November 1070

I didn't get much sleep for the rest of the night. I couldn't even stay in my bedroom. I just took everything I'd need for tomorrow and went downstairs, to the main room. There was a small and varnished perch there, shaped like a bowl atop a stick, where Guy slept. I stopped when I saw him, wondering if he'd felt what had gone on upstairs. Considering the amount of rime it seemed like he should've, but he was fast asleep.

"Guy," I said. He didn't stir. Worried that Mab might've done something, I set the Accords down on my table and moved over to his perch, then poked him. A few times. Nothing happened.

Frowning, I leaned forward, Listening for the sound of his breathing. I let out a sigh of relief once I heard it, and leaned back. I considered waking him up anyway, maybe by tossing fire at him, but I didn't have the heart for it. Let someone get a good night's sleep.

I went to my larder and mixed myself a mildly alcoholic drink, put it in a tankard I'd bought off one of the local bars, and went to sit down. Drinking myself into a stupor seemed an attractive option at that moment, but I couldn't afford to wake up with a hangover and a splitting headache. Not when I was planning on walking into a den of vampires.

With nothing better to do, I brought a few candles over, lit them up, and opened up the Accords, figuring I may as well see what it was I was forcing Lord Raith to sign. There was a small preface in what felt like Etruscan, but while I could speak Etruscan, I couldn't read a lick of it. After flipping through a few pages and finding that the rest of the text was in Latin, I decided a memory dive for written Etruscan - which Lash may not have even retained - wasn't worth the risk.

I'd never been very "up" on the Accords back in my time. I just knew the gist: rules of engagement, rules of hospitality, weregild, neutral ground, conflict resolution, Freeholding Lords, so on. But the one thing I did remember was that my copy fit on a vellum scroll, and not a huge one either. This book seemed to be much larger.

So was the handwriting in this book, but I didn't think it was enough to make that much of a difference.

I couldn't make much sense of the opaque syntax, but some surface elements seemed to be the same as what I was familiar with, with large segments devoted to seemingly every form of conflict resolution between two Accorded entities one could think of. In fact, it probably was every conflict resolution method Mab could think of. I skipped large tracts to go to the middle, found the language had switched to French, then jumped to the last few pages, before the page where Raith was supposed to sign, and found that it had switched back to probably-Etruscan.

So the "official" set of guidelines at the start, followed by questionably official translations, ostensibly for the benefit of the reader, but probably to try and trip them up. Classic faerie sophistry, in other words.

I flipped over to the French translation and started over there. While the syntax wasn't much better, it was at least easier to read; even with Lash's help in sorting out my Latin, the fact I'd chosen pseudo-Latin as my lingua arcana was still screwing me over all these decades later, so where possible I preferred to avoid it. Probably another factor behind why I hadn't gone to Constantinople, now that I thought about it.

At some point I must have slumped over and fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew someone was pounding at the door, the candles on the table had gone out, and rays of morning sunlight were stabbing into my eyes as someone crooned over me. I opened my eyes blearily, finding Guy leaning over me looking as worried as a bird could manage.

"Hey," I groaned, clutching my head and sitting up. Luckily I hadn't fallen asleep on the Accords; delivering a drooled-on book would have been an excellent conversation starter. I blinked my eyes a few times, looking over at the shelf with the ward-candles, and found that they were both very large, and very blue.

Someone hit the door again.

"Coming!" I yelled. Then I winced as Guy started rapidly clacking his talons against the table. I looked over at him, then down when he clacked his talons again, and found that his talons were framing a small pool of blood. Not enough to even fill a cup, maybe more like a few thimblefuls, but still concerning.

Then he leaned forward and tapped his beak against the skin right under my nose.

Slowly, I brought a hand up and dabbed at the same spot, and frowned as I felt something other than skin, something dry. I rubbed at the spot, then pulled my hand back to see ruddy flakes of dried blood sticking to my finger.

"Oh," I said. I'd had a nosebleed during the night. A moderately severe one, going by the quantity of blood. I guess the complications with Bonea were starting.

"One minute!" I yelled. I stood up shakily, grabbed a washcloth, soaked it up, and moved back to the table. I pushed the Accords aside with my elbow, then got to scrubbing the table clean. I didn't get it all out, but I was primarily just worried about the surface layer. Dried blood, particularly blood that had soaked into something else, was useless thaumaturgically. After I washed up the table, I scrubbed hard above and around my mouth, then tossed the washcloth over into the "sink" area.

