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!