She said "When you have fulfilled three requests, your obligation to me ceases."
This is at least the third time I've supplied the quote in this thread. It illustrates three things: 1. Mab has "requests" owed to her, not "favors." 2. It's his "obligation" that ceases. And three, the obligation is to Mab.
Favors can be done without being requested. If Harry owed Mab a favor, Harry could get out of his obligation to Mab without her initiating anything.
I think it's important that the obligation isn't specifically defined when combined with Harry's warning in
Changes right before Harry's fellowship leave Chicago about not relying or trusting context when dealing with the Sidhe.
Don't make her any offers. Don't accept any, not even in passing, not even things that seem harmless or that could only be construed through context.
Another thing that is important is that if Harry's obligation to
Mab ceases, as Winter Knight, he still would have obligations to Mother Winter and the Winter Lady. So if it doesn't free him of the Winter Mantle, then I expect Mab would kill him so that she can have a Winter Knight. It could be that having no obligations to the Queen would mean that the Mantle would leave him.
I really don't think Mab is going to make a request of Harry while he still has the Mantle.
The wedding may not happen - In TM we will follow Harry over the year, seeing his dates with Lara, but if they really make it down the aisle sounds like it's up in the air.
And, because I do like the Harry/Molly pairing, I'm putting this in. Someone asked about a relationship between Harry and Molly. Jim sounded like he wants people to realize that it very well may happen, just right now isn't a good thing or time for it to happen.
I really felt like this was just an "I'm not going to tell you" type of answer. He seems to have retired the sing song phrase. I think Jim knows the answers to these questions, but they would be pretty major spoilers. Of course he isn't going to answer them.
I was disappointed in Mike's interview as a source of new information. Too many questions that have been asked and answered. We got the writing assignment origin story, the died at his type writer like a man story, that Zelazny Amber Chronicle's were an influence, where he could go with the Alera world, next Cinder Spires book, next Dresden book, the number of books, he doesn't drink beer, and the Alera bet story. I might be missing a couple more. At least he didn't ask where Bob came from.
Most of the stuff we got out of this was more about Jim than anything he's written.
One new piece is to the writing assignment story. He said he used B5 in class discussions a lot, and his professor suggested writing a story like Buffy and/or B5. B5 being an influence on Jim isn't at all surprising to me. We knew he liked it. I've referenced it more than once as something that might tell us how Jim's writing this.
Was this the one where he asked if we'd see Elaine again, and Jim's response was something like "oh, definitely"? I'm pretty sure we all would have predicted that one.
