“I would never have stolen those things if I’d known they were being put into the hands of a human,” said Bucer.

  “Well, then, it’s a good thing you didn’t know, because I needed them,” said Janet. “I still need my hope chest.”

  “Why? You’re not fae. It won’t do you any good.”

  “No, but I’m expecting to come into the custody of a part-fae infant very soon, and when that happens, I want to be ready to make sure it becomes permanent.”

  She started to turn, as if to look in my direction. Bucer saw it too. He grabbed her arm, snapping her attention back to him. I was still furiously angry with him, but I had never been prouder. Maybe I’d find a way to forgive him after all when this was finished.

  “You can’t do that!” he said, the smell of pine and linen getting even stronger. Almost desperately, he continued, “Hope chests aren’t meant to be used before people can—before they make the Choice! They’re not supposed to be used to erase Faerie from the places it belongs.”

  Janet refocused her attention on him, scowling. Meanwhile, I had an open doorway into the kitchen. I stopped there, fighting back the urge to charge at her and make her stop talking—forever if possible. I had no question that she meant my child. She wanted my baby, and she was intending to use the hope chest she’d asked Dame Altair to acquire for her to turn that baby fully human before they were old enough to understand what was happening to them.

  My own mother had changed the balance of my blood when I was too young to remember. Only the fact that she’d been trying not to do me permanent harm had stopped her from taking it all the way before Sylvester found out what she was doing and intervened. I was still recovering the ground she’d stolen from me. A hope chest wouldn’t be able to feel the baby’s suffering. It was an object, a tool, and it would do as it was commanded.

  Quentin was suddenly beside me, having crossed the room quickly and silently while Bucer had Janet distracted. He put a hand on my shoulder.

  “We have to go,” he hissed.

  “I will kill her,” I replied.

  “You’ll do a better job with Tybalt to help you,” he said, voice soft but reasonable.

  I turned to meet his eyes. Janet had been closer than she knew when she called him my replacement child. I wasn’t his mother, but I was his mom, even as Janet was with Gillian. I’d been the only stable adult in his life for too many years to call myself anything else. I hadn’t been trying to put myself in that position. I’d done it anyway, one lesson and adventure at a time.

  “Okay,” I whispered, and stepped through the doorway.

  It was quiet in the kitchen. Too quiet—we should have been able to hear Janet and Bucer talking, even if we couldn’t see them anymore. I realized guiltily that Madden had stayed behind rather than sneaking after us as I’d expected, probably realizing that she would be able to hear his claws clicking on the wood if he’d tried to follow. Walther and Spike had also remained behind. Thanks to that strange silence, I no longer believed that I’d be able to hear them if they decided to follow now.

  I pulled one of the knives from my belt, using it to lay open the ball of my thumb with a quick slash. The smell of blood overwhelmed the smell of floor cleaner that lingered in the air, and I stuck my thumb into my mouth, sucking as hard as I could to get the most blood possible before the wound sealed over.

  “Maybe hurry,” said Quentin urgently.

  I swallowed, not saying anything, and closed my eyes for a moment, searching for the gleam of blood. The house was so clean that it was even easier to spot than it should have been: a small streak on the doorframe, as if it had been carelessly left by a man slung over someone’s shoulder. I took note of its position, the taste of blood still filling my mouth and lighting up the world. It was inside the kitchen. Tybalt had been here.

  With this knowledge in mind, I turned to study the kitchen around us with new eyes, still sucking blood off my thumb. It was a crudely infantile gesture, and I didn’t give a damn if it helped me find my husband.

  The kitchen was as clean as everything else I had seen in this house. The exterior was decrepit, but in here, the walls were straight and strong, with no sign of mold or water damage, and the floor was level, covered in linoleum slightly younger than the rest of the house around it, but still old enough to qualify as vintage, if not antique. Two more doors marked the walls. One had a large window, showing another slice of garden; this place apparently had a backyard of some sort. Quaint.

