Page 32 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

As soon as the door was closed I began testing my bonds again, in case she’d accidentally loosened something when she checked them before. There was no change. Every attempt to pull or break free just rattled the chains—which shouldn’t have been metal enough to rattle—against the bedframe.

I had just finished my check when the door opened and the Candela bustled back into the room, a ceramic chamber pot in her hands. “Here we are, dearie,” she said. “You’ll feel all better soon.”

“Great,” I said, and watched her approach the bed, only to stop and look at me expectantly.

It was difficult not to start laughing when I realized she was waiting for permission to unfasten my maternity jeans.

They were comfortable poisoning and restraining me, holding me against my will, but she drew the line at pulling my pants down so I could pee?

I guess it was nice to know I was being held by people who had some standards, even if I wished they’d drawn the line substantially further back than they had.

“Please,” I said. “I don’t want to pee on my clothes.”

She nodded and moved to tug my stretch jeans down over my hips, before manually shifting me into position, first hiking my hips off the bed, then sliding the chamber pot beneath me.

I squirmed a little, adjusting my position over the pot. “Can you step back and look at the wall?” I asked. “I still have some pride.”

“Of course, dearie,” she said, and stepped away from the bed, turning ostentatiously away from me. I managed, barely, not to sigh.

“Do you have a name?” I asked, talking to mask the sound of urine hitting ceramic.

I really had needed to pee, more badly than I had realized before it became possible; my kidneys are very efficient things, and my body contained a lot of toxins it needed to filter out and dispose of.

Once again, I silently resolved to kick Dame Altair in the head as soon as I had the opportunity to do so.

“Halcyon, ma’am,” said the Candela woman—said Halcyon. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“I can’t quite say the same, Halcyon,” I said.

My back was starting to ache from the effort of holding myself sufficiently above the chamber pot that I wasn’t overly peeing on either myself or the bed.

The sound was tapering off. She’d be able to take it away in a moment.

“Do you know why your mistress has decided I need to be an involuntary guest in her knowe? Because my husband’s going to be pretty pissed when he realizes what’s going on. ”

“You mean the cat-king, yes?” she asked, turning back around and moving to remove the chamber pot from beneath me.

“Pardon my boldness, ma’am, but I’m not sure he can be your husband.

There were rules against good, proper fae laying down with beasts when I was younger.

The shame of it all. Your Firstborn must be rolling in her grave. ”

“My… Amandine isn’t dead.”

She frowned as she straightened. “Standards have fallen even further than I believed, if you don’t know your own First’s name. Eira Rosynhwyr begat your line.”

“No, she really didn’t,” I said. “I’m not Daoine Sidhe. My Firstborn is Amandine the Liar, Last Among the First, and bearer of the D ó chas Sidhe.”

“Oh, my.” She crossed the room to set the chamber pot delicately down on a side table, then returned to ease my pants back over my hips.

She neither offered nor attempted to clean me up.

Under the circumstances, the discomfort this was going to cause was probably better than the thought of her touching me. “I’ve never heard the claim.”

“It’s been all the news in the Mists since she was revealed as her father’s daughter,” I said, watching her carefully. “Have you really not heard?”

“Oh, I don’t get out much,” she said. “My lady needs me here to manage her household and see to her needs. I have plenty to keep me busy inside the knowe, and I’ve not heard anything of a new Firstborn or descendant line.”

“Well, you should get out more. And I assure you, Tybalt is definitely my husband. We were wed by the sea witch, in full view and with the approval of the High King. He couldn’t be any more my husband if Oberon himself had chosen to bind us.”

“Even so, he won’t be a bother here.”

I frowned. “Why not?”

“My lady decided long ago that she didn’t like intrusions without her consent, and barricaded the Shadow Roads. No one here dances those paths. Your cat-king won’t be able to reach you even if he tries.”

“You might be surprised.” Dame Altair being able to seal the shadows against ordinary use was surprising, but not outside the realm of believability. Her being able to seal them against an enraged King of Cats trying to reach his wife and child? That was a little harder to accept.

“We shall see,” said Halcyon. She picked up the chamber pot and started for the door.

“Wait!” I said, and cringed from the desperation in my own voice.

She looked back toward me. “Yes?”

“Do you know why I’m being held here? I didn’t offer any insult or threat to Dame Altair. I came here to find out why she’d been attacked, and hopefully help her to receive justice.”

Halcyon made a noncommittal sound and continued toward the door.

“I didn’t do anything that would justify this! Please, you have to know there will be consequences for abducting a hero of the realm!”

“Only if you’re unwilling to leave the realm in question,” said Halcyon mildly. She left the room then, and I was alone.

For a moment, I considered the virtues of screaming. It would have been so satisfying. Then, deciding that wouldn’t do me any good, I turned my thoughts to my situation.

I was bound to a bed by both wrists and both ankles, with enough give to shift slightly, and not enough to let me majorly change position.

The give was actually part of the problem—if I’d been bound more tightly, it would have been easier to start using the cuffs on my wrists to cut myself and get access to the blood my magic needed.

Tension is as good as a knife under the right set of circumstances.

Wait. I paused. Dame Altair poisoning me had confirmed something we’d all been too cautious to test: the baby healed at least partially the way that I did, meaning I probably couldn’t do them any serious damage without doing something I couldn’t personally recover from.

