Court of Summer

The Iron Spear, The Crimson Court, The Court of Wrath

Wrath

Wrath is rejection. Wrath doesn’t accept that things are the way they are, and there’s nothing to do about it. When someone shoves a knife into you, wrath is the urge to pull that knife out and stab right back. Let Spring and Autumn and Winter all try to avoid or mitigate their pain. Summer channels wrath to scream through bloodflecked lips, no more!

Nobody spends much time debating whether or not they belong with the Iron Spear. Summer Courtiers are those who drew a line and chose to push back. Maybe it was their own pain: loss, wounds, failure, humiliation. Maybe it was someone else’s. But something awakened that fury in them, a wrath pure enough that they stopped thinking about flight and decided to fight. It’s not always healthy, of course. Wrath doesn’t make you happy, even if it dulls the pain and gives you something else to think about. It might lead you to sacrifice yourself for an empty promise of vengeance. But nothing gives a hunter pause like a beast that has decided it’s not going to be prey any more.

There were other things that Summer had to offer, so long ago. But the Bargain with Summer was paid in wrath. It’s the oath of the blazing sun destroying shadows. It’s the vigilance of the longest day. It’s the spike in violence when the streets are baking and the AC is out.

Anyone harboring illusions about “polite society” would be deeply chagrined to find out just how easy it is to harvest wrath, especially in a large city. Sure, you can drink up the anger in a Rust Belt diner full of frustrated, still-unemployed workers or in a congregation listening to a fire-and- brimstone preacher scream about how the sinners are ruining the world. But the city’s full of people tightly packed…and hell is other people. Long lines at the bank or grocery store vent clouds of succulent frustration. Schoolyard bullies let out their anger on smaller children, who in turn seethe for retribution. Rush-hour traffic is practically a five o’ clock dinner bell. Sporting matches are festivals of tribalized wrath, particularly if it’s a contact sport.

Talk to a Crimson Court aficionado, and they’ll tell you Glamour harvested from wrath tastes like heat. Sullen, suppressed anger has a low slow burn, and a berserk tantrum is a peppery explosion. Truly righteous wrath has a cleansing, spicy heat that seeps into your lungs. Hatred and the lust for vengeance add a metallic aftertaste. If you’re unlucky and foolish enough to try drawing on the rage of something not human, like a werewolf, then it’s like drinking molten gold. But for all that, the Iron Spear teaches that you shouldn’t think of it in terms of consuming wrath entirely. You’re meant to just hold it for a while — to forge it and hone it and give it a new target. A target that honestly deserves it.

Anger

When everything is going to shit, when you’re afraid for yourself and the people you care about, you get angry. You look for someone to blame, because that’s better than being impotent. You need a target.

The line between wrath and anger is a thread spun from semantics. Summer philosophy holds that anger is wrath with less discipline, less direction. Anger clouds your eyes. It drives you to strike, strike now, no matter what or who you hit. Anger creeps up on you when you don’t have clarity of purpose. It makes you toxic — and worse, when the toxin runs its course, it leaves you weak and fatigued. Wrath is tiring, and anger doubly so.

That toxic nature spawns an ugly truth — many changelings fear Summer more than they fear Autumn. A Summer Courtier’s rage might be triggering in its familiarity. All the more reason to focus that wrath, say the elders of the Iron Spear. Wrath can deter the Gentry. Anger will drive your loved ones from you — or worse, hurt them if they don’t abandon you.

The Turning of the Seasons

High Summer: Summer stands. When the Crimson Court is in power, it marshals the freehold’s defense. A Summer monarch doesn’t precisely militarize a freehold — though some would like to, or have tried. The Lost are individuals, and a freehold’s populace is full of people who might man a barricade in a time of need, but have no interest in making discipline and chain of command the new normal. But the Iron Spear usually has to spend three seasons watching the other courts ignore martial concerns. A Spring monarch typically leaves the freehold in high spirits but inclining to complacency. When Summer takes power, it’s time to clean the guns and sharpen the blades.

Kings and queens of Summer are exceptionally intimidating creatures. If you want to avoid conflict, you join some other court where it’s okay to hide or talk your way out of trouble. Crimson Courtiers test each other all the time, whether it’s sparring to blow off steam, settling who’s best with a sword or stick, or arguing over the best tactic for blasting out a warren of dangerous hobgoblins. The monarchs of Summer have to prove themselves constantly, and it shows. A tower of steel-cable muscle and scars flexes a killing strength in each finger. An elegant diplomat with cold iron in his voice never asks for anything twice. A plainly dressed woman seems smaller than she is until her thumb brushes up against the hilt of her blade, and the smell of blood seems to surround her. A crooked man in sunset regalia proposes daring offensives backed by seemingly uncountable layers of strategy.

