There was another, louder crack, and my hand was free, thumb folded so far that the nail had slid into the meat of my palm. I rolled onto my back, panting, and brought my throbbing right hand around to my left, using my working fingers to dig my thumbnail loose and shove my thumb back into its normal position.

  In that regard, the cuffs were doing me a favor. Yarrow and silver can’t completely suppress magic that’s turned inward, onto the caster, rather than outward to the world. I was still healing. I was just healing minutely more slowly than I would have done normally, allowing me the time to get my bones back where they belonged before they healed crooked and forced me to break them again.

  The pain when I snapped my thumb back into position was briefly dizzying, making the world flash white. I inhaled sharply through my nose, waited for the throbbing to stop, and then reached down with my now-free hand to begin tugging at the other cuff.

  Like many cuffs designed to be “inescapable,” this one was reasonably simple from the outside, with a wrapped latch system that surrounded a locked hasp. I folded my thumb toward my palm and forced it as hard as I could with my free hand, until the fingers dislocated and I could pull my hand loose. The cuff dropped away and I immediately reached up with my left hand to shove my right shoulder physically back into its socket. There was a sickening popping sound, and I collapsed into the mattress for several seconds, breathing hard, while I waited for the flare of dizziness to pass.

  Once it did, I sat up on the now-bloody sheets and reached as far down as I could manage, trying to get to my ankles. Normally, that would have been the easy part: I had two free, fully working hands, and a comfortable bed to bleed on. This was where I should have broken free and gone racing for the next trouble I could throw myself into.

  Unfortunately, the situation wasn’t normal. I reached for my feet, and I failed to touch them. My stomach was making it too hard for me to bend forward without moving my legs into a more accessible position, and the cuffs on my ankles were making it impossible for me to move them in any meaningful way. I pulled as hard as I could. Nothing budged.

  There was a chance that if I repeated the “throwing myself to the side” trick, I could break one of my ankles. But without being able to reach my ankles and with my shoes on, I didn’t have the flexibility in my feet to dislocate them and yank them loose the way I had my hands. I stopped pulling and started trying to kick instead, with no better results. My legs were tied too far apart, and the cuffs were too secure. I couldn’t even try reaching for whatever spells might have been braided into them; with the silver and the yarrow so close together, I’d never be able to get up the strength to hook and snap the threads.

  What I could do was move my hands and arms with ease. I reached behind me and grabbed the center of the bedframe, using the leverage it provided to pull myself further toward the top of the bed. This drew the cuffs even tighter, my legs going straight as the conflicting forces of cuffs and hands met and fought with one another.

  When I was sure that I was as upright as I could possibly get, that there was no further give in the chains holding my feet in place, I gripped the bedframe even tighter and closed my eyes, bracing myself against what I was about to do. Anticipation only made it worse.

  Unable to stand the waiting any longer, I threw myself hard to the side, letting momentum carry me over the edge.

  There was a sickening crunch and my head hit the floor, and everything became darkness and bright, flashing pain.

  Way to go, Daye.

  TEN

  FORTUNATELY, IT WAS JUST a minor skull fracture, and it didn’t knock me out for long; I’m not sure I even lost consciousness. My head was the farthest point of me from the silver and yarrow cuffs on my ankles, and when it cleared, my hip and ankle were still on fire, telling me that any bones I’d broken or dislocated were still busted. That shouldn’t have been a good thing, but under the circumstances, it was the best I could have hoped for.

  Cautiously, I tried to move my left leg. The hip was almost certainly dislocated on that side, and might be broken. If it was broken—or if I’d managed to injure my spine—my leg wouldn’t move. If it was just dislocated, it would hurt, but should still work. To my immense delight and relief, my leg moved, a little jerkily, a lot painfully, but obeying my commands. I twisted my hips as far to the right as they would go, and focused on trying to shake my leg until my broken ankle lay at an angle that might allow me to pull it out of the cuff.