  The other had a drop of blood on the floor in front of it, setting my path. I turned that way, Quentin still following close. I reached for the doorknob.

  He touched my shoulder again. I stopped.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  I nodded, biting the inside of my cheek this time. When I inhaled, I could pick up faint traces of magic, left behind by people who had passed through here—panther lily and cinnamon, cotton candy and pennyroyal.

  And rowan. Beneath everything else, faint and pale, but present, rowan. I set my jaw and opened the door.

  A narrow set of stairs descended into darkness on the other side. Everything about this house felt like it had been constructed without the use of magic, and these stairs were no different. I looked down into the dark and wondered what Janet had been thinking, digging a basement in a seismically active place like Berkeley.

  But it didn’t matter. I stepped over the threshold, into the dark …

  … and nearly fell down the stairs as the world spun wildly around me, the rarely used transition between the human world and the Summerlands smacking me in the head for daring to go where anyone with human blood wasn’t welcome. Even the baby kicked, hard enough to be momentarily painful. I grabbed the stair rail, driving splinters into my palm and re-scenting the air with my blood.

  That helped. Blood is centering for me, and breathing in the scent of it let me get my balance back, although I still felt as if I might throw up at the slightest additional distress. I took a few steps down the stairs, making room, and mustered a smile as Quentin came through behind me.

  There were no visible light sources, not even the open door that should have been behind us, but somehow the space around us was more late twilight than true night: I could still see. He began to move his hand as if to call a ball of witch light, and I grabbed his wrist, shaking my head. He blinked at me, barely visible in the gloom.

  “No lights,” I whispered.

  He paused before lowering his hands. I nodded firmly as I turned to face front once again, then began descending into the dark.

  Knowes remain anchored to the mortal world because they’re used, as a general rule; it’s why the transition is so much more harrowing when it involves an unusual route. They can be sealed and eased into sleep for long periods of time, if the right person does the sealing, but most of them will collapse if not in common usage. Personally, I think they get lonely. No one does well for long in true isolation. If knowes are alive—and knowes are alive, the evidence is overwhelmingly in support of that idea—then they can get lonely when they’re left by themselves.

  There are other means of digging holes in the barrier between the mortal world and the Summerlands. Shallowings are exactly that—shallow—and frequently share the physical rules of the mortal world to a degree that knowes do not. This didn’t feel like a shallowing. It felt more like a den, the habitat of some wild creature, dug as deep as necessary and no deeper. Which meant it wouldn’t be very large.

  That was something, anyway.

  We continued to descend, and the reason for the shadowy nature of the light, rather than true darkness, appeared ahead of us: a torch was set into the wall, burning with a pale gray flame, only a few shades brighter than Quentin’s witchlights. As we drew closer to it, I realized that it wasn’t putting off any heat; it was a cold light, swallowing warmth from the air around the flame.

  No one else was coming down the stairs behind us. I paused to spare a concerned thought for Walther, Spike, and Madden—Bucer could take care of himself—and kept on going. There was no time left to waste.

  As if summoned by the thought, the end of the stairs came into view, flanked by two more of those cold torches. I sped up as much as I dared given my current physical condition, putting one hand on the hilt of my sword, gripping it until the metal of the pommel bit into my palm.

  Stepping off the stairs into a narrow, stone-walled corridor was so anticlimactic it was almost shocking. The corridor extended in both directions, lined by those cold torches. I looked both ways, trying to pick up on something—anything—that would tell me which way to go. There was nothing.

  I bit the inside of my cheek again, grinding down until I drew blood. The Luidaeg’s bracelets were slowing my healing enough that it hurt more than it usually would have, my molars slicing through already-bruised tissue. But the blood came, as the blood always did, and I saw more droplets leading off to the left.

  I turned, and Quentin followed, and we made our way deeper into the impossible dungeon beneath Janet’s equally impossible house.

