Jim Butcher - Proven Guilty

“What are those things?” Thomas asked me.

“Some kind of ogre,” I told him. “Hit them hard and fast. Scare them with iron as much as we can, as fast as we can. If we can get them to come at us cautiously, we might be able to pull off a fighting retreat back up the slope.”

“Got it,” Thomas said. And then, when the first of the snow ogres was maybe thirty feet away, my brother took two steps and bounded into the air. The top of his jump was about ten feet off the snow, and when he came down he held the saber in both hands. The iron weapon sliced cleanly through the ogre’s breastbone and filleted the monster, splitting him open like a steaming baked potato. Its faerie blood took flame, purple and deep blue, and gouted in a blaze of streaming energy.

But Thomas wasn’t done there. The next ogre threw a rock the size of a volleyball at him. Thomas whirled, dodged it, faked to one side, and then cut across the second ogre’s thighs, sending it howling to the ground.

The third ogre hit him with a small tree trunk, baseball style, and turned my brother into a line drive that missed slamming into me by six inches. The ogres howled in fresh aggression and charged.

I’m not a terribly skilled swordsman. I mean, sure, more so than ninety-nine percent of the people on the planet, but among those who know anything about it, I don’t rate well. To make matters worse, my experience was largely in fencing-fighting with a style that uses long, thin blades; a lot of thrusting, a lot of lunging. Charity’s sword would have been at home on the set of Conan the Barbarian , and I had only a basic under-standing of using the heavier slashing weapon. I have two advantages as fencer. First, I’m quick, especially for a guy my size. As long as something isn’t superhumanly fast, I don’t get massively outclassed. Second, I have really long arms and legs, and my lunge could hit a target from a county away.

So I played to my strengths. I let out a howl of my own to match the ogres‘, and when the one with the club drew near and swept it up over his head in a windup, I lunged, low and quick, and drove about a foot of cold steel into its danglies. I twisted the blade and rolled out to one side as I withdrew it. The club came down on the snow where I’d been. Fire fountained from the ogre’s pelvic region. The ogre screamed and ran around in a panicked agony, and the ogres coming behind it slowed their steps, their charge faltering, until the ogre keened and fell over into the snow, the fire of cold iron consuming it. They stared at their fallen comrade.

Hey. I don’t care what kind of faerie or mortal or hideous creature you are. If you’ve got danglies and can lose them, that’s the kind of sight that makes you reconsider the possible genitalia-related ramifications of your actions real damned quick.

I bared my teeth at them, and ogre blood sizzled on the steel of my borrowed sword. Never turning from them, I started walking back step by slow, cautious step, tight agony in a fiery band around my ribs reminding me of my injuries. I reached Thomas a second later, and he was just then sitting up. He’d crashed into a boulder, and there was a knot already forming just above one eye. He was still too disoriented to stand.

“Dammit, Thomas,” I growled. My left hand wasn’t strong enough to grab onto him and haul him up the hill. If I used my right, the sword would be in my weak hand, and I wouldn’t be able to defend either one of us. “Get up.”

The ogres began gathering momentum, coming for us again.

“Thomas!” I shouted, lifting my sword, staring at the ogres as my shadow abruptly flickered out over the ground between us.

Wait. My shadow did what?

I had part of a second to realize that a new source of light had cast the flickering shadows, and then a bead of intense fire, maybe the size of a Peanut M amp;M, flashed over my shoulder and splashed over the chest of the nearest ogre. Summer fire slammed the ogre to the ground before it could so much as scream, and began to rip its flesh from its bones.

“I’ve got him!” Fix called, and I saw him in my peripheral vision, sword in hand. He got a shoulder under Thomas’s arm and lifted him with more strength than I would have credited the little guy with. The ogres’ charge came to a complete halt. I shoved my staff through the belt tying up the bundle of mail Thomas had been carrying, lifted it awkwardly to my shoulder, and we fell back toward the rift, never turning our backs on the ogres. They hovered at the edge of visibility in the gusting snow, but did not menace us again.

“Watch your step,” Fix warned me.

Then I felt a rippling sensation around me, and then I stepped into an equatorial sauna.

I found myself on the thin stretch of stage before the screen in Pell’s dingy old theater. I stepped to one side, just as Fix came through with Thomas.

Lily stood on the floor, facing the rift. She looked weary and strained. As soon as Fix came through, she waved a hand as if batting aside an annoying fly. There was a rushing sound, and then the rift folded in on itself and vanished.

Silence fell on the dimly lit theater. Lily melted down onto her knees, one hand holding her up, white hair fallen around her head as she shivered, breathing hard. The ice and frozen snow that had been coating me, gathering in my hair and in the creases of my clothing, vanished, replaced by the usual residual ectoplasm.

“Mmmm,” Thomas observed in a slightly slurred voice. “Slime.”

Fix lowered him to the ground and went to Lily.

“Fix,” I said. “Did you hear what was happening out there?”

“Kicked a beehive, it sounded like.” He knelt beside Lily, providing her his support. “The castle’s garrison came out to meet you?”

“No,” I said. “That was every other Winterfae on the map, apparently.”

“What?” he demanded.

“I, uh, kind of threw a bunch of Summer fire around Mab’s playhouse, and blew up most of this frozen fountain thing.”

Fix’s mouth dropped open. “You what?”

“The Scarecrow was hiding behind the thing and so…” I put Charity’s sword down and waved a hand. “Kablooey.”

Fix stared at me as if I’d gone insane. “ You poured Summer fire into Winter’s wellspring ?”

“I can’t sleep well any night I haven’t inflicted a little property damage,” I said gravely. “Anyway, I did that, and all hell broke loose. My god-mother told me that anybody who was anybody in Winter had gotten their vengeance on and was coming to kill me.”

“My God,” Fix breathed. “That would do it all right. Where did you get Summer fire to…” His voice trailed off and he stared at Lily.

The Summer Lady looked up, her weary smile gorgeous. “I only provided a minor comfort and guide in order to repay my debt to the lady Charity,” she murmured, a small smile on her lips. “I had no way to know that the wizard would steal that power for his own use.” She drew in a deep breath and said, “Help me up. We must go.”

Fix did so. “Go where?”

I said, “All of those Winter forces are now at the heart of their own realm. Which means that they aren’t on the borders of Summer waiting to attack. Which means that Summer has forces that can be spared to assist the Council,” I said quietly.

“But it only took them a few minutes to show up,” Murphy pointed out. “Couldn’t they just run back and be there a few minutes from now?”

“No, Murph,” I said. “They planned for that. This whole raid was a setup from the get go.” I jerked my head at Lily. “Wasn’t it.”

“That is one way to describe it,” Lily said quietly. “I would not, myself, interpret it that way. I had no part in bringing the fetches here-but their presence and their capture of Lady Charity’s daughter presented us with an opportunity to temporarily neutralize the presence of Mab’s forces upon our borders.”