  My damned sensible shoe made it even harder than it should have been—and I’m saying this as someone who had just intentionally dislocated her hip in the pursuit of getting loose—but in the end, I was able to kick, shake, and contort my foot until it was pointed virtually flat, like I was emulating the world’s most broken ballerina. Grasping the bottom of the bedframe for leverage, I pulled as hard as I could.

  A white-hot sheet of pain cascaded over me, wiping everything else away, and I felt my heel start to slip out of my shoe and through the cuff. I stopped, panting, and clenched my fingers around the bedframe, hard, like I thought I could just claw my way to freedom. The immediacy of the pain retreated, leaving only the sharp throb of broken and dislocated bones behind. That was a pain I could cope with. I braced myself and pulled again.

  This time I definitely felt my heel slipping free. I bent my abused knee as far as it would go, and with an anticlimactic pop, my left foot came out of both my shoe and the cuff that held it.

  I immediately rolled onto my back, grasping my left thigh with both hands and pulling it upward and inward, until I felt my thigh bone snap back into my hip socket. The pain accompanying the adjustment was intense enough that I had to bite my lip to stop myself from screaming. My teeth clacked as they met through my tongue, piercing cleanly through the center, and I gasped, inhaling a salty mouthful of blood.

  The taste soothed me, even as it kicked my healing into a higher gear. It seems wrong that my own blood should be enough to fuel my magic the way it does—somewhat self-cannibalistic, like I’m going to consume myself in the pursuit of a perfect equilibrium that doesn’t exist—but it works, and I’m not going to argue.

  With my hip handled, I bent my leg toward myself until I could reach down and grasp my ankle, snapping the bones back into position. They went easily enough, but I could feel the small tears in the surrounding tissue; they’d already started to heal. Breaking bones is awful. Rebreaking them because they healed wrong is one of my least favorite ways to abuse my body, which already puts up with enough of my bullshit.

  Now that I had both wrists and one ankle free, it was relatively easy to haul myself back onto the bed and reach down to remove my right shoe. Once this was done, I grasped my right foot and snapped it sharply to the side, breaking the ankle and allowing me to yank my foot out of the cuff. With this finished I sat up, legs dangling over the edge of the bed, and stretched extravagantly. Things were about to get a lot less pleasant than a few hours chained to a bed trying not to wet myself.

  As if in answer to the thought, the baby rolled over and kicked me in the kidneys. I winced.

  “Chill, kiddo,” I said. “We need to find a weapon.”

  The room didn’t have a lot of options. The bedframe was metal, but so well-assembled that I wasn’t going to get a piece of it without a screwdriver—something I most distinctly didn’t have. Still, no one had shown up when I started thrashing and banging around, and there was no way that hadn’t been audible from the hall. I had a little time.

  I stood cautiously, testing my abused legs. They twinged as I put my full weight on them, but even with the cuffs blunting my magic, they had healed enough to hold my weight, and I hobbled toward the table where Halcyon had placed the chamber pot before taking it away. The table was sturdy mahogany. I tipped it up onto two legs, looking critically at the joins. Then, with a bit more effort than I would have preferred, I flipped it over and sent both it and the chamber pot crashing to the floor.

  “Oopsie,” I said, and began viciously kicking the spot where one of the legs joined with the body of the table. Every kick hurt like hell, but I kept going. On the third kick, it cracked. On the fourth, it began to tilt dangerously over. On the fifth, it listed to the side with an almighty snapping sound, and I grabbed it, putting as much of my weight as I dared onto it until it broke off entirely, leaving me with a hefty wooden club. The jagged splinters making up the larger end were just a bonus.

  It was no sword, but I started my career in heroics with a baseball bat, and there was something nice about returning to my roots. I gave it a practice swing, testing the way it felt in my hands, then turned speculatively toward the closed door to the hall.

  No time like the present.

  The door wasn’t locked. That made a certain amount of sense—why bother locking the door when there’s no way for your captive to escape—but it was still incredibly stupid of the people who were holding me here. I guess Dame Altair wasn’t a frequent flyer in the “taking local heroes captive” club. I eased the door open, granting myself a view of the hall, or at least, a narrow slice of the hall.

