Page 56 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

SEVENTEEN

W E ALL STARED, ESPECIALLY Madden, who shifted positions to lean against my leg and whine unhappily.

“Grandmother,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice level. “Assuming you are my grandmother, after I chose your daughter’s ex-husband in the divorce. I guess legalities don’t change blood, as much as we might wish they would. I had no idea you were here.”

“You wouldn’t,” she said. “I know you understand marshwater magic better than most of your kind, October, but what you don’t understand is what it’s capable of being, when you have the right ingredients. Sunlight obscures things from the fae. Walk in the light of day and you can go unseen forever.”

“Quentin, get behind me,” I said, voice low.

Quentin blinked at me, mouth opening like he wanted to object, but the habits of obedience that had been ingrained in him by his time as my squire were momentarily stronger than his stubbornness.

He stepped behind me. It was a futile gesture, since he was taller than I was and had been for some time now.

Still, it made me feel a little better to have something between him and her. Even if that something was my body.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

She scoffed. “I thought you just admitted that this was my place, deeded to me long ago, and forbidden to all of Faerie. I could be asking you the same question, but with much more authority on my side of things. You shouldn’t have come beyond the wall, October. You know better than that.”

“I know my husband has been taken, and the blood trail left by his captors led me here.”

“Wasn’t that your excuse last time? That the blood trail left by my daughter had led you to my holdings, past the door that was never to be opened, into the air that was never yours to breathe?

Either you’re lying, or you’re no good at holding on to your family, because this is sheer carelessness, to lose so many in such a short time. ”

I clenched my jaw against all the hurtful, hateful things I wanted to say in response to her. “I thought we were getting along these days,” I said, almost desperately. “For Gillian’s sake, I thought we were trying.”

“I was trying,” countered my grandmother.

“I was trying to let you in, to let you be a part of her life, and to believe that Faerie wasn’t here to steal everything away from me one more time.

And then she went with you on a trip across the sea, deep into Faerie, and she came back to me no more human than a houseplant.

Do you know what that’s like? To let someone else walk away with your daughter and get a cheap replacement in her place?

No. Of course you wouldn’t know. When you had a daughter, you couldn’t vanish fast enough.

You only came back when all the hard work was done. ”

“That’s not true!” Gillian was the only reason I couldn’t fully forgive Simon for what he’d done to me, couldn’t fully relax into the idea that my fourteen lost years had eventually been a good thing.

Gillian was two years old when I disappeared from her life.

Two years old, my little fairy tale, and I had never wanted to leave her, and I would still have given up everything to have her back again, to be returned to the life that had been stolen from me.

But time doesn’t run backward, not even in Faerie, and Gillian had grown up believing I was a deadbeat who’d deserted her, calling another woman “Mom”—calling Janet “Mom”—and turning to her when she was lost or lonely.

We’d been rebuilding a relationship. It was never going to be the one we should have had.

“You promised me you wouldn’t take her away, that you weren’t here to steal her, and yet the first chance you had, you swept her into your world with no way back to me.

” She shook her head, expression one of pure disgust. “You ruined her. Faerie ruined her, even as it ruined you. Gone for months without a word. She still won’t tell me where she was, only says she didn’t have a choice and changes the subject. ”

“… oh, no.” Titania’s enchantment had caused most humans to forget anything related to Faerie that had ever touched on their lives.

Bridget’s renters had disappeared for the spell’s duration, and while I was sure they’d had issues returning to their lives once things were returned to normal, they hadn’t noticed the gap.

But Janet wasn’t an ordinary mortal anymore.

Maeve had cursed her after she broke the Ride, freezing her in place in a way that humans weren’t meant to be held.

She could probably still die—she was still mortal—but she didn’t age, and Faerie’s tricks rarely worked on her.

One Queen had cursed her, and the other had swept her adopted daughter away. Could the second’s spells supersede the first’s? I had been assuming yes, if I thought about her at all. And maybe I’d been wrong.

Janet nodded, looking quietly smug. “You thought I wouldn’t notice that she was gone for four months?

That you were nowhere to be found for the same amount of time?

