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| Photo by Valentin Petkov on Unsplash |
They're at the top of a low hill, in a misty landscape of other such hills, and there's a raven perched on the nearest tree, very obviously looking at them. Harry describes the scene as "very Baskerville", which I initially took to be about the bird, and was going to question on that basis, but I finally went and reread The Hound of the Baskervilles like I said I was going to do back in Chapter 11 (a year ago?!), which is raven-free but does feature dense fog surrounding rolling hills. Also now that it's been named specifically I think we can be very confident there's a deliberate Hound of the Baskervilles thing happening here. The important part, for our purposes, I think, is that the secret heir to a small but wealthy estate takes advantage of an old legend about a curse on the family to try to arrange the death of the current baronet (who dies) and his only known heir (who doesn't). It's not entirely clear how he meant to put himself forward after they'd been gotten out of the way, since he had been living under a false name in the nearby village, with his wife whom he was pretending was his sister, but that's really neither here nor there since he fails to kill Henry Baskerville and dies in a bog. The old baronet, whose names escapes me...Charles Baskerville? Yeah, Sir Charles, was literally frightened to death by a large, but entirely corporeal and non-cursed, dog painted up with phosphorus. This wasn't gonna work with Sir Henry, who wasn't old, and didn't have heart problems, so Stapleton (not his real name, but what he's called for most of the story) has to get a little cute trying to arrange for his dog to physically kill him. There's a whole subplot where the couple who take care of the Baskerville house are hiding the housekeeper's brother, who's an escaped mass murderer, out on the moor, but I don't think that matters here. Aurora is obviously positioned as Stapleton here, operating under a false name (if not for such a large portion of the story) and working behind the scenes to pull off a really complicated inheritance scheme involving property she is, legally, entitled to. Reuel is of course Sir Charles, the old man who was murdered (iirc in a way that wouldn't have worked if he weren't old and frail) to get the inheritance in question where she wanted it. Lily, then, parallels Sir Henry, the relative outsider (Lily is half-human and her fae parent was from Winter, Sir Henry has spent most of his life in North America) inheriting this not-actually-cursed but currently very dangerous thing, and going to get killed for it, although she also has commonalities with Laura Lyons, a somewhat naive woman whom Stapleton manipulated to get at Sir Charles, and who, in backstory, the entire community had to pull together to save from destitution and/or sex work (everyone's a bit delicate about the particulars) after she was abandoned by, or left, her husband, who was, perhaps significantly, an artist, and her father "refused to have anything to do with her", much as Reuel and the other changeling kids seem to have done with Lily, although Lily's difficulties seem to stem from an inherent difficulty in "taking care of herself" rather than a bad marriage and a shitty father. I don't think Aurora manipulated Lily to get at Reuel, although I could be wrong, but that is what the reader is positioned to expect, once they have enough information to draw inferences on this point, which at this stage we don't, really. More importantly, this positions Elaine as Mrs. Stapleton, Stapleton's wife and largely unwilling accomplice, and I think it is possible that we should be able to work that out at this stage. The reinforcement of the Hound of the Baskervilles reference, after setting it up with an explicit Sherlock Holmes reference in the same chapter that Harry goes to investigate the death of an old man who apparently died for Old Man reasons but also clearly there's more to it than that, should tell us that someone who has so far appeared to be friendly and helpful, whom Harry did not know before this book, is behind the murder and the ongoing shenanigans, and that they have an accomplice who doesn't like or support their plan but has been forced to help. Also that a lot of the apparently supernatural aspects of the case are just cobwebs, but we'll get to that in a second. Technically there are three people who meet our Stapleton criteria at this stage: Aurora, Meryl, and Listens to Wind. Meryl was the first person to approach Harry about Lily, even though she wasn't the first person to approach him about this case as a whole, which makes her a better fit, if we're going to keep matching up characters, for Dr. Mortimer. And Listens to Wind is not, as far as we know, closely associated with the faerie courts - he's not an insider the way Stapleton needs to be, nor is he much involved in the events of the book after Harry accepts the case. That makes Aurora the strongest candidate here, and Elaine is the only person we've met who could plausibly be her Mrs. Stapleton, although Summer Knight is not so very similar to The Hound of the Baskervilles as to make anything extrapolated about the former from the latter certain. Also, notably, Mrs. Stapleton does not, so far as I can recall, actually do or even appear to do anything to either Sir Henry or Watson during the story. She's maybe sort of trying to seduce Sir Henry, but that doesn't really go anywhere, and the thing where she pretends to be Stapleton's sister seems to be more about making sure he appears unattached so he can seduce Laura Lyons.