  The décor continued here, with plain white wallpaper, an intricately patterned runner rug, and multiple small decorative chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. They were lit by balls of lambent witch light, not pixies, and for once, I was almost sorry to see a pureblood not abusing our smallest kin as household accessories. I felt guilty for the thought as soon as it formed, but still. It would have been incredibly useful to be able to call for help by smashing a few glass balls, and it would have made such a satisfying sound.

  Bouquets of panther lilies and ginger cardamom flowers dotted the small tables that appeared periodically along the length of the hall, their blooms perfectly open, unbruised and perfuming the air with a sweet, compelling mix. It wasn’t a combination I would have considered, but they worked well together. I stepped out of the room, table leg in hand, and looked around again, scanning for threats.

  No one moved. There were three doors I could see along the length of the hall, as well as the one I’d just emerged from, and doors at either end. Those were the most likely to either lead to the way out or to Dame Altair’s private quarters. They could wait.

  That left me with three possibilities for finding Quentin. If I’d been trying to take the two of us captive and had only one hallway where I could reasonably imprison people I had no business abducting—which was, alone, a major assumption—I would have wanted to keep the knight and her squire as far apart as possible. With this in mind, I crossed the hall and went to the door farthest down from my own.

  It wasn’t locked either. If I hadn’t already hated these people, I would have felt the need to lecture them on operational security.

  Easing the door open, I looked carefully inside. There was another bed like the one I’d been bound to, and Quentin was there, tied to the four corners of the bed and clearly pissed off about it. He was glaring at the ceiling, jaw set in a stubborn line, hands balled into fists.

  “I’m not telling you anything,” he spat. “You can go and tell your mistress that she’s made the biggest mistake of her life, and I’m not telling her anything.”

  “That’s cool,” I said, easing the door shut again behind me. “I don’t think I want to hear anything you haven’t told me already, since you’re a grown-up now and the only thing we really don’t talk about is your sex life. Whatever it is you and Dean get up to, I would really prefer not to know, if that’s all right with you.”

  His eyes widened as the first words left my mouth, and he whipped his head around, staring at me instead of the ceiling over his head. “Toby?” he squeaked. “Promise?”

  “Hang on,” I said, and bit my lip, swallowing the blood and closing my eyes. The smell of my magic rose around me. Quentin was good enough at reading magical signatures that smelling me in the process of spellcasting should be easily sufficient to confirm my identity … if this was Quentin, of course.

  Pulling the blood toward the part of me that burned it for power, I looked at the bed without using my eyes, studying the shape of the person inside it. There were no cotton candy threads of magic wrapped around his outline; this was either Quentin or a true shapeshifter, not someone wearing a disguise.

  True shapeshifters are mercifully rare, and after my last encounter with a community of Doppelgangers, I don’t think they’d mess with me by impersonating my squire, even if someone offered to pay. I opened my eyes and smiled wearily at Quentin.

  “Promise,” I said. “You satisfied?”

  “Freshly cut grass and copper that’s halfway to becoming blood,” he said. “Yeah, it’s you. Do you think it’s going to go all the way to blood?”

  “Maybe eventually,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like someone’s been using my head as a punching bag,” he said. “That creepy Candela who works for Altair brought me some sort of antidote. It tasted even worse than the things the Luidaeg comes up with. I can still feel it coating my molars. But I stopped throwing up after that.”

  That explained the faint smell that lingered in the air, sick and sweet at the same time. I grimaced.

  “I didn’t get an antidote; I guess they figured I wouldn’t need it,” I said. “I think I might be glad to have been the somewhat neglected prisoner.”

  Quentin’s eyes widened in alarm. “You didn’t—the baby.”

  “Is fine,” I assured him. “Looks like they found a way to test whether or not the kiddo would heal the way I do, and it looks like we have a winner in the ‘whose magic is going to come out dominant’ competition. Baby and I are both fine.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “I can know it well enough to keep standing, and to get myself free,” I said, slapping the chair leg against my palm to punctuate my words. “Do you want me to let you up, or do you want to keep trying to upset me when I’m already having a lousy night?”

