“She’d barely been able to walk,” I said, my voice growing slowly, volcanically hotter. “She would have stayed somewhere safe if she hadn’t been able to move. You made it possible for her to go out and fight that night. Didn’t you?”
“I provided the means and opportunity for her to make a choice,” Mab said without inflection. “Just as I did for hundreds of other souls who stood to the city’s defense. I did nothing to coerce her choosing.”
“Youknewwhat she would do, given that opportunity,” I spat.
“I strongly suspected,” Mab said calmly. “She was who she was.”
“Did you strongly suspect she woulddiein that battle?” I said. I think I was shouting. My vision was edged with red. “Did you set her up to die, Mab?”
I said her name properly. With intent. I’d heard it from her own lips, after all. A shudder rippled over her, quick but visible, a reaction that had been forced from her, by my words, by my will.
If I’d slapped her in the face, she’d have been less enraged.
Her expression did not change by any movement of muscle or skin, by any reposition of the features of her face. It simply grew bleak, bleak as a pitiless arctic chill settling over stone. There was a crackling soundas frost spread out from her feet in a rapidly accelerating circle. It began climbing the bookshelves and covered the windows, darkening the room. My breath began to plume in front of my mouth in the freezing air.
“A great many mortals died that night,” Mab said quietly. “A great many of them gave their lives to limit the civilian casualties, as you well know and remember. All of them took up the defense of this city with my support. All those who died, died in part because I had supported them.” She leaned forward, her eyes cold and bright. “Exactly asyoudid, wizard. How many did you lead to their deaths? Do you lie to yourself, tell yourself that none of them had lives, had families, had those who loved them who will miss and mourn them? Just as you mourn her?”
I stared at her, my rage scorching the inside of my belly—while my heart suddenly went cold.
Mab lifted her chin.
The chill in the air eased slightly.
“I did what I did because Ethniu had to be defeated,” she said. “Your life was expendable. Ms. Murphy’s life was expendable. All the lives of those who fought were expendable. They—you—were expendable because the chaos that would be caused by Ethniu’s victory would have drowned all the world in demons and blood. I make such choices because no one else is cold enough and no one else is hard enough. It is only your arrogance and pride that make you believe I would have had the time or attention to spare a thought for you or for Ms. Murphy or for something as fleeting and ephemeral as your emotions when doing so.” She inhaled slowly. “What is the phrase? ‘Get over yourself.’ It was war. She died. You survived. That is the whole of it.”
Mab’s eyes grew heavy-lidded. She stared at me for a long moment.
I broke the gaze first, looking away from her. I was shaking. I think I was crying.
“The first time one raises the banner of her will,” Mab said, speaking very slowly, “it is an unsettling experience. Feeling so much pain. So much death. Being with them in the moment of their passing.” She closed her eyes briefly and took a breath. “It pleases me that I was not there with you, my Knight, for your death. But I was there for hers. Felther fear. Her frustration. Felt how desperately she wanted to tell you what was in her heart. She had the courage to face gods and monsters. But not what was in her own breast.”
“She loved me,” I whispered.
“Perhaps,” Mab agreed. “I was not privy to that part of her. But it would be consistent.” She inhaled slowly, and when she spoke again it was in a voice of absolute authority. “We will regard your…outburst, with Our name, as an unfortunate aftereffect of your use of a banner of will, and given that it is your period of mourning, and that We were in privy council with you, We will overlook this disrespect.” She turned toward the window and said, “If it happens again, wizard, your suffering will be drawn from the darkest caverns of Our imagination, and We will consult with Mother on ways to make it worse.”
I felt myself start shaking.
Mab wasn’t looking at me, but her cheek rounded, and I could picture the cold smile on her face. Then a frozen gale wind and a blast of snow threw open the nearest window, and Mab was gone.
I stood there in the cold for a while, breathing, shuddering, just feeling the fires cool inside me.
Then I went to find Will to have him get some people into the library with towels.
Frost all over the books. That hadn’t been called for.
Chapter
Twenty-Four
The lawyers had decided that Oz Park was, by its very nature, wizard territory. Or at least, that it favored me. So, I had to arrive first for my next date with Lara, on the last of November. I guess negotiations had gotten tense and there had been shouting and thrown documents, food, and beverages.
Things were tough all over.
Or maybe I’d touched on Mab’s last remaining nerve ending, and it had been passed down to her people. She mostly used changeling attorneys, half bloods, usually of the Sidhe. They made excellent litigators and negotiators and could navigate tense situations and delicately phrased legal paragraphs with Grishamesque aplomb. But when the Queen of Winter was on edge, so was the rest of the Court. That’s just how those things worked out.
I had spent the night pacing my room and muttering out loud to no one.
That was one of the things that told me I was still hurt. That I wasn’t healed. I couldn’t just sit. I had to get up and move sometimes. I had to pace. And it hurt so much, in my belly and chest and head, that I had to talk to someone. Even if there wasn’t anyone there. Just hearing a voice, even if it was mine, even if I was carrying both sides of the conversation, eased something inside.
