"You aren't going to let me live anyway, Maeve," Sarissa said. "I'm not stupid."

"And I am not blind," Maeve spat back. "Do you think I did not know about all the time she has been spending with you? All the intimate talk, the activity together. Do you think I don't know what it means? She's doing with you what she always meant to do with you-using you as a spare. Preparing you as a vessel for the mantle. Preparing my replacement. As if I were a broken piece of a machine."

Sarissa looked pale and nodded slowly. "Maeve," she said, her voice very soft. "You're . . . you're sick. You've got to know that."

Maeve stopped, tilting her head, and her hair covered most of her face.

"Somewhere, you have to realize it. She wants to help you. She cares in her way, Maeve."

Maeve moved her left arm alone, pointing a finger straight at me. "Yes. I can see how much she cared."

"It isn't too late," Sarissa said. "You know how she lays her plans. She prepares for everything. But it doesn't have to happen that way. The Leanansidhe was sick and Mother helped her. But her power alone isn't enough to heal you. You have to want it, Maeve. You have to want to be healed."

Maeve quivered where she stood for a moment, like a slender tree placed under increasing strain.

"We need the Winter Lady now," Sarissa said. "We need you, Maeve. You're a vicious goddamned lunatic and we need you back."

Maeve asked in a very small voice, "Does she talk about me?"

Sarissa was silent. She swallowed.

Maeve said, her voice harsher, "Does she talk about me?"

Sarissa lifted her chin and shook her head. "She . . . won't say your name. But I know she fears for you. You know that she never lets things show. It's how she's always been."

Maeve shuddered.

Then she lifted her head and stared venomously at Sarissa. "I am strong, Sarissa. Stronger than I have ever been. Here, now, stronger than she is." Her lips quivered and twitched back from her teeth into a hideous mockery of a smile. "Why should I want to be healed of that?" She cut loose with one of her psychotic laughs again. "I am about to unmake every precious thing she ever valued more than her own blood, her own children. And where is she?" Maeve stuck her arms out and spun around in a pirouette. Her voice became pure vitriol. "Where? I have closed the circle of this place and she may not enter. Of course, these stupid primates sussed out a way through it, but she, the Queen of Air and Darkness, could not possibly stoop to such a thing. Not even if it costs her the lives of her daughter and the mortal world, too."

"Oh, Maeve," Sarissa said, her voice thick with compassion and something like resignation.

"Where is she, Sarissa?" Maeve demanded. There were tears on her cheeks, freezing into little white streaks, forming white frost on her eyelashes. "Where is her love? Where is her fury? Where is her anything?"

Whilethat drama was going on, I thought furiously. I thought about the mighty spirit who was my ally, who was being held immobile and impotent. I thought about the abilities of all of my allies, and how they might change the current situation if they weren't all incapacitated. Molly was the only one at liberty, and she had worn herself out over the lake. She wouldn't have much left in her-if she appeared now, the fae would defeat her handily. She couldn't change this situation alone. Someone would have to set things into motion, give her some chaos to work with.

I just didn't have much chaos left in me. I was bone-tired, and we needed a game changer. The mantle of the Winter Knight represented a source of power, true, but Maeve had damned near talked me into joining her team when I'd let it have free rein. I wasn't going to help anyone if I let myself give in to my inner psycho-predator.

If we weren't all inside the stupid circle, at least I could send out a message, a psychic warning. I was sure I could get it to my grandfather, to Elaine, and maybe to Warden Luccio. But while I was sure a mud coating could get us out of the circle, there was no way the fae would give us time to coat ourselves and do it. We were effectively trapped in the circle until sunrise, just like a being summoned from the Nevernev-

Wait a minute.

Circles could be used for several different things. They could be used to focus the energy of a spell, shielding it from other energies. They could be used to cut off energy flows, to contain or discorporate a native being of the Nevernever.

And if you were a mortal, a genuine native of the really real world, they could be used for one thing more: summoning.

The hilltop was one enormous circle: one enormous summoning circle.

"She is not here," Maeve was ranting. "She sends her hand to deal with me? So be it. Let me send her a message in reply!" The little automatic swiveled toward my head.

I shouted as swiftly as I could, putting whatever will I had left into the shortest and most elemental summons there is: "Mab! Mab! Mab! I summon thee!"

Chapter Fifty-two

It's impossible to know how something is going to arrive when you summon it.

Sometimes it's huge and dramatic, like it was with Titania. Sometimes they come in a burst of thunder or flame. Once, this thing I'd summoned arrived in a shower of rotting meat, and it took me a month to get the smell out of my old lab. Less often, they simply appear, like a slide-show image suddenly projected on the wall, drama-free.

Mab came in a bell tone of sudden, awful, absolute silence.

There was a flash-not of light, but of sudden snow, of frost that abruptly blanketed everything on the hilltop and gathered thick on my eyelashes. I reached up a hand to flick the snowflakes out of my eyes, and when I lowered it, Mab was there, again in her crow black dress, with her midnight eyes and ebon hair, floating three feet off the ground. The frost was spreading from her, covering the hilltop, and the temperature dropped by twenty degrees.