December 1069

Lucille was sat in the back corner of the Drunken Hog when we arrived. I felt Rowena's shift her veil as we walked in by the way everyone promptly took one glance at us and looked away, even Lucille only half managing to track our approach.

Then we sat down, and she properly focused on us.

"That's disturbing," she said. Her English wasn't the smoothest, Tim's was better, but it was much better than Robert's.

Rowena didn't respond, instead pulling out some parchment, a quill, and a stoppered container of ink and handing them all to me.

"Harry is getting a pair of horses and some travel supplies from the earl tomorrow," Rowena said clinically, only turning to face Lucille after I'd taken everything she was offering. "I assume you can't show your face before him."

"That would be awkward, yes," Lucille said slowly.

I scratched out an idea and passed it to Rowena. I might've written it in French and passed it to Lucille instead, but I didn't know if she could read. It seemed like something she should be capable of, but maybe her father hadn't pushed literacy that early.

"Harry proposes that you wait for him outside the west gate tomorrow morning so that no one sees you joining him," Rowena paraphrased.

Lucille gave me a look. "You wish for me to wait for you outside the city, in winter?"

I took back the parchment and scrawled a quick response. "Do you have any better ideas?"

"You'll be going to York Castle, yes?" Lucille asked.

I nodded.

"Then I will wait nearby and watch for your entrance, and then head out the west gate. Less waiting and freezing."

I shrugged, then pulled the parchment back and wrote out a question. After finishing, pausing, and thinking, I added another one.

"You're not staying here, then?" Rowena asked for me.

Lucille turned up her nose and looked around the Drunken Hog. "No, I think not. This is a very... Saxon establishment."

Rowena took that in stride. "And second question, how did you cover for your disappearance in Berkhamsted."

Lucille gave another look, different from the last one, same amount of incredulous, more amused. "You ask this now?" She shook her head. "I told some of my... group that I was going to London to shop. It's unexpected, but not entirely uncharacteristic."

Another question. "And when you don't come back with anything?"

Lucille shrugged. "I'm picky."

I nodded, sat back in my chair, and looked over my shoulder at the innkeeper.

"Do you want food? Breakfast?" Rowena asked.

I nodded, dug out a penny, dug out another to be safe, and handed them to Rowena.

"Any preferences?"

I wrote down "FOOD" on the parchment. Then "the lightest beer they had" a moment later.

Rowena looked the parchment over, nodded, and headed off to talk with the innkeep. I turned to look at Lucille, glanced down at the parchment, and scrawled something out in French before passing the parchment over to her.

She looked it over, skipping past the English. "Yes, I can read and write," she said. She passed the parchment back and looked up at me. "What happened to your voice?"

I wrote down "strained it doing magic, will take a few days to come back" in French and passed it over. Lucille read it over and got a strange look in her eyes.

"So what you are saying is that for the next few days, I have to speak for you?" she asked innocently.

I gave her the classic Eadric look.

Lucille gave me an innocent smile and stood up. "I'll be leaving now. Until tomorrow."

I held up a hand for her to pause, then scrawled out a quick, "Thank you."

She read over the parchment, looked up at me, and nodded. Then she left the inn.

Rowena came back a minute later with a tankard of ale that I got three sips out of before it grew warm, and a couple of minutes later the innkeep came by with breakfast: bread and some hastily slapped together meat. Because breakfast wasn't really a thing these days.

Honestly, I'd completely overlooked that detail, preparing all my own meals as I did.

Rowena passed me the change and then dug out her room key and slid it over to me. I paused in my consumption of the bread to look at her.

"I'm going to meet with Helga. Assuming nothing new comes up, I'll be leaving for my tower. I don't need the room anymore, and it's paid for the night." She paused. "I just need to grab my things first."

I snorted and nodded. Rowena gave me a quick look, then went up the stairs. I was mostly done with the bread and tentatively setting into the meat with just a knife when she came back down, rucksack over her shoulder. She looked at me, I looked at her, I nodded, she nodded, and she left.

The rest of breakfast reminded me of why I reintroduced forks into my cutlery set as soon as I could: eating meat with gloved fingers is incredibly awkward. And messy. I should just start carrying forks around.

Once I was done with breakfast I stuffed parchment, quill, and re-stoppered ink bottle into one pocket, palmed the room key, and returned the tankard and plate to the innkeep. Then I went upstairs to Rowena's former room, sat down on the bed, and let out a muted sigh of relief.

