Summer Knight

I all but tore my hair out in frustration. "Go!" I shouted and started running for the water, pushing and tugging at them to get them moving. "Go, go, go!"

We were ten feet from shore when I heard hoofbeats sweeping toward the river from the far side. I looked up to see horses sailing through the mist – not flying horses but long-legged faerie steeds, coats and manes shining golden and green, that had simply leapt from the far side of the river, bearing their riders with them.

On the lead horse, the first whose hooves touched the ground on our side of the river, was the Winter Knight. Lloyd Slate was spattered in liquids of various colors that could only be blood. He bore a sword in one hand, the reins to his mount in the other, and he was laughing. Even as he landed, the nearby goblins mounted a charge.

Slate turned toward them, sword whirling and gathering with it a howl of freezing winds, its blade riming with ice. He met the first goblin’s sword with his own, and the squat faerie soldier’s blade shattered. Slate shifted his shoulders and sent his horse leaping a few feet to one side. Behind him, the goblin’s head toppled from its shoulders, which spouted greenish blood for a few seconds before the body fell beside the head on the misty ground. The remaining goblins retreated, and Slate whirled his steed around to face me.

"Wizard!" he shouted, laughing. "Still alive!"

More faerie steeds leapt the river, Summer Sidhe warriors touching down behind Slate in helmets and mail in a riot of wildflower colors. One of them was Talos, in his dark mail, also stained with blood and bearing a slender sword spattered in so many colors of liquid that it looked as if it had cut the throat of a baby rainbow. Aurora landed as well, her battlegown shining, and a moment later there was a thunder of bigger hooves and a grunt of effort, and Korrick landed on our side of the river, his hooves driving deep into the ground.

Strapped onto the centaur’s shoulders, both human and equine, was the stone statue of the kneeling girl – Lily, now the Summer Knight.

Aurora drew up short and her eyes widened. Her horse must have sensed her disturbance, because it half-reared and danced nervously left and right. The Summer Lady lifted her hand, and once more the roar of battle abruptly ceased.

"You," she half whispered.

"Give me the Unraveling and let the girl go, Aurora. It’s over."

The Summer Lady’s eyes glittered, green and too bright. She looked up at the stars and then back to me, with that same, too-intense pressure to her gaze, and I began to understand. Bad enough that she was one of the Sidhe, already alien to mortal kind. Bad enough that she was a Faerie Queen, driven by goals I didn’t fully understand, following rules I could only just begin to grasp.

She was also mad. Loopy as a crochet convention.

"The hour is here, wizard," she hissed. "Winter’s rebirth – and the end of this pointless cycle. Over, indeed!"

"Mab knows, Aurora," I said. "Titania will soon know. There’s no point to this anymore. They won’t let you do it."

Aurora let her head fall back as she laughed, the sound piercingly sweet. It set my nerves to jangling, and I had to push it back from my thoughts with an effort of will. The werewolves and the changelings didn’t do so well. The wolves flinched back with high-pitched whimpers and frightened growls, and Fix and Meryl actually fell to their knees, clutching at their ears.

"They cannot stop me, wizard," Aurora said, that mad laughter still bubbling through her words. "And neither can you." Her eyes blazed, and she pointed her finger at me. "Korrick, with me. The rest of you. Kill Harry Dresden. Kill them all."

She turned and started down the river, golden light burning through the blue mist in a twenty-foot circle around her, and the centaur followed, leaving the battle roar, the horns and the drums, the screams and the shrieks, the music and the terror to come thundering back over us. The Sidhe warriors, a score of them, focused on me and drew swords or lifted long spears in their hands. Talos, in his spell-repelling mail that had enabled him to impersonate an ogre, shook colors from his blade and focused on me with deadly feline intensity. Slate let out another laugh, spinning his sword arrogantly in his hand.

Around me, I heard the werewolves crouch down, growls bubbling up in their throats. Meryl gathered herself to her feet, blood running from her ears, and took her axe in one big hand, drawing her machete into the other. Fix, his ears bleeding, his face pale and resolved, opened his toolbox with shaking hands and drew out a great big old grease-stained monkey wrench.

I gripped my staff and blasting rod and planted my feet. I called my power to me, lifted my staff, and smote it against the ground. Power crackled along its length and rumbled like thunder through the ground, frightening the faerie mounts into restlessness.

Slate leveled his sword at me and let out a cry, taking the panicked animal from a frightened rear to a full frontal charge. Around him, the warriors of the Summer Court followed, the light of stars and moon glittering on their swords and armor, horses screaming, surging toward us like a deadly, bejeweled tide.

The werewolves let out a full-throated howl, eerie and savage. Meryl screamed, wild and loud, and even Fix let out a tinny battle shriek.

The noise was deafening, and no one could have heard me anyway as I let out my own battle cry, which I figured was worth a shot. What the hell.

"I don’t believe in faeries!"

Chapter Thirty-two

Cavalry charges are all about momentum. You get a ton of furious horse and warrior going in one direction and flatten everything in your way. As the Sidhe cavalry came thundering toward us along the banks of the river, and as my heart pounded in my chest and my legs started shaking in naked fear, I knew that if I wanted to survive the next few seconds, I had to find a way to steal that momentum and use it for myself.

I dropped my blasting rod to grip my staff in both hand, and extend it before me. The moment I did, Sidhe riders began making swift warding gestures, accompanied by staccato bursts of magical pressure, separate protective charms rising up before each of them to block whatever magic I was about to throw.

The horses, however, didn’t do any such thing.

I raised a shield, but not in a wall in front of me. Such a warding would have brought the faerie nobles into contact with it, and no one wizard could hold a spell against the wills of a score of faerie lords. I brought up a shield only a couple of feet high, and stretched it in a ribbon across the ground at the feet of Slate’s mount.

The Winter Knight’s steed, a giant grey-green beast, never knew what hit it. The low wall I’d called up clipped it at the knees, and it came crashing down to the misty earth with a scream, dragging Slate down with it. Talos, on Slate’s right, could not react in time to stop his mount or to avoid the wall, but he threw himself clear as his horse went down, dropped into a roll as nimble and precise as any martial arts movie aficionado could desire, and came up on his feet. He spun, a dance-like step somehow in time with the vast song of the battlefield, and his sword came whipping at my head.