Jim Butcher - Changes

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, crap.”

“What?” Susan asked.

I turned to speak quietly to her in a whisper pitched to register only to her more-than-human hearing, and hoped that the goblins didn’t hear even better than that. “The Erlking can’t harm us, or allow us to come to harm while we are his guests. Ditto for the Reds. But since we have competing claims that must be settled, he can establish a trial by combat to see who is correct—or at least, most committed to his version of the story.”

Susan’s eyes widened as she understood. “If we won’t fight for our side of the story, he decides against us and for the Eebs.”

I nodded. “At which point he can declare that we have abused his hospitality,” I said. “And he will be free to kill us, probably without repercussion.”

“But you just said—”

“M—The Winter Queen doesn’t feel a thing for me,” I said. “She might be annoyed. But this time next week, she’ll barely remember me.”

“But the Council—”

“I said they would feel strongly about it,” I said. “I never said they’d be upset.”

Susan’s eyes got a little wider.

“A trial of skill, then,” the Erlking said. “A match. The Knight and the lady huntress versus two of your own, Red hunters. Choose which will stand for your side of the issue.” He clapped his hands once, a sound like a small cannon going off. “Prepare the hall.”

Goblins leapt to obey, and cleared the long trestle tables outward with great energy and efficiency. Others began to rip at the stone with their bare, black-nailed hands. They tore it like wet earth, swiftly gouging out a great ring in the floor, a trench six inches wide, almost that deep, and thirty or forty yards across.

“We’re hardly armed properly for such a trial, mine host,” I said. “Whilst the Red hunters are fully equipped for battle as they are.”

The Erlking spread his hands again. “Ah, but they are armed with what they deemed necessary to them for the hunt. And a true hunter never leaves himself unprepared for what the world may bring to face him. Do you say, perhaps, that you are no hunter after all?”

“No,” Susan said at once. “Of course not.”

The Erlking looked at her and gave her a nod of approval. “I am glad you find yourselves appropriately armed.” He glanced over at the Eebs, who were discussing matters in furious whispers, probably employing a nonstandard use of pronouns. “Sooth, boy, you were quick enough at wordplay that I would fain feed thee and send thee on thy way, had you come here unpursued. But I will not rouse the wrath of the Lords of Outer Night lightly. A war with them would be a waste of dozens of excellent hunting moons.” He shrugged. “So. Prove yourselves worthy, and you may be on your way.”

I cleared my throat. “And our . . . fellow visitors?”

The Erlking didn’t smile or otherwise change his expression, but I suddenly got creeped out enough to have to fight to keep from stepping away from him. “My hall is fully furnished to receive all manner of outsiders. There are rooms in these caves filled with clever devices meant for the amusement of my kin, and lacking only the appropriate . . . participants.”

“What happens if we lose?” Susan asked.

“If fortune is kind, you will have clean deaths in the trial. If not . . .” He shrugged. “Certain of my kin—Rafforut, for example—are most eager to give purpose to all the rooms of my hall. You would amuse them for as long as you could respond. Which might be a very, very long time.”

Susan eyed the Erlking. Then she said, “Let’s do it, then. I, too, have promises to keep.”

He inclined his head to her. “As you wish, lady huntress. Sir Knight, lady, please enter the circle.”

I started toward it and Susan walked beside me.

“How should we do it?” she asked.

“Fast and hard.”

Her voice turned wry. “How did I know you’d want it like that?”

I let out a short bark of genuine laughter. “I thought I was supposed to be the one with one thing on his mind.”

“Oh, when we were younger, certainly,” she replied. “Now, though, our roles have reversed.”

“Meaning you want it fast and hard, too?”

She gave me a sly and very heated look with her dark eyes from beneath her dark lashes. “Let’s just say that there’s something to be said for that, once in a while.” She spun the table leg in a few circles. I watched. She stopped and glanced at me, arching an eyebrow inquisitively.

My godmother might have tipped me off to a cure, a way to free Susan of the creature that had devoured half of her being and thirsted for me, something the Fellowship of St. Giles had been trying—and failing—to do for hundreds of years. It was possible that, with a bit more work, I could make it happen for her, give her back control of her life.

But even if I did, we couldn’t be together. Not now.

Mab was bad enough . . . and Hell’s bells, I hadn’t even thought about it, I’d been so busy, but Mab’s understudy, Maeve, the Winter Lady, was arguably more psychotic than Mab herself. And she was unarguably pet-tier, more vicious, and more likely to want to play games with anyone close to me.

I wondered how long it would take me to lose myself. Weeks? Months? Neither Mab nor Maeve would want me to remain my own man. I wondered if, when I was what they wanted me to be, it would bother me to remember what I had been. What others had meant to me.

All I said was, “I miss you.”

She looked down and away, blinking. Then she gave me a rather hesitant smile as a tear fell—as if it were something she hadn’t done in a while, and was still remembering how to accomplish it. “I miss joking with you.”

“How could you do it?” I asked quietly. “How could you not tell me about her?”

“By tearing out a piece of myself,” she said quietly. “I know it was wrong. I knew it was wrong when I did it, and that . . . that I was going to regret it someday. But I had to keep her safe. I’m not asking you to forgive. Just . . . just understand.”

I thought about that moment of stillness and choice at the Stone Table.

“Yeah,” I said. I lifted a hand and touched her face with my fingertips. Then I leaned over to kiss her forehead. “I do understand.”

She stepped closer and we hugged. She felt surprisingly slender and fragile in my arms. We stayed that way for a little while, both of us feeling the fear of what was coming. We tried to ignore the hundreds of red eyes watching us. We more or less succeeded.

Another cannon clap of sound echoed around the vast hall, and the Erlking said, “Red hunters. Let your chosen champions enter the circle or else forfeit the trial.”

“Okay,” I said. “The Eebs will be tough but they’re doable. They rely on stealth tactics, and this is going to be as straight up as you can get. I’m going to hit them with something that should give you enough time to close. Take whichever one is on the left. Move too far to the right and you’ll be in my line of fire, so don’t. You smash one, I burn the other, and we go get some custom coffee mugs to memorialize the occasion later.”

Susan said, “I stopped drinking coffee. You know, the caffeine.”

I looked at her with mock disgust. “You heathen.”

“Fine!” Esmerelda said from the far side of the circle. She pointed a finger at one of the vampires trapped beneath the goblins’ nets. “You. You do it.” Impatiently, the tiny woman went to the trapped vampire, hideous and inhuman in its true form, and sliced through the odd material of the net with her nails, freeing the captive. Without ceremony, she pitched the vampire into the circle.

One of her foot soldiers? Okay. This might be easier than I’d thought.