My default assumption was that Maeve was messing around. Despite a year and a half of being frenemies, most of our confrontations had been aggressive flirting, or confusing trickery. But I guessed that you had to put the "fatal" in femme fatale eventually.
Also, Moody would kill me a second time if I got murdered without putting up a fight because I assumed I was perfectly safe.
So when the sudden burst of razor-sharp shards of ice flew at my face, I already had a shield up and was falling back. Three barrages of frozen projectiles flew from her hands within a few seconds with the sound of a cracking glacier. Right hand palm out, pirouette and the right hand again, and a downward sweep with the same right hand, each launching a torrent of frost magic. The last ended on a mocking bow and that smug smirk.
My father was a stage magician, so I'd known my whole life to pay attention to the other hand when someone's putting on a performance. I didn't get distracted by the show and dived to the side as she summoned a huge stalagmite of ice from the floor with her left hand to try to stab me in the back. Constant vigilance!
"Nice dodge," Maeve observed, silently throwing a slippery coating on the floor in the direction I'd dodged, forcing me to abort my momentum. She really had been holding back when she dueled Mathilda the previous winter. "Training with your godmother?"
"Accio staff!" I managed, summoning my focus into my hand from where it had been propped against the wall, my dimly lit dark-walled old foyer already starting to get smashed up from her attacks. I was able to grab the staff out of the air and duck as she sent another blast of cutting ice just behind it. "We talking or fighting? Stupefy!"
"You should be able to do both, Harry," she taunted, negligently dodging my stunner and sending a flock of illusory crows at me to cover more ice knives, which I could hear beneath the cawing. I fell back through a door into the next room of the "manor" set, letting it all slam into the door as I shoved it closed. The slab of dark oak began to crack from the impacts and the cold, and I assumed it would evaporate into the Room's ectoplasm as soon as chunks began to separate, so I kept moving.
"I know we're not exactly friends," I shouted as I began a cat and mouse game of moving through the labyrinthine chambers I'd set up in the haunted house. I was hoping that my foreknowledge of the space would give me an advantage, and that her fae attunement to it wouldn't just tell her the map. Unfortunately, the dark and tight rooms and corridors wouldn't leave me a ton of room to maneuver in a straight-up spell battle. "But this seems like overkill."
"I offered you friendship," she said, sounding like she was a couple of rooms behind. "Or at least an alliance. You've done nothing but throw my overtures in my face. Our initial plans counted on your willing assistance. But even accounting for your recalcitrance, I've decided that you're a liability."
"You've decided? Guess you didn't clear it with the rest of the Winter Court that you were going to murder me?" This was a fight I wasn't sure I could win using my usual tactics. She might actually have me beaten on energy throughput, I had only a limited amount of iron on me, and she was much smaller and faster of a target than I was in the confined space. Also, I didn't really want to kill her; if nothing else, I wasn't as confident I could get away with it, and the Ministry would certainly throw me in Azkaban for killing someone they believed to be a Malfoy.
So it was time to expand my skill set a bit.
"I have the local authority!" she was starting to get mad. If nothing else, for all her age and power, Maeve had the emotional control of the spoiled hormonal teen she pretended to be. "Not your godmother! Not the other nobles. I am a queen!" Her voice was echoing oddly, as if she was moving extremely fast from room to room trying to find me. She didn't seem to have an intuitive sense of the floorplan, at least, and it was a good thing that I'd made a haunted house where every room connected to at least two others rather than rooms I could get trapped in because they just exited onto a central hallway.
"But not the queen, right?" I needled her, between bouts of magical set up. "How is your mom? I haven't met her yet, I don't think." I wasn't actually going to say the name of the Queen of Air and Darkness. With my luck, she'd show up and be on her daughter's side.
"Still locked behind your pitiful Veil," she revealed. It was always hard to tell what she meant to reveal, but I was guessing the madder she got, the more she'd let slip. "Perhaps she'll have a cross word for me that we had to go with a more pliable alternate in the plans. But what do you mortals say? 'Better to ask forgiveness than permission,' I believe. I remain baffled that she has taken your Godmother's side in your continued existence as it is. If I'd had my way, you'd have died the first time you were rude to me."
"Think of it as your high school education, Maeve," I insisted, still on the move as her long speech seemed to be wending closer to me. "It's about socialization as much as book learning. You'll be a more rounded person if you're used to not everyone being nice to you. It's all part of forming adult relationships."