An ascendant Summer monarch tends to focus on offense or defense. Defense involves activities such as gathering useful tokens of war, setting watchers on potential Hedge points of entry, building up the armory, and extracting pacts of alliance from whatever neighbors can be trusted to keep their word. Offense entails scouting missions deeper into the Hedge, grand hunts of particularly dangerous hobgoblins, and moving on tempting targets of opportunity. More fetches die when the Summer Court is in power than at any other time.

Low Summer: When another season holds power, the Iron Spear insists on offering counsel. A Summer advisor stands as close to the throne as she can, fully armed. She defers to the reigning monarch in most things, like a good soldier, but always has an opinion when there’s a mention of a Huntsman, or of the Gentry.

High-ranking Summer Courtiers tend to split between looking inward and outward. Focusing inward is usually a matter of keeping the freehold defenses shored up. It’s common practice to organize self-defense and physical training for interested parties, even weapons training for both ballistics and hand-to-hand combat.

Looking outward entails many things, small offensives against the Others in particular. A hunt during Low Summer might not be large and grandiose, but a few truly dedicated Summer soldiers can do some real damage. In most freeholds, a Courtier of Wrath keeps something like a bounty system running year round, making public the descriptions, last known whereabouts, and names (if available) of the freehold’s most dangerous known enemies. The payments for a Summer bounty are as strange and tempting as you might expect — cash is certainly possible, if gauche, but the truly dangerous targets are worth weapons and tokens and pledges.

Lower-ranking Summer Courtiers find ways to serve the freehold. Obviously, they provide the lion’s share of soldiers, sentinels, and constabulary. Standing guard isn’t a full-time job — most freeholds aren’t nearly large enough to support that — but the Iron Spear is there when needed. In most freeholds, the Summer recruitment pitch is based on unity: Everyone does their part, but we’ll always have your back. It’s an attractive offer to Lost looking for a new place to belong and comrades they can trust, especially if they’re all right with rolling up their sleeves. Some take well to crafting, be it gunsmithing, archaic weapons and armor, or restoring and improving vehicles.

The Iron Spear encourages a volunteer culture in times of Low Summer, even outside the prospect of the hunt. Keeping busy is a good way to maintain or further your court standing. In the absence of more organized activities, Crimson Courtiers focus their energy into action —vigorous exercise, athletic competitions, martial training, Hedge raids, street races, poetry slams, all manner of pursuits. Wrath is a smoldering burden, and a responsible Summer Courtier (they’re not all responsible) needs to direct all that furious energy into something productive.

To be Summer Court is to remember the necessity of vigilance, year round. Most Crimson Courtiers understand joy, just not unfettered joy. They dance and sing and even laugh, sometimes, at the freehold’s celebrations, but the Iron Spear is the designated driver. At least one of them is always sober, eyes on the exits.

Give and Take

The Bargain of Summer is very straightforward: Where a Summer monarch holds power, the Others and their vassals must fight to the last. This compulsion isn’t courage — indeed, a True Fae may be hollowed out by panic when it realizes that its enemies will not flee, and it cannot. It can only try to push forward, hoping that it’s as invincible as it believes itself. The Iron Spear takes clever advantage of the Bargain during a hunt. If they can find a weaker enemy party, all they have to do is force the enemy to draw weapons in self-defense. The rest is bloody formality.

Summer also offers strength and focus. Strength is to be had in the Contracts of Summer — but focus is the philosophy antithetical to the Others, and therefore the first line of defense. The season guides its courtiers down a straightforward path, because straightforwardness is a weapon in its own right where the Fae are concerned. Gentry used to the perpetual twilight of their Arcadian realms falter when faced with changelings calling on the days at their longest and the sun at its zenith. Mercurial Fae, given to expect an echo of their fickleness, wither when confronted with the intense focus of the Iron Spear. Summer doesn’t equivocate or flee — an unthinkable character trait in the debauched Gentry so used to having others crumple before them.

The Summer Court draws the most forthright Lost to its ranks. A faerie might find it easier to outwit a Summer soldier, but it might also think too many steps ahead. It can be very difficult for the solipsistic Gentry to anticipate the Summer Court by asking “What would I do?” The immortal game players never wind up thinking in terms of “Stop fucking around and just hit them.”

In return for this strength and focus, Summer asks for blood sacrifice. Not of the B-movie, knives-and-altars human sacrifice variety, though — well, almost never — and not simply blood. The Crimson Court venerates their season with competition and physical mortification. They lead ritual hunts such as the Mir-Shikar, a grand hunt on the first day of summer targeting a foe or menace to the freehold. They hold tournaments of first-blood duels and cage fights, ranging from displays of meticulous dexterity and control to brutal punch-ups where the victor’s the one who can still stand up. Their parties are physical affairs where they leap bonfires, run across coals, and brand their skin; they stage eating competitions and sporting matches and mock battles. The court stokes the flames of Summer with aggression, and has many rituals to direct that aggression safely against their own. Mostly safely. Usually.

