The Winter Lady wore an opalescent formfitting gown that very heavily emphasized that she was my best friend’s daughter and that I ought not to notice that about her, dammit.
“Harry,” she said, and then paused, eyeing River Shoulders. “Uh, that is, Harry Dresden.”
River Shoulders went from sitting down to standing in a light, liquid motion. “You want to insult me, you going to have to try something worse than calling me hairy, Miss Lady Winter,” he said politely, and bowed a little at the waist. “If you will excuse me. Miss. Hoss.”
“Good talk,” I said. “Next time, a fire and steaks.”
River Shoulders nodded and moved out of the room in long, silent, relaxed strides that carried him at about the same pace as me when I went jogging.
Molly waited until he had left and said, “What the hell, Harry? What are you doing up here?”
“Liaising,” I said. “Listens-to-Wind asked me to keep an eye out for him.”
“Well, I need you to do it some more,” she said. “The fiddler decided he liked the look of Warden Yoshimo and tried to lay a whammy on her.”
I stood up. “Hell’s bells. Did it work?”
“Not for long. But it should be dealt with openly, in front of everyone, by you.”
Right. As Mab’s nominal enforcer, I was the guy she would send to, well, enforce the Accords, unless the infraction had been committed by someone out of my league.
“Okay,” I said. “Show me.”
She looked pointedly at my arm. I offered it to her, and we started back down to the main hall. “Molls, I talked to your dad today.”
“Oh?” she asked, her tone utterly neutral.
“He says you haven’t been home to visit in a while.”
She glanced surreptitiously at me. “I’ve been busy. There’s been no time.”
I stopped and perforce she stopped with me. I frowned at her and said, “Kid. Make time.”
Her voice turned sharper. “You aren’t my father, Harry. You aren’t my mentor anymore, either.”
“No,” I said agreeably. “But I am your friend.”
“We can talk about this later,” she said, tugging my arm.
I didn’t budge. “Now seems to be a good time. Your family misses you. And you owe them better than this, Molls.”
“ Harry …”
“Just tell me you’ll visit. The word of the Winter Lady is good.”
“Harry, I can’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
She fretted her lower lip. “It’s complicated.”
“Going to Sunday dinner isn’t complicated.” I turned to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve got something precious. You’ve got a family. And they love you. And you’re probably going to live for a very long time without them. It’s idiotic to miss the chance to be with them while you can.”
She looked away from me, and tears made her eyes glisten.
“Come on,” I said, gently. “Don’t get all famous and forget the people you started with, faerie princess. They’ve got to be proud to have a celebrity in the family.”
Molly closed her eyes entirely as the tears fell.
Then she said, in a tiny voice, “They don’t know.”
I blinked exaggeratedly. “What?”
“I … I haven’t told them. About being the Winter Lady.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I know. Stars and stones, Molls, what were you thinking?”
She shook her head. “It’s … They’re going to see it as a bargain made with dark powers. If they found out …”
“Not if,” I said. “When. You can’t keep things like this hidden forever.” She shook her head wordlessly.
“It needs to be done,” I said. “You owe them the truth, at least.”
“I can’t,” she hissed. She opened her eyes and met mine. “It’s Papa. I’ve wanted to tell him, so many times. But he wouldn’t understand. I just … just imagine the look on his face when he knows … and it hurts, Harry.” She closed her eyes and shook her head again. “I can’t face that. I can’t.”
She broke off, and her tears fell in silence.
It hurt to see her suffering.
So I gave her a hug.
She clung to me, hard.
“This is hurting you. And it’s hurting them, too, even if they don’t know it yet.”
“I know,” she said.
I said gently, firmly, “It has to be done.”
“I can’t.”
“You can,” I said. “I’ll be there with you.”
She shuddered and clung to me. “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You didn’t.”
The shudders eased after a few moments. “You will?”
“What are friends for?”
Her weight leaned harder against me for a moment, in gratitude. “Thank you.”
“Anytime.”
We went back down to the main hall, where I immediately walked across the room to the musicians’ alcove, reached up, and ripped down the swath of cloth