Part of me, a large part of me, wanted to just sleep most of the day away. The brief sprint through the Nevernever, followed by all of yesterday, had left me exhausted and burned through a good chunk of my soul. Not enough to really be concerned, but I could still feel the kind of faint and ephemeral yet bone-deep weariness and numbness that came with extensive soulfire usage.

And my vocal chords still weren't working, so there was that.

But my encounter with the Leanansidhe stuck in my head. I didn't feel... completely bad about it, I had needed to get away from her, but in retrospect it was possible, just possible, that I could have handled that better, and not made an enemy out of one of the most powerful beings in Faerie. The trouble was, I had, by shooting iron through her leg without having any kind of prior consideration like being her godson. Fixing that wasn't going to be easy.

But hey, it's Christmas. Maybe a miracle will happen.

I set my own rucksack down on the floor, got out of my duster, dusted off my tunic and hose, and got in bed. Then I closed my eyes, steadied my breathing, and began to picture a room in my mind. My laboratory.

Specifically, my old laboratory.

I sketched out the shape first, the cold stone walls and floor, the texture and feel of them. Then my various shelves and tables, filled with the accumulated minutia of two decades as a wizard, books and potion components and sacks and containers of various kinds - the Tupperware blurred together a little, but the sack made from the genitals of a lion stood out in my mind clearly - all laid out in accordance with my own haphazard organizational scheme. I thought of the shelf reserved for Bob, his carved and runed skull sitting amidst a bunch of tawdry romance novels and too-expensive bodice rippers. The long work table in the center, and the model of my old city that I'd built into it. Little Chicago started to take form and shape, but after some thought I reluctantly let it fade and vanish. The rest of the room could be excused and overlooked. Little Chicago really couldn't.

Finally, I moved on to the final, improved version of my old summoning circle, the braided hoop of svartalf-made copper, silver, and iron, each strand engraved with incredibly tiny and precise symbols. I imagined the flickers of light that slithered around each strand of metal, red and blue and green dancing and intertwining in continuous spirals.

I added the unlit candles, five at equidistant points forming a pentacle just like the one in my amulet. I added the smells, sandalwood incense and burned wax, and the temperature, the cold of my basement laboratory. Lastly I lit the candles one by one, walking slowly around the circle in a clockwise fashion - deosil, as the Celts and fairy tales call it - gradually building up the energy I needed in the process.

It was a painfully complex mental construct, but for the being I was about to call up, I really needed the big guns.

Once I finished lighting the candles, I imagined myself sitting down, the floor digging unpleasantly into my knees, and closed the circle. I gathered the power. Then, after a brief pause to give myself one last chance to back out, I took a deep breath and called.

"Leanansidhe. An it please thee, come hither and hold discourse with me."

I sent out my will, my magic coursing into the words, and waited for a response.

It came quickly. The demented lovechild of a blizzard and a hailstorm that itself had a kid with a laser light show slammed into the circle, rattling the teeth in my skull and setting all my hairs on end. I poured my will and power into the circle, focusing on the iron winding through the floor. I didn't know if the Leanansidhe could see through the storm but wasn't willing to risk it, so I kept the soulfire back for the moment. My mental image started rattling and shaking like it was coming apart, and I spared a little focus to shore up the state of the laboratory, fighting against the shaking.

I came close, damn close, to adding in soulfire. But just before I reached the point I'd set for myself, the line, the storm stopped. The hail dropped, the snow fell, and the light faded, and in their place stood the Leanansidhe in her dress, the emerald fabric heavily covering up her left leg.

She was smiling, her lips peeled back to expose her neatly pointed canine teeth, and her green catlike eyes bore into mine for a fraction of a second before I glanced away.

"Wizard. You must be very foolish indeed to summon me after how you wounded me," she said, her voice sickly sweet.

"And yet, you're talking to me," I said quietly, a night of decent sleep having fixed up the spiritual side of my voice enough that I could use it in my mind.

"So I am," she allowed, pressing a hand up against the edge of the circle. Lightning started to crackle and writhe against her palm as she did. "For now."

I got the subtext. Fortunately, I was sure I could keep her talking.

"How would you like to make a deal?" I asked.

Author's Note: I was expecting all this setup to be shorter, but it sprawled out.