Page 33 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

TEN

F ORTUNATELY, IT WAS JUST a minor skull fracture, and it didn’t knock me out for long; I’m not sure I even lost consciousness.

My head was the farthest point of me from the silver and yarrow cuffs on my ankles, and when it cleared, my hip and ankle were still on fire, telling me that any bones I’d broken or dislocated were still busted.

That shouldn’t have been a good thing, but under the circumstances, it was the best I could have hoped for.

Cautiously, I tried to move my left leg.

The hip was almost certainly dislocated on that side, and might be broken.

If it was broken—or if I’d managed to injure my spine—my leg wouldn’t move.

If it was just dislocated, it would hurt, but should still work.

To my immense delight and relief, my leg moved, a little jerkily, a lot painfully, but obeying my commands.

I twisted my hips as far to the right as they would go, and focused on trying to shake my leg until my broken ankle lay at an angle that might allow me to pull it out of the cuff.

My damned sensible shoe made it even harder than it should have been—and I’m saying this as someone who had just intentionally dislocated her hip in the pursuit of getting loose—but in the end, I was able to kick, shake, and contort my foot until it was pointed virtually flat, like I was emulating the world’s most broken ballerina.

Grasping the bottom of the bedframe for leverage, I pulled as hard as I could.

A white-hot sheet of pain cascaded over me, wiping everything else away, and I felt my heel start to slip out of my shoe and through the cuff.

I stopped, panting, and clenched my fingers around the bedframe, hard, like I thought I could just claw my way to freedom.

The immediacy of the pain retreated, leaving only the sharp throb of broken and dislocated bones behind.

That was a pain I could cope with. I braced myself and pulled again.

This time I definitely felt my heel slipping free. I bent my abused knee as far as it would go, and with an anticlimactic pop, my left foot came out of both my shoe and the cuff that held it.

I immediately rolled onto my back, grasping my left thigh with both hands and pulling it upward and inward, until I felt my thigh bone snap back into my hip socket.

The pain accompanying the adjustment was intense enough that I had to bite my lip to stop myself from screaming.

My teeth clacked as they met through my tongue, piercing cleanly through the center, and I gasped, inhaling a salty mouthful of blood.

The taste soothed me, even as it kicked my healing into a higher gear.

It seems wrong that my own blood should be enough to fuel my magic the way it does—somewhat self-cannibalistic, like I’m going to consume myself in the pursuit of a perfect equilibrium that doesn’t exist—but it works, and I’m not going to argue.

With my hip handled, I bent my leg toward myself until I could reach down and grasp my ankle, snapping the bones back into position.

They went easily enough, but I could feel the small tears in the surrounding tissue; they’d already started to heal.

Breaking bones is awful. Rebreaking them because they healed wrong is one of my least favorite ways to abuse my body, which already puts up with enough of my bullshit.

Now that I had both wrists and one ankle free, it was relatively easy to haul myself back onto the bed and reach down to remove my right shoe.

Once this was done, I grasped my right foot and snapped it sharply to the side, breaking the ankle and allowing me to yank my foot out of the cuff.

With this finished I sat up, legs dangling over the edge of the bed, and stretched extravagantly.

Things were about to get a lot less pleasant than a few hours chained to a bed trying not to wet myself.

As if in answer to the thought, the baby rolled over and kicked me in the kidneys. I winced.

“Chill, kiddo,” I said. “We need to find a weapon.”

The room didn’t have a lot of options. The bedframe was metal, but so well-assembled that I wasn’t going to get a piece of it without a screwdriver—something I most distinctly didn’t have.

Still, no one had shown up when I started thrashing and banging around, and there was no way that hadn’t been audible from the hall. I had a little time.

I stood cautiously, testing my abused legs.

They twinged as I put my full weight on them, but even with the cuffs blunting my magic, they had healed enough to hold my weight, and I hobbled toward the table where Halcyon had placed the chamber pot before taking it away.

The table was sturdy mahogany. I tipped it up onto two legs, looking critically at the joins.

