Cold Days

who could move back and forth across boundaries like that without disturbing them in the slightest—most notably the common cat. It was one reason practitioners so often kept cats as house pets. From a technical standpoint, they are very magic-friendly. Maybe I hadn’t broken it because it had been set up in such a way as to consider the island’s Warden one of those creatures. Or maybe it was the continual, rippling, liquid nature of the circle itself.

Whatever the case, I was standing inside an active circle. Possibly the most active circle I had ever seen. Magic hummed through the air and the ground, so much that I felt my hair standing on end, and some primitive instinct-level awareness from the Winter Knight’s mantle, the same part that had given me so much trouble all day, started advising me to get the hell out of there along with the rest of the island’s animals. That was why my intellectus hadn’t been able to tell me what was happening here. As a form of magical awareness, an active circle had blocked my intellectus out. Now it worked just fine for what was inside the circle—it was everything outside of it that it could no longer touch.

I learned all of that at the same time my regular old five senses registered what was happening: I was not alone. The crown of the hill was covered with faeries.

All right, that wasn’t literally true. There were twenty of them, plus one other mortal.

And Demonreach.

The island’s spirit made manifest stood in the ruins of the lighthouse, in the opening in the wall that led to the entrance to the stairs down to the Well. Its vast form was planted, braced like a man standing against a strong wind, hunched, bent forward slightly, but not in a stance of battle. The spirit did not exist for such things. Instead, I realized, it did only what it always had: It endured. But even as I watched, I saw bits of Demonreach flying backward, away from its mass, but slowly, as if a current of thick syrup flowed past the spirit, slowly wearing it away.

The spirit stood at one point of an equilateral triangle.

At one of the other points stood Lily, the Summer Lady. She stood with her right arm, the arm that projects energy, upraised. She wore the same simple dress I’d seen her in earlier. It was pressed against the front of her body, and her silver-white hair was blown back as if in a strong wind. There was no visible display of energy coming from her other than that, but the ground between her and Demonreach was covered in fresh green grass, and I could feel that she was pouring out power against spirit.

Behind her stood a pair of Sidhe of the Summer Court, each with a hand on her shoulder. Behind them were three more, and four more were behind them, each with their hands on the shoulder of someone in front of them, forming a pyramid shape. They were all projecting power forward, focusing it through Lily, making her even stronger than she already was.

Maeve stood at the third point of the triangle, with her own pyramid of supporters. She wore leather short- shorts, military boots, and a bikini top, all of midnight blue. She stood in the same stance as Lily, the same unseen power flaring from her outstretched hand, but her face was set in a wide, manic smile, and the ground between her and Demonreach was covered in a layer of frost.

The Redcap stood at her right hand, one hand on her shoulder. The massive rawhead from my birthday party was there, too, and its bony claws, drenched in and dripping fresh blood, rested on her other shoulder. Eight other Winter Sidhe were behind them, forming a power pyramid of their own.

Then I heard footsteps, and a second later Fix, the Summer Knight, stepped around the corner of my partially completed cottage and walked toward me. He was wearing faerie mail, gleaming, draping over a wiry, hard- muscled frame, and he carried his sword in his hand. Fix stopped between me and the triangle at the top of the hill.

“Hey, Harry,” he said quietly.

“Hey, Fix.”

“Cold?”

“Not so much. You know what’s happening here?”

“What must happen,” he said.

“According to whom?”

“My Lady.”

“She’s wrong.”

Fix stood there for a time, quiet. Then he said, “Doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“Because she is my Lady. You will not raise your hand against her.”

I stared at Fix, who had suffered under the office of Lloyd Slate, and behind him at Lily, who had been Slate’s frequent victim. I wondered how many times, back then, Fix had ached to be able to save her, to have the power to stand up to the Winter Knight.

And now he did.

There comes a time when no amount of talk can change the course of events—when people are committed, when their actions are dictated by the necessity of the situation their choices have created. Fix had put his faith in Lily, and would fight to the death to defend her. Nothing I had to say would change that. I could see that in his face.

“Go back,” he said.

“Can’t. Stand aside?”

“Can’t.”

“So it’s like that?” I said.

Fix exhaled. Then he nodded. “Yeah.”

And for the first time in a decade the Winter Knight and Summer Knight went to war.

Fix hurled a bolt of pure Summer fire that scorched the ground beneath it as it flew at me.

I didn’t have time to think, but some part of me knew this game. Dodging the bolt wouldn’t be enough—the bloom of heated air coming off that fire would burn me if it even came close. That was why Fix would have the advantage in this match if he kept the distance open and just threw bolt after bolt. So I called upon Winter to chill the air around me as I ducked to one side. Fire and cold met, clashed, and filled the air with mist—mist that would give me the chance to close to grips with my foe.

Part of me, the part of me that I was sure was me, viewed these tactics with alarm. I was freaking naked and unarmed. Fix had the mantle of the Summer Knight, and it made him just as strong and fast and tough as I was. He was armored and toted a freaking sword, and he’d had ten years of training with the Summer Court to learn how to fight and use the mantle. Plus, he presumably hadn’t spent all day pushing his abilities to the limit.

But the Winter mantle didn’t care about that. It simply saw its enemy and wanted to destroy it. The best way to do that was to get in close and rip out Fix’s throat.

Except that wasn’t how the last Winter Knight had killed the last Summer Knight. Lloyd Slate had iced the stairs underneath the other guy’s feet and pushed him down. And Slate had been young and in good shape, whereas the other Summer Knight had been an old man. So I thought it would be smart to assume that the instinctual knowledge of the Winter mantle, while it could be handy, was basically that of a starving predator, a wolf in winter—it wanted blood, lots of it, now.

And if I played it like that, Fix was going to leave my guts on the ground.

Instead of charging ahead, I veered to one side for several steps and then froze. An instant later, another bolt of fire lit up the mist, right through where I would have been if I’d followed the mantle’s instinct.

Of course—it had to be that way. Winter’s Knight was the mountain lion, the wolf. Summer’s was the stag, the bison. Winter was oriented to stalking, hunting, and killing prey. Summer to avoiding a confrontation until an advantage could be had, then savagely pressing that advantage for all it was worth. Fix would have a wealth of instinctive knowledge to draw on if I went after him Winter’s way, and would be at his most dangerous the same way as, for example, a student of pure aikido. He would use the strength of an attack to assist his own defense, turning it back on the attacker. But if I didn’t give him that kind of aggressive assault, I would rob him of his instinctive advantage.

Screw being the Winter Knight. Before everything else, I was a wizard.

So I flicked my wrist, whispered, “Obscurata,” and vanished behind a veil.

My veils aren’t much good compared to the grasshopper’s, or almost anyone else’s, really, but when you’re