Someone was in the middle of pounding against the door when I finally took down the wards and pulled it open sharply, their hand passing through the threshold and narrowly missing my nose. The knocker turned out to be Salazar, whose look of irritation turned into one of confusion as he saw me. Helga and Rowena, standing behind him, skipped right past confusion into concern. Which told me I really didn't look good.

I stood there for a moment, sorting my thoughts out, then shook my head and stepped back. "Come in," I said gruffly.

"Harry, is everything alright?" Helga asked.

"No," I said, before going back into the main room and slumping into a chair. It took a few moments for the others to follow me, one of them closing the front door behind them. None of them missed the spot of wet table and dried blood as they went to sit down.

Rowena frowned at me and furrowed her brow, while Helga upgraded her look to be one of alarm. Before she could say anything though, Guy popped his head out of his nest - he'd gone back to it at some point - and trilled out a welcome.

Everyone stopped, blinked, and looked at him as he did that, except me. Salazar in particular looked dumbfounded.

"Is that a phoenix?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said, too tired to take any amusement or schadenfreude from his reaction.

He looked between me and Guy a few times in rapid succession, eyes wide, then let out a long and vaguely disgusted sigh. "Of course. It fits you perfectly. You end up with the one companion that's too stupid to know when it should die."

"Salazar, be quiet."

Salazar and Helga both turned to look at Rowena in surprise, while Rowena just kept staring at me, eyes narrowed. It was rather unnerving, especially since I could tell it meant she was checking out my emotional state. Finally, after another few seconds of that, she shook her head slightly and leaned back.

"Did someone die?" she asked. "Elfleda?"

I snorted and laughed bitterly, hard enough to double over. "Yeah," I said, my voice uneven. "You could say that."

"What happened?" Helga asked.

I took a deep breath. "Turns out that she was Mab all along," I said.

No one had a response to that. None of them seemed to know how to react to it - Rowena with concern, Helga with horror, and Salazar with something I couldn't quite make out.

"She arranged events to get me here," I said, my voice starting to crack. "And I came to trust her, to like her, to... and it was all a lie. Some demented shellgame to finally have sex with me." I snorted and shook my head. "Well, she got what she wanted, the bitch."

Surprisingly, it was Salazar who replied first. Even more surprisingly, he said it in a conciliatory and sympathetic tone, two adjectives I'd never thought to associate with him. "It gets easier. The loss."

I shot him a glare but managed to bite down my immediate response. He wasn't trying to be snarky or an ass, he was trying to help. Not very well, but trying. I swallowed, took a deep breath, and composed myself. "I know, Salazar. It's only my fifth or sixth time going through something like this."

Okay, so maybe I didn't manage to be that polite.

I frowned as Helga stood up in response to that, and frowned further as she moved around the table towards me. I finally realized what she was aiming for when she opened her arms and hugged me. She was so short and I was so tall she didn't even need to bend down to do it properly.

I stiffened in response, and at first I tried to wriggle out. But she had height and leverage on me and had already trapped my arms, so the only alternative was to try and stand up, which would have left her hanging off me like a limpet. Funny image in retrospect, but not something I wanted in the moment.

My eyes watered, and I swallowed.

"We can delay a few days if you need," she said. "Or go on ahead."

I shook my head and slowly managed to extricate myself. "No. No, we go today, and get this over with."

Helga glanced over at Rowena, and something passed between them. Then Helga moved away for a moment, only to drag a chair over to sit right next to me.

"Alright. You have a phoenix and I have a thousand questions, but most can wait," she said. "Why today?"

I leaned over, grabbed the Accords, and pulled them closer to me, flipping the book closed as I did so. Then I turned it around so everyone could see and read the cover.

"The Unseelie Accords?" Helga read. "How do you have a copy? Why do you have a copy?"

"You know what they are?" I asked.

"Vaguely. I heard about them while I was in Constantinople," she replied.

"Salazar, Rowena, you know what these are?" I asked.

"I do," Salazar said, at the same time as Rowena said, "No."

"Okay, well, to give a very high-level summary, these are essentially an attempt at establishing a formal set of rules for interactions between major supernatural powers. I checked the book, and so far it looks like the signatories are the White Council, the Faerie Courts, the Tylwyth Teg, Svartalfheim, the Archive, and the Denarians, though they've signed under 'The Knights of the Coin' like a bunch of imitators."

"The Fallen?" Helga asked. "Why would they sign?"

"It would provide them with a paper shield to hide behind when necessary and dispose of when convenient," Salazar said.

"Yeah, that," I said. "There are a few groups that haven't signed though, one of them being the White Court."

