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.
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.
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!
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