Is it confirmed that Mother Winter is Hecate underneath the mantle?

No, just my WAG. Could easily be wrong - maybe the original Hecate persona either sacrificed herself to accomplish the division, or left the game after giving away the bulk of her power to the Sidhe.

But if a goddess of dark witchcraft was going to hang on to any of the queen mantles for her own, the biggest one of Winter is a really good fit. She's basically only legs on her hut away from Baba Yaga. And drive to carry on the purpose for which she split her power would explain not retiring to match the previous Mother Summer who grew tired of her role and abdicated the Mother mantle to her Queen.

As I said before, what information does Bob have or power does Bob have that Anduriel couldn't provide? Anduriel has so much more that he is a whole different weight class by several orders of magnitude, even limited as he is, let alone unbound.

I don't doubt Bob knows less than the Fallen overall, but he might well know things they don't - he described his own specialties as knowing a lot about magic but very little about faith stuff. It's pretty notable that Lash never tried to use "oh, I already know what the darkhallow is, because awesome fallen knowledge base" as temptation material in DB, when Bob did have that (albeit locked away).

That's probably not of immediate use to Nic or Anduriel. But Marcone/Namshiel could probably find a use for him if Butters and Harry aren't careful enough to keep him away.

If it comes to that, Harry would probably be treating it more or less like the fight with Fix, trying to pull his punches enough to disable without killing. So he probably wouldn't even be trying fire, but Carlos' water shield would block that anyway.

Carlos has seen enough of Harry's use of forzare and air bursts to plan for countering those as well. Infriga is probably also more lethal than Harry would reach for to subdue a well-meaning but dangerously misguided good guy, but Carlos would presumably bring a plan for countering ice magic to any fight with the winter knight anyway. I'd assume even slipping something around the edge of his shield like icing the ground under his feet would be a challenge.

Harry would pretty much need something unusual enough that Carlos wouldn't have seen him using it before to plan a counter, as well as not easily countered by water. I wonder if he could pull off the gravity-concentrating spell fast enough to be useful in a fight, if he was only trying to focus it enough for a trip rather than to the point of turning anything organic in the AoE into chunky salsa.

He might be able to do something non-lethal with the strangler tendrils he learned off Namshiel using on him and tried on Shagnasty. He can boost that with soulfire (see: Shagnasty fight), and while I doubt he can get up to Namshiel's five wavelengths that are impossible to shield against, he might have progressed enough from TC to manage two or three.

The sleep spell the Gatekeeper used in TC is apparently not invasive enough to be black magic. If Harry can learn that, it's pretty much ideal for stopping an attacker without harm. Probably also a good idea to brush up on to subdue Justine long enough to set up an exorcism.

Whereas in Dresden stuff the Fomor forget that they can kill 250 million or more Americans by hexing the right 9 substations in favour of trying to manually carve through Chicago and all the accorded nations at the same time.

Was body count the point? I thought they were trying to inflict a highly visible bloody nose on humanity in a way that wiped away any doubt about the supernatural, and incite the humans to indiscriminate revenge against any other supe they could find.

The fae can't lie, but has Mab incorporated not lying into Winter Law?

If so, it's since Slate's time. I don't know that Winter Law is that changeable.

Harry doesn't outright lie that often anyway. The only one I can think of was faking surrender to Lea in GP, and that burned him pretty badly. He's a lot more inclined toward omission than falsehoods.

Also I don't see him as a worthy adversary for Dresden.  Harry is facing gods at this point.  Carlos is a kid by comparison to Harry.  It wouldn't feel right.  It needs to be someone who not only is able to break the laws of magic, but is actually really good at it.

I don't think it was an accident narrating in BG that Carlos' technique is better than Harry's in some significant ways. Jim is setting this up as a rivalry to be concerned about, even if it doesn't play out all the way to a life-and-death confrontation.

Harry wasn't so much facing gods as being bailed out of a fight he would have lost by Namshiel for his own reasons. Carlos is still very much someone he should be worried about on a normal day. He wouldn't even need the blackstaff if he decided Harry had to go ... unless Harry has the Guard on 24/7 veiled assassin patrol, he's plenty vulnerable to invisible guys with a simple gun.

at point 1 no. Killing people in battle is not self defense, you can flee. The real question is do think those servitors are human.

Which would be desertion in battle, after the Senior Councilors present ordered him to fight, with Eb even specifying no quarter. But sure, he could have theoretically done that, even though it would have presumably been a catch-22 death sentence on different grounds.

We have Molly's POV that the turtlenecks' minds aren't human anymore as far back as Bombshells, but the Council might not have made that kind of detailed assessment, and they're not going to take her word on it at this point.

Glad to see somebody else sees this.  Papa Raith is dying or he's coming back.  Pick your poison. Either way it will put Lara under the gun.

Makes me wonder how well the curse on him is going to hold up with Thomas in stasis and Harry pulled away to the Mirror world.

A lot is going to be riding on whether Maggie and Thomas' nem-baby can sustain it via their bloodline to Maggie Sr.