“Are you telling me that Titania has ordered you both not to help me?” I asked them.
They stared back at me with faerie poker faces that told me nothing.
I nodded, beginning to understand. “You aren’t permitted to speak officially for Summer. And Titania’s laid some kind of compulsion on you both to prevent you from helping me on a personal level,” I said. “Hasn’t she?”
Had there been crickets, I would have heard them clearly. Had my table companions been statues, I’d have gotten more reaction from them.
“You’re not supposed to help me. You’re not supposed to tell me about the compulsion.” I followed the chain of logic a step further. “But you want to help, so here you are. Which means that the only way I could get information out of you is to approach it indirectly. Or else the compulsion would force you to shut up. Am I close?”
Cheep-cheep. If it went on much longer, they’d have to worry about inbound pigeons.
I frowned a little and thought about it for a minute. Then I asked, “Theoretically speaking,” I said, “what kinds of things might prevent Winter and Summer from reacting to an incursion by another nation?”
Lily’s eyes sparkled, and she nodded to Fix. The little guy turned to me and said, “In theory, only a few things could do it. The simplest would be a lack of respect for the strength of the incurring nation. If the Queens considered them no threat, there would be no need to act.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Go on.”
“A much more serious reason would be an issue of the balance of power between the Courts of Summer and Winter. Any reaction to the invasion would alter what resources one would have at hand. If one Court did not act in concert with the other, it would provide an ideal opportunity for a surprise assault while the other had its strategic back turned.”
I rubbed my hands along my thighs, squinting one eye shut. “Let me see if I’ve put this together right. Summer’s ready to throw down. But Winter isn’t gonna help, because apparently they’d rather take a poke at you guys when you were focused on another threat.”
I took Fix’s silence as an affirmative.
“That’s insane,” I said. “If that happens, both Courts are going to suffer. Both of you will be weakened. No matter who came out on top, they’d be easy pickings for the Reds. Theoretically speaking.”
“An imbalance between Winter and Summer is nothing new,” Lily said. “It has existed since the time when we first met you, Harry. It continues today because of the fate of the current Winter Knight.”
I grimaced. “Christ. He’s still alive? After… what, almost four years?”
Fix shuddered. “I saw him once. The man was a psycho, a drug addict and a murderer-”
“And a rapist,” Lily interjected in a quiet, sad voice.
“And that,” Fix agreed, his expression grim. “I could break his neck and not lose a minute’s sleep. But no one deserves…” He swallowed, his face going pale. “That.”
“The moron betrayed Mab,” I said quietly. “He knew the risks when he did it.”
“No,” Fix said, with another shudder. “Believe me, Harry. He didn’t know what would happen to him. He couldn’t have.”
Fix’s obvious discomfort made a certain impression on me, especially given that Mab had displayed an unnerving amount of interest in me, and that I still owed her a couple of favors. I shifted uneasily in my chair and tried to blow it off. “Whatever,” I said. “There’s a Summer Knight. There’s a Winter Knight. What’s unbalanced about that?”
“He isn’t exerting his power,” Fix replied. “He’s a prisoner, and everyone knows it. He has no freedom, no will. He can’t stand on the side of Winter as its champion. So far as the tension between the Courts goes, the Winter Knight might as well not exist.”
“All right,” I murmured. “Mab’s got a man in the penalty box. She wants to take the offensive before Summer pushes a power play, and she’s looking for ways to even the odds. If Summer goes running off to take on the Reds, it will give her a chance to strike.” I shook my head. “I don’t pretend to know Mab very well, but she isn’t suicidal. If the imbalance is so dangerous, why is she keeping the Winter Knight alive to begin with? And she must see what the consequences of another Winter-Summer war would be.” I looked back and forth between them. “Right?”
“Unfortunately,” Lily said quietly, “our intelligence about the internal politics of Winter is very limited-and Mab is not the sort to reveal her mind to another. I do not know if she realizes the potential danger. Her actions of late have been…” She closed her eyes for a moment and then said, with some obvious effort, “Erratic.”
I propped up my chin on the heel of my hand, thinking. “Mab’s a lot of things,” I said thoughtfully. “But she sure as hell isn’t erratic. She’s like some damned big glacier. Not a thing you can do to stop her, but at least you know just how she’s going to move. What’s the bard say? Constant as the northern star.”
Fix frowned, as if struggling with an internal decision for a minute, then let out an exasperated sigh and said, “I think many who know the Sidhe would agree with you.”
Which was neither a confirmation nor a denial-technically, at any rate. But then, Sidhe magic and bindings tended to lean heavily toward the technical details.
I sat back slowly again, thoughts flickering over dozens of ideas and bits of information, putting them together into a larger picture. And it wasn’t a pretty one. The last time one of the Faerie Queens had come a little bit unbalanced, the situation had become a potential global catastrophe on the same order of magnitude as a middling large meteor impact or a limited nuclear exchange. And that had been the youngest Queen of the gentler and more reasonable Summer, Lily’s predecessor. Aurora. The late Aurora, I suppose.
If Mab had blown a gasket, matters wouldn’t be just as bad.
They would be worse.
A lot worse.
“I’ve got to know more about this one,” I told them quietly.
“I know,” Lily said. She lifted her hand to a temple and closed her eyes in a faint frown of pain. “But…” She shook her head and fell silent again as Titania’s binding sealed her tongue.
I glanced at Fix, who managed to whisper, “Sorry, Harry,” before he too closed his eyes and looked vaguely ill.
“I need answers,” I murmured, thinking aloud. “But you can’t give them to me. And there can’t be all that many people who know what’s going on.”
Silence and faint expressions of pain. After a few seconds, Fix said, “I think we’ve done all we can here.”
I racked my brains for a few seconds more and then said, “No, you haven’t.”
Lily opened her eyes and looked at me, arching a perfect, silver-white brow.
“I need someone with the right information and who isn’t under a compulsion not to help me. And I can only think of one person who fits the bill.”
Lily’s eyes widened a second after I got done speaking.
“Can you do it?” I asked her. “Right now?”
She chewed her lower lip for a second, then nodded.
“Call her,” I said.
Fix looked back and forth between us. “I don’t understand. What are you doing?”
“Something stupid, probably,” I said. “But this is too big. I need more information.”
Lily closed her eyes and folded her hands on her lap, her expression relaxing into one of deep concentration. I could feel the subtle stir of energy around her.