Page 34 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

“Freshly cut grass and copper that’s halfway to becoming blood,” he said. “Yeah, it’s you. Do you think it’s going to go all the way to blood?”

“Maybe eventually,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

“Like someone’s been using my head as a punching bag,” he said. “That creepy Candela who works for Altair brought me some sort of antidote. It tasted even worse than the things the Luidaeg comes up with. I can still feel it coating my molars. But I stopped throwing up after that.”

That explained the faint smell that lingered in the air, sick and sweet at the same time. I grimaced.

“I didn’t get an antidote; I guess they figured I wouldn’t need it,” I said. “I think I might be glad to have been the somewhat neglected prisoner.”

Quentin’s eyes widened in alarm. “You didn’t—the baby.”

“Is fine,” I assured him. “Looks like they found a way to test whether or not the kiddo would heal the way I do, and it looks like we have a winner in the ‘whose magic is going to come out dominant’ competition. Baby and I are both fine.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I can know it well enough to keep standing, and to get myself free,” I said, slapping the chair leg against my palm to punctuate my words. “Do you want me to let you up, or do you want to keep trying to upset me when I’m already having a lousy night?”

“Up, please,” said Quentin immediately.

I crossed the room to study the cuffs on his wrists.

They were of a different composition than mine had been, less yarrow, more silver.

I wondered, briefly, what the balance meant.

I’d never studied the interactions of the Sacred Woods closely enough to know what shifting the proportions would do.

That was more of an alchemist thing. Silently, I vowed to ask Walther what the way the cuffs had been woven meant.

It was a good promise to make to myself.

Among other things, it meant I was promising to get out of here without actually making the mistake of thinking the words. It can be dangerous to tempt fate that way.

The cuffs were locked, and I scowled, casting around for anything I could use as a pick.

There wasn’t much—this room was as barren as mine had been—and I was about to go back for the flowers I’d seen in the hall when I shifted positions and something dug into the side of my breast, hard enough to hurt.

I yelped and stuck my hand down my shirt.

Quentin blinked at me. “Uh, Toby?” he asked. “You okay over there?”

“I’m fine, I just—” I pulled my hand out of my shirt, clutching the little shell knife in its little shell sheath. I blinked at it. “Where the hell did you come from?”

The knife didn’t answer.

“What is it?”

“The Luidaeg gave me a knife. I guess I wanted it more when I needed to get you loose than when I was trying to free myself.” I’d think about that one later. Or maybe never. Never might be the way to go.

Pulling the small knife out of its sheath, I turned to picking the locks.

They weren’t complex. The magic of the cuffs, combined with the way they were used, was supposed to supply most of the security.

It only took me a minute or so to free Quentin.

He sat up, rubbing his wrists as he tried to ease the circulation back into his hands, and watched me unfasten the cuffs on his ankles. “You’re covered in blood,” he said.

“Unavoidable side effect of getting myself loose,” I said. “If Dame Altair employs a Bannick, we can ask them to clean me up before Tybalt sees.”

“Why isn’t he here yet? I don’t know how long we were out, but I feel like he should have freaked out and come looking for us ages ago.”

“Halcyon—the creepy Candela—told me Dame Altair had sealed the knowe against the Shadow Roads. Candela usually teleport through their edges, so them being sealed would explain why she’s going everywhere on foot, and it would definitely keep Tybalt out.”

“It would stop him from coming in without an invitation, but what stops him from ringing the doorbell?”

That was a good question. I paused, frowning.

The location of Dame Altair’s knowe was well-known throughout San Francisco, if not the entire kingdom, and Tybalt was still King of Cats, with a virtual army of feline spies answering to his call.

Quentin and I had gone out and not come back again, and it had been long enough for even Quentin to wake up on his own.

What was there to stop Tybalt from getting tired of waiting and marching down to the house to find out where we were?

The two remaining closed doors suddenly seemed much more concerning.

“See if you can get your own table leg,” I recommended. “There are two more doors in this hallway. I’m going to go see what’s behind them.”

“Or you could wait three minutes and we could go together,” said Quentin, sounding exasperated. He didn’t move to stop me as I turned back toward the door, though, only slid off of the bed and moved to knock his own side table to the floor.

