Jim Butcher - Summer Knight

"Stolen a baby ? I'm in enough trouble already."

"Well, if you weren't such a Goody Two-shoes all the time …"

I pushed at the bridge of my nose with my thumb. This was going to be one of those conversations that gave me a headache, I could tell already. "Look, Bob, can we stick to the subject, please? Time is important, so let's get to work. I need to know why Reuel would have been knocked off."

"Gee whiz, Harry," Bob said. "Maybe because he was the Summer Knight?"

My pencil fell out of my fingers and rolled on the table. "Whoa," I said. "Are you sure?"

"What do you think?" Bob replied, somehow putting a sneer into the words.

"Uh," I said. "This means trouble. It means …"

"It means that things with the Sidhe are more complicated than you thought. Gee, if only someone had warned you at some point not to be an idiot and go making deals."

I gave the skull a sour look and recovered my pencil. "How much trouble am I in?"

"A lot," Bob said. "The Knights are entrusted with power by the Sidhe Courts. They're tough."

"I don't know much about them," I confessed. "They're some kind of representative of the faeries, right?"

"Don't call them that to their faces, Harry. They don't like it any more than you'd like being called an ape."

"Just tell me what I'm dealing with."

Bob's eyelights narrowed until they almost went out, then brightened again after a moment, as the skull began to speak. "A Sidhe Knight is mortal," Bob said. "A champion of one of the Sidhe Courts. He gets powers in line with his Court, and he's the only one who is allowed to act in affairs not directly related to the Sidhe."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that if one of the Queens wants an outsider dead, her Knight is the trigger man."

I frowned. "Hang on a minute. You mean that the Queens can't personally gun down anyone who isn't in their Court?"

"Not unless the target does something stupid like make an open-ended bargain without even trying to trade a baby for—"

"Off topic, Bob. Do I or don't I have to worry about getting killed this time around?"

"Of course you do," Bob said in a cheerful tone. "It just means that the Queen isn't allowed to actually, personally end your life. They could, however, trick you into walking into quicksand and watch you drown, turn you into a stag and set the hounds after you, bind you into an enchanted sleep for a few hundred years, that kind of thing."

"I guess it was too good to be true. But my point is that if Reuel was the Summer Knight, Mab couldn't have killed him. Right? So why should she be under suspicion?"

"Because she could have done it indirectly. And Harry, odds are the Sidhe don't really care about Reuel's murder. Knights come and go like paper cups. I'd guess that they were upset about something else. The only thing they really care about."

"Power," I guessed.

"See, you can use your brain when you want to."

I shook my head. "Mab said something had been taken, and that I'd know what it was," I muttered. "I guess that's it. How much power are we talking about?"

"A Knight of the Sidhe is no pushover, Harry," Bob said, his tone earnest.

"So we're talking about a lot of magic going AWOL. Grand theft mojo." I drummed my pen on the table. "Where does the power come from originally?"

"The Queens."

I frowned. "Tell me if I'm off track here. If it comes from the Queens, it's a part of them, right? If a Knight dies, the power should snap back to the Queen like it was on a rubber band."

"Exactly."

"But this time it didn't. So the Summer Queen is missing a load of power. She's been weakened."

"If everything you've told me is true, yes," Bob said.

"There's no more balance between Summer and Winter. Hell, that could explain the toads. That's a serious play of forces, isn't it?"

Bob rolled his eyelights. "The turning of the seasons? Duh, Harry. The Sidhe are closer to the mortal world than any other beings of the Nevernever. Summer's had a slight edge for a while now, but it looks like they've lost it."

"And here I thought global warming was due to cow farts." I shook my head. "So, Titania loses a bunch of juice, and naturally suspicion falls on her archenemy, Mab."

"Yeah. It is kind of an archenemy-ish thing to do, you have to admit."

"I guess." I frowned down at my notes. "Bob, what happens if this imbalance between the Courts continues?"

"Bad things," Bob said. "It will mess around with weather patterns, cause aberrant behavior in plants and animals, and sooner or later the Sidhe Courts will go to war with one another."

"Why?"

"Because, Harry. When the balance is destroyed, the only thing the Queens can do is to blow everything to flinders and let it settle out into a natural distribution again."

"What does that mean to me?" I asked.

"Depends on who has the edge when everything is settled," Bob said. "A war could start the next ice age, or set off an era of rampant growth."

"That last one doesn't sound so bad."

"No. Not if you're an Ebola virus. You'll have lots of friends."

"Oh. Bad, then."

"Yeah," Bob said. "Keep in mind that this is theory, though. I've never seen it happen. I haven't existed that long. But it's something the Queens will want to avoid if they can."

"Which explains Mab's interest in this, if she didn't do it."

"Even if she did," Bob corrected me. "Did she ever actually tell you she was innocent?"

I mulled it over for a moment. "No," I said finally. "She twisted things around a lot."

"So it's possible that she did do it. Or had it done, at any rate."

"Right," I said. "So to find out if it was one of the Queens, we'd need to find her hitter. How tough would it be to kill one of these Knights?"

"A flight of stairs wouldn't do it. A couple of flights of stairs wouldn't do it. Maybe if he went on an elevator ride with you—"

"Very funny." I frowned, drumming my pen on the table. "So it would have taken that little something extra to take out Reuel. Who could manage it?"

"Regular folks could do it. But they wouldn't be able to do it without burning buildings and smoking craters and so on. To kill him so that it looked like an accident? Maybe another Knight could. Among the Sidhe, it was either the Winter Knight or one of the Queens."

"Could a wizard do it?"

"That goes without saying. But you'd have to be a pretty brawny wizard, have plenty of preparation and a good channel to him. Even then, smoking craters would be easier than an accident."

"The wizards have all been in duck-and-cover mode lately. And there are too many of them to make a practical suspect pool. Let's assume that it was probably internal faerie stuff. That cuts it down to three suspects."

"Three?"

"The three people who could have managed it. Summer Queen, Winter Queen, Winter Knight. One, two, three."

"Harry, I said it could have been one of the Queens."

I blinked up at the skull. "There are more than two?"

"Yeah, technically there are three."

" Three? "

"In each Court."

"Three Queens in each Court? Six ?" That's just silly."

"Not if you think about it. Each Court has three Queens: The Queen Who Was, the Queen Who Is, and the Queen Who Is to Come."

"Great. Which one does the Knight work for?"

"All of them. It's kind of a group thing. He has different duties to each Queen."

I felt the headache start at the base of my neck and creep toward the crown of my head. "Okay, Bob. I need to know about these Queens."

"Which ones? The ones Who Are, Who Were, or Who Are to Come?"

I stared at the skull for a second, while the headache settled comfortably in. "There's got to be a simpler parlance than that."

"That's so typical. You won't steal a baby, but you're too lazy to conjugate."