  We had gone about thirty feet when two things happened in quick, terrible succession. There was a soft gasp from behind me, and I turned to find Quentin gone, leaving only empty hallway behind me.

  I began to draw my sword, only for something to hit me in the back of the head hard enough that I actually heard the bone crack before my eyes rolled back and I collapsed like a sack of potatoes to the floor. I managed to stay awake long enough to feel myself land on my side, rather than my stomach, and then the darkness was all, and nothing else mattered.

  EIGHTEEN

  FOR THE SECOND TIME in as many days, I woke up tied to a bed, my arms above my head and my legs spread apart. This time I was tied with stronger stuff than silver and yarrow; these ropes were rose boughs and thin iron wire, cutting and burning my skin at the same time. The remaining bracelet of the pair the Luidaeg had made from my blood was still on my wrist, slowing my magic and making my healing more painful than it would normally have been. Every twitch and tremor burned. I still tried to jerk myself free when I finally opened my eyes and realized the situation I was in.

  The burn of the iron threads being pressed against the open wounds created by the rose thorns dissuaded me from trying again. I hissed and sagged back into the bed, which was surprisingly comfortable, smelling of herbs and—from what I could tell—spotlessly clean. The sheets were still cool beneath me, despite the fact that I’d been here long enough for the fracture in my skull to mend, even with the bracelet on my arm.

  I was also naked, something I hadn’t realized until I started noticing the sheets. I looked down at myself. A top sheet was draped across me, presumably to preserve my modesty, but from the way it had settled, I could tell there was nothing else beneath it. No clothing—and no weapons.

  I pulled on the chains again, despite the pain. This wasn’t good. Nothing good has ever come of involuntary bondage and nudity. I don’t think that’s a very controversial position to take.

  The iron dug into the wounds opened by the rose thorns, and blood ran down my arms, too far from my face for me to get any proper benefit from it. I strained anyway, trying to reach it, to no avail.

  I couldn’t repeat the trick I’d used to get away from Dame Altair. I was tied more tightly, without the slack I needed to roll, and digging iron wires that deeply into my flesh would come with a degree of damage that my body would be hard-pressed to handle, even if my magic hadn’t been slowed by the mixed-blessing of a bracelet I was wearing. The bed also felt like it was larger, making it harder to suspend myself in a way that gave me any leverage.

  “I learn from my mistakes,” said Dame Altair. I jerked my head around. She was standing in a corner of the spare, unadorned room; there was no wallpaper on the stone walls, and while I couldn’t see the floor, I had little doubt that it would be equally bare. We were still in the dungeon-like space beneath Janet’s house, the rooms that inexplicably burrowed into Faerie. “I’m sorry I tied you incorrectly back at the house. This would all have been so much simpler if you’d stayed where I put you.”

  “What the hell are you doing, Eloise?” I demanded, using her given name rather than her title. I couldn’t sit up, and so I settled for glaring at her. It was a small comfort, but my temper was still my own.

  “Fulfilling a client order,” she said calmly. “And don’t worry about the iron in your bonds. That’s just there to keep you from gnawing your own arm off to get away from me. If you stop struggling, you won’t get any more of it in your bloodstream, and I have the fount that lets me treat iron poisoning. I’ll let you use it before I let you go.”

  I gaped at her. “Janet didn’t attack you for failing her. She attacked you because she was helping you lure me out of the house!”

  “Took you long enough to figure that out. But then, you were never smart—just persistent. It’s amazing how far that can get you when you’re also indestructible. Yes, I arranged the attack, and when Dugan said he needed to get his liege out of Windermere’s custody before the sentencing, I agreed to help him. I was never in any danger, and it all went exactly as I had planned. Crafting a narrative of the abduction that would work in front of an Adhene without triggering their tedious need for the truth was the most difficult part.” She smiled, slow and languid. “And now here we are.”

  “You know I’m going to kill you as soon as I get off this bed.”

