Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 4

Photo by Ryan Ancill on Unsplash

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. 

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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.

Photo by Allison Batley on Unsplash

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!