Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(10)

I flipped the pancake. I’d timed it right. It was golden brown.

“If they boot me,” I said, thinking through it aloud, “it means that I will no longer have the protection of the Council. I won’t be an official wizard.”

“You’ve made a great many enemies over the years,” Ebenezar said. “So have I. If you were outcast from the Council, your enemies—and mine—would see you occupying a weakened position. They’ll do something about it. How much protection can Mab provide you?”

“Mab,” I said, “is not all that into safety. She mostly provides the opposite of that, actually. The way she figures it, the only way she could make me perfectly safe would be to cut my throat and entomb me in amber.”

The quip did not draw a smile from the old man. He stared at me with craggy non-amusement.

I sighed. “It isn’t Mab’s job to protect her Knight. It’s supposed to be the other way around. If something comes along and kills me, I clearly wasn’t strong enough to be her Knight in the first place.”

“You aren’t taking this seriously,” he said.

I flipped the pancake onto the pile and poured out batter for the next. “If it gets bad, I can always fall back to Demonreach.”

“God, if they knew the whole truth about that place,” Ebenezar muttered. “And then what? Stay trapped on your island for the rest of your life, afraid to step off it?”

“So don’t let the motion go to a general vote,” I said. “You’re on the Senior Council. Pull rank. Assume control of it.”

“I can’t,” Ebenezar said. “Without a quorum, it’s got to be a general vote, and four of the Senior Council are going to be at the peace talks when the vote takes place.”

My stomach twisted a little. “Which four?”

“Me, Cristos, Listens-to-Wind, and Martha Liberty.”

“Oh,” I said quietly. My grandfather was a cagey old fox, with a thick network of alliances throughout the White Council—and almost as many enemies. The Merlin himself couldn’t stand Ebenezar, and of the three Senior Council members who would preside over the next Council meeting, only the Gatekeeper had ever shown me any kind of fondness. Even if the vote could go to the Senior Council, I’d lose two to one.

Of course, I wasn’t sure about how I would fare among the general population of the White Council, either. Wizards live a long time, and they don’t do it by taking unnecessary risks. If you look up unnecessary risk in the White Council’s dictionary, my picture is there. And my address. And all my personal contact information. And my permanent record from middle school.

“You need to talk to some of them face-to-face,” Ebenezar said. “Shake some hands. Make sure they know who you are. Reassure them. You only have a few days, but if you move fast, I think you can gather enough support to defeat the motion.”

“No,” I said. “I can’t. Not without neglecting my duties as a Warden and the Winter Knight both.”

“What?” he asked.

I told him about my meeting with Ramirez that morning. “I’ve been assigned to look out for you at the summit and to liaise with Winter.”

The old man spat a curse.

“Yeah,” I said.

Most of my support in the Senior Council was getting sent away at exactly the same time I was given a high-profile assignment providing security for the peace summit. Meanwhile, of the wizards who actually did know me, Ramirez and his bunch were the ones who would probably speak on my behalf—and they’d been sent to the summit, too.

“I’m being set up.”

“Hngh,” Ebenezar agreed.

“Was it the Merlin?” I asked. “Kind of feels like his style.”

“Maybe,” my grandfather said. “On the other hand, Cristos is throwing around a lot of orders these days, too. Hard to say where it comes from.”

I flipped the pancake. If I hadn’t spent years with the old man, I wouldn’t have noticed anything in his tone, but there was a peculiar shade of emphasis to his phrasing that made me glance up at him. He’d said Cristos, but what he meant was …

“The Black Council,” I said.

He grimaced at me and then at the walls.

The Black Council was secret stuff. Some unknown folks in the wizarding community had been causing a great deal of mischief in my life over the past decade and more. Their goals were no clearer than their identities, but it was obvious that they were damned dangerous. Wizard Cristos had ascended to the Senior Council under odd circumstances—circumstances that seemed to indicate that the Black Council was exercising power within the Council itself. A White Council that was bumbling and fussy and not interested in anything but its own politics was a fairly terrible but normal thing—but a White Council that was being directed by the kind of people I’d run into over the years was a nightmare that barely bore thinking upon.

A few of us had gotten together to see if we could stop it from happening. Because secret societies within the White Council were seen as evidence of plotting to overthrow it, we had to be really, really careful about our little cabal. Especially since we were kind of plotting against the White Council, even if we were doing it for its own good.

“I sweep it three times a day and have the Little Folk on the lookout for any possible eavesdropping,” I said. “No one is listening in on us.”