Harry asks "where to now?" and the raven flies off, stopping almost out of sight but clearly waiting for them. Elaine tells Harry not to make any "never more" jokes, and I was gonna do a little bit of analysis on the potential relevance of this literary allusion, but honestly I'm not sure there's a lot there. Harry's upset about losing his girlfriend, which is also one of the things "The Raven" is about, but like, a quarter of all art ever is about that. Like the speaker in "The Raven" he's been keeping odd hours and spending a lot of time with his books about it, I guess. And the has in common with Baskervilles that it features an ordinary animal frightening the shit out of someone who ascribes supernatural powers to it, but nothing along those lines is really part of the plot of themes of this book. The lost love who's currently standing next to Harry never gets back together with him, but she's not dead, and she's never again fully out of reach after this book. The one he's been up in his feelings about since the end of Grave Peril does of course die eventually, but at the moment she's still alive, and in the next book, this soul with sorrows laden very much will clasp that rare and radiant maiden. Not even within the distant Aidenn, just like, in his apartment. I guess it's foreshadowing for his giving up the chance to use the unraveling, maybe, but that's sort of dubious since in "The Raven", Lenore is already dead and the speaker doesn't come to terms with that or give up a chance of seeing her again anyway for a greater good, he just kinda gives up on ever being happy again because a bird that only knows one, really depressing word, got into his house. They follow the bird for a while, until it leaves them just barely in sight of a light they assume, not unreasonably, is the Mothers' place.
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| Photo by Leonie Clough on Unsplash |
two sort of goatlike horns next to its regular unicorn horn, and a mane like rotten cobwebs, and Elaine says it's not as "prancy" as the ones she saw in the Summer court. There's a pair of odd descriptive choices here that I'm not really sure what to make of. At the beginning of the first paragraph describing this thing, Harry tells us it looks like "a Budweiser horse", and then just after that paragraph says "that was where its resemblance to a Clydesdale ended". Similarly, we're told that its hooves are cloven and "stained with old blood" and then later that its horn has "rust-brown stains". There's nothing wrong with any of those descriptors individually, but I think it would have been more evocative to start by comparing it to a Clydesdale, and then say "that was where its resemblance to a Budweiser horse ended", because most people know that the Budweiser horses are Clydesdales, so when you say "Clydeasdale" you're prompting the reader to think "Oh, like the Budweiser horses" which puts you in a position to say "No, not like the Budweiser horses." And I know it's more artistically effective to start with the somewhat euphemistic "rust-brown stains" and then escalate to "blood" rather than the reverse. It's possible Butcher is trying to do something Clever here, but if so, I can't figure out what it is and I don't think it worked. Only his having done it twice in the same passage makes me think it might have been deliberate. Harry's first idea for getting past this thing is to blow it up. Elaine's is to use a veil. Certain amount of Ah, yes, the two genders. This is a tangent but I would at some point in this series like to see a man be specialized in veils and mental stuff - one who isn't so vastly much more experienced than Harry that his superior abilities in this area are clearly the result of practice and discipline rather than having a talent for it. Or a woman who's better than Harry at blowing things up. Blowing things up is, in this setting, clearly established to be a sign of not being very good at evocation, but that's fine - fantasy needs more women who are strong as hell but not all that refined in their control, and part of showing women as people in your writing is not having them all be hypercompetent. Anyway, what they eventually settle on, since unicorns can sense thoughts, is for Elaine to focus on a mental image to distract it and lure it away while Harry sneaks past. This works, but only for a few seconds, and when it starts gearing up to attack Elaine, Harry, remembering how Grum shrugged off his magic, blows up the ground at its feet. Unicorns having somewhat better balance than horses, this doesn't knock it over, but it does get it focused on Harry, who follows up first by trying to get it to charge into a tree and get stuck, which doesn't work at all (it hits the tree but just tears through it), and then by hitting it in the ankle on a spot that's apparently vulnerable on horses, which doesn't really work either. There's pretty good paragraph of frantic staff vs. horn combat here - a staff is a good weapon for this situation, which buys Elaine time to pull together a spell to force a memory of hers onto it more aggressively, which pretty well incapacitates it.
She tells Harry to go on ahead, that she can hold it, although not for long, and won't be sticking around to get skewered once he's out of danger. Harry mostly does this, but stops for just a second to admire Elaine. This is noteworthy mostly inasmuch as he describes her as " My slender and straight and beautiful Elaine." which reminds me a great deal of the description of Blaes of Matuchin in Wheel of Time, "strong as the ash she stands, as lithe as the willow's branch, and as beautiful as a rose." This matters because from birth, the Dark One marked Blaes as his own, although as far as we know (she's a legendary historical figure who's only present in the books twice and doesn't have much chance to exposit about her biography either time) she never went over to the Shadow. Something to keep an eye on, potentially, regarding Elaine. Harry succeeds, barely, in not getting distracted by memories of when he and Elaine were together, and runs for the Mothers' cottage.
So that's what I have for this chapter. Took a week longer than I'd hoped, on account of I had to reread an entire other novel and also I finally got my phone situation sorted out, which is basically a good thing but it took, y'know, time. Still gonna be trying to keep up a pretty good pace at we close in on the end of the month, so hopefully I will get you another one of these in the next like, four days. Until then, be Gay, do Crime, and read All The Things!
