Page 66 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)
“Oh, doubt not that I am in a state of full and genuine panic,” he said, with a hint of humor.
“But one thing I’ve learned from my time beside you is this: when we are together, the impossible comes to pass with remarkable frequency and fervor.
So let me panic. Let the fates rage. Let the stars tremble in the heavens, should they feel the need, and I will stand by your side, and I will see what cannot be brought to pass with skill, grace, and an utter lack of hesitation.
The pain will be yours, my love. The fear will be shared between us, but I know enough of a woman about to face the birthing bed to know that the lion’s share will be yours to harbor.
I can retain my calm in the face of tempests ahead so that one of us will stand sentry at the gate. ”
“I’m not sure I understood half of that,” I said, and looked to May, feeling obscurely better. “He gets all archaic when he’s worked up.”
“At least he’s not speaking in iambic pentameter yet,” said my Fetch, sounding halfway amused. “When he starts that, we need to watch out.”
“Heavens defend us from a Shakespearean soliloquy,” I agreed. “Do you really think you can do this?”
“You know I remember lives lived before yours,” said May delicately. “Other times, other faces. Other professions.”
“I do,” I said. Most of who May was came from a combination of my memories and the memories of a young changeling girl named Darice Lorimer—Dare. But she had other memories under those, bits and pieces of the various people whose faces she’d worn during her centuries among the night-haunts.
“Among them was a stint working under Gilad’s medic, as an assistant and adjutant. What a human doctor would call a nursing aide. I’ve never been a midwife, but I’ve assisted in the delivery of my share of babies. And I know where to cut.”
Those last words fell ominously between us, heavier than they should have been with all the implications of the idea. Her knowing where to cut made it make a little more sense that she’d been the one to suggest this course of action; she could do whatever was possible to minimize the damage.
Not normally something I needed to worry about very much, but under the circumstances, the concern seemed like a good thing.
“Do you have any of that boneset left?” I asked, turning my attention to Walther.
He shook his head. “I left that whole setup back in the room where they were holding us. But I saw some alchemical equipment in the crates while we were searching for the anti-iron fount. I can probably cobble something together.”
“And I found some blankets,” said Quentin, clearly desperate to contribute.
“Then let’s do this horrible, awful, necessary thing,” I said, sagging against Tybalt.
I was so damn tired. The exhaustion was sinking into my bones, making it difficult to stay upright.
It was like all the concern was giving me permission to be as tired as I actually already was, and now I couldn’t fight it off. “May? Do you have a knife?”
“I’ll find something,” she said, confidently. “Don’t worry.”
“No. I’m not worried. I just…” I lifted my arm with what felt like an impossible effort, reaching into the front of my magically tailored gown, and for the second time, retrieved the shell knife the Luidaeg had given me.
I held it out toward May, feeling it slip through my numb fingers, unable to grab it before it clattered to the ground. “Luidaeg’s… gift…”
My limbs felt like they were getting heavier by the second. The iron was singing in my blood, wordless and atonal, jerking the rest of my body’s rhythms along in its wake. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how I was supposed to die.
At least this was more recognizable as iron poisoning than the slowly growing ache in my joints had been.
I knew how to deal with iron singing through me, iron refusing to let me rest. My skin crawled with invisible ants, and I couldn’t find the focus to lift my arms and slap at them.
I just continued to lean against Tybalt, trying not to whimper in time with the iron-song inside me.
Gentle as he’d been when he rescued me from the false Queen’s dungeons, Tybalt scooped me off the crate and into his arms. Quentin must have gone to fetch those blankets he’d mentioned, because when Tybalt lowered me to the ground, there was something soft there to cradle me.
Plenty of somethings—the floor was hard stone, like the walls, and yet I felt like I was sinking into a featherbed fit for a queen.
I wanted to turn my head and look at it. My body refused to oblige.
Tybalt must have seen the strain, because he leaned close to my ear and murmured, “Take some delight in the fact that we are about to destroy a king’s ransom in fine silks and tapestries.
Some of them feel woven with old magics, and those may recover, but the rest will be rags when we’re done with them.
Such riches to welcome our child into the world. Rejoice.”
I couldn’t reply, but I could close my eyes and smile, the slightest upward quirk of my lips.
There was a clatter as Walther returned and dumped alchemical supplies onto the floor next to me, then began quickly jamming them together. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear every sound he made.
“She’s starting to go rigid,” said Tybalt, worry in his tone.
“That’s one of the later stages of iron poisoning,” said Walther. “Her organs will start to fail soon. We need to get this done. She needs her magic to focus on keeping her alive, not split its attention between them. May?”