Salazar snorted. "And why would they? They're one of the two most preeminent groups in Europe. Perhaps the most powerful, after the Council's recent troubles."

I frowned, but didn't linger on that. "Well, Mab doesn't like that they rejected her," I said.

Salazar frowned and looked down at the Accords, while Rowena looked thoughtful. "She made her last request of you?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said. "Get the White King to sign."

"A tall task," Salazar noted. "How do you plan to accomplish it?"

"As it so happens, Gauthier Renouth called a meet of the White Court," I said. "In his castle, in France. One that's going on today." I cracked my neck. "I figured we'd drop by and crash the party. With you at the head."

Salazar frowniered his frown. "Why me?"

"You have a basilisk, don't you?" I asked. "And you loved your wife."

Salazar narrowed his eyes until they were as wide as slits, and he looked between me and Helga before letting out a sigh. "I do not see how that's relevant."

"Do you know what the Raiths are weak to?" I asked.

"Love," he replied. "A difficult emotion to muster at any given moment."

"Yeah, but there's another quirk," I said. "Selfless love lingers, especially after moments of close physical intimacy. It forms a kind of barrier, protection. So long as you haven't been with anyone since, sexually..."

Salazar shook his head slowly.

"Then it's still there. And it means that the White King, who is a Raith, and all his family and attendants, can't touch you, can't control you, can't feed on you. That makes you a great pointman."

"I see," he said. "How do you know this?"

"I had a vampire friend way back when," I said. "He gave me the inside scoop on the White Court, the Raiths in particular. How they operated, how they fed, how their Hunger worked, what it was weak to... everything."

"And what happened to this... friend?"

"He's dead, like everyone else I knew," I said. "So?"

"I can see the advantages, assuming you are correct," he said. "But there is a slight problem."

"What?" I asked.

"I don't know French," he said. "Any dialect of it."

I blinked. "Wait, really?"

"Never bothered to learn it," he replied.

"Uh... huh," I said. "But you know Latin, right?"

"Obviously," he scoffed.

"Then that'll have to be enough. I can't see the White King not knowing some Latin; the White Court came from the same region as the Romans, probably spread on the back of their republic and empire," I said.

"Perhaps. You have Amoracchius, do you not?" he asked.

I grimaced. "I don't think that's a good idea, after last night. Not for me."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Because I was an inch away from breaking it cutting out Mab's heart," I said.

Salazar's eyes widened.

"So no, I'm not picking up that blade ever again. Unless you'd care to?" i asked.

He pursed his lips and furrowed his brow in thought. "...no. No, I don't believe I should. Ignoring that I may not be able to wield it properly, the last time I even touched a sword was well over a century ago. I'd look like an idiot just holding it."

"So there you have it," I said. "No sword."

"That poses a significant problem, then," he said.

"Why? You have a basilisk, don't you?" I asked.

"I do," he said. "But I have no effective way to wield him in a prolonged confrontation. He's simply too large to fit through any stable Way except through a dedicated ritual or in a location I have already prepared. The best I can manage is a brief opening for him to strike, but that lasts a matter of seconds and can be tiring to reuse. Which is why I asked about Amoracchius, because without it I do not know if we have a way to... encourage the White King to sign a document he doesn't care to."

"Crap," I said. "There goes that idea."

"It's not a concern," Rowena said. "Neither is the lack of Excalibur."

"Why?" I asked, looking in her direction.

She hummed thoughtfully and looked down at the table. "Do you need this table, or like it?"

"Uhm... it's... a table," I said. "There's nothing special about it. I can always fix it or get a new one. Why do you ask?"

Rowena nodded, pulled out her wand, and with a few gestures and muttered words made the candles and Accords float. Then she reached into her robes with her other hand and pulled out a small, slightly curved, single-edged knife made out of some dark, glassy material. With it in hand, she leaned forward and stabbed the table. And even though that really shouldn't have done much of anything, besides maybe chip the knife, the moment the glassy tip hit the wood, the table split in half widthwise and collapsed.

"This is the athame of Morgana LeFay," Rowena said. "My heirloom. It's been used in many workings over the years and as a result has become an object of Power in and of itself. I've used it for a number of purposes over the decades, and it's very versatile and potent tool. But at its core, this is an athame. A ritual knife." She pulled it back and gestured to the split table.

"It cuts."

Author's Note: I'm a bit surprised no one guessed this earlier.

Also, before anyone gets started, no, there's no Nemesis involved here. Just get that out of the way right from the start, I don't care to have anyone going crazy about it and running off after a wild conspiracy goose.