Page 38 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

“How the hell is Dugan still alive ?” asked Quentin.

“We knew he survived cutting his own throat. Arden had him taken into captivity. I guess he got out when everything went to hell.”

“That sucks ,” said Quentin, with surprising fervor. I glanced at him. He was scowling.

“I miss something?”

“I just really hate that guy, is all,” he said petulantly. “I’ve had real trouble finding Daoine Sidhe who could train me in illusions the right way. His illusions are ridiculously strong. Why’d he have to go and be an asshole? I can’t learn illusion magic from an asshole.”

Under any other circumstances, I would have laughed. Instead, I nodded gravely and kept walking down the stairs.

“We can look harder to find you a tutor,” I offered. I had learned many useful things from assholes, but that didn’t make them my first choice in every situation. “Maybe Garm? He’s not Daoine Sidhe, but the principles should be the same.”

Quentin hesitated, then nodded in turn. “That might be a good thing.”

In Titania’s version of Faerie, it wasn’t just that the purebloods were better than the changelings; the Daoine Sidhe were better than all the rest of the fae.

Quentin probably didn’t want to insist on teachers of his own species, because it would edge up too closely upon the values of that other world.

Even gone, Titania was making our choices for us.

I really hated that woman. And not only because she’d killed my best friend.

Titania would have insisted that she’d done no such thing, that Stacy had never been real and was thus impossible for her to have killed, but I knew the truth.

A story you told loudly and clearly enough for long enough could take on a life of its own.

The stairs ended in a narrow, virtually featureless hallway.

I blinked, then kept going, recognizing this as a servant’s corridor, something meant to go unseen by the main occupants of the house.

There was probably another set of stairs that I’d missed, some more respectable route that led to the floor where we’d been held.

It didn’t really matter in the moment. What mattered was getting out.

We passed a kitchen, a dining room, and what was pretty clearly a cellar door, marked with a small wooden sign graven with potatoes and onions.

At the end of the hall was a door taller and nicer than the others.

I motioned for Quentin and Bucer to stay where they were, then crept forward, feeling about as stealthy as a draft horse as I approached the door.

Still, it didn’t open, and no one appeared to accuse me of criminal activity, so I took that for a good sign. Shifting the table leg to my other hand, I reached out and tried the door. Locked. I leaned back against the wall, letting my fingertips rest against the brass doorknob.

“Your mistress drugged and captured us,” I said, voice pitched low.

“It wasn’t very kind, and I’m afraid we’ve damaged some of your furniture getting ourselves loose.

I know it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.

It would be a real help if you could let us out.

At the very least, it would probably go a long way toward our allies not being angry with you over us having been held here.

None of this should reflect back on you.

Your mistress and her brother helped to bring you into the world, but now that you’re here, you should be allowed to make your own choices. What do you think? Can you help us?”

Quentin sighed, muttering, “I hate it when she does this.”

“What is she doing?” asked Bucer.

“She thinks knowes are alive. I think she’s probably right, because this works almost every time. She’s trying to suck up to the knowe so it will let us leave.” Quentin sounded more frustrated than I would have expected. “It’s just weird.”

“Nothing’s weird if it works, kid,” said Bucer.

“Hey, nice knowe, it’d be really swell if you could let us out.

We don’t want to be here any longer. And we’re not really the kind of people your lady likes hanging around with most of the time.

If you let us out, we’ll leave, and she won’t have to worry about us being here any longer. ”

I don’t know whether it was my request or Bucer’s that got through, but I heard a very soft click, and when I tried the knob again, it turned easily under my hand.

I pushed inward. The door swung gently open, revealing a Victorian-themed foyer.

I exhaled, relieved, and stepped through, Bucer and Quentin close behind.

“You are a wonderful knowe,” I said, stroking the wall once I was on the other side of the door.

The knowe didn’t respond, but I felt better about convincing it to go against its owner’s will.

Addressing the knowes with respect is so often a self-serving act, intended to get me out of bad situations, and I always worry a little about getting them in trouble with the people who have actual control over them.

Quentin eased the door closed behind him as he entered the foyer.

