Proven Guilty

Chapter Thirty-nine

The Scarecrow let out an ear-splitting trilling chirp, like a summer locust on steroids, and it bounded to one side in an effort to keep the mounded ice of the fountain between us. I’d already seen how fast a fetch could move, and didn’t bother with a snap shot. Instead, I let it distance itself from Molly and Charity, until it reached cover behind the fountain’s ice and stopped moving.

Then I blew two-thirds of that dome away in a single blast of light, thunder, and fire.

The golden Summer flame hammered straight through the ice and into the Scarecrow. The old fetch was taken off guard, and the lance of fire incinerated what would have been a hip and thigh on a human being. It bellowed a metallic roar of pain and anger, bounced off one of the white marble statues of the three sisters, and was forced to seize hold of one of the statues’ ankles to keep from bouncing over the edge of the parapet.

But the Scarecrow wasn’t the only faerie who cried out. Without warning, a hurricane of sound slammed into me, painfully intense. Once more Arctis Tor shuddered, the black ice trembling and heaving while deep, almost subsonic groans echoed through the fortress. The other fetches’ screams arose from below, a frenzied chorus of berserk rage.

The heaving ground and the sonic sledgehammer tossed me into a bank of ice-sculpted rose vines with thorns three times as long as their flowers. The ice was not brittle, and it didn’t break as my weight hit it. I felt a sharp pain from my ankle, a thorn stabbing underneath the hem of my duster, but the spell-worked coat protected me from further harm. I was on my feet again in a second, readying another blast.

But in that second, the Scarecrow had reversed its course with eerie agility. It headed for Charity and Molly, running on all three of its limbs like a wounded spider, awkward but still swift. This time I couldn’t afford to take my time about lining up the shot. I flicked a lash of fire between the Scarecrow and the Carpenter women, but it sidestepped and I only burned a few loose-end tendrils from its vine-body. The Scarecrow hurtled toward Molly. Charity lay perfectly still beside her, sprawled on the black ice.

But only until the Scarecrow came within reach of her sword. Then Charity rolled and popped up into a low, slashing lunge. Her sword seared its way through the Scarecrow’s undamaged leg, slicing it off at an angle that began at midthigh and finished just above the knee. It frantically rolled again, struggling to get out of sword range. Charity pressed ruthlessly, too close to the damned fetch to let me blast it again. The Scarecrow hopped and skittered on its remaining limbs, heading for the edge of the parapet.

“Charity!” I shouted. “Down!”

Michael’s wife dropped out of my line of fire in an instant.

The fetch shimmered, body contorting weirdly, and leapt. On the way, it changed. Membranous wings unfurled from its body and beat powerfully down, and within a heartbeat the rest of the fetch’s body had conformed to the shape of one of the monstrous, hang-glider-sized bats I’d seen in Faerie once before. It hurtled away, wings thrashing to gain altitude, and the faerie moon shone down in lunatic glee.

I had a perfect shot.

Once more, I called upon the fire of Summer I’d taken in. I could feel its intensity beginning to ebb, but if the fetch managed to slip away I might never have such an opportunity again. Besides. That creature had tormented my friend’s wife and daughter, nearly murdered them right in front of my eyes, and now it was going to answer for it.

So I unleashed the fire again, this time so brilliant that it lit dark mountainsides five or ten miles away, so hot that the blowing snow hissed into instant steam in the wake of the flame. When it struck the fetch, it detonated into a blinding conflagration, an explosion that roared so loudly that it shattered every icy replica of a rose vine upon the parapet.

What tumbled burning from the faerie skies toward the merciless mountains below could not have been identified as anything in particular. It trailed sparks, soot, and ash, and when it slammed into a granite cliff side, it hit with such force that an icy rockslide was jarred loose from the mountain’s slope, burying the fetch under incalculable tons of stone.

I shook my staff at the rockslide in a primal gesture of triumph and shouted, “Who’s next!?!”

The courtyard below become completely silent for a second, and then I could see fetches, too dark to make out clearly, darting away from the base of the spire, retreating from the fight.

“Harry!” Charity said, her voice strained.

I hadn’t realized it when Charity had gotten her head down, but she’d dropped into a baseball player’s slide. Thanks to all the fire I’d been pitching around, the black ice had become slick with a thin layer of melt-water, and her momentum was carrying her with slow, dreamy smoothness toward the parapet’s edge.