“On it,” said May. I felt her hike my dress up over my hips, baring my stomach. “Do you have anything I can use to sterilize this?”
“It’s Toby. Infection is the least of our worries.”
“It’s not just Toby.”
“Don’t cut the baby and you’ll be fine,” said Tybalt, voice gone as stiff as I felt.
He sounded like he was talking through the veil of propriety and loathing that he used to pull around himself whenever we interacted, the one that said he was a king and I was nothing but the pebble in his shoe.
I wanted to reach for his hand, to hold him tightly and let his presence comfort me, but even that much motion was beyond me at this point.
“I guess a gift from the sea witch won’t need to be sterilized,” said May, trying to sound confident. Under the circumstances, it was probably the best call she had.
Infection is a danger. Iron is a death sentence.
People like the false Queen—and one presumed, Dame Altair—liked to claim that using it to restrain prisoners didn’t violate the Law, because it wasn’t their fault if those prisoners were noncompliant and came too directly into contact with the iron.
Under the right monarch, that argument might even fly, and since it’s not like we’ve had any higher authorities to make sure we were doing things the way Oberon would have wanted, that’s been good enough up until now.
I didn’t think Arden was going to be quite that chill about things if I died of iron poisoning. And even if she was, Oberon was back now—the useless asshole that he’d turned out to be—and the Luidaeg would make sure her father enforced his own damn Law.
None of which would make me any less dead, or Tybalt any less a widower.
“Careful,” said Walther. “It’s sharp.”
“No shit,” said May. There was a shifting sound, and then she added, “Don’t hate me, okay Toby? This is going to suck so hard, and I just need you to not hate me.”
I could never hate you, May, I thought. She was my sister, the girl I’d failed to save, and myself, all wrapped up in one large, colorful package. I loved her too much to hate her, no matter what she had to do.
The sharp edge of the shell knife was pressed against the skin of my belly, well below the apex of the curve and just above my pubic bone.
It was colder than should have been possible, and I could feel it freezing my skin.
I couldn’t scream. Even with a knife that felt like solid ice pressed against me close enough to cut and freeze at the same time, I couldn’t scream.
“Is she breathing?” asked Quentin.
“She’s breathing,” said Tybalt.
“I didn’t realize she’d gotten exposed as badly as all this,” said Madden, sounding like he was on the verge of panicking.
“Perhaps you should have,” said Tybalt. He bit off each word until they were essentially their own little sentences, each one standing utterly alone.
“Can you stop tormenting poor Madden, please?” asked Walther. “He already looks miserable enough.”
“Yes, he looks miserable, and my pregnant wife is possibly dying of iron intoxication, which suppresses her magic and makes her less than half as indestructible as she considers herself to be,” said Tybalt. “Their conditions are exactly equivalent.”
“Boys,” muttered May, sounding disgusted. She pressed down a little harder with the knife, beginning to cut, and I discovered there was still something I could do, if shocked by enough sudden pain.
I could still scream.
What I couldn’t do was stop myself from screaming, which would have required an amount of self-control that I no longer possessed.
“Self-control” implies having a choice in the matter.
May kept cutting and I kept screaming, until Tybalt pressed his hand down over my mouth and pushed me deeper into the bedding beneath me.
“Seek silence, beloved,” he said solemnly. “We must not be found out, but must complete this action as quickly as we can, that we might escape into the shadows unharmed.”
He only got that archaic and stilted-sounding when he was really upset about something, and my natural impulse was to try and make him feel better.
I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t even stop screaming, although the sound was muffled by his palm.
I never would have expected to be that relieved to have a man trying to silence me.
May kept cutting, like a line of fire up the length of my abdomen, until there was a clatter as she tossed the knife aside and began pulling at the edges of the wound she’d created. My eyes rolled back in my head, waves of pain threatening to steal me entirely from consciousness.
“Is there supposed to be that much blood?” asked Quentin anxiously. “Walther?”
“This is a reasonable amount of bleeding for abdominal surgery,” said Walther. “Come help me measure this tubing.”
“Okay…?”
The feeling of May pulling at my flesh was replaced by the strangest sensation, both pain and pressure, as if she were reaching up inside of me and tugging. The pain and pressure receded, replaced by a terrible feeling of emptiness, like something essential had been stolen.
Tybalt took his hand away. That was all right. I had no more screaming left in me. I lay there, emptied out and spent, and listened to the others fussing around something at my feet.
Then a baby wailed into the gloom of the warehouse, and I understood what had been taken, and that it had been saved, not stolen. I closed my eyes.
The iron was waiting there, and as soon as I gave in, it had me.