Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 23

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Harry drives out to the suburbs, "a couple miles north of Northwestern University", "out toward Winnetka", which should put him somewhere in New Trier Township, maybe-probably in Wilmette? There is a Sheridan road there, and several places in this general area that pulling off it could put you in a position to walk through some woods to Lake Michigan. So we're doing better on geography than we were with the Walmart. As an aside, Winnetka's northern border with Glencoe runs through 58 homes, which for a long time forced the people that lived there to pay taxes to, and seek permits from, both villages. And that's fine, but Glencoe and Winnetka started trying to work this out in the 1920s and didn't reach an agreement until 2007, and I would really like to know why that took more than 80 years. (Residents of the affected houses can now choose which village they want to be part of, while the official border still goes through their houses). Anyway, he walks out onto a little rock promontory, and starts gathering energy from the stone, the water, and the wonky weather. I was gonna say that this promontory should properly be termed a jetty, but apparently it's only a jetty if it's manmade. He raises his arms and turns his wrists outward, so that the scars from where Lea bled him back when he was a teenager are facing up, and getting rained on directly. At least, I assume these are the scars from Lea bleeding him - it doesn't actually say, and they weren't established back in Grave Peril when we start learning about his time with her. I'm mildly intrigued that these scars have never been mentioned before and moreover, so far as I can recall, are never mentioned again, even in the one or two scenes where someone is actively reviewing Harry's scars. That doesn't start happening until much later in the series, and the timespan covered by the books is now well over ten years, so it's possible Harry's wizardly enhanced healing eventually caused the scars to fade past visibility. And I'm fascinated by the implication that, at least under some circumstances, you can use the scar of an injury someone gave you as a point of sympathy in magic. Maybe this wouldn't have worked if Lea weren't sidhe, or if the injuries hadn't been acquired during a pretty serious ritual, but clearly it's possible, and I don't think it ever comes up again. 

Harry calls Lea, and she basically pops up next to him like "There's no need to shout, I'm right here," startling him so badly that he almost falls into the lake. We get a very thorough description, of which the only important bit for our purposes is that she's wearing the knife Bianca gave her in Grave Peril. There's some discussion a little later on of how trading Harry's debt to Mab was part of redressing an imbalance created by her having that knife. It has been my impression that it was payment, or part payment, for Mab curing her of Nemesis brain poisoning, but I don't actually remember if the books come out and say that anywhere. If so, it's interesting that she's still out and about at this point, much less permitted to carry the dagger, although it's possible that leaving it with the person already infected is the most reasonable way to contain the contagion for the time being, and Mab is really busy right now. This does also firmly establish that she had time to infect both Maeve and Aurora, although I don't know for sure if she already got Maeve at this point, or if she was the source of Aurora's infection. It may be that Mab hasn't yet figured out what the dagger actually is and does yet, but it strikes me as a bit more likely that she just can't afford to take one of her most powerful lieutenants off the board on the literal eve of battle, so she's just living with the risk. If that choice was what led to Maeve getting Nemesised, that would account for some of her squirreliness about it in Cold Days. They argue a little about whether Lea has Harry's best interests at heart. The whole "trying to turn Harry into a dog" thing is still sort of an odd point in that regard - he would have been safer, and maybe happier, absolutely, but the personality changes we see from his relatively short time in dog form in Changes suggest that this would not really have been in keeping with Lea's duty of care to what she describes in Ghost Story as Harry's "spiritual self". So either the hellhound thing was some boundary-pushing malicious compliance, or there's really some greater threat from which the best available protection would include turning Harry into a dog. Honestly, both seem reasonably possible, although if it's the latter I wish she'd explain already. Harry asks if they can bargain for her taking him to see the Queens, and she says she can do it without extracting a price from him, because his mother already paid for it. Harry's understandably skeptical, trying to figure out what the catch it, but Lea reminds him that their existing bargain that she not hurt him still has a couple weeks left. Harry had straight up forgotten about that, which I think speaks to his mental state in this book about as well as anything here. It's not so good for Wizards to lose track of that kind of thing. 