Then, with a bit more effort than I would have preferred, I flipped it over and sent both it and the chamber pot crashing to the floor.

“Oopsie,” I said, and began viciously kicking the spot where one of the legs joined with the body of the table.

Every kick hurt like hell, but I kept going.

On the third kick, it cracked. On the fourth, it began to tilt dangerously over.

On the fifth, it listed to the side with an almighty snapping sound, and I grabbed it, putting as much of my weight as I dared onto it until it broke off entirely, leaving me with a hefty wooden club.

The jagged splinters making up the larger end were just a bonus.

It was no sword, but I started my career in heroics with a baseball bat, and there was something nice about returning to my roots. I gave it a practice swing, testing the way it felt in my hands, then turned speculatively toward the closed door to the hall.

No time like the present.

The door wasn’t locked. That made a certain amount of sense—why bother locking the door when there’s no way for your captive to escape—but it was still incredibly stupid of the people who were holding me here.

I guess Dame Altair wasn’t a frequent flyer in the “taking local heroes captive” club.

I eased the door open, granting myself a view of the hall, or at least, a narrow slice of the hall.

The d é cor continued here, with plain white wallpaper, an intricately patterned runner rug, and multiple small decorative chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.

They were lit by balls of lambent witch light, not pixies, and for once, I was almost sorry to see a pureblood not abusing our smallest kin as household accessories.

I felt guilty for the thought as soon as it formed, but still.

It would have been incredibly useful to be able to call for help by smashing a few glass balls, and it would have made such a satisfying sound.

Bouquets of panther lilies and ginger cardamom flowers dotted the small tables that appeared periodically along the length of the hall, their blooms perfectly open, unbruised and perfuming the air with a sweet, compelling mix.

It wasn’t a combination I would have considered, but they worked well together.

I stepped out of the room, table leg in hand, and looked around again, scanning for threats.

No one moved. There were three doors I could see along the length of the hall, as well as the one I’d just emerged from, and doors at either end. Those were the most likely to either lead to the way out or to Dame Altair’s private quarters. They could wait.

That left me with three possibilities for finding Quentin.

If I’d been trying to take the two of us captive and had only one hallway where I could reasonably imprison people I had no business abducting—which was, alone, a major assumption—I would have wanted to keep the knight and her squire as far apart as possible.

With this in mind, I crossed the hall and went to the door farthest down from my own.

It wasn’t locked either. If I hadn’t already hated these people, I would have felt the need to lecture them on operational security.

Easing the door open, I looked carefully inside. There was another bed like the one I’d been bound to, and Quentin was there, tied to the four corners of the bed and clearly pissed off about it. He was glaring at the ceiling, jaw set in a stubborn line, hands balled into fists.

“I’m not telling you anything ,” he spat. “You can go and tell your mistress that she’s made the biggest mistake of her life, and I’m not telling her anything .”

“That’s cool,” I said, easing the door shut again behind me.

“I don’t think I want to hear anything you haven’t told me already, since you’re a grown-up now and the only thing we really don’t talk about is your sex life.

Whatever it is you and Dean get up to, I would really prefer not to know, if that’s all right with you. ”

His eyes widened as the first words left my mouth, and he whipped his head around, staring at me instead of the ceiling over his head. “Toby?” he squeaked. “Promise?”

“Hang on,” I said, and bit my lip, swallowing the blood and closing my eyes.

The smell of my magic rose around me. Quentin was good enough at reading magical signatures that smelling me in the process of spellcasting should be easily sufficient to confirm my identity… if this was Quentin, of course.

Pulling the blood toward the part of me that burned it for power, I looked at the bed without using my eyes, studying the shape of the person inside it.

There were no cotton candy threads of magic wrapped around his outline; this was either Quentin or a true shapeshifter, not someone wearing a disguise.

True shapeshifters are mercifully rare, and after my last encounter with a community of Doppelgangers, I don’t think they’d mess with me by impersonating my squire, even if someone offered to pay. I opened my eyes and smiled wearily at Quentin.

“Promise,” I said. “You satisfied?”