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| Photo by Rebekah Vos on Unsplash |
shields on the outside, long spears on the inside - fighting a swarm of giant bumblebees. Like, park-bench sized bumblebees, not just giant like "Oh, that bee is the size of my hand" or even "that bee is the size of my cat", either of which would be giant enough, relative to the usual size of a bumblebee, to warrant the adjective. The goblins are not having a great time, and a portion of the swarm peels off to attack Harry and co. Harry gets rid of most of the bees using forzare, the effect of which is described here as "a curtain of blazing scarlet energy". That's... odd. His force spell isn't usually visible at all, except in its effects on objects and people. And it would be pretty consistent with genre norms for his magic to work a little differently in faerie, wouldn't even need a particular explanation, but it's unusual for Harry not to notice when something weird happens with his magic. He noticed in Blood Rites when the runes on his staff started smoking. In fairness, he didn't immediately realize he'd been messed with in Small Favor, which is the other book where he's working for Mab before taking up with Winter Knight's mantle, but that was like, a whole plot thing. This doesn't seem to be a plot thing. We're like three chapters from the end of the book, and so far as I can recall, there's no mention anywhere in the series of wizard magic behaving oddly in the Nevernever. This suggests that Harry must be doing something different on purpose here, but there's nothing to give us any idea what that might be. He blasts the last couple with fire, which doesn't seem to have anything terribly unusual going on and impresses the shit out of Fix. That's a little important, because we don't see very much of Fix here, or again until Proven Guilty, and there's an emphasis there on how he's changed since taking up the mantle which doesn't work without giving him some proper characterization here. Fix's unvoiced "wow" here is most of our textual evidence to support Harry's surprise when Fix interrupts him on the phone four books from now.
Unfortunately, everyone was so busy being impressed that they forgot they're supposed to be running, so Harry has to get them moving again. Ten feet from the river, they encounter Lloyd Slate, covered in multicolored fairy blood and accompanied by several warriors of Summer, including Aurora, Talos and Korrick. These guys are described as wearing armor "in a riot of wildflower colors", but as this description is sandwiched between Slate's being "spattered in liquids of various colors that could only be blood" and Talos "bearing a slender sword spattered in so many colors of liquid that it looked as if it had cut the throat of a baby rainbow" it's difficult to tell if these wildflower colors are part of their helmets and mail, or the fluids staining them. I like that. It's a good sort of "war is hell" image, and one you couldn't really include outside of a multispecies battle, or make significant if one of the factions in that battle was not strongly associated with light and the natural world. I've never seen this one before, and that gives it some weight on its own, even if I'm not sure the execution was solid enough to call it like, "powerful" or anything. It's also a good use of prose, printed text, as a medium - you couldn't really make this work in a visual medium, because at some point it would become clear one way or the other whether the "wildflower" colors were the armor or just the blood. Which, if you kept it ambiguous for a while first, could be effective, but wouldn't have the same effect that this does.
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| Photo by Adam Hornyak on Unsplash |
found wearing a whole other person, who is currently made of stone, as a backpack more dignified than hauling her in a cart, even if it's also awkward and more physically difficult than it needs to be. I don't think it's ever addressed here, but it's common enough in other fiction for centaurs to be touchy about being treated like beasts of burden that we can kinda assume it applies here, or at least might apply here, even though it isn't mentioned. Also Lily is described here as the Summer Knight, and I like that, because the Knights we see in non-statue form are all men, and it's implied that this is required, by tradition if not by the mantle itself, just as the Queens are all always women, and it's not like Lily has any occasion to actually do anything as the Summer Knight, so it would have been understandable to say something like that she was carrying the Summer Knight's mantle, instead. But no. She's got the Mantle, she's the Summer Knight, for however short a time and in however limited a capacity that might be. Harry tries to give Aurora the opportunity to surrender, to hand over Lily and the unraveling and let this end here. Unfortunately, as becomes clear through a moment of prolonged eye contact (not a soulgaze, just... vibes, I guess), Aurora is insane. Or, as Harry puts it, "loopy as a crochet convention", which a mildly interesting way to put it, since Harry doesn't use that many textiles metaphors, and this one required at least minimal familiarity with what crochet actually entails. When Harry continues trying to talk her down, she laughs, a more-than-physical sound which jars Harry's nerves and causes the changelings's ears to bleed, then rides off with Korrick, instructing the rest of her retinue to kill Harry and the others.
This, incidentally, is when we find out, presumably because it's when Harry figures it out, that Talos's armor repels or resists magic, which is what allowed him to pass as an ogre in his "Grum" disguise, so I'm glad that does actually get addressed at some point. Harry, Meryl with her axe and machete, Fix with his big wrench, and about ten werewolves, are facing about twenty Sidhe warriors, including Talos and Slate. I'd honestly thought it was later, when he's directly engaged with Aurora, but this is where Harry says the Thing. "I don't believe in faeries!"
Yay, first post of the new year as defined for the purposes of tracking my productivity and essentially no other purposes. The Book is now properly underway, with two posts edited into book chapters, including substantial expansion, copyediting (although I'm adding enough material that there will have to be a second editing pass just for that), and turning the embeded links into Works Cited and Further Reading sections. Timing of the next post depends some on how hard I stay on top of other things, of course, but I wouldn't expect it to take more than a week. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!
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