  “Up, please,” said Quentin immediately.

  I crossed the room to study the cuffs on his wrists. They were of a different composition than mine had been, less yarrow, more silver. I wondered, briefly, what the balance meant. I’d never studied the interactions of the Sacred Woods closely enough to know what shifting the proportions would do. That was more of an alchemist thing. Silently, I vowed to ask Walther what the way the cuffs had been woven meant. It was a good promise to make to myself.

  Among other things, it meant I was promising to get out of here without actually making the mistake of thinking the words. It can be dangerous to tempt fate that way.

  The cuffs were locked, and I scowled, casting around for anything I could use as a pick. There wasn’t much—this room was as barren as mine had been—and I was about to go back for the flowers I’d seen in the hall when I shifted positions and something dug into the side of my breast, hard enough to hurt. I yelped and stuck my hand down my shirt.

  Quentin blinked at me. “Uh, Toby?” he asked. “You okay over there?”

  “I’m fine, I just—” I pulled my hand out of my shirt, clutching the little shell knife in its little shell sheath. I blinked at it. “Where the hell did you come from?”

  The knife didn’t answer.

  “What is it?”

  “The Luidaeg gave me a knife. I guess I wanted it more when I needed to get you loose than when I was trying to free myself.” I’d think about that one later. Or maybe never. Never might be the way to go.

  Pulling the small knife out of its sheath, I turned to picking the locks. They weren’t complex. The magic of the cuffs, combined with the way they were used, was supposed to supply most of the security. It only took me a minute or so to free Quentin. He sat up, rubbing his wrists as he tried to ease the circulation back into his hands, and watched me unfasten the cuffs on his ankles. “You’re covered in blood,” he said.

  “Unavoidable side effect of getting myself loose,” I said. “If Dame Altair employs a Bannick, we can ask them to clean me up before Tybalt sees.”

  “Why isn’t he here yet? I don’t know how long we were out, but I feel like he should have freaked out and come looking for us ages ago.”

  “Halcyon—the creepy Candela—told me Dame Altair had sealed the knowe against the Shadow Roads. Candela usually teleport through their edges, so them being sealed would explain why she’s going everywhere on foot, and it would definitely keep Tybalt out.”

  “It would stop him from coming in without an invitation, but what stops him from ringing the doorbell?”

  That was a good question. I paused, frowning.

  The location of Dame Altair’s knowe was well-known throughout San Francisco, if not the entire kingdom, and Tybalt was still King of Cats, with a virtual army of feline spies answering to his call. Quentin and I had gone out and not come back again, and it had been long enough for even Quentin to wake up on his own. What was there to stop Tybalt from getting tired of waiting and marching down to the house to find out where we were?

  The two remaining closed doors suddenly seemed much more concerning.

  “See if you can get your own table leg,” I recommended. “There are two more doors in this hallway. I’m going to go see what’s behind them.”

  “Or you could wait three minutes and we could go together,” said Quentin, sounding exasperated. He didn’t move to stop me as I turned back toward the door, though, only slid off of the bed and moved to knock his own side table to the floor.

  Maybe we were going to get out of this with no further trouble.

  The first room I checked was empty. The second stopped me in my tracks, because there was a man inside, bound to the bed as both Quentin and I had been.

  He was tall, skinny to the point of being scrawny, and while he was bipedal, the outline of his body wasn’t entirely human. From the thigh down, he had the legs of the largest goat that had ever lived, complete with scraggly brown fur and black cloven hooves. His ears were equally goat-like, dangling well past the line of his jaw. Unlike a Satyr, he didn’t have any horns, only a smooth brow and a receding hairline that was mostly notable in relation to how hairy the rest of him was. His clothing was worn and threadbare, combining shorts that stopped just below the knee with a T-shirt that would have been vintage if it hadn’t been barely better than a rag, the marijuana leaf printed on the front so faded that it looked more like the pawprint of some unknown creature.