Page 47 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

FOURTEEN

G OLDENGREEN WASN’T A MARTIAL county, and as far as I was aware, had never been involved with a war, declared or otherwise.

And for all of that, it was a county controlled by our first landed noble from the Undersea, whose domains were traditionally submerged.

Faerie wasn’t as bloodthirsty as it was said to be in the histories and old stories, but the threat of violence was always there, and Dean had grown up in the depths.

He knew what it meant to defend his home, and he was always prepared to do so.

All of which went to explain why Goldengreen, a relatively small holding, had an armory almost as large as the one in Shadowed Hills.

Racks of polearms and longswords stood alongside hanging bows and veritable piles of short swords, knives, and other weaponry.

I could have fit out an army from that room.

After a few moments to stand there and contemplate the amount of damage the armory’s contents could do, I’d grabbed a baldrick large enough to be worn by a centaur and strapped it on, drawing it tight enough to stay on without pinching me, and filled the sheath on either side with knives taken from the seemingly limitless pile.

After another moment’s contemplation, I’d added a short sword to my haul and stepped back, secure in my conviction that I could defend myself if necessary.

Quentin had been quicker. He’d skipped the knives entirely, going straight for the short swords and strapping one to his hip with the quick, efficient motions of someone who was getting all too accustomed to the need to arm himself in a hurry.

I had even allowed Bucer a weapon, a short staff that would hurt like hell if he rapped someone in the knuckles with it, but wasn’t going to turn the tide of battle on its own.

He seemed to feel better with some sort of weapon in his hands, and since he was coming with us, that made things easier on me.

I ducked off to the bathroom once we were all armed, to pee and clean myself up after my unpleasant chamber pot experience back at Dame Altair’s knowe.

Marcia met us at the exit with a bag of additional sandwiches and we were off, our illusions refreshed to conceal the number of weapons we were now carrying.

Quentin had even remembered to tell Dean about my foxing the museum staffer, and gotten an assurance that the registers would balance at the end of the day.

Sometimes it’s good to be friends with the people in charge.

We walked through the empty, silent museum, unnoticed by the motion sensors and bathed in the moonlight through the windows, out the seemingly locked doors which opened easily at our approach, and into the parking lot, where my car was parked.

Crickets chirped from the grass around the parking lot as I unlocked the car and bent to peer inside, verifying that no one had broken into the backseat while we were busy inside. Bucer scoffed but didn’t try to interrupt me, while Quentin checked the other side of the car. I opened my door.

“Bucer, you get in the back,” I said.

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll bop you with my stick?” he asked.

“Should I be? Because if you think I should be, then the correct answer is probably taking the stick away.” I managed to sound more exhausted than annoyed. That was a nice trick.

I wedged myself into the driver’s seat and rubbed my stomach where it pressed against the steering wheel, trying to reassure myself that everything was all right, and this was going to be over soon.

“You okay in there, kiddo?” I asked, bending my head slightly to make it obvious to Bucer and Quentin that I wasn’t talking to them.

Although it would have been weird for me to call Bucer “kiddo,” since I was a year younger than he was, and Quentin was so used to it that he wouldn’t bat an eye at the address.

Indeed, Quentin slid into the passenger seat, slamming the door so hard it shook the whole car. “Dibs on the radio,” he said.

“You can’t dibs the radio,” I said.

“Sure can. Just did. Want me to do it again?”

I rolled my eyes and twisted the wires to start the engine, pulling out of the lot while Quentin flicked through the radio stations, seeking his beloved Canadian folk music.

April had arranged satellite radio for the car on his most recent birthday, and despite the fact that we didn’t have a subscription for anything of the kind, it worked.

Settling on a station, Quentin relaxed into his seat and stole a glance over at me.

“They’re going to be just fine,” he said.

“I know. But I still feel terrible for leaving them the way we did, even if it wasn’t entirely our choice.”

In the rearview mirror, I saw Bucer wince and shoot an apologetic look in my direction.

“That would work better if I actually thought you were sorry, Bucer,” I said.

“I am sorry,” he protested.

“Sorry you did it, or sorry you got caught?”

He didn’t have an answer to that one. I snorted.