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Lea, as best I can tell, teleports both of them to the cloudscape, Chicago-over-Chicago, where the Queens are readying for war. At the center of the landscape, and very near to where Harry and Lea popped in, stands the Stone Table. It's inscribed with what Harry describes as "runes", some of them Norse, others perhaps Egyptian. I know what he means, but this is a really strange way to describe it. Neither "letters" nor "symbols" would be strictly accurate here, but I think either word would have been better than "runes" in this context. In any case they come from multiple sources, making them functionally unreadable. This tracks with the Fae's apparent indifference to the distinctions between languages, except occasionally for aesthetic purposes. Harry has apparently heard of the Stone Table, enough to recognize it on sight, but needs Lea to explain what exactly it does. Essentially, the Table passes between Summer and Winter with the changing of the seasons, and blood spilled on it grants the power in that blood to whoever controls the table at that time. The table itself is also pretty damn powerful, in some way, enough so that when Harry touches it, he gets physically zapped, scorching a couple of fingernails. This from the guy who was only a few pages ago reminding Lea that he needs his hands. Harry works out almost immediately that if a Wizard like him were sacrificed on the Table, that would be a lot of power for whichever side held it. Lea confirms this, and tells Harry never to let Mab bring him here. Of course, Mab does take him there in Changes, but I don't know if that's the scenario Lea was worried about, or if she has reason in this book to fear that Mab would straight up sacrifice Harry here. Honestly, given the Starborn thing, it might be good for like, the safety of reality to give Winter the power Harry, specifically, has, although obviously it wouldn't be good for Harry. 

Lea points Harry to a pair of hilltops, but he can't initially see what's going on. She prompts him to open his Sight, and we get a reminder of how that works, and what the risks are. This is also where we get the description of the tree spirit Harry saw the first time he used his Sight, which I honestly thought came in a much later book. Maybe it comes up again later? In any case, Harry opens his Sight, and is almost physically knocked over by the sheer volume of magical energies swirling around. He sees the light of Titania's power, green and gold and garden-y, competing with Mab's crystaline blue and purple, forming a pattern like a chessboard, except at the center, where Summer holds the area around the Stone Table. Mab and Titania themselves are points of blinding light, the former freezing cold, the latter burning hot, and he's drawn to both of them, like, as he puts it, an insect to a bug zapper. Given that he is using his sight here, I wonder if this experience, permanently engraved on his mind like all memories of the Sight, didn't play a role in his decision to become the Winter Knight. He said it was because Mab was the least evil option, and that looks like a solid call from where I'm standing, but that doesn't mean the choice was unbiased. Looking at the Queens, Harry finally gets a real sense of what he's up against, how big the forces involved really are, and loses consciousness. 

He wakes up back in regular reality, next to the lake, with his head on Lea's lap. He recounts his understanding of the situation, that Summer and Winter have done this before, that there's a ritualistic aspect to their battles, but that with the Summer Knight's mantle missing, the balance could be thrown off, permanently. Moreover, since Mab will gain control of the table in only about a day, on the Summer Solstice, there's no reason for her to act now if she has the Summer Knight, and the only way she is moving is in response to Titania. Which means she doesn't have it, and she probably doesn't know who does. Lea tells him that it's almost sunrise, and the battle will begin at sunset that night - all the lesser powers of the Courts, including her, and including the Emissaries, and thus including Harry, will participate. Lea says the outcome of that battle will "determine the balance" - she seems to think this is normal, so presumably it's a question of settling out a relatively small shift in the status quo. Harry makes the comparison to two springs pushing against each other, and I suppose you can have a small difference in which has pushed the other further, as long as they then resume pushing each other with equal force, "cancelling each other perfectly". So she has to go get ready. Harry points out that she hasn't taken him to see the Mothers yet. Lea agrees that he needs to see them, but says she has no way to contact them, and that Harry can't visit without an invitation. 

So this leaves Harry with about 15 hours to solve things before the balance of nature gets irrevocably upset, and no clear way forward. He needs to tell the White Council what's going on, also - this is a fate of the world thing, now, and shouldn't be left to one guy just because there's politics happening. And then when he tries to start his car, the engine catches fire. 

 Hey, look, it didn't take like, a month or more for me to post this time! Here at Mint and Brambles, we're heading into Frantically Trying to Catch Up season, so hopefully this pace will continue, at least for a while. In the meantime, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!