Page 31 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

NINE

I KNEW I WAS still inside Dame Altair’s knowe as soon as I woke up.

It wasn’t the lingering scent of her magic in the air, although that was a factor—it was the fact that I’d been stowed in a bedroom as Victorian and fussy as the rooms I’d seen downstairs.

I’ll give her this: when she found a decorating scheme she liked, she committed to it completely.

Consciousness returned in a trickle, drop by drop, until my skull was so full that it overflowed and I woke up, head pounding, eyes blurred, but otherwise fully present.

I tried to sit up. The chains holding my hands above my head and my legs in a spread-eagled position stopped me.

I frowned, craning my neck to get a better view of my bonds.

Padded manacles made from yarrow braided with silver clasped my wrists and ankles, keeping me on my back.

Cute. They looked fragile, but I knew from their design that I wouldn’t be able to break them if I spent a hundred years pulling as hard as I could.

This was Coblynau crafting, and it contained far more metal than it seemed.

Yarrow dampens the magic of the rare descendant lines who aren’t bothered by iron.

Enough silver to enhance that effect, and yarrow can be used to dampen anyone’s magic, including my own.

I tried again to sit up, testing the limits of my bonds.

The cuffs around my wrists prevented me from using my hands, while the ones around my ankles were tight enough to keep me from really moving my legs.

The only reason I didn’t immediately spiral into panic was that I could tell I was still pregnant.

The baby wasn’t currently moving around, which was a little worrying, since there weren’t any outward signs to tell me what my own injuries had been.

The trouble with healing like it’s my job is that any injuries I might have incurred while I was knocked out were already gone, my body undoing any damage with effortless speed.

I exhaled, relaxing more than I probably should have—I was also still captive, bound in one of Dame Altair’s guest chambers for no reason I could guess.

I fumed, glaring at the room around me like it was somehow personally responsible for my situation.

The walls didn’t offer me any apologies, which was honestly a little rude of them.

The air was cool if not quite cold, and my captors hadn’t given me a blanket, although there was a pillow under my head, probably to add one more limiting factor to my movement.

Bit by bit, the blurry edges of my vision turned crisp, although the aching in my head remained.

Headaches aren’t always strictly physical for me.

They can also mean I’ve done too much magic, or had too much magic done to me, and that sort of thing doesn’t heal as quickly as everything else.

I didn’t remember doing that much magic, but anything was possible.

She’d dosed me with something strong enough to put me under, and that sort of thing isn’t supposed to be possible anymore.

I froze, the implications of that sinking in.

She’d dosed me with something so powerful that it could get past my healing to hurt me.

The baby.

I bit my own lip, trying to focus on what the blood had to tell me despite the humming interference of the yarrow and silver, like white noise injected into what should have been a private conversation.

The static it created was severe enough that I had to bite myself twice more to get enough blood to understand what my body was saying.

The baby was fine. The baby had been knocked out alongside me, but had woken up, and there were no traces of whatever poison or potion she’d used remaining in either one of us.

That answered a question I hadn’t been actively asking, since I’d been trying to let myself be surprised by this pregnancy as much as I could.

While the baby and I currently shared a circulatory system, it seemed increasingly likely that they had inherited at least some degree of my ridiculous healing speed.

That was a good thing—in my line of work, having an indestructible kid is far from the worst possible complaint—but it was also a bad thing.

No human school for this kiddo. No trips to the public park until they were old enough to avoid skinned knees and split lips.

Children pay attention, and human children are much more willing to believe impossible things than their parents are. We would need to keep our kid away from places where recovering too fast for Band-Aids might endanger our ability to keep Faerie hidden.

Of course, before we had to worry about playgrounds and playdates, I needed to worry about getting out of this alive.

I tugged on my bonds again, uselessly, then slumped into the bed, trying to figure out how I was supposed to navigate my current shitty situation.