“Yeah, about what I thought,” I said.

“You have to understand, Toby, not all of us are heroes here,” he said. “Some of us are just trying to do whatever we can to keep body and spirit together, and we’re not here to play chicken with certain doom.”

“Neither am I,” I said sourly. “Hero, yes, trying to get myself killed, no. I’ve been out of commission for months, and I wasn’t planning to go back into the field now. I wouldn’t be here if the queen hadn’t made it difficult for me to refuse.”

“We both learned a lot about taking orders from Devin,” said Bucer. “I learned how much I hate it, you learned to look for someone else to hold the leash.”

“Hey!” snapped Quentin. “You don’t get to talk to her like that.”

“It’s okay, Quentin. Let him sulk because I grew up and he didn’t. He’s just pissed off that he decided it was better to steal and run than to find a way to stand within Faerie’s hierarchy.”

“You hate Faerie’s hierarchy.”

“Yes, and Bucer is a great example of the reason I choose to be a part of it anyway. Him, and the people like him, who decided that hating it meant they didn’t need to do anything to try making it better.

I may not be able to change the way the whole world works, but I can change enough to make things a little bit better for people like me.

And some days, that’s enough. Some nights, that’s everything. ”

It was late enough that the first part of our drive had been smooth and relatively quick, but we were approaching the part of the city where “late enough” only existed between three a.m. and sunrise.

Cars began to crowd the streets, and red lights blinked menacingly from atop the traffic cameras, alerting wary drivers to the presence of traffic cameras.

I took one hand off the wheel and slapped the roof of the car, chanting, “Give me roses red, my lovely, give me lilies fair, give to me a darling girl with violets in her hair.”

The smell of cut grass and copper rose to fill the cab, stronger than it would have been even a year before, if still tinged inexorably with my mortality.

The spell built and then burst. I tested it by hitting the gas a little harder and cutting off the mortal driver in the next lane, sliding in front of him without using blinker or brake lights to signal my intentions.

The driver didn’t react, just kept on going as if that hadn’t happened, and I smiled. My don’t-look-here was good enough to get us where we were going.

Bucer, on the other hand, yelped. “What are you doing ?” he demanded.

“You know defensive driving?”

“Yes…”

“The opposite of that.”

The spell I’d cast would make it difficult for other drivers to notice or care about my car, without removing it entirely from their awareness: they knew someone was on the road with them, just not any details about the other car.

If I ran a red light, the resulting picture would come out blurry and without any identifying marks the police could use to track me down.

The technology would probably advance beyond such simple spells eventually, but until it did, this would be enough to get me where I was going.

I pressed the gas pedal down as far as it would go, the car leaping forward with a snarl and a shake, the wheel shuddering in my hands as I pushed the machine to the absolute limits of its endurance. We were going fast enough that every cop in San Francisco should have been on my tail.

We screeched up the driveway of the house fast enough that I risked losing control of the car. I killed the engine when I saw the kitchen lights on, a knot letting go in my stomach. They weren’t answering the phone but someone was home, even if it wasn’t necessarily someone I wanted to deal with.

“Toby, wait—” began Quentin, but I was already out of the car, moving with a speed I was under no illusions of being able to sustain. In that moment, I didn’t care.

I released the illusion on myself as I stormed up the back steps to the kitchen door, glad that I’d recast my own human disguise before leaving Goldengreen.

The door was closed and, naturally, locked.

I hammered my fist against it, paused to listen for footsteps, and then hammered again as no one moved anywhere beyond the door.

I was on my third round of hammering, and giving serious thought to having a proper panic attack, when I heard someone approaching. I stopped and stepped back, hand on the hilt of my borrowed sword. If I was going to get into a fight, I was going in armed this time.

The lock clicked. The door eased open, just a crack, and Rayseline’s pale, worried face appeared, golden eyes bright with tears and filled with wary trepidation.

“Prove it,” she said, not pausing to ask who I was or let me offer any excuses.

Dame Altair had dropped the charade at some point, then, enough to frighten Raysel into this sort of reaction—but not enough to stop her from opening the door. That was probably a good sign, given the things she could have done.