Page 52 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

I bit the inside of my cheek and squinted at the darkness in the doorway, looking for ward spells or anything that might sound an alarm.

I didn’t find them. There were no threads stretched across the doorframe, no enchantments lurking in wait for us to come back to the scene of the crime.

I hadn’t checked the wards when I arrived; I couldn’t tell whether they had never been there in the first place, or whether Dame Altair had allowed them to collapse.

Either way, what wasn’t there couldn’t hurt us. I took one last quick glance around for witnesses, then stepped into the house, making the transition into the knowe at the same time.

The room spun and wove around me, and I was standing in the hall.

It was identical to its appearance in the mortal world, save for the light.

From the porch, the hall had seemed completely dark, filled with shadows that omitted even moonlight.

In the Summerlands, twilight pooled in the corners of the hall, coming in through high windows set against the line of the ceiling and refracted by prismatic crystals hung from the chandeliers.

I wondered, somewhat uselessly, whether the mortal side of Dame Altair’s home had any furnishings at all.

If I could wiggle through a window or come in through the back door, would I find myself in an empty house, set up entirely for show? It seemed likely.

Quentin and Bucer came in behind me, Spike rattling at their heels with every step. The rose goblin sniffed the floor and rattled again, making any attempt at stealth even more pointless than it had seemed before.

“I don’t think anyone is here,” I said, voice low.

“Neither do I,” said Quentin. He made a scooping gesture with one hand, like he was collecting a handful of bubbles from a bubble bath.

It turned into a tossing gesture as he finished the initial motion, and he threw a ball of lambent witch light into the air, where it hung and bobbed and cast a pale white illumination over everything around it.

I nodded approvingly. Fae have excellent night vision, but even excellent night vision isn’t great when it comes to looking for clues in a room filled with shifting, irregular shadows.

“Bucer, you were here for a while before you decided to bite the hand that paid you,” I said. “Any idea where she would go to conduct business or plot evil?”

“Her study,” said Bucer. “I can lead you there.”

“Good. I was hoping you’d volunteer. So much simpler than my needing to twist your arm until you understand the value of cooperation.”

“I’m cooperating!” he protested.

“For now,” said Quentin darkly.

Bucer shot him an irritated look and started walking deeper into the knowe, Spike close on his heels. The rattling would make the pair of them easy to track, even if the rugs muffled Bucer’s hoofbeats.

Quentin and I exchanged a look and went after them, working our way down the hall and through a palatial parlor—not the one where we’d been poisoned; there seemed to be a plethora of parlors—and into a receiving room, which gave way to another hall.

It was difficult to say how much of this was the original floor plan, and how much of it was the knowe showing off how many rooms it had for company.

I got the sense that Dame Altair didn’t have a lot of visitors, and the ones she had probably weren’t overly interested in admiring the architecture.

I ran a hand along the wall as we walked, fingertips trailing against the wallpaper and skimming over the decorative flourishes in the architecture.

Very quietly, I said, “It feels like she’s abandoned you, and I’m sorry.

But please. We’re looking for my husband and my sister.

If she brought them here, can you turn on a light for me?

Just one little light. I’ll find them if you tell me to start looking.

Otherwise, I don’t think there’s anyone here but us. ”

Nothing changed. The air around me seemed to grow heavier, like I had the knowe’s attention, but no lights came on, and nothing else happened. I sighed, then turned as I felt a hand on my arm.

Quentin was looking at me with concern. “We’ll find them,” he said. “I know we will. Once Madden gets here, we’ll know if they were ever here, and we’ll find them.”

“I know,” I said. “I just hate everything about this.”

Bucer at least seemed to know where he was going. As we got deeper and deeper into the knowe without hearing any voices or seeing any lights apart from Quentin’s witchlights, my belief that we were alone got steadily stronger.

“Here,” said Bucer.

He opened another door, and behind it was a parlor, decorated entirely in leather and dark woods, with bookshelves swallowing one wall entirely and a large desk dominating the whole space, sitting in front of the only window. It, too, was empty.