Since I’d come back from the dead several times, I didn’t think I could do something I couldn’t recover from.

Before, I’d been approaching my situation from the perspective that I couldn’t try anything that might harm the baby.

If harming the baby was less of a consideration, my options were a lot more open.

I looked thoughtfully to my left. The bed was standing in the middle of the room, with a wall behind the frame but open space to either side.

I’m right-hand dominant, meaning that if I rolled as far to the left as I could, I’d be yanking my right arm out of the socket—and possibly dislocating a hip.

That wasn’t the worst possible outcome. What I needed to figure out was which arm I wanted to have available when I started trying to move.

The right. I took a deep breath, said a silent apology, and rolled hard to the left, wincing as the motion pulled my hips from the mattress. The cuff on my right wrist snapped taut, stopping me before I could roll onto my front.

With the right-hand cuff holding tight, I forced myself to roll just a little further, a little closer to the bed’s edge.

The rowan and silver bit into my wrist, forming a solid surface harder than it should have been.

The padding mostly blunted the braided cuff, but what of it did make contact with my skin should have felt like wicker, like solid macrame, like something other than a hard cuff. That’s magic for you, I guess.

My shoulder ached, not quite wrenched out of the socket, but close enough that I could feel the individual muscles straining not to tear.

I did my best to ignore the pain and began twisting my wrist back and forth, pulling as I did, until the padding ripped and the cuff bit into my skin, ripping and tearing with the friction.

Blood started to trickle down my arm. I yanked hard, taking advantage of the lubrication the blood provided, and was rewarded with half an inch or so of give.

It was accompanied by a bolt of searing pain that traveled all the way down my arm to my spine, and from there to my hips.

I was suddenly very grateful that I’d been able to access a chamber pot as recently as I had.

I bit my lip, hard enough that it also started to bleed.

The taste was revitalizing. I swallowed, flickers of my own memory exploding behind my eyes, and began to twist and yank again, trying to get just a little more give from the cuff.

Silver and yarrow tore at my skin, and as the blood cascaded down my arm, I was able to pull my hand another half inch downward.

My thumb folded inward toward my palm with a sickening cracking sound that I felt as much as heard, like a rotten tooth had suddenly become embedded in the meat of my hand. I bit my lip harder and arched my neck, tension lighting my spine like a burning brand as I continued to pull.

There was another, louder crack, and my hand was free, thumb folded so far that the nail had slid into the meat of my palm.

I rolled onto my back, panting, and brought my throbbing right hand around to my left, using my working fingers to dig my thumbnail loose and shove my thumb back into its normal position.

In that regard, the cuffs were doing me a favor.

Yarrow and silver can’t completely suppress magic that’s turned inward, onto the caster, rather than outward to the world.

I was still healing. I was just healing minutely more slowly than I would have done normally, allowing me the time to get my bones back where they belonged before they healed crooked and forced me to break them again.

The pain when I snapped my thumb back into position was briefly dizzying, making the world flash white. I inhaled sharply through my nose, waited for the throbbing to stop, and then reached down with my now-free hand to begin tugging at the other cuff.

Like many cuffs designed to be “inescapable,” this one was reasonably simple from the outside, with a wrapped latch system that surrounded a locked hasp.

I folded my thumb toward my palm and forced it as hard as I could with my free hand, until the fingers dislocated and I could pull my hand loose.

The cuff dropped away and I immediately reached up with my left hand to shove my right shoulder physically back into its socket.

There was a sickening popping sound, and I collapsed into the mattress for several seconds, breathing hard, while I waited for the flare of dizziness to pass.

Once it did, I sat up on the now-bloody sheets and reached as far down as I could manage, trying to get to my ankles.

Normally, that would have been the easy part: I had two free, fully working hands, and a comfortable bed to bleed on.

This was where I should have broken free and gone racing for the next trouble I could throw myself into.

Unfortunately, the situation wasn’t normal.

I reached for my feet, and I failed to touch them.

My stomach was making it too hard for me to bend forward without moving my legs into a more accessible position, and the cuffs on my ankles were making it impossible for me to move them in any meaningful way.

I pulled as hard as I could. Nothing budged.

There was a chance that if I repeated the “throwing myself to the side” trick, I could break one of my ankles.

But without being able to reach my ankles and with my shoes on, I didn’t have the flexibility in my feet to dislocate them and yank them loose the way I had my hands.

I stopped pulling and started trying to kick instead, with no better results.

My legs were tied too far apart, and the cuffs were too secure.

I couldn’t even try reaching for whatever spells might have been braided into them; with the silver and the yarrow so close together, I’d never be able to get up the strength to hook and snap the threads.

What I could do was move my hands and arms with ease.

I reached behind me and grabbed the center of the bedframe, using the leverage it provided to pull myself further toward the top of the bed.

This drew the cuffs even tighter, my legs going straight as the conflicting forces of cuffs and hands met and fought with one another.

When I was sure that I was as upright as I could possibly get, that there was no further give in the chains holding my feet in place, I gripped the bedframe even tighter and closed my eyes, bracing myself against what I was about to do. Anticipation only made it worse.

Unable to stand the waiting any longer, I threw myself hard to the side, letting momentum carry me over the edge.

There was a sickening crunch and my head hit the floor, and everything became darkness and bright, flashing pain.

Way to go, Daye.