April 1070

"Now, this fallen angel?" Elfleda asked.

I sighed and rubbed the back of my head. "Okay, so, it's... sort of in the name. Ursiel. The el means 'of God.'"

"Am I then right to assume that makes it an especially dangerous demon?" she asked.

"It's definitely up there," I said. "A few rungs below the Devil, depending on how you look at things."

"And you charged off to face it," she said, then sighed. "Why?"

"Because I was asked to," I said. "By an angel."

Elfleda shook her head and sighed. "And you're worried about my safety..."

It took a full day to get everything organized, loaded, and sorted, and by that point the weather was iffy enough that Robert didn't feel comfortable setting sail at night.

It did afford me enough time to work things out with Godiva though. She had a few questions for me when I popped in, and I spent an hour answering her questions and checking her work. By noon on the second day, Godiva felt confident that my proposed enchantments would work as advertised and that she could work the rest out on her own, so she parted with the necklace.

I also received some clothing during the wait and got around to enchanting it. It still feels a bit awkward so that's all I'm going to say on the matter.

There was some kind of small storm during the second night, but come morning the weather had cleared up enough that the sailors didn't hem and haw about leaving port. I was, I admit, a bit apprehensive about getting on a boat again. The first time had more than the recommended number of encounters with Mab, i.e. zero. I was a bit concerned about the second time.

Fortunately though, as I write this on the morning after our departure, my dreams have been untroubled.

God damn it Uriel. Do you arrange these "coincidences", or just enjoy them?

Anyway, so there I was, coming back to my cabin from dinner. The sun was going down, we were far from any city or town or port, there were only a few torches flickering out on deck, and the candle in my cabin was unlit. It was dark, in other words.

When I entered my cabin, the final flickers of sunlight that filtered in only illuminated what was immediately in front of the door: the bed. I closed the door, wandered over to the small stand that held the one candle in the room, and lit it with a muttered incantation, revealing the face of the Leanansidhe maybe six damn inches away from mine.

"Gah!" I flailed, stumbled back, and fell on the bed. Across from me, sitting in the wooden reading chair, the Leanansidhe snickered.

"Yeah, yeah," I grumbled, shifting so I sat on the edge of the bed. "Laugh it up. Give me a heart attack, why don't you."

"It would not be fatal."

"Hah." I glanced around the room quickly to make sure we were alone, then looked back at the Leanansidhe. "I don't have anything to offer you in terms of food and drink, and you've already taken the chair, so you'll have to forgive me if I don't engage in any more formalities."

"Do I?" she asked.

"You got your laugh," I said. "And seeing as how the wards are just fine, I figure you're here to talk. Am I right?"

"You are," she agreed, recrossing her legs so one pointed directly at me, showing off a good amount of skin.

I nodded, and hoped she hadn't found Amoracchius. I'd gotten a sheath for it in the weeks before we left Berkhamsted, and right now that sheath was wrapped up in layers of fur and stuck under my bed, out of reach. Not that it would be of any use in this scenario.

"Well, in that case welcome to my humble temporary abode," I said, gesturing around the room with one hand. "What's your question today?"

"So eager to skip straight to the meat?" she asked, smiling.

I decided to not look for any potential innuendoes in that statement, though I certainly see some now, and just said, "Yep."

"Hmph. You won't be rid of me that easily, wizard."

"A man can dream," I said. "And I won't be buying whatever you're selling."

"So confident," she said. "We shall see how long that lasts. But if you wish your second question so badly, tell me, wizard, how did your debt come to be held by my queen's predecessor?"

I took a deep breath. That was a much harder question to answer than her first.

First impression: Mab seemed to think like Helga, that I'd owed the previous Winter Queen a debt and it had carried over. At least that's how I interpreted it; the way the question was phrased made it seem like she didn't suspect I was from the future. Which was very, very good.

Second impression: I must've been in Avalon a lot longer than I initially thought. The question didn't make much sense otherwise; if Mab had been Queen when I'd arrived, she probably would've been asking how a debt to her suddenly appeared.

Third impression: by the terms I had set out, I could not answer that question. I'd said no lying, no wordplay, and no half-truths. And at first glance, I didn't see a way to tell the truth without falling afoul of one of those.

Keep things general, just say I had a debt to a servant of the old Queen who'd sold that debt on, and I wouldn't really be giving a straight response. Moreover, I would be consciously engaging in wordplay, getting fancy with the verbiage in order to obscure the truth. Tell the unvarnished truth, and Mab would stop toying with me.

I kicked my feet against the ground and tried to find a response that I wouldn't see as bullshit, that wouldn't be a breach. And try as I might, I just couldn't find one.

After a few minutes, I let out a sigh and said, "Veto."

"Are you certain?" she asked.

I frowned at her. "Why are you double-checking?"

"I am not asking out of idle curiosity, dear, but because I wish to know the answer. So I ask again: are you certain?"

I nodded. "Yes. I veto the question. You'll have to ask another."

"Hmm." The Leanansidhe folded her hands together in her lap. "Shame."

"Mab get you to ask that question?" I asked.

"My queen did not 'get' me to do anything," she said. "It was a question I had already considered. She simply convinced me to reassess my priorities."

"Sorry you didn't get whatever you were bargaining for, then," I said.

"Who said I haven't yet?" she asked, amused.

I frowned, then took in the way she was sitting: leaning back, head cocked slightly to the side, eyes a little distracted. As if she was looking at something else.

No, as if she were listening to someone else.

"Is… is she here?" I asked, sitting up ramrod straight.

The Leanansidhe tittered. "Indeed. My queen is nearby, listening. Did you expect otherwise?"

For a moment, there was a slight, cold breeze, carrying the faint hint of laughter. I studiously ignored it and refused to look around.

