Okay, but definitly long enough for canon-Molly to have a significant backlog of unfullfilled duties, right?
That's at least what I remember from some people here talking about the situation.
Long enough. But we don't actually know how long. It might have been a year, might have been five.
Or a century.
In canon, by Skin Game the Winter Court was just coming off a decade during which only Mother Winter and Mab were fully up and capable of doing their jobs.
The Leanansidhe and Maeve had been compromised by Nemesis. Winter Knight Lloyd Slade had been a traitor and either dupe or willing collaborator of a Nemesis scheme who was essentially imprisoned until Mab had a replacement and could afford to execute him without giving Nemesis a chance to have a hand in choosing his replacement.
And just as Lea came back, Mab had to spend an entire year keeping Dresden's body alive and then nursing him back to health before unleashing him back on the world to settle a whole lot of scores.
And this doesn't even count the fact that there was a need for internal housecleaning of Nfested.
It makes sense that there's a lot of routine housekeeping that wasn't done because they were shorthanded at the top end.
Killing a Lady is definitly something Mab can do, if she isn't doing her part for Winter in general.
There's no need to involve the Knight into that.
Apparently not. There are Rules.
IIRC there are even political rules about Queens having limits on how much they can countermand each other's orders; that's how Maeve was able to timewarp the heart of Winter in Proven Guilty. And why Mother Winter didn't simply go over Mab's head and murderize Maeve herself.
The Knight is one of the few people who can get past the defenses of a Queen without brute force.
The ultimate expression of this was when Mab told Dresden to kill Maeve as his first job as Winter Knight in Cold Days, Maeve trying to get Dresden to kill Mab instead, and the Mothers deliberately not giving Dresden any orders one way or the other, just providing him with information about the stakes, letting him draw some conclusions about who was right and stepping back.
It even makes sense that whoever set up the Courts in their current form made it so Fae Royalty are not allowed to directly move against each other. It minimizes coup attempts, internal infighting and paranoia that might distract from defending the Outer Gates.
After all, Mothers, Queens and Ladies are not usually related to each other, nor do they have any requirement to like each other. Loyalties are not automatic.
Plus, if its true that in this AU Maeve is the daughter of Merlin?
In addition to maternal love by a mother for her kid? There would be strong pragmatic reasons why Mab as a Queen and Winter as a corporate agency would be willing to go to significant lengths to attempt to salvage her.
The daughter of a Winter Queen and one of the most powerful wizards in recorded history, himself the son of an incubus, would be a hilariously potent magical legacy and weapon for Winter to wield in its duties.
They would not write her off if they have any alternatives.
Look at canon. Mab spent six months keeping Dresden's body alive after he got shot at the end of Changes, and another seven months nursing him back to health at the beginning of Cold Days. And that's what she did for a single Starborn wizard; there were forty thousand Starborn born this cycle, so while uncommon, they could have sought others.
There's only two daughters of Merlin and Mab in this world. Their value would be much, much higher.
And would give Nemesis additional incentive to go after them.
