I crossed the room to the bar, and Mac nodded at me. Mac was a lean man somewhere between thirty and fifty. He wore his usual dark clothes and spotless white apron while simultaneously managing all the bartending and a big wood-burning grill where he cooked various dishes for the customers. The summer heat was fairly well blunted by the shade and the fans and the partially subterranean nature of the room, but there were still dark spots of sweat on his clothes and beading along the bare skin of his scalp.
Mac knew what the tough-guy face was about, and it clearly didn’t bother him. He nodded to me as I sat down on a stool.
“Mac. You got any cold beer back there somewhere?”
He gave me an unamused look.
I leaned my staff on the bar, lifted both hands in a placating gesture, and said, “Kidding. But tell me you’ve got cold lemonade. It’s a zillion degrees out there.”
He answered with a glass of lemonade cooled with his patented lemonade ice cubes, so that you could drink it cold and not have it get watered down, all at the same time. Mac is pretty much a genius when it comes to drinks. And his steak sandwiches should be considered some kind of national resource.
“Business?” he asked me.
I nodded. “Meeting with Fix.”
Mac grunted and went out to a corner table, one with a clear view of the door. He nudged it out a bit from the wall, polished it with a cloth, and straightened the chairs around it. I nodded my thanks to him and settled down at the table with my lemonade.
I didn’t have long to wait. A couple of minutes before noon, the Summer Knight opened the door and came in.
Fix had grown, and I mean that literally. He’d been about five foot three, maybe an inch or so higher. Now he had towered up to at least five nine. He’d been a wiry little guy with white-blond hair, and most of that remained true. The wire had thickened to lean cable, but the shock of spikes he’d worn as a hairdo had gotten traded in on a more typical cut for faerie nobles-a shoulder-length do. Fix hadn’t been a good-looking guy, and the extra height and muscle and the hair did absolutely nothing to change that. What had changed was his previous manner, which had been approximately equal parts nervous and cheerful.
The Summer Knight projected confidence and strength. They shone from him like light from a star. When he opened the door, the dim shadows retreated somewhat, and a whispering breeze that smelled of pine and honeysuckle rolled through the room. The air around him did something to the light, throwing it back cleaner, more pure, more fierce than it had been before it touched him.
Fix wasn’t putting on a face, like I had. This was what he had become: the Summer Knight, mortal champion of the Seelie Court, a thunderstorm in blue jeans and a green cotton shirt. His gaze went first to Mac, and he gave the barkeep a polite little bow of respect. Then he turned to me, grinned, and nodded. “Harry.”
“Fix,” I said. “Been a while. You’ve grown.”
He looked down at himself and looked briefly like the flustered young man I had first met. “It sort of snuck up on me.”
“Life has a way of doing that,” I agreed.
“I hope you don’t mind. Someone else wanted to speak to you, too.”
He turned his head and said something, and a breath later the Summer Lady entered the tavern.
Lily had never been hard on the eyes. The daughter of one of the Sidhe and a mortal, she’d had the looks usually reserved for magazines and movie stars. But, like Fix, she had grown; not physically, though a somewhat juvenile eye might have made certain comparisons to the past and somehow found them even more appealing. What had changed most was the bashful uncertainty that had filled her every word and movement. The old Lily had hardly been able to take care of herself. This was the Summer
Lady, youngest of the Seelie Queens, and when she came in the room, the whole place suddenly seemed more alive. The lingering taste of lemonade on my tongue became more intensely sour and sweet. I could hear every whisper of wind around every lazily spinning fan blade in the room, and all of them murmured gentle music together. She wore a simple sundress of green, starkly contrasting the silken waterfall of purest white tresses that fell to her waist.
More than that, she carried around her a sense of purpose, a kind of quiet, gentle strength, something as steady and warming and powerful as summer sunlight. Her face, too, had gained character, the awkward shyness in her eyes replaced with a kind of gentle perception; a continual, quiet laughter leavened with just a touch of sadness. She stepped forward, between two of the carved wooden columns, and the flowers wrought into the wood upon them twitched and then burst into sudden blooms of living color.
Everyone there, myself included, stopped breathing for a second.
Mac recovered first. “Lily,” he said, and bowed his head to her. “Good to see you.”
She smiled warmly at his use of her name. “Mac,” she replied. “Do you still make those lemonade ice cubes?”
“Two,” Fix said, grinning more broadly. He offered his arm to Lily, and she laid her hand upon it, both gestures so familiar to them that they didn’t need to think about them anymore. They came over to the table, and I rose politely until Fix had seated Lily. Then we mere menfolk sat down again. Mac came with drinks and departed.
“So,” Fix said. “What’s up, Harry?”
Lily sipped lemonade through a straw. I tried not to stare and drool. “Um. I’ve been asked to get in touch with you,” I said. “After the Red Court’s attack last year, when they encroached on Faerie territory, we were kind of expecting a response. We were wondering why there hadn’t been one.”
“We meaning the Council?” Lily asked quietly. Her voice was calm, but something just under its surface warned me that the answer might be important.
“We meaning me and some people I know. This isn’t exactly, ah, official.”
Fix and Lily exchanged a look. She nodded once, and Fix exhaled and said, “Good. Good, I was hoping that would be the case.”
“I am not permitted to speak for the Summer Court to the White Council,“ Lily explained. ”But you have a prior claim of friendship to both myself and my Knight. And there is nothing to prevent me from speaking to an old friend regarding troubled times.“
I glanced back and forth between them for a moment before I said, “So why haven’t the Sidhe laid the smack down on the Red Court?”
Lily sighed. “A complicated matter.”
“Just start at the beginning and explain it from there,” I suggested.
“Which beginning?” she asked. “And whose?”
I felt my eyebrows arch up. “Hell’s bells, Lily. I wasn’t expecting the usual Sidhe word games from you.”
Calm, remote beauty covered her face like a mask. “I know.”
“Seems to me that you’re a couple of points in the red when it comes to favors given and received,” I said. “Between that mess in Oklahoma and your predecessor.”
“I know,” she said again, her expression showing me less than nothing.
I leaned back into my chair for a second, glaring at her, feeling that same old frustration rising. Damn, but I hated trying to deal with the Sidhe. Summer or Winter, they were both an enormous pain in the ass.
“Harry,” Fix said with gentle emphasis. “She isn’t always free to speak.”
“Like hell she isn’t,” I said. “She’s the Summer Lady.”
“But Titania is the Summer Queen,” Fix told me. “And if you’ll forgive me for pointing out something so obvious, it wasn’t so long ago that you murdered Titania’s daughter.”
“What does that have to do with anything,” I began, but snapped my lips closed over the last word. Of course. When Lily had become the Summer Lady, she got the whole package-and it went way beyond simply turning her hair white. She would have to follow the bizarre set of limits and rules to which all of the Faerie Queens seemed bound. And, more importantly, it meant she would have to obey the more powerful Queens of Summer, Titania and Mother Summer.