“I want your help with a problem,” I said quietly.
“Indeed,” Mab said. Her eyes didn’t actually get larger, just harder and harder to ignore.
“Thomas,” I said. “For my boon, I wish you to grant him every aid at your disposal. This aid will include several aspects: your sincere and genuine cooperation and counsel on how to pacify his Hunger and restore him to health. I want Justine found and returned to him, whole and sane. I want his child safe and secure. And I want his debt to Etri made right, so that he may live in safety from the svartalves.”
Mab’s huge eyes grew darker, and she shivered so that gooseflesh ran down her arms. “Ahhh,” she said gently. “Mab is Mab. Her word is good, and must be. But Mab is neither all-knowing nor all-powerful. This, then, is thy request?”
I took a slow breath. “It is.”
“What thou dost wish may be done,” she warned, “but not without pain.” She leaned forward intently. “Sooth, my Knight. It is within my power to make possible what now is not—but even Mab cannot know all ends. Riches and power, slaves and pleasure, would be far more easily given. This is a road that may wind toward great joy or great sorrow, and I cannot foresee its ending.” She drew back, spine straightening, chin lifting, regal in a way that no mortal who has walked the world could ever hope to be. “Knowing this,” she said, “is it still thy desire?”
“Thrice said and done,” I breathed. “It is.”
Mab shuddered. Her exhalation of breath came out in a dense plume of frost. There was a deep crackling sound, and a film of ice spread over the table, the food, the glasses, the surface of the wine. It spread out across the stones of the castle, whose faded runes began to glow with icy blue light.
“So be it,” she whispered. “Let the scales be balanced, the debt repaid.”
And she was gone.
I sat there alone on the roof of the castle.
If I wasn’t so brave and manly, I might have been feeling a sense of horrible dread.
But…
Somewhere, deep down, there was also a small, fierce, bright light of hope.
I’m a wizard. And believe me, I know damned well that there aren’t any magical solutions in life. Not from spells. Not from Queens of Faerie. As far as I can tell, not even from the Almighty Himself.
Nothing is easy. Nothing is perfect.
But if I’d given my brother his life and his family a fighting chance, maybe that would be enough.
Maybe that’s all there ever is.
And if it hurt to do it, well. Only the living felt pain.
My stomach growled.
I ate my food and Mab’s share, too. The ice just made it crunchy.
Chapter
Forty-Five
The protests got uglier when it got warmer.
I stood on the roof of the castle, and Bear loomed next to me. Across the street, there were maybe a hundred or hundred and fifty people, and the chanting was going nonstop, in shifts. The signs had gotten angrier, too.
The folks who lived across the street weren’t terribly happy about all the ruckus happening in their front yards. They were trying to form a kind of ad hoc homeowners association, and they’d written me asking me to take action to “ameliorate the situation.”
I’d spent time and creative effort in my reply, suggesting that they could help me move the castle stone by stone to another location, or that they might contact the protesters themselves, or that they might lodge a complaint with our alderman. They’d tried to go through channels, which always worked so well with supernatural-related conflict. CPD had a car parked down the block to monitor the situation, but if things got ugly, two patrol officers weren’t going to be able to do much.
“This is going in one direction,” Bear noted calmly to me.
“I know,” I said.
I leaned forward as Will came out of the front gate of the castle and walked across the street, smiling. A reception committee of large and unfriendly types, including the former members of the Brothers of St. Brigid that Daniel Carpenter had removed from the organization, andthe guy from Bock’s ceremonial group with the broken wrist, came forward to meet him.