Maybe we were going to get out of this with no further trouble.

The first room I checked was empty. The second stopped me in my tracks, because there was a man inside, bound to the bed as both Quentin and I had been.

He was tall, skinny to the point of being scrawny, and while he was bipedal, the outline of his body wasn’t entirely human.

From the thigh down, he had the legs of the largest goat that had ever lived, complete with scraggly brown fur and black cloven hooves.

His ears were equally goat-like, dangling well past the line of his jaw.

Unlike a Satyr, he didn’t have any horns, only a smooth brow and a receding hairline that was mostly notable in relation to how hairy the rest of him was.

His clothing was worn and threadbare, combining shorts that stopped just below the knee with a T-shirt that would have been vintage if it hadn’t been barely better than a rag, the marijuana leaf printed on the front so faded that it looked more like the pawprint of some unknown creature.

His face was turned toward the wall, but he was awake: I could tell from the tension in his neck, the way his jaw was clenched. He knew he wasn’t alone.

For a moment, I considered turning around and going back into the hall. If Bucer O’Malley was here, we probably knew who’d been stealing all Arden’s things, and there was very little Dame Altair could do to him that he wouldn’t inevitably deserve. Only for a moment, though.

I didn’t like the man. That didn’t mean he deserved to be left captive to a woman who thought nothing of poisoning her guests, violating half a dozen rules of hospitality in the process.

There was no Law against it if the poisoning wasn’t fatal, but Faerie doesn’t operate on law most of the time.

It operates on customs, traditions, and rules, and all the rules about hospitality said that once Quentin and I had been welcomed into the knowe, we should have been untouchable until we either offered some offense or a certain amount of time had passed.

Unless Dame Altair’s knowe was one of the kind where an hour was a day, we hadn’t been there remotely long enough to have worn out our welcome.

There’s no specific time frame for hospitality unless it’s stated during the offer or acceptance of same.

Even so, poisoning your guests is generally frowned upon, even when they aren’t there on behalf of the local regent, and letting Dame Altair hang on to her other victims didn’t suit my sense of justice.

I started toward the bed. “I can let you go, but you have to promise not to attack me or try to use your stupid persuasion magic on me,” I said. “I’m really not in the mood to be charmed. If you can promise me that you won’t, I can release you.”

Bucer’s head whipped around so fast that he hit himself in the face with one of his own ears, eyes wide as he stared at me.

I lifted an eyebrow and looked impassively back.

Unusual eyes are nothing strange in Faerie, odd as that statement may seem: enough of us have animal attributes that pupils can come in all shapes and sizes, and many descendant lines seem to view sclera as entirely optional.

Even so, Bucer’s horizontally slit pupils were always a little unsettling to look at.

All the more so because I wasn’t seeing him on a regular basis anymore, and hadn’t since we’d both left Home.

“October?” he managed, finally. His voice was as squeaky and thin as it had always been, his tone that of a man who’d been born to cringe and grovel his way through life. Hearing it was like someone running their fingernails along a chalkboard.

I ground my teeth, not letting him see how much I didn’t want to be in this room.

“It’s still Toby, Bucer,” I said. I used to hit people to reinforce how much I didn’t want to be called by my full name.

But that was a long time ago, and I didn’t do that anymore.

Bucer had been out of my life for a while.

He might not realize that I’d learned some basic self-control, and I wasn’t going to inform him.

“Toby,” he echoed, not a question this time, but with dawning belief, like he was coming to accept that I was really here. His eyes flicked down to my bloodied belly for a moment, then back to my face. “You got…”

“Careful how you go,” I said.

“… really fat,” he finished. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

“And you got caught,” I said. “I always knew I’d see the day, but I thought when it finally arrived, you’d be smart enough to not antagonize the person who might be able to release you.”

“How do you know I’m not here because I want to be?”

“Oh, are you? My mistake.” I began to turn away.

“Wait!” he yelped.

I looked back to Bucer. “Yes?”

“I’m not here because I want to be.”

“I didn’t assume you were,” I said, and started toward the bed. “What happened? Why are you here?”

He shrugged as much as his bonds would allow, expression turning shifty. “It’s not important.”