"Has anyone ever told her that acting like a stalker isn't attractive?" I asked.

"You did, just now."

I narrowed my eyes at the Leanansidhe. "Really?"

"How did you put it at our last meeting, wizard? Like a cagey squirrel?"

I sighed and looked down. Of course she'd use that against me.

A minute passed in relative silence, broken only by the rocking of the boat and the muted crashing of the waves, before the Leanansidhe asked, "Tell me, wizard, were you ever the Winter Knight?"

The question completely blindsided me, and I stiffened. And for a moment, I was angry. Then I went over her phrasing again, and I got confused.

I'd thought the Leanansidhe had thrown me a curveball, asked a question designed to provoke a response without phrasing it in a way that used one of her questions. Only, she had - used one of her questions, I mean.

I slowly lifted my head and looked at the Leanansidhe. Her expression was calm and controlled, the only sign of her interest a slightly raised eyebrow.

It didn't make sense. Okay, the actual question itself kind of made sense, if she or Mab had suspicions in that direction, but using one of her three questions to do it rather than asking something more encompassing, or playing dirty?

I was missing something here, and I didn't like it.

Still, she'd asked me a question, and if my immediate reaction hadn't given it away, my silence had, so there was no point wasting a veto.

"Yes," I said. "And as an addendum, if you ask anything else about my tenure, I will veto that question."

The Leanansidhe smiled faintly, and I was tempted to tell her to bugger off in classic British fashion so I could start panicking. But Mab was here, or "here", and that was an opportunity of its own sort. Kind of. Sort of. Maybe.

"Can Mab do the 'speak through you' trick?" I asked vaguely.

The Leanansidhe cocked her head to the side. "Whatever do you mean?"

"I've seen a few entities –" just Mab "project their voice through those weaker than them."

She considered that for a moment. "She can, but usually that is done when the very act of speaking would hurt or kill those being spoken to. Given the circumstances I see no need to surrender my voice should you wish to converse with her."

"Alright," I said.

To outline my thoughts in that moment: I wanted information out of Mab, while getting her to focus on the wrong things. Now, that was going to be difficult, but tricking or outwitting Mab wasn't impossible, just very difficult. I'd managed it once with my murder-suicide, and twice when escaping Avalon. This was a completely different ballgame though; it wasn't me skirting around her, it was me directly engaging with her. That needed a different strategy:

"Why are you so interested in me?" I asked.

A mix of refuge in audacity and ordering strategy. See, most people tend to focus on and remember the start and end of a conversation, and any big high-points in between. So if I threw out the attention-grabbing questions first and last, then the "less interesting" but still important ones I could pepper in the middle. Now, whether that would work on Mab or not I had no idea. But simple strategies had worked twice on Mab, and in general they just had fewer points of failure.

The air in the room got colder, and the candle in the corner flickered and shook as a slight breeze wound through the room, laughter echoing in its wake.

"You ask this question now?" Mab's voice asked, seeming to come from everywhere in the room. "I should think it eminently obvious. You are powerful, knowledgeable, and once of Winter, and yet I know so very little about you."

"And so instead of trying literally anything else, you decided to try and seduce me by keeping me locked up," I said. "Real great interrogation technique you've got there."

"Were you not able to escape, you would not have been interesting," she said.

I frowned. "You were coming onto me from day one. You told me yourself you didn't know how I escaped."

"And? What difference does that make?"

My frown turned frownier. There was some kernel of truth in that – obviously, or else Mab couldn't have said it – but it felt off. Had her interest changed, then? From relatively simple curiosity at finding me in Avalon to dedicated interest when I escaped the Leanansidhe and her by proxy?

Yeah. That felt right. Still, there was something missing.

"Okay, so my escape supposedly made you more interested. To which you responded by not showing up for a whole two years," I said.

"You were thorough in avoiding me."

"Yeah, sure," I said. "You're not even trying that hard to get me interested in you, after telling me that's what you were aiming for. Seems to me like you just don't care that much and I can just keep avoiding you forever."

That there was what I really wanted to know: Mab's plans for bringing me around. I doubted she'd go into extensive detail, but even a few ideas would help.

"It wouldn't be very difficult," she said.

I blinked. "What?" I asked.

"I told you I wish for you to be desperate when you come to me, needful." A wave slammed hard into the side of the boat, and it shook as if laughing. "I need not pursue you, wizard. You charge heedlessly into danger so often that I need not do anything. In time, you will fail, and fall, and break. And I will be waiting."

If that was the first time I'd heard that, I probably would have reacted. But it wasn't. Mab had said the exact same thing to me, paraphrased, a few years before I became the Winter Knight. Then, it had been chilling. Now, it was still worrying, but it was also a relief; it meant she probably wouldn't try anything, deliberately.

Outside of one situation, at least.

"Except I still owe you," I said. "So when are you going to get around to presenting that third task?"

"When I see a need for your particular capabilities," she said. "Which I expect to come after you come to me."

I grimaced in response. It wasn't surprising, but it was definitely unpleasant. That had been the deal: three tasks, and I went free, free of Sidhe influence, free of any obligation to her or, now defunct, Lea. It would've let me skirt around the hanging Bed of Damocles, or just avoid any entanglement with her altogether.

I'm still kicking myself over not explicitly requiring the end of this debt when I bargained with Mab. I should've known she would screw me over for not being specific.

"Well, that's very reassuring to hear," I said, trying to affect a dry tone. "I'm sure anyone I was ever involved with, if they were still around, would be able to tell you you're going to be waiting a very long time for that. Now, I'm going to sleep. Alone. So get out. Please."

With one last laugh, the candle guttered and died, plunging the room into darkness. I sat there for a few seconds, Listening for the sound of breathing. Once I was sure I was alone in the room, I shook my head and sighed, "Faeries."

Author's Note: One question remains.