Legends

Thousands of years ago, the seasons were at war. Winter started it, they say, refusing to melt her snows and cede the land to Spring. Soon enough, all four were at each other’s throats. Summer was the fiercest, so before long the other three decided to unite against him. He fought the battle on three fronts, but knew he couldn’t last, so he put a part of his soul into a fiery bird and sent it away to be safe.

A hundred stories tell what happened next. A soldier, or a maid, or a prince, or a princess, found the firebird. They guarded the firebird against the hunters that came after it, beasts of ice or flowers or withered wood. At last they returned the firebird to Summer, settling the war and earning his gratitude. We don’t know the name of that first founder, but we know and share their heart.

The tale of the founding begins with three siblings. The youngest sister was fast as thought, the oldest son was strong as the ocean, and the middle child was hungry as fire. With these gifts, they fought their way back from Arcadia, free at last from the all-seeing “father” that had taken them. They were nearly to the mortal world when they heard a terrible howl, far above. It was a wolf so immense it chased the sun itself through the sky.

The three leapt to the sun’s defense without a thought. The youngest sister distracted the wolf and led it a merry chase. The middle child ate a great trough in the ground for the wolf to fall in, and the oldest son lifted a mountain to trap the wolf in the pit. The grateful sun revealed itself as Highest Summer, and pledged its gratitude to the three. Summer promised to teach the three’s descendants and apprentices how to defend themselves against the wolf — for sooner or later, the wolf will get free, and it will come looking for us.

Don’t listen. It wasn’t a brawler, a biter, or a berserker who first tracked down Summer — it was a sharpshooter. A hunter. The other courts will tell you otherwise, fearing hunters as they do, but think: How could you track all the skies in a year without patience?

Summer had run for a month, and yet it looked down and saw this mortal always behind it. Summer grew angry, as Summer does, and rolled out a furious sun to blister the hunter’s flesh. Without a word, the hunter shot that sun from the sky. Summer, suddenly unsure, turned its chariot and rode on. Another month passed, Summer’s anger grew again, and it spat out another ball of fire. And the hunter shot it down. Again and again. Nine months, and nine dead suns later, Summer at last stopped, and descended to face the sharpshooter. The hunter’s face was calm, but Summer looked into his eyes, and it saw wrath. And then Summer understood.

The name we all remember is Sam Noblood. Seems a strange name for a man whose mien flooded with red when he got into a fight, but the story holds — and there ain’t much reason to doubt it — that Sam was the second coming of Achilles. He couldn’t be cut by any hand but his own.

Sam wasn’t the first one to think of pacting with a season, but he was the first to actually pull it off. He made a spear out of dead wood and autumn leaves, figuring the only thing Summer had to fear was Fall. And he went out to chase it like a boar hunt. He won that oath out of Summer by the strength of his arm. And Summer was glad to go along with it in the end, because if Sam could pin a season’s ears back, then Sam’s court had a real shot against the kings and queens of Arcadia.

The hunter chose the horned Beast in the hoodie first: a sharp kick to the virilities, and the bull-man was down. Next was the troll with long, Black Annis fingers: she was still gawking when the baseball bat smashed into her temple. But when the hunter rounded on the third member of the motley, he realized he’d prioritized his prey all wrong. The waif held a blade near-long as she was, a crimson cloth knotted around its guard, and its point was already at his throat.

“When I started sharpening this sword, ten years ago,” she whispered, “it was a knife the size of my finger.”

Mantle Effects: The Summer Mantle is strength and heat. It may pulse warmth like a heartbeat, with a faint smell of iron, or it may be a level, dry heat that seems to press the skin flat. A stronger Mantle may display heat effects like a mirage’s shimmer or faint curls of steam. Standing near a truly powerful Crimson Courtier is like standing near an open furnace door — every time they shift, it’s like an exhalation out of hell.

Courtiers: A betrayed mother swears vengeance for every year of her children’s lives that she missed. An Ogre meditates on his sword, an instrument with no purpose but to cut apart men and women. A rusalka armors herself in ice to keep her fury frozen in her heart. A spine-fingered guitarist pours his rage into a ballad of loss and vindication. A ragged woman in a ragged coat visits the freehold every full moon, eating and drinking enough for any five people before she wanders away again to resume her hunt. A soft-spoken, gentle Fairest writes elaborate and ruthless battle strategies on delicate scrolls. A short-tempered bully picks fights at the drop of a hat, then offers to teach a few fighting and first-aid tricks by way of apology. An unobtrusive custodian quietly builds another few shattered Hedge-spears into the wall. A Hedge courier hides her true lightning speed under a casual trot, seeing whom she might draw out to chase her.

Type

Court, Noble

Fuck compromise. You know who wants you complacent and afraid? They do. They want you thinking you don’t want to fight back. No. Fuck that. You need to be angry. They earned your wrath.