Page 65 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

I tried to stand, and fell back to the crate as a wave of dizziness washed over me, the iron making its presence known.

We were definitely going to need to talk more about the possibility of an early delivery.

It wasn’t just about saving the baby, although that was a priority—if we got the baby out, my body could stop spending all its magical reserves trying to protect my pregnancy, and turn them to protecting the rest of me instead.

It would still be a race to see if my magic could heal me enough to keep me alive until we found the fount, or were able to get out of here and get me treatment for the iron in my blood, but at least I and the baby would both have a better chance.

I hate iron. Out of all the worlds we could have decided to attach ourselves to, why did it have to be a place with so much iron ?

Sitting still is a funny thing. It can be a refreshing pause, a chance to take stock and recover.

Or it can be a chance for your body to realize just how much hell you’ve put it through over the last little while and finally decide to start giving up on you.

In this specific case, my body seemed to be going with the promises hidden behind door number two.

My head didn’t stop spinning when I stopped trying to stand up; if anything, it got worse.

I couldn’t be angry with my body for the way it was allocating resources.

Bodies aren’t intelligent. They just try to stay alive, and to protect themselves.

Right now, my body still recognized the baby as a part of itself, and it was struggling to keep that part as safe as possible.

I knew the placenta played a large part in filtering out toxins, but not enough to know whether that would be sufficient.

Would I inevitably start poisoning my baby and killing myself slowly at the same time?

And if I did, would it be too late to do anything do about it?

Footsteps in the nearby aisles told me that someone was coming. I tensed, but didn’t try to stand again. If it wasn’t my people, I might be able to bluff my way into a standoff—assuming I didn’t fall down. Once I hit the floor, all bets would be off.

Quentin emerged from the stacks. He had my knives, both the ones I’d been wearing when I went to Dame Altair’s and the ones I’d taken from Goldengreen.

He also had both our swords, and an arm-mounted shield that looked to be just his size.

At least he was thinking about avoiding injury while he could.

“Hey, kiddo,” I said wearily. “Where’s everybody else?”

“Walther and May are trying to talk Tybalt into letting them do something alarming—May whispered it to Walther, and then they both turned on him. None of them wanted me to hear what it was.” He fixed me with a stern eye. “You want to fill me in?”

Not particularly, no. “May thinks I may need to deliver the baby early in order to save us both,” I said.

“I got the worst dose of the iron out of all of us, because I wouldn’t stop fighting against the ropes, and more of the wire got into my wounds than I’ve been letting on.

You should have seen how much iron Walther was able to pull out of a beaker of my blood.

” The image of the black sludge rose behind my eyes, unbidden and unwanted.

It was possibly the most horrific thing I had ever seen extracted from my own body, and I’ve been impaled on almost everything you care to name.

“How does having the baby help with that?” he asked, coming closer.

“Right now, my magic is mostly focused on trying to keep the baby alive—and that’s what it should be doing.

When someone gets pregnant, their whole body switches over to building and protecting the baby.

It steals calcium from their bones and teeth, it takes nutrients from their blood, it does everything short of steal their wallet and start opening credit cards in their name.

That’s how babies are made . But even though my body is using my magic to protect the baby from all the iron that’s in my blood right now, the baby weighs less than a housecat.

The amount of iron it takes to do real damage is incredibly small.

And with my magic focusing that hard on the baby, there isn’t any left for me. ”

“That’s why you’re not healing,” said Quentin, with slow horror. “There isn’t any magic left to let you heal the way you’re supposed to.”

“I’m healing like a normal person would,” I countered. “I am healing, just really slowly, because everything else is going to shield the baby from the iron.”

“And if you have the baby, things will go back to normal?”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “I’m worried that if I have the baby, I’ll keep healing too slowly because of the iron, and I’ll bleed to death. I don’t know that Tybalt’s ready to be a single parent.”

“That’s a good thing,” said Quentin.

I raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“I mean, not the bleeding to death part. The single parent part. Tybalt would never be a single parent.”

“If I’m dead… he took a few hundred years to get over the death of his last wife, and they didn’t have as long together as we have. I think the baby would be past their majority and moving to the other side of the kingdom before he remarried.”

“Who said anything about remarrying?” Quentin shook his head.

“That baby would have so many parents. May and Jazz and August and me—and the sea witch. She’d show up before the night-haunts came for your body and demand to go over the custody agreements she would already have drawn up and ready for him to sign. ”

The image of the Luidaeg shoving a custody agreement at Tybalt was funny enough to make me snort. “Still. There’s not an easy answer here, and the answers I do have, I pretty universally don’t like.”

More footsteps in the aisles. I held my hands out to Quentin, silently begging, and he smacked a knife into each of them, hilt-first, before gripping his own sword and letting the rest fall to the ground at his feet with a clatter. Thus armed, he turned to face whoever was coming.

Neither of us relaxed until Tybalt, May, and Walther stepped out of the aisle. Walther was pale and pensive-looking. Tybalt was clearly shaken, but doing his best to tamp it down and keep a calm expression on his face.

All three of them were empty-handed. Tybalt walked over to stand behind me, and I leaned back, resting my shoulders against his midsection. I looked up at him.

“Where’s Madden?”

“Pursuing a prayer,” said Tybalt, looking back into the distant jumble of the storehouse. “He can’t move around in his canine form for long, but he swore when he assumed it that he smelled something familiar. He’s slowly making his way toward the source, in hopes of finding the solution we need.”

“You don’t sound too hopeful.”

“I am, perhaps, too much the realist, little fish.”

I paused before responding, looking at him gravely. “May told you, didn’t she?”

“She did.”

I turned to Walther. “But you agree that it’s dangerous, right?”

“There are enough jarred herbs and salves here that I might be able to cobble together something that would help you,” he said.

“I don’t know that I can do anything about the iron already in your system, not without better ingredients or the fount we’ve been seeking.

But that doesn’t make May’s suggestion a bad one, only a complicated one.

Your body’s ability to repair itself is stronger than any I’ve ever seen.

If we can take off some of the strain, you might be able to recover from the operation and the iron poisoning. ”

“It’s not that bad,” I protested.

Walther looked at me levelly. “October, your eyes are bleeding.”

“What?” I reached up to touch the corners of my eyes, looking for proof that he was telling the truth. I found a slight dampness, but nothing more than that. Relieved, I lowered my hand.

My fingertips were smeared with red.

“Oh,” I said, numbness washing over me.

“It’s not catastrophic yet, but it’s getting worse,” said Walther. “That scratch on your face still isn’t healing. You’ve got a lot more iron in your system than I think is safe for you. May’s right. We need to deliver that baby, now.”

“I—but—but it’s not time.” I looked helplessly at Tybalt. “We don’t even have a name. And I haven’t had a chance to tell the Luidaeg we want her to be the godmother.”

Walther blanched, but to his credit, didn’t say anything about us trusting the sea witch with our child.

Tybalt stroked my hair back from my face with one hand. “It’s all right, little fish. The time is never precisely right for all things, and this is far from ideal, but we can make this work.”

“Did they tell you what Janet wants to do?” I demanded, grabbing the front of his shirt with both hands. “Did they tell you why she was setting traps for me? Why she asked Dame Altair to lure me out in the first place?”

“They did.” He moved his hand, sliding it down to press flat above my heart. “She doesn’t have a hope chest. What she desires cannot come to pass. And if she lays so much as a single finger upon our child, she won’t have a hand to hold with. Immortality doesn’t mean invincibility. It never has.”

I sighed. “How are you so calm?”