Page 41 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

In remarkably short order, all four of us were seated around one of the kitchen tables, platters of sandwiches in front of us and pixies in the rafters overhead.

I didn’t know what Marcia’s fae heritage was—it had never come up, and it was thin enough that my usual trick of breathing it in and rolling it over my tongue didn’t seem to work with her—but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t some sort of hearth fae, Brownie or Hob or the like.

They have natural talents for cooking and keeping things clean, and the way that woman could put together a tray of sandwiches was nothing short of magical.

I picked up a sandwich, peeling back the bread to check its contents. Ham, cheddar cheese, and sliced nectarine. Next to me, Quentin was munching on a chicken salad sandwich with chunks of apple studded through the mixture. Bucer had a more standard roast beef and cheese with ginger spread.

“So what happened?” prompted Marcia.

“The first part is like I told you,” I said.

“Dame Altair hired Bucer to empty the royal vaults. I don’t know how she found them, or whether she somehow knew they were affiliated with the Windermere family despite Titania reworking reality around us, but she did, and instead of going ‘maybe this is something not to touch,’ she went looking for a thief. ”

“Hi,” said Bucer.

Marcia gave him a sidelong, noncommittal look.

“She was expecting there to be a hope chest, and when Bucer didn’t bring her one, she assumed he must have stolen it.”

“Did he?”

“No,” said Bucer, sounding stung. “Why would you think that?”

“You worked for Devin,” said Marcia, holding up one finger.

“He employed you as a pickpocket and petty thief, and you were good enough to graduate from ‘kid’ to ‘associate,’ which even our October never managed.” A second finger.

“Last time we saw you, it was because you’d stolen the crown jewels of Angels, which tells me you’re willing to bite the hand that feeds you.

” A third finger. “You took the job to begin with, when you didn’t know who you were stealing from.

Could have been the crown, like it turned out to be.

Could have been Oberon himself. That shows a certain flexibility of morals that really doesn’t make me think you wouldn’t fence things out from under your employer’s nose. So did you steal the hope chest?”

“No,” said Bucer again. He started to stand. Quentin reached across the table and put a hand on his shoulder, pushing him back down into his seat.

“No,” echoed Quentin, in a much lighter tone. “We untied you so you could eat something. Don’t make me regret that more than I already do.”

There was something to be said for having a squire who was large enough to physically control a prisoner. Bucer slumped in his seat, pouting sullenly at Quentin, who ignored him and went back to eating his sandwich.

“M’not a liar ,” said Bucer. “That’s the one thing I’ve never been.

I’m a crook and a sneak, and I’d steal from my own mother if she hadn’t stopped her dancing after my dad took me into the Summerlands, but I don’t lie unless there’s a profit to be made from it.

S’why I get caught so damned often. Can’t keep a secret if you won’t tell a lie. ”

“Huh,” I said, and took another bite of my sandwich. “I met someone you might like recently. Her name’s Bahey, and she’s an Adhene.”

“There’s an Adhene in the Kingdom?” Bucer sat up straighter, ears twitching.

I raised an eyebrow. “Nervous?”

“Delighted! If we can get me in front of an Adhene, Dame Altair will have to believe me when I say I didn’t steal the hope chest and fence it on the side. She’ll let me come back to her household.”

I lowered my sandwich, turning to fully stare at him. Bucer blinked.

“What?”

“Why are you so excited about going back to the household of a woman who poisoned me, tied you up, and left you in a room you couldn’t escape from on your own?”

Bucer shrugged. “I don’t really have anyplace else to go,” he said.

“Home’s gone, and since Lily passed, there’s not a real independent demesne in Golden Gate Park.

No one’s managed to force open a new knowe.

The people who are there are just trying to stay alive.

They don’t have anyone to champion them, not really.

We need someone who’s willing to look out for the independents. ”

“And you think Dame Altair is going to be that someone?”

Bucer snorted. “Hell, no. She hates changelings, she thinks fae who don’t serve a noble household are filthy and beneath her, and she’d pave the whole park for a dollar.

But she has a position. She has power. And if I could worm my way deep enough into her household, I might be able to change her mind. ”

Meaning if he could use his compulsion magic on her long enough, he might be able to bring her away to his way of thinking. It was underhanded and wrong, and it might be the only chance some of the people trying to survive in Golden Gate Park without a champion had. Faerie can be a cruel mistress.