You promised you weren’t here to turn her against me, and God forgive me, I stood by while you dragged her an inch at a time into Faerie. ”

“Blame me if you need to, but Tybalt and May didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “Give them back.”

“Why do you assume I have them?”

“Because the people you’ve been paying to rob the kingdom while no one was looking brought them here to you,” I said. “I don’t know why you’ve been doing that, but I want my family back.”

Because this garden was where I’d seen the sun-apples before, where they still grew in the mortal world. And her initials, in her current mortal identity, were M.M., for Miranda Marks. The woman who’d married Gillian’s father in order to take my place. I should have made the connection sooner.

Janet smiled, bitterly. “Funny,” she said. “That’s all I ever wanted, too. Maybe we’re more similar than I thought we were, granddaughter. Faerie’s stolen so much from me, I can’t possibly steal from Faerie. I’m just taking payment with interest for what I never agreed to give.”

“Give me back my family.”

“Or what?” She tilted her head to the side, still smiling. “You’ll stab me with that sword you’re carrying? You’ll let your replacement child stab me? I don’t think that can kill me, but you’re welcome to try. Prove that the fae are monsters. Attack your own flesh and blood. Do it.”

“I could handle her for you,” said Walther, quietly. “She’s not my flesh and blood. I could take care of things without proving anything about monsters.”

“That’s a very kind offer,” I said. “But no. We’re not going to fight her. Bucer?”

“Yeah?”

“Remember the Luidaeg said no more passive effects; you’d have to try?” I grasped the bracelet on my left wrist with my right hand, twisting it until I worked it over past my thumb, then pulled it entirely off. I reached around and offered it to Walther.

Quentin, catching my line of thought, removed one of his own bracelets and handed it to Madden.

“Put those on,” I said, voice low and urgent. Walther blinked and slid the bracelet on without objection. Madden held his bracelet in his jaws like it was a chew toy.

Bucer looked at me, apparently confused, then nodded and turned to Janet.

“I don’t think you’re thinking this through,” he said.

The air around us began to swim with the faint smell of pine and damp linen.

It was thinner than it should have been, like it was being filtered through a screen, but it was distinctly there.

Without the Luidaeg’s bracelets muffling his magic, I had little doubt the compulsion to go along with whatever he said would have been enough to knock me on my ass.

“No?” asked Janet.

“You were hiring my boss to steal things for you, weren’t you? Dame Eloise Altair? How did you find her?”

Bucer couldn’t command, only influence and convince: Janet wouldn’t do anything under his control that she couldn’t have been convinced to do on her own.

Which made me feel even worse about being convinced to leave Tybalt and May in danger before, because it meant that was something I could have been talked into all along.

I didn’t want to think of myself as that kind of person.

And yet I knew where the root of the urge had come from.

Months of confinement dropped on top of memories of an entire lifetime of being kept locked away from the world for my “own good.” They’d been trying to protect me, and I’d let them, because I’d known that they were right, even as I’d hated every single moment.

Apparently, my hatred had gone even deeper than I thought it had, if I’d been so willing to grasp an excuse to walk away.

Janet looked at Bucer, her smile melting into an expression of confusion.

“I know who all the landed gentry in the Mists are. It’s a matter of self-preservation.

I can’t keep my eyes open for your kind if I don’t know who the players are.

Dame Altair has always been… flexible when it comes to things like artifacts or information.

Slip her a few seeds or a jar of jam and she’ll do almost anything I ask. Are you one of her contractors?”

“I guess you could say that. She hired me to clean out the vaults. Why now? Why did you decide this was the time to act?”

“My daughter was missing. I knew Faerie had to be responsible. I started looking, and discovered my granddaughter was also gone, meaning they must have disappeared together, just like they promised me they were never going to do. None of the nobles I was accustomed to avoiding were in their places, and I saw an opportunity. I contacted Dame Altair. She seemed to have forgotten me, but she was willing to establish a new iteration of our existing relationship all the same. I always knew she subcontracted her retrievals. You’re not special. ”

“Never wanted to be,” said Bucer. “Why did you want all those things?”