I turned to run toward her, and then used an ounce of brainpower to deduce that I’d only be duplicating the behavior that got Charity into the mess to begin with. Instead I dropped to all fours, crawling forward with my staff extended. Her ankles were over the edge by the time I got close enough to reach her. She was able to get her fingers around the end of the wizard’s staff, and I locked onto the other end, halting her slide. I then began to move backward, very slowly, very carefully. The black ice of the parapet hardened once more in a moment, as though it had never thawed, and I pulled Charity carefully away from an involuntary education in skydiving.

Once she was clear, we both turned to look at Molly. The girl lay quietly, still breathing. I rolled onto my back until I could get my breath again. Charity rose and went to her daughter. I didn’t follow her. It wasn’t the kind of moment she’d appreciate me sharing.

I watched, and kept an eye out for trouble. Charity knelt down beside the young woman and gathered her into her arms as she might have a smaller child. Charity held Molly against herself and rocked gently, her lips murmuring steadily as she did so. For a moment, I thought that the terror and trauma had driven Molly too far away to return. But then she shuddered, blinked her eyes open, and began to weep quietly, leaning against her mother.

I heard a groan behind me, and spun up into a crouch, blasting rod ready again.

The sculpture of the crucified man groaned again. Though he was still crucified and horribly rotted, my fire spells, as augmented by Lily’s extraordinary power, had melted the bonds around his left wrist, and now his left arm flopped bonelessly in the steady, howling wind. I had never seen human flesh so badly mangled. His fingers, wrists, and forearms had long since succumbed to frostbite, the blood gone poisonous as it flowed through them, causing the flesh to swell grotesquely. Despite that, I could see that the skin of his entire arm was covered in layers of scars. Burn scars. Knife scars. Scars from flesh torn by blunt force and left to heal incorrectly.

I’ve taken a few hits myself. But that poor bastard’s arm had suffered more than my whole body.

Almost against my will, I walked over to the tree. The man’s hair hung like Spanish moss over his bowed face, some of it light brown, some of it dark grey, some of it gone brittle and white. I reached out and brushed the hair back from the man’s face, lifting his head toward me a little. His beard was as long and disgusting as his hair. His face had been ravaged somehow, and I got the unsettling impression that his expressions had so contorted and stretched his face that they had inflicted their own kind of damage, though there were no scars as on his arm. His eyes were open, but completely white and unseeing.

I recognized him. “Lloyd Slate,” I murmured. “The Winter Knight.”

The last time I’d seen Slate had been after the battle on the hill of the Stone Table, a place that served as the OK Corral for the Faerie Courts when they decided to engage in diplomacy by means of murdering anyone on the other team. Slate had been a first-rank menace to society. A drug addict, a rapist, a man with no compunctions about indulging himself at the expense of others. By the end of the battle he had killed a young woman who might have become a friend.

He stirred and let out a small whimper. “Who is there?”

“Dresden,” I replied.

Slate’s mouth dropped open, and a maniacal little giggle bubbled under his reply. “You’re here. Thank God, you’re here. I’ve been here so long.” He tilted his head to one side, exposing his carotid artery. “Free me. Do it, quickly.”

“Free you?” I asked.

“From this,” Slate sobbed, voice breaking. “From this nightmare. Kill me. Kill me. Kill me. Thank God, Dresden, kill me.”

The seedier neighborhoods of my soul would have been happy to oblige him. But some dark, hard part of me wanted to see what else I could think of to make him suffer more. I just stared at him for a while, considering options. After perhaps ten minutes, he dropped unconscious again.

From somewhere to my right, a delicious voice, at once rough and silky, purred, “You do not understand his true torment.”

I turned to face the frozen fountain. Well. The remains of it, anyway. Maybe a third of the ice mound remained, but it had partially uncovered the statue within-no statue at all, but a member of the Sidhe, a tall, inhumanly lovely woman, her appearance one of nigh perfection. Or it would have been so in other circumstances. Now, partially free from the encasing ice, her scarlet hair clung lumpily to her skull. Her eyes were deeply sunken and burned too bright, as though she had a fever. She stood calmly, one leg, her head, one shoulder, and one arm now emerging from the ice, which was otherwise her only garment. There was an eerie serenity to her, as though she felt no discomfort, physical or otherwise, at her imprisonment. She seemed to regard the entire matter with amused tolerance, as though such trivial conditions were hardly worthy of her attention. She was one of the oldest and most powerful Sidhe in the Winter Court- the Leanansidhe.