"I will not take life advice from an actual child!" she yelled, finally bursting into the room I'd chosen for my stand. It was modeled on the drawing room at the Black Manor, with lots of furniture and cabinets full of various props. Unlike the actual Grimmauld Place house, they weren't terrifyingly dark, but were just miscellaneous bric-a-brac from the Room of Requirement's storage. Not even valuable stuff, since McGonagall had followed through on selling off a lot of the lost items to fund the school budget. "There you are!"
"Here I am!" I agreed, standing behind a sturdy old couch that looked like it was from some professor's office from the 1700s. "Incendio!" I used my blasting rod to lob a jet of fire her way.
A simple wave of her hand erected a shield that was more icy wind than forcefield, blowing the fire away from her as much as it blocked it. It was my first good look at her since this began, and her descent into her fae mien had completed. She was taller than any other girl in the school, probably clipping six feet, and impossibly slender, like she was made more of bone and wooden branches than flesh. Pointed ears extended obviously through her mop of dreadlocks, which practically floated on a wintery breeze and flickered with cool colors through their base white like moonlight on a frozen lake.
And despite the look of madness and rage on her face, she was still impossibly beautiful. She was pretty much a manga-style illustration of a pretty girl, but many a guy has become obsessed with cartoon characters. The alienness of her features almost made it easier to become attracted: no flaws on her, no imperfections.
The battering aura of lust and fear didn't hurt her case. People that dealt with the Winter sidhe in full regalia probably picked up some really weird fetishes.
"Die," she hissed, almost beyond rational thought, putting both hands forward to emit a howling blizzard of frost across the room.
"Locomotor furniture," I cast, ducking down and summoning the cabinets and other couches in between me and her cone of cold. The temperature in the room still dropped well below freezing in an instant, but at least the blast expended itself on my hastily-assembled barricade. I didn't even have to maintain the levitation: the haphazard structure was immediately welded together with ice. As soon as she stopped the torrent, my breath fogging in the air, I ordered, "Now!"
My command was more a mystical intention than it was a spell, unleashing all my conjurations and transfigurations to dogpile her.
I'd stuck with what I'd been using all day. Swarms of doxies flew out of the curtains and other hiding spots. "Cursed" animated items began to move and attack her legs. A pair of acromantulas dropped off the ceiling. And the werewolf I'd used to scare the Weasley twins erupted from the closet behind her.
Each and every one of them had some of the iron filings I kept in one of my pouches embedded into its claws and teeth.
She might have still won, if I'd sat back and let my creatures go to work. They were just magical constructs, after all. The werewolf got a lucky hit, but she spun and nearly beheaded it with a battleaxe of ice in one blow. One of the spiders went down not long after, and she physically punted a biting footstool across the room where it smashed to bits. She was getting cut up, dozens of abrasions marring her porcelain skin and leaking blue blood, but she wasn't going down.
"Flipendo," I incanted, coming out from behind the barricade and golf swinging my staff, nailing her with an overpowered knockback jinx. I'd lined up the shot, and asked the Room to make a small adjustment in the layout. She slammed into a door that opened to send her sprawling across the Hogwarts lawn from a temporary egress that exited from the side of the school.
Yeah, I could have escaped at any time, but that would have left her alone inside and potentially in control of the Room. Plus, she wouldn't have learned anything. I was on the clock as a Hogwarts professor, after all.
I stepped out after her, leaving the manufactured creatures inside, and letting the Room close behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the door instantly vanish back into stone. We were on the far side of the school, where I didn't expect any observers at this time of day, a small favor I'd done for her. She'd be extra antagonistic if I blew her cover and embarrassed her in front of other people.
"Now we're back in the wards," I assured her, as she rolled up to her feet in a backwards somersault, never fully stopping her motion and ending about ten yards away from me. She glanced around, realized where we were, and nodded, visibly regaining control of her emotions. Her fae appearance receded like a mirage over a couple of seconds, as she transformed or just recreated her human glamor. She hid all the cuts completely, to give no evidence of the fight she'd lost. "Are we done? Or do you want to schedule another round?"
"You act like it hasn't already been scheduled," she smirked, back to coldly calculating. Smoothing her robes down, she told me in her normal Irish-tinged accent, "Little advice, Harry: the more you win, the more enemies you make. Maybe you should just lose for once."
"I'll work on it," I told her. "Let me know what it's like?"
She barely restrained a snarl and then stalked off. I probably shouldn't relish making such a powerful enemy, but winning did feel nice. Once I was sure she was no longer going to curse me in the back, I wandered off the other way to see if I could salvage some time with Mathilda before I had to go home.