Page 1 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

ONE

Therefore the lottery,

that he hath devised in these three chests of gold,

silver and lead, whereof who chooses his meaning

chooses you, will, no doubt, never be chosen by any

rightly but one who shall rightly love.

—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

I SAT ON THE living room couch with my feet propped up on a pile of pillows and a version of Much Ado About Nothing I’d already seen a dozen times playing on the television, and all I could think was that if I didn’t get to do something—pretty much anything—soon, I was going to start screaming, and I might never stop.

My name is October Christine Daye. I am a trained knight, a private detective, and a named and known Hero of the Realm.

I can take care of myself. And yet none of the people in my family seemed to believe that just now, as they were intent on keeping me locked in the house while I went slowly out of my mind from boredom.

Oh, yeah. Being back in the real world was definitely better than being trapped in Titania’s toxically idealized version of what Faerie should have been. But honestly, both of them sucked.

I could hear people rattling around in the kitchen, and knew that if I tried to get off the couch or made any sort of noise, someone would immediately head into the living room to make sure I was okay and take care of anything I might need.

That was why I was holding as still as I possibly could, barely even breathing.

I did not want another supportive round of “what can I do for you, October? How can I make things better? How can I convince you to keep acting like a houseplant instead of a person?”

It’s rude to throw things at your family, and I didn’t want to start, except for the part where I absolutely did .

Important piece of information I may have omitted before: everything I said about who I am is true.

I just happen to also be a little over eight months pregnant, and married to a man whose first wife died due to complications in childbirth.

I should probably have considered what that was going to mean during my own pregnancy before I agreed to have kids with him. I didn’t. That’s my bad.

Not my bad, exactly, is the fact that almost as soon as we’d realized I was pregnant, Titania, the Summer Queen of Faerie, had decided to throw a Kingdom-spanning enchantment over everything I knew and loved, transforming us into alternate versions of ourselves and locking us into her ideas of what Faerie should have been from the beginning.

I’d been trapped there for four months, unaware that I was pregnant—unaware that I’d ever done anything that could have made me pregnant—while my husband searched for me, coming up with endless nightmare scenarios of things that could have gone wrong while I was enchanted and barely aware of them.

Lots of things went wrong while we were all Titania’s captives.

Titania is kind of the worst. But nothing terrible happened to the baby, and after tearing her enchantment down, we’d finally been free to return home and get back to our lives.

I’d been excited about that, right up until I discovered that “getting back to my life” meant effectively going into lockdown.

I’d been trying to deal with the transition from “surprise, you’re pregnant” to “you’re four months along and your normally reasonable husband looks like he wants to vomit every time you mention leaving his line of sight,” while he’d been trying to deal with the fact that I was still me, no matter what I’d been living through for the previous four months without him, and he was going to have serious trouble keeping me completely stationary.

I’d actually said as much to him, during one of the brief quiet moments after our return home, when our collection of random teenagers had been sleeping and my Fetch, May, had been upstairs with her girlfriend.

His response had been that the Luidaeg could probably turn me into a tree of some sort without harming the baby, and then remaining stationary would be easy.

To make matters worse, he’d repeated this suggestion to the Luidaeg when she’d dropped by a few days later, and she had not only laughed, but agreed that it was wholly possible.

I’d reminded them both that I don’t care for involuntary transformation, and the Luidaeg, looking me dead in the eye, had answered, “If you force the issue, I won’t regard it as involuntary. ”

The Luidaeg can’t lie. I’d changed the subject quickly after that, and spent the next few months doing my level best to take it easy.

I was allowed out for short walks around the park, but never unaccompanied, and never if it looked like there might be anything remotely dangerous going on—a list which included “light rain,” “large dogs,” and “human teenagers being too rowdy while they played games of Frisbee.”

Tybalt and the Luidaeg were the loudest voices encouraging me to stay safe at home, but they weren’t the only ones.