“Would her brother ever let that happen?” asked Quentin. “We can’t all sit here and pretend that we didn’t see Dugan while we were making his escape.”

Marcia gaped at him, and then at me. “Harrow?” she squeaked. “Dugan Harrow is back in the Mists?”

“He is, and it seems he’s Dame Altair’s brother,” I said. “Which somehow no one ever bothered to mention to me before.”

She slumped in her seat. “Everyone in Faerie is related one way or another if you’re willing to go back far enough.

There are only so many Firstborn, and their kids married each other, or at least dallied, enough that it’s less a family tree and more a family thorn briar.

Why do we value some family connections and not others? ”

Her question was a fair one. I’d never known Marcia to say anything about her family, either fae or human.

I didn’t know how old she was, or how long she’d been in Faerie—time can get a little squishy in the Summerlands.

She looked like she was somewhere in her twenties, but she looked like that before Simon turned me into a fish, back in the mid-nineties.

She could be a hundred years old. She could be older.

And she was looking at me like the question I couldn’t answer was breaking her heart. I sighed.

“I guess some of the purebloods modeled their ideas of family so closely after the humans that they latched on to the thought that brothers and sisters matter more than cousins, and spread it through Faerie,” I said, hesitantly. “Like blood only matters up until a certain degree of removal.”

“I hate it,” Marcia said, more sharply than I would have expected. “It’s stupid and it’s wrong and I hate it. Dugan’s her brother? Let me guess, she’s sheltering him.”

“Him and, I suspect, the false Queen,” I said grimly.

“What?”

“We know his illusions are remarkably strong, and he has some of her supply of borrowed magic from back when she was in power and he was one of her favorites—the kind of little tricks Simon used to make for his owner, the ones that use a little bit of someone else’s blood to make their powers temporarily accessible.

So we don’t actually know what Dugan is capable of, just that he’s in the Kingdom right now, and maybe in my house. ”

“What,” said Marcia again. It wasn’t a question this time. She looked right at me, squinting a little.

“After we broke out of Dame Altair’s, we went back to my place to regroup and tell Tybalt what had happened,” I said. “But when we got there, we were already inside. Someone who looked just like me opened the door. So I’m assuming it’s the two of them under illusion spells.”

“And you just… left?”

I blinked at her. “Yeah?”

“And you didn’t think anything was strange about that? About you being willing to just… leave?”

“May’s indestructible, and Tybalt can take care of himself,” I said.

“And are May and Tybalt the only people in the house?”

“No,” I admitted, more slowly. “Raysel’s in there, and Spike. And my cats.”

“Uh-huh.” Marcia nodded exaggeratedly, like she was trying to make a small child understand her point. “And don’t you think you should have been worried about them, not just left them there with dangerous people?”

“Maybe.” I took another bite of my sandwich.

It was a good sandwich. Marcia always made good sandwiches.

I’d have to ask her sometime how she could do that so effortlessly.

In her hands, ingredients even I would have thought couldn’t possibly go together could somehow be combined into a coherent, delicious whole.

“I don’t think ‘maybe’ is good enough here, Toby.” She turned her attention to Bucer. “You want to cut this shit out before I summon my liege and make you face him ? Because Dean’s originally from the Undersea, and he doesn’t have a lot of tolerance for this sort of thing.”

Quentin frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“I know you squires are always eager to graduate and become knights in your own right, but believe me when I say that one of the best parts of being a squire is that none of this is your problem: Toby’s the one who gets to deal with it.

You get to sit back and eat your sandwich and be decorative. Play to your strengths.”

Quentin wrinkled his nose at her. “Why do I feel vaguely like I’ve just been insulted?”

“Because you’re smarter than you’re acting right now,” said Marcia kindly. She turned her attention back to me. “Toby. Think. Why did you leave your people to take care of themselves when you were right there to try and help them?”

I couldn’t think of a good reason. I also couldn’t think of a good reason why I wouldn’t have done that. I just blinked at her.

Marcia heaved a heavy sigh and stood. “Wait right there,” she said. “All three of you. Bucer, you are not allowed to get up and run away while my back is turned, and if you try, Toby will have the clarity to stop you. Do you understand me? This is not your opportunity to escape.”