Normally I would either dislocate a joint or find something sharp to saw my bonds against; no such luck this time.

My cuffs were padded, I didn’t have a knife, and I didn’t have anything hard enough to throw myself against that I could reliably dislocate my shoulder.

My magic is pretty great when it comes to tracking people down or shredding spells, but it’s not so useful when I’m trying to get out of situations like this one. I didn’t get any of the big flashy tricks. No teleportation or voluntary transformations here.

I paused. I didn’t have either of those things, but my husband did.

Tybalt had to have noticed by now that Quentin and I had been gone for too long.

Even if he’d gone feline and somehow lost all track of time—not likely, when I was out in the field and he couldn’t directly keep an eye on me—Danny would have noticed our failure to return.

The cavalry was coming. All I needed to do was wait it out.

Just wait.

There were no clocks in the room, and while there was a window, it looked out on the eternal twilight of a Summerlands sky, giving me nothing I could use to hang the passage of time upon.

I tried to focus on my breathing, the beating of my heart, and the occasional, comforting movements of the baby as they rolled inside of me, flailing against their increasingly limited living space.

This pregnancy was so much easier and so much harder than my pregnancy with Gillian.

I had different fears now, bigger fears than just “will I drop the baby” and “if the baby has pointed ears, will Cliff break up with me?” Now I had “will my estranged mother show up to abduct her grandchild and reassert her ownership over her descendant line” and “will I have to die to save Faerie before the kid is grown?” I’d already been an absentee mother once. I didn’t want to do it again.

And still no one came.

My shoulders began to ache from being held in a slightly elevated position, and my bladder began to ache from being unable to get myself to a restroom, and no one came to either rescue or reposition me.

The baby’s kicks were becoming less reassuring and more concerning, since they were inevitably going to culminate in something deeply embarrassing.

I squirmed, trying to find a more comfortable position on the bed. All I managed to do was make my shoulders ache even more. I slumped.

“Well, fuck,” I said.

Those were the first words I’d uttered since waking up tied to a bed.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise when the door creaked open only a few seconds later, but it somehow was.

I turned to stare for a moment before letting my head flop back down into the pillow that had been mercifully placed beneath it.

“How long have you been out there waiting for a sign that I was awake?” I demanded.

“Long enough to worry that the mistress had given you too much tincture of cinnabar when she put you under,” said the Candela from the parlor, stepping fully into the room. She crossed to the bed, where she began to check that my cuffs were secure.

“You could let me go,” I suggested, trying not to sound like I was whining. “I promise not to tell anyone.”

“But you wouldn’t need to,” she said. “My mistress would know it must have been me, and she would make me pay for my insolence. Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?”

“Unfasten these cuffs.”

“No.”

“I’m extremely pregnant, I’m unarmed, and I really need to pee.”

“And at least two of those conditions will remain unchanged, no matter what I do,” she said, continuing in her inspection of my bonds. “I can bring you a chamber pot, if you’ll cooperate with me in getting it beneath you.”

The thought of pissing into a bucket while she stood there and watched to make sure I didn’t have magical acid urine or something else that might make it possible for me to get away was a repulsive one.

I didn’t want to do that. I also didn’t want to wet the bed when I was pretty clearly going to be here for a while, and the longer she spent in the room, the more chance there was that I’d be able to trick her into revealing more than she’d intended to.

Not needing to feign shame in the least, I dropped my gaze to the swell of my own stomach and said, in a meek voice, “I’ll cooperate. ”

“Good.” She sounded a lot more pleased than I would have been if I’d been in her position.

She leaned up and gave my pillow a quick, efficient plumping, then stepped away again, moving far enough back that I could see her smile at me.

It was a distressingly maternal expression, combined with utterly empty eyes.

She looked like she wasn’t seeing me at all, but was looking at someone else altogether.

“I’ll get that chamber pot,” she said, and turned to leave the room. I watched her go. There wasn’t anything else I could really do in that moment.