  “You realize statements like that are just an incentive for me to make sure that you never leave that bed,” she said. “But it won’t matter. I’ll treat your iron poisoning before I leave you, and my employer has paid me enough that I can go anywhere in the Westlands or Aztalan and fund a comfortable life for myself. I won’t break the Law.”

  “Where are Tybalt and May?” I demanded. “Where is Quentin?”

  “Your cat and death omen are in cells of their own,” she said. “One of the artifacts Bucer was kind enough to steal for me sets wards against the Shadow Roads so strong that I doubt their First could tunnel through them. The cat-king isn’t going anywhere before I’m ready. As to the Fetch, she hasn’t even tried to escape since I told her that one of my tasks was gathering as many skinshifting tokens as possible. She worries for her little bird. What is it with your line and the shifting kinds?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “It’s not my whole line. Last time I checked, August wasn’t seeing anyone, and Gillian is a shapeshifter. She doesn’t need to date one to keep up the family tradition.” I paused then, and asked the more important question: “Did you hurt Jasmine?”

  “No.” Janet shook her head. “The bird landed on the roof as we were loading the Fetch into the car, and my brother disguised us well enough that we were able to drive away without her following. Wherever she is now, that isn’t down to us. But I may have implied to the Fetch that we would hunt the bird if we released her from our custody. Need to get paid for something.”

  “And Quentin?”

  “The boy? Oh. We may have hit him a trifle harder than intended while we were apprehending you—my brother forgets which of you is the unreasonably fast healer, and which is the pain in my ass. The alchemist is seeing to him now.”

  “Walther’s not a healer! He’s not going to be able to fix a cracked skull!”

  “Oh. Oh, no.” Dame Altair put a finger to the corner of her mouth like she was thinking very hard. “Sounds like you need to get him out of here sooner than later, and that’s not going to happen unless you agree not to fight while I take what I’ve been hired to provide.”

  Janet’s obsession with raising Gillian as a substitute for the child who’d been taken away from her and hidden in Faerie, where she couldn’t reach. Dame Altair’s questions about my pregnancy when I’d first come to see her. The search for the only hope chest in the kingdom, and her frustration when it was nowhere to be found—meaning she knew it was real, knew it would work, and had a specific reason to want it.

  If I’d been able to move my arms, I would have been clutching my stomach. As it was, I tried as hard as I could to roll onto my side and shelter it from her with the bulk of my body. All the action did was rock me a few inches to the left and drive the rose thorns deeper into my wrists and ankles, bringing a fresh wave of pain and a fresh cascade of blood.

  She sighed. “Oh, don’t be so stupid, October. I knew you weren’t the brightest pixie in the flock, but that doesn’t mean you need to behave this way. You have no way out. You’re tied and taken, and all you’re doing is making it worse for yourself. If you don’t stop behaving this way, I’ll have to take steps to prevent you from damaging the merchandise.”

  “My child is not merchandise,” I spat.

  “Maybe not in your eyes,” she said, and turned, letting herself out of the room. “Maybe a little time to think about the situation will help.” She closed the door when she was gone, making sure that anyone who passed in the hall wouldn’t be able to hear me. Not that it would matter: the only people who were likely to be passing in the hall were Dugan and Janet and, for all I knew, the false Queen. No one who would be able or inclined to help me.

  Every inch of me was beginning to ache. The burn of the iron at my wrists and ankles was constant and impossible to ignore: the closest human comparison I can come up with is something nuclear, like uranium. It harms the fae through contact alone, and once it gets into our blood, it keeps doing damage.

  Radiation poisoning isn’t the worst comparison I could make, really. Iron poisoning is remarkably similar. It starts with aches in muscle and bone, progressing to swelling of the joints that can be so painful it becomes incapacitating; sometime in all of that, hallucinations and dizziness will become a problem. Finally, it makes its victims go rigid, their every muscle locking up and refusing to respond as the iron begins shutting its victim’s organs down. It’s anybody’s guess how painful it is by that stage. No one’s really survived to give it a review.