I am not a patient woman. What I am is a woman who desperately loves her husband and family, and doesn’t want to hurt them when I don’t have to.

Tybalt’s concern was clear enough, and obviously rooted in his own past traumas, and so I did my best. But I’d come home not just to Tybalt, but to a collection of heavily traumatized teens who all seemed to be convinced that I would disappear again if they let me out of their sight.

I couldn’t entirely blame them for that: I’d spent the last six years of my life mostly trying to stay alive, not get transformed into anything unpleasant, and not overthrow any monarchies that didn’t already deserve it.

That didn’t mean I was enjoying my time as a functional prisoner in my own home.

Still, if it had just been Tybalt, and if he hadn’t been reeling from the effects of a major trauma, I could probably have found a way to talk him into the idea that I at least needed to be allowed to go to the grocery store and visit my liege.

Sylvester and I hadn’t been on the best terms for quite a while, but we had been close when under Titania’s enchantment, and the twisted life she’d created for him had to have reminded him how much he needed his family.

As long as he and I were semi-estranged, he wouldn’t have his brother, or either of his nieces.

The immediate aftermath of breaking the spell would have been the perfect time to start rebuilding some bridges.

And yet, while I’m not always the most emotionally intelligent person in the room, I knew that forcing the issue while Tybalt was barely sleeping out of sheer anxiety would make what he was already going through much worse than it already is, and I loved him far too much to hurt him like that.

I just needed to keep trying to make him understand that at a certain point, his concern had started hurting me.

The rattling from the kitchen was getting louder.

I decided to risk swinging my feet around to the floor and sitting up, only slightly hampered by the size of my midsection.

I wasn’t as large as I’d been with Gillian, but I was large enough to be inconvenienced by my own body.

That was only fair. I inconvenience my body enough, after all.

I’ve mentioned Faerie a lot, so here’s the brief: it’s real, the fae are real, and they live alongside humanity, hidden by illusions and veils of otherworldly distance.

I’m what’s called a changeling—fae mother, human father.

My first child, Gillian, was born a thin-blooded changeling: her own father, Cliff, was fully human.

For most of her life, she lived with him and his wife, Miranda, who was perfectly human, but under an unbreakable enchantment spun by Maeve.

She’s actually my maternal grandmother, Janet Carter of the old ballad.

Because once you add magic and curses that can extend people’s lives by centuries, nothing gets to stay simple.

Not that things are particularly simple for humans, either.

Gillian thought she was one, but when Faerie came calling for her, she lost her humanity and became one of the skin-shifting Selkies, only to lose that as well and become a shapeshifting Roane.

She had barely spoken to me since then, and I couldn’t entirely blame her.

I wrapped one arm around the sphere of my belly, addressing my next words to the child inside.

“I’ll do better by you,” I promised. An unkeepable pledge, maybe, but in the moment, I more than meant it.

Carefully, I pushed myself off the couch, grunting slightly, and started toward the living room door.

For a moment, I thought I was going to get away with it. Then I opened the door to find Raj already waiting there, a perkily helpful expression on his face. I groaned.

“Oak and ash, Raj, aren’t you supposed to be running the Court of Cats right now?” I asked.

“Tybalt’s there, checking in with Ginevra,” he said brightly. “Which means I get to be on Toby duty. Why are you up? What do you need?”

“I’m pregnant, not an invalid, ” I snapped.

And as pregnant women go, I was in remarkably good health, as long as you ignored the constant hunger and all the vomiting.

My size was a problem, and my knees—which had never quite recovered from the way I treated them when I was younger—sometimes complained, but that was about it.

My type of faerie heals like it’s our job.

I can literally slice my hand open and be healed less than ten seconds later.

My knees would probably fix themselves if I was willing to start hacking at them and giving the tendons and cartilage an opportunity to self-repair.

So yeah, I was more than a little tired of people acting like being pregnant meant that I was suddenly breakable.

It wasn’t even like it was my first time.