Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files 8)

"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.

"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?"