“Madden should be here soon,” said Quentin, following me and Bucer into the parlor.

“We left so much blood on the porch, he’s not going to have any trouble finding us,” I said. “Can you toss one of those lights over here? I want to go through the desk.”

Quentin obliged, tossing another ball of lambent white over to hang above the desk. I allowed myself to collapse heavily into the large leather chair between the desk and the window and tried the top drawer. It was locked. Pulling the last thorn out of my pocket, I got back to work.

Altair didn’t invest any more heavily in desk locks than she did in door locks, and it wasn’t long before I heard the click that meant the lock was open.

I removed the thorn and eased the drawer gingerly open, watching for traps.

Not well enough, it seemed, as a needle flashed abruptly out from the drawer’s edge, biting into the side of my hand.

I swore, dropping the drawer onto the desk and yanking the needle out.

It burned with the specific sickening wrongness of cold iron, and I dropped it in turn, recoiling.

Leave it to someone who would willingly ally with the pretender queen to think that iron was a reasonable reaction to someone invading her privacy.

The needle wasn’t hollow: it hadn’t been delivering poison, only itself.

I rubbed the side of my hand, watching the skin around the puncture grow rapidly red and inflamed, then turned my attention back to the drawer.

The damage, such as it was, had been done, and that little iron wasn’t going to be enough to hurt me or the baby; I needed to just get on with things.

“Don’t touch that,” I snapped, and reached for the drawer.

There were no further traps, and after all that, it contained nothing but a black leather ledger. I pulled it carefully out, wary of further traps, and flipped it gingerly open. “Maybe she left us something useful,” I said.

The pages were blank. I sniffed the air.

Traces of black clove and cardamom lingered around the ledger—Dame Altair’s magic and Dugan’s.

They were both Daoine Sidhe. I bit my lip, looking for the threads of an enchantment.

I found them this time, a faded mass of orange and brick red, but when I reached for them, there was nothing there.

It wasn’t a spell I could easily untangle, especially if I couldn’t get my hands on it.

“Toby?” asked Quentin. “What is it?”

“She’s spelled this ledger somehow,” I said.

“But it’s faded out and distant, like it’s barely here.

Like it’s—” I paused, sudden thoughts of Marcia flashing to the front of my mind.

I frowned. “Like it’s a marshwater charm of some sort,” I concluded.

“I can’t catch hold of it because the magic is too far removed from my own.

It’s weak enough that it’s like I’m trying to pick up a grape with a steam shovel. I can’t aim that small.”

“That’s a weird problem to have,” said Bucer.

“It is,” I agreed. Dame Altair and her brother were both Daoine Sidhe, meaning almost anything they did would be rooted in blood magic. That was their natural comfort zone. That was also the basis for all Simon’s magic-borrowing charms. Blood was the common link.

I looked speculatively at the thorn I’d used to pick the desk lock. It had been dulled by the process, but it was still more than sharp enough to draw blood if I really needed it to.

“Quentin, start searching the room for anything out of place,” I said, still looking at the thorn. “I’m going to try something with this ledger, but we don’t want to miss something just because I decided to focus on the most obvious clue.”

“All right,” he said reluctantly, stepping away from the desk.

“No one leaves this room,” I said, perhaps needlessly. It’s always better to make clear statements than it is to count on common sense. I speak from experience as much as anything else.

While Quentin moved to start checking the bookshelves on the other side of the room, I jabbed myself in the index finger with the thorn, pushing down until I broke skin. A bead of blood formed on my fingertip, gleaming and perfect.

Carefully, I reached down and streaked the blood across the page, trying to focus on how much I didn’t want an illusion to stop me from seeing what was written there.

It wasn’t a normal application of my magic, but if this was a blood-based marshwater charm—and from the smell of it, that was a reasonable guess at what I was dealing with—I might be able to overload it and wipe it away.