I looked carefully around, then started in the direction I judged most likely to lead to the exit.

Knowes have a tendency to shift their layout around when no one’s looking, and most of them seem to take rearranging the rooms on guests—willing or unwilling—as a funny way to do things.

Nothing moved, and the next room after the foyer was a short hall I recognized from our arrival. There was no one between us and the door. I walked faster, and the knob turned easily under my hand, swinging open to reveal the porch.

Cautiously, I stuck my table leg through the open door, swinging it around in a short spiral.

Nothing happened. Bracing myself against whatever traps Dame Altair might have set to keep her captives contained, I extended my free arm through the opening as well.

Again, nothing happened. I relaxed. Yeah, it looked silly for me to test the opening so thoroughly, but better silly than suddenly turned into a frog or whatever.

Dame Altair had never struck me as particularly dangerous in this reality.

In the other reality, when she’d threatened me, she’d run as soon as it looked like there might be consequences.

Now, though, I was rethinking things, especially since Dugan was her brother.

Dugan was no more or less dangerous than most Daoine Sidhe, but he was a fanatic who was willing to do anything for the false queen of the Mists.

With him added to the mix, her escape suddenly made far too much sense.

I turned to Bucer. “Looks like it’s safe,” I said. “You go first.”

“You’re not afraid I’ll run?”

“I’ll be right behind you,” I said, a thin line of danger in my tone.

He paled but nodded, swallowing hard.

Maybe it wasn’t very heroic of me to allow someone else to walk through the doorway first and trigger any lingering traps, but my baby couldn’t consent to me going through the door first, and if it wasn’t going to be me, it wasn’t going to be Quentin, either.

Still pale, Bucer squared his shoulders and stepped through the doorway. Nothing happened, and so I followed him, taking hold of his arm, while Quentin followed me, closing the door behind him. We were out.

So was the sun. Based on the light, it was sometime in the early afternoon, meaning we’d been held captive for somewhere between four and six hours. Tybalt was going to kill me, once he got through checking me over to be sure that I was all right.

Still holding Bucer’s arm, I started down the porch steps, using him for balance until we got to the bottom. Once there, I started to let go, then hesitated. I was forgetting something. What was I—?

The sunlight glinted off the soft hairs on Bucer’s ear, and my breath caught in my throat.

Disguises. I had been so distracted with the need to get out of the knowe, to get away, that I had forgotten about human disguises.

Quentin and I might be able to get away with it—there was nothing blatantly inhuman about us except for our ears, which could be hidden in our hair or passed off as something from a Lord of the Rings costume party. Bucer, though…

Even if his ears had been some sort of headband and his eyes had been really expensive contacts, his legs were anatomically impossible.

There was no amount of costuming skill that could make the bones of a human being bend that way.

I moved so I was standing between Bucer and the street, blocking his body with my own as much as possible.

“Quentin,” I hissed.

He stopped in the process of coming down the stairs to frown at us. Then his eyes widened, and I knew he’d reached the same realization I had.

With the chain wrapped around his wrists, Bucer couldn’t exactly disguise himself.

He didn’t flinch as Quentin raised his hands and chanted something under his breath—probably a verse to some old maritime song, if I knew my squire.

The smell of heather and steel rose around us, wreathing us both in ropes of perfumed air.

Then the spell burst, leaving illusion in its wake.

Bucer suddenly looked like a skinny, sleazy human man. His clothing hadn’t changed, except for the addition of clompy boots with hard plastic soles, which would help to explain the way he sounded when he walked. My ears itched, which told me that Quentin had decided to disguise me at the same time.

Most people enchant me, I get annoyed. My squire does it, I take it as him helping me conserve my magic for what I’m actually good at.

I looked at my hand. I could still feel the table leg clutched there, but it was no longer visible; instead, I appeared to be holding a cellular phone.

Raising an eyebrow, I looked back to Quentin, who shrugged.

“You needed to be holding something to explain the way your fingers were bent, and this seemed better than a popsicle or something,” he said.

“Fair enough,” I allowed. “Weird, but fair.”