“Hey,” I said. “Took you long enough.”
“I was waiting to be invited.” Tybalt adjusted his hold on Nolan, shifting the Prince’s weight a bit more, and matched my stride as we walked together up the remaining stairs. “You do get cranky when I insert myself into your life-threatening situations without consent.”
“It’s a character flaw.” The blood I’d borrowed from my past self was running out, and it was getting hard to breathe again. “How far are we from the top?”
“About fifty steps.”
Judging by how many I’d already climbed, that meant we were still a little more than halfway down. “Swell,” I muttered, gritting my teeth, and climbed.
The next forty steps passed without incident, either good or bad. Tybalt turned pale and started to sweat as the iron wore away at him. I managed to keep walking, but my breath was growing shallower, and every time I exhaled, I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to find the strength to inhale again. It was all I could do to keep putting one foot in front of another.
We rounded the final curve to see the man from the Queen’s guard standing in the open doorway, staring down at us.
“Hey!” I called. “Come down here and help us carry this guy!”
“Some of us remember the meaning of loyalty,” he responded.
The iron was clouding my reactions enough that it took me a few precious seconds to realize what he was saying. “No!” I shouted, and lunged, trusting Tybalt to keep Nolan from falling back down to the bottom of the stairs.
I was too slow, and the distance was too great. I reached the door a split second after the guard—who was still the Queen’s man after all—slammed it shut. As I impacted with the wood, I heard the small, terrible sound of a key turning in a lock.
We were trapped.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“HE LOCKED US IN HERