Of course, they have already proposed a peace agreement, with an accompanying ceasefire, although as Harry points out they already broke it by attacking Harry like, maybe six whole hours ago. Wizard LaFortier, who received their missive, waves this off as like, of course they can't control everyone who works for them, which strikes me as rather thin when they can use like, cell phones.

There's some extended reiteration of what Harry did in the previous book, including some suggestion by LaFortier that "burn the building down" is like, Harry's signature move, and therefore indicates his culpability in starting the war, even though the last two times he's did that before Bianca's place, he was actively fighting an evil wizard, and those cases were deemed by the Council to be justified self-defense and sufficiently heroic to have the Doom of Damocles lifted, respectively. Not to say that "burn the building down" isn't Harry's signature move, but that just indicates his involvement, which is hardly a secret in any case, not his guilt. LaFortier says that they should consider giving the Reds what they want, and when Harry asks what exactly that is, after making some sarcastic suggestions, he reveals that what they want is Harry. 

I'm honestly intrigued by the amount that Jim Butcher isn't explaining or explicating here. This is our first look at the White Council and in some ways we haven't actually learned a lot. But Our Hero is properly in the soup now. If I keep up the current pace, I might be able to get you the next post in like, 5-7 days? Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!   

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 4

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Harry stands in the doorway of his office for a minute, processing. He's scared, "a rational sort of fear that puts a lawn chair down in the front of your thoughts and brings a cooler of drinks along with it." which is too specific and clear an image not to just quote directly. He compares it to waiting for the results of a medical test, which is interesting inasmuch as it implies that Harry has at some point had the kind of access to healthcare necessary to get medical tests and experienced a health problem that warranted testing with potentially frightening results. He's entered a bargain with Mab, whom he initially describes as the queen of wicked faeries, although he almost immediately corrects himself - not all the unseelie, the winter court, are evil, any more than all the seelie summer court are good. Wizards can live a very long time, but Harry's pretty clear that this doesn't entirely apply to him, since he has a habit of starting fights with people and things way the heck outside his own weight class, and while that's gone okay so far, it's not, realistically, going to keep going okay indefinitely. He did have a choice, technically, in whether to accept Mab's bargain or not, although the consequences of refusal were unlikely to be pleasant, or survivable.  He considers the possibility that he took Mab's bargain because he needs to live long enough to help Susan, but Inner Harry, or some other voice in Harry's head, thinks it's more likely that he just wanted to live, full stop. He figures Mab wouldn't have offered him the Reuel case if it wouldn't somehow get him in deeper with her, and more entangled in fae politics generally, which isn't a bad thought, although it doesn't escape my notice that by this reasoning, he can't safely accept any task she offers him, which is going to prove something of a complication if he ever wants to get out of her debt. 

He also has the council meeting tonight, which is enough of a stressor for one day, honestly, and for which he still needs to get ready. And if that sounds like a blunt, awkward transition, I assure you it has nothing on the one in the text itself. He also has the sense that he's forgetting something, and after a moment realizes that he still needs money, and Mab didn't actually offer to pay him for any of this. It's confirmed in Blood Rites that he did not, in fact, get payed for the work he did in this book, and I don't actually remember how he gets out from under the money situation here. He stops by his apartment long enough to get the things he'll need for the meeting, or as close as he can manage, but doesn't have time to shower, and the only food left in the house is half a candy bar, which he puts in his pocket. There's bad traffic on the way to the meeting, and of course the air conditioning in the Blue Beetle doesn't work - we're given a refresher on the way technology tends to misbehave around wizards. 

Ebenezer McCoy arrives at the convention center where the Council is meeting at almost the same time Harry does, and we get descriptions of the truck, and the rack where he keeps his shotgun and his staff. This is foreshadowing of a sort. I don't remember how much of it is established in this book, but we're going to hear a lot between here and the end of Blood Rites about how McCoy taught Harry that magic is a creative force, that it's wrong, even blasphemous to turn it to destructive ends, and almost the first thing we learn about him is that he keeps his staff and his shotgun on the same rack, a staggeringly unsubtle indication that he thinks of magic as a weapon first, and whatever else it might be second. McCoy himself is described as well, and Harry asks why he's here, since he never comes to Council meetings if he can avoid it. McCoy says that the last time he missed a meeting, they saddled him with a teenage apprentice. This goes into their backstory together, which we'll get to in a second, but I did want to note here that this means he was at the council meeting Morgan called after the events of Storm Front. Which may help account for the council having decided to lift the Doom of Damocles. 

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We learn about how, after DuMorne's death, after Harry was tried and found guilty of breaking the First Law of magic, Harry, as he was still a minor, couldn't just be left to his own devices, and so he was sent to live with McCoy, on his farm in Hog Hollow, Missouri, to keep an eye on him and teach him how to control his power. He didn't teach Harry much actual magic, but he did make him do a lot of farm work, and taught him about patience, and about the importance of creating things, making something worthwhile. It was a good place for him. "A good place for me then," (my italics) it says, which I double checked to make sure it wasn't "at the time" or any more similarly loaded phrase, because this kinda drew my attention to the fact that we don't actually know exactly when or why Harry left. Harry says he wasn't that bad, and McCoy retorts that Harry burned down his barn, and alludes to a noodle incident involving the laundry that frightened McCoy's cat so badly it left and never returned. He asks about the toad blood stains covering Harry's car, and the bandage around his hand. He tells McCoy about the toads, but describes the hand injury as the result of an accident in the office. He says he's okay, but won't meet McCoy's eyes, fearing to see disappointment there, which... literally why? Like I understand why he doesn't want to disappoint his former mentor, the only person he regularly addresses as "sir", but it's not immediately clear why he thinks he would have, or might have, done so. It's possible this is about his having, from his own rather skewed perspective, put Susan in danger, but the evidence kinda points against his protectiveness being something he picked up from McCoy. I think here especially of how surprised Harry is by McCoy's insistence that Maggie must be sent away until she's old enough to show magical potential. Could just be a trauma thing, though. It's not like, unusual for people who've been through something awful and violating to feel like "Oh, I've failed everyone whose opinion I care about" even though nothing of the sort has actually happened. 

McCoy observes that the Senior Council is pretty annoyed with Harry, and that he's not going to make a stellar impression when he walks in wearing a blue flannel bathrobe. Harry points out that he's supposed to wear a robe, everyone is, and more seriously that Mister used his good robe as a litter box, so this is his only option. He's also got a blue silk stole, which does not go with the bathrobe. McCoy, who brought proper robes but isn't wearing them because it's too hot, has a red stole, although the significance of the colors is not explained, and I honestly don't remember what they all mean, except that blue is for regular wizards and purple is for members of the senior council. Red might be for wizards who have been part of the Council for more than a century? He tells Harry that a few members of the Senior Council want to talk to him, before they "close the circle", an extremely neopagan phrase which suggest that there may have been a time when the Council's meetings were primarily for the purposes of group workings, rather than governance. Harry is unenthusiastic about this idea, and goes all the way to angry when he realizes that McCoy is risking social capital to arrange this meeting. He goes on a bit about his unwillingness to suck up to the Senior Council, and expresses surprise that McCoy would suggest such a thing, considering he has in the past spoken about the Senior Council in vivid and disrespectful terms. McCoy denies this, and vaguely threatens Harry, to which Harry says to go ahead, threats don't impress him like they used to. This is not hugely surprising considering he told Mab essentially the same thing.

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McCoy starts laughing, and asks what appears to be an empty parking space if it's satisfied. From under the best veil Harry's ever seen, two members of the Senior Council emerge. The first is Martha Liberty, the second of the approximately five named black characters in this entire series. She says that Harry's arrogant, which he points out applies to every wizard ever, and that he's bitter, angry, and obsessive, which McCoy points out he has every reason to be. Martha says "You know what he was meant to be." which I think is the first hint we get in the series that Justin had some specific plan for Harry beyond "recruit a relatively powerful young wizard to the side of evil". She tells McCoy to look at the destruction Harry has caused in his conflict with Bianca, but McCoy's not having it, saying that Harry was right to stand up to her. I'm not like, wholly unsympathetic to the White Council's position here, but I do think McCoy has the right of it here, inasmuch as a policy of "let them do whatever they want so they don't get upset" is not gonna result in less shitty behavior from the vampires. Martha tries to bring up something the Merlin said, but McCoy cuts her off. She shifts gears pretty abruptly, asking Harry if he remembers her (he doesn't - the only time they've been in the same room previously was at his trial, and he had a bag over his head for that), and then kind of feels his aura, observing that he's hurt, emotionally. Apparently this is what she was looking for, because she agrees to support McCoy. She steps back to the side of the other Senior Council member, and we get our initial description of Wizard Listens to Wind. 

This next part is really goddamned racist. The "Injun Joe" thing is weird and gross and I don't know why it's presented as funny. The "How" thing I actually had to look up - I knew it was a Thing in racist, stereotypical depictions of indigenous Americans, but not the particulars; per the first paragraph on Wikipedia, it's a "pop culture Anglicization" of the Lakota word "hau", but the source link leads to a 404 error, and the paragraphs below give two different linguistic origins and three different meanings, all provided by old dead white people. I think most people who could reasonably be expected to be reading Dresden Files probably mostly know this one as a stereotype, so I think the joke here is supposed to be "Harry accidentally said something that could be misinterpreted as racist" but like, it's not funny? I'm also pretty sure you're not supposed to describe people of color as "inscrutable". Harry getting the shit startled out of him by a baby racoon is funny, obviously, but I'm not sure "Here's the first native American character introduced in the series (one of like, one to four depending on whether you want to count Tera, who isn't human, and whether you want to count Anna Ash and Fitz, both of whom are described as looking like they might have native ancestry), and here's his animal friend that he can talk to" is a good look either, although I'd probably be more forgiving if it weren't in, y'know, this context. Anyway, we're told here that he's an Illinois "medicine man" (this term is also racist, but I will grant some leeway here on account of that was harder to find out in 2002 than it is now, and would have been harder for McCoy, who can't use a computer, to find out in 2002 than it would have been for me in 2002, notwithstanding that this entire area of cultural practice is super private and even asking directly might not have gotten McCoy, much less Jim Butcher, the correct term to use - I probably would have settled on "traditional healer" or "ritual specialist", but I'm not like, confident those are good choices). Anyway, the Illinois Confederation was an organization of 12 or 13 different mostly Miami-Illinois language-speaking peoples in the Mississippi River Valley, most of the surviving descendants of whom are now part of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, although some of the Mitchigamea merged with the Quapaw Nation. I should note that trying to get even this much detail nailed took about the maximum time and effort it's reasonably possible for me to put in for a blog post. Kept running into walls of "Yeah we don't know, because genocide" and "Yeah someone probably knows but we don't care enough to put it on the internet, because racism". If I have avoided dangerous oversimplification and outright inaccuracy, I will take that as a win. The baby racoon is cute though. 

McCoy asks where Simon Peitrovich is, which brings the others around to the news that he's dead, along with everyone else at his compound in Archangel. That's presumably Arkhangelsk (Архангельск, Russian for Archangel), a city in Russia and the administrative center (I believe this is comparable to a state capital in the US) of the oblast of the same name. Arkhangelsk, the city, is a modern port city, if rather closer in scale to St. Louis than to Chicago, and I'm not really sure where you could put a "tower" and an associated compound that could reasonably be described as a "fortress" without its attracting some notice. This suggests to me that Simon's compound may have been somewhere else in the oblast, maybe in the border security zone, where restricted access kind of inherently makes things harder to notice because fewer people have the opportunity to see them. McCoy is visibly distressed by Simon's death in and of itself, but the Red Court's attack on his compound presents another, more immediate difficulty. Someone let the vampires in, past a substantial portion of Simon's formidable defenses, and some in the White Council, including the Merlin, are going to think that Harry either did this or orchestrated it. Martha says "master to student" - I think it's established later that the master in question who was familiar with Simon's defenses was Justin, but I'm not 100% sure. Bottom line, the Merlin is going to accuse Harry of starting this war, and try to have him held responsible for "a number of deaths", and without Simon, they don't have enough people in the Senior Council on Harry's side to stop it from going to a general vote, which is unlikely to go Harry's way. 

Hey, look, I actually got one of these done basically within the timeframe I was hoping for. We'll see if I can keep that up as we head into the summer, yeah? Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 3

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 Harry is thoroughly freaked out by the realization that Mab is a fairy queen. He repeats, in narration, that she's a Fairy Queen four times. (I have nothing on the numerological significance of this one.) He describes fear like ice water, how it can spread down your body, chilling and weakening you, even as your mind screams at you to run away. Mab acknowledges Harry's unmistakable terror as a sign of wisdom on his part, and asks how it feels. He compares her to Godzilla, and isn't sure what she thinks about it. In case the reader isn't sure whether Harry's exaggerating in comparing her to a Kaiju, we are told that short of summoning up a god or fighting the White Council directly, he's unlikely to come up against anything with as much raw power as she has. Notably, of course, at the present writing, Harry has dealt with a number of old gods, including summoning the Erlking, who's supposed to be on a level with Mab, and may be gearing up to face off against the White Council, based on the events of the end of Battle Ground. Which, if this power scaling is accurate, rather suggests that he could take Mab, if he had to, give or take that he's currently her Knight and dependent on the Winter Mantle for his ability to do things like walking and using the bathroom unassisted. 

Harry hates being afraid, and he hates being bullied - it makes him angry, maybe too angry to make good choices, because he tells her to just blast him and get it over with. It's not like he can stop her, not when his debt gives her enough leverage to make him put a letter opener through his hand. She approves of his defiance, reiterating that he is what she needs. He says he won't be her emissary unless she forces him, and that he's unlikely to meet her needs under those conditions. Obviously this is setup for the longer version of this same exchange that they have at the end of Ghost Story, but I think it also reflects Harry's ability to think and perceive under pressure. It actually took some attention to extrapolate from Mab's assertion that Harry's "fire" is what makes him what she needs for an emissary, and that by extension he wouldn't be much use if he's compelled. 

Mab says she's offering him a chance to win free of his obligations. Harry doesn't think she's much into freedom (indeed, she clarifies that she largely values it as a source of leverage), but can almost physically sense her sincerity when she says that she'll let him go if he meets her terms, so he agrees to hear her out. The basic terms are as follows: she will periodically make requests, and he's free when he fulfills three of them. Harry clarifies that he gets to choose which requests to fulfill, which Mab implies was already her intent, although I'm sure she wouldn't have held herself to it if Harry hadn't brought it up. Harry then adds that she can't punish him or otherwise retaliate if he refuses a request, get others to harass him, or transfer his debt to anyone else. Mab agrees to all three terms, and Harry confirms that they have a bargain. He can physically feel the new agreement coming into effect. The experience is not unlike that of Wile E. Coyote when he realizes that he's gone off the edge of a cliff, but Harry hopes that as long as he doesn't look down, he can just keep running. 

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Mab gives him a manila envelope containing the details of her first request, that he investigate the murder of one Ronald Reuel, find something that was stolen from him (Mab says he'll know it when he sees it), return it to the rightful owners, and prove she wasn't involved. Yeah, so, Ronald Reuel - that would be Tolkien's middle names. In real life, at the time Summer Knight was published, Tolkein had been dead for close to 30 years, so I suppose we are meant to understand, once we have more details about who and what Reuel was, that at the time of his apparent death, he instead became the Summer Knight, and has remained in that position since. That would make him about 110 years old, but we know from Cold Days that the Mantles allow humans to reach, if not exceed, the limits of human physical capability, so this is not wholly impossible, even if we discount the possibility that Summer may have had some additional means of unnaturally prolonging his life, or of Tolkien himself having been a wizard or something else supernatural. I do note here that Tolkien was we really don't have a tidy, non-pejorative word for this, but he was very attached to his wife, Edith, and survived her by less than two years. It seems unlikely that he would choose to continue so long without her. However, given Tolkien's own identification of Edith with Luthien, it is reasonably possible that we are meant to understand Edith to have been a changeling, so she may in this setting have Chosen very late in life and also still be somewhere in Summer, although in that case I am mildly surprised she isn't more involved with the gaggle of changelings Reuel was looking after. Reuel is also known as a painter, not an author. Now, Tolkien could and did paint and draw, but I find it drastically unlikely that he would have stopped writing. It may be that whatever new writing he did was simply accumulating, unpublished, somewhere, or that we are meant to understand that he was passing work along to Christopher Tolkien, at that time still the manager of his works and estate, and that these comprise some or all of Tolkien's myriad posthumously published works. 

Mab won't tell Harry how she knows Reuel's death wasn't an accident, what was stolen, or what her interest in any of this even is, although she does heavily imply that it's not the mortal police she's worried about, but that she is worried about someone. Harry says he'll think about it, although Mab insists that he will take the case. She also insists that he walk her to the door, and then zaps his hand with cold, claiming when he complains that this is a violation of their bargain that she did it purely for spite, not in retaliation for his refusing the Reuel case. She tells him to expect to meet his Summer counterpart that evening, and when he reminds her that he's not her emissary yet, he hasn't taken the job, she tells him the story of the fox and the scorpion (the better known version is the frog and the scorpion, but it's the same story either way), and says that she knows he'll take the case because it's his nature. Harry, still making up for lost misogyny time from the previous book, checks out her ass as she leaves. 

Sorry this one took longer than we thought it would. It's not even that long a chapter, but I've been dealing with overlapping Automotive Situations for the past two weeks, and while I'm a heck of a multitasker, I have not quite got the trick of simultaneously blogging and installing a starter, at least not without getting car grease all over my phone. The part of this situation that requires physical work is very nearly resolved, though, so hopefully I'll be a bit quicker on the next one. Remember as always that if you want the functionality of the car to interrupt my blogging less, you can always support me on Patreon. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!