And she was also my godmother.

“Lea,” I breathed quietly. “Hell’s bells. What happened to you?”

“Mab,” she said.

“Last Halloween,” I murmured. “She said that you had been imprisoned. She’s kept you here? In that?”

“Obviously.” Something extremely unsettling glittered in her eyes. “You do not understand his true torment.”

I glanced from her to the Winter Knight. “Uh. What?”

“Slate,” she purred, and flicked her eyes in his direction. She was unable to move her head for the ice about it. “There is pain, of course. But anyone can inflict pain. Accidents inflict pain. Pain is the natural order of the universe, and so it is hardly a tool mete for the Queen of Air and Darkness. She tortures him with kindness.”

I frowned at Slate for a moment, and then grimaced, imagining it. “She leaves him hung up like that. And then she comes and saves him from it.”

My godmother smiled, a purring sound accompanying the expression. “She heals his wounds and takes his pain. She restores his sight, and the first thing his eyes see is the face of she who delivers him from agony. She cares for him with her own hands, warms him, feeds him, cleans away the filth. And then she takes him to her bower. Poor man. He knows that when he wakes, he will hang blind upon the tree again-and can do naught else but long for her return.”

I shook my head. “You think he’s going to fall for that?” I said. “Fall in love with her?”

Lea smiled. “Love,” she murmured. “Perhaps, and perhaps not. But need. Oh, yes. You underestimate the simple things, my godchild.” Her eyes glittered. “Being given food and warmth. Being touched. Being cleaned and cared for-and desired. Over and over, spinning him through agony and ecstasy. The mortal mind breaks down. Not all at once. But slowly. The way water will wear down stone.” Her madly glittering eyes focused on me, and her tone took on a note of warning. “It is a slow seduction. A conversion by the smallest steps.”

The skin on my left palm itched intensely for a moment, in the living skin of the Lasciel sigil.

“Yes,” Lea hissed. “Mab, you see, is patient. She has time. And when the last walls of his mind have fallen, and he looks forward with joy to his return to the tree, she will have destroyed him. And he will be discarded. He only lives so long as he resists.” She closed her eyes for a moment and said, “This is wisdom you should retain, my child.”

“Lea,” I said. “What has happened to you? How long have you been a Sidhe-sicle?”

Some of the strength seemed to ebb from her, and she suddenly seemed exhausted. “I grew too arrogant with the power I held. I thought I could overcome what stalks us all. Foolish. Milady Queen Mab taught me the error of my ways.”

“She’s had you locked up in your own private iceberg for more than a year?” I shook my head. “Godmother, you look like you fell out of a crazy tree and hit every branch on the way down.”

Her eyes opened again, glittering and unsettling as hell. And she laughed. It was a quiet, low sound-and it sounded nothing like the laugh of the deadly Sidhe sorceress I’d known since before I could drive.

“Crazy tree,” she murmured, and her eyes closed again. “Yes.”

I heard heavy, thumping steps on the staircase, and Thomas came sprinting onto the parapet, fae-bloodied sword still in hand. “Harry!”

“Here,” I said, and waved an arm at him. He glanced at Charity and Molly, and hurried over to me.

A little lump of fear knotted itself in my guts. “Where’s Murphy?”

“Relax,” he said. “She’s downstairs guarding the door. Is the girl all right?”

I pitched my voice low. “She’s breathing, but I’m more worried about damage to her mind. She’s crying at least. That’s actually a good sign. What’s up?”

“We need to go,” Thomas said. “Now.”

“Why?”

“Something’s coming.”

“Something usually is,” I said. “What do you mean?”

He gritted his teeth and shook his head. “Since last year… since the Erlking… I’ve had… intuitions, maybe? Maybe just instincts. I can feel things in the air better now than before. I think the Wild Hunt is coming toward us. I think a lot of things are coming toward us.”

No sooner had he said it than I heard, blended with the distant cry of the wind, a long, mournful, somehow hungry horn call.

I stepped up onto the edge of the fountain and peered out into the moonlit night. I couldn’t make out anything very clearly, but for an instant, far in the distance, I saw the gleam of moonlight on one of the odd metals that faeries used to make their weapons and armor.

Another horn rang out, this one more a droning, enormous basso- only the second horn came from the opposite side from the first. Over the next few seconds, more horns joined in, and drums, and then a rising tide of monstrous shrieks and bellows, all around us now. In the mountains east of Arctis Tor, one of the snowcapped peaks was abruptly devoured by a rising black cloud that hid everything beneath it. A quick check around showed me several other peaks being blanketed in shadow. Horn calls and cries grew louder and continuously more numerous.

“Stars and stones,” I breathed. I shot a glance at my godmother and said, “The power I used here. That is what caused this, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” Lea said.

“Holy crap!” Thomas blurted, jumping like a startled cat when what he must have thought was another statue moved and spoke.

“Thomas, this is my godmother, Lea,” I said. “Lea, Th-”

“I know who he is,” my godmother murmured. “I know what he is. I know whose he is.” Her eyes moved back to me. “You summoned forth the power of Summer here in Arctis Tor, in the heart of all Winter. When you did so, those of Winter felt the agony of it. And now they come to slay you or drive you forth.”

I swallowed. “Uh. How many of them?”

The mad gleam returned to her eyes. “Why, all of Winter, child. All of us.”

Crap.

“Charity!” I called. “We’re leaving!”

Charity nodded and rose, supporting Molly, though the girl was at least mobile. If she’d remained unaware and walled away from the world, it would have been a real pain to get her all the way back down the tower. Molly and her mom hit the stairs.

“Thomas,” I said. “See if you can chop off some of this ice without hurting her.”

Thomas licked his lips. “Is that a good idea? Isn’t this the one who tried to turn you into a dog?”

“A hound,” Lea murmured, glittering eyes flicking back and forth at random. “Quite different.”

“She was a friend of Mom’s,” I told Thomas quietly.

“So was my Dad,” Thomas said. “And look how that turned out.”

“Then give me the sword and I’ll do it myself. I’m not leaving her.”

Lea made a sudden choking sound.

I frowned at her. Her eyes bugged out and her face contorted with apparent pain. Her mouth moved, lush lips writhing, twisting. A bestial grunt jerked out of her throat every second or two. The fingers of her freed hand arched into a claw. Then she suddenly sagged, and when she turned her eyes back to me, they were my godmother’s again; one part lust, one part cool, feline indifference, one part merciless predator.

“Child,” she said. Her voice was weak. “You must not free me.”

I stared at her, feeling confused. “Why?”

She gritted her teeth and said, “I cannot yet be trusted. It is not time. I would not be able to fulfill my promise to your mother, should you free me now. You must leave.”

“Trusted?” I asked.

“No time,” she said, voice strained again. “I cannot long keep it from taking hold of…” She shuddered and lowered her head. She lifted her face to me a few seconds later, and the madness had returned to her eyes. “Wait,” she rasped. “I have reconsidered. Free me.”

I traded a look with Thomas, and we both took a cautious step backward.

Lea’s face twisted up with rage and she let out a howl that shook icicles from their positions. “Release me!”

“What the hell is going on here?” Thomas asked me.

“Uh,” I told him. “I’ll get back to you after we get out of Dodge.”

Thomas nodded and we both hurried toward the stairs. I glanced back over my shoulder, once. The fountain was already building itself up again, freezing water to ice. A thin sheet of it already covered my godmother. I shuddered and looked away, directly at the delirious Lloyd Slate. My footsteps quickened even more.

And then, just as I was leaving, only for an instant, I thought I saw one more thing. The triangle of statues of Sidhe noblewomen caught a stray beam of moonlight, while thin clouds made it jump and shift. In that uncertain light, I saw one of the statues move. It turned its head toward me as I left, and the white marble of its eyes was suddenly suffused with emerald green the same color as Mab’s eyes.

Not just the same color.

Mab’s eyes.

The statue winked at me.

The sounds of the approaching fae grew even louder, reminding me that I had no time to investigate. So I shivered and hurried down the stairs beside Thomas, leaving the parapet and its prisoners and-perhaps-its mistress behind me. I had to focus on getting us back to Lily’s rift in one piece, so I forced all such questions from my mind for the time being.

The four of us were slogging through snow up to my knees a few moments later, while I spent the last reserves of power I’d taken from Lily’s butterfly to keep us from going into hypothermia.

I took the lead and ran for the rift as a nightmarish symphony of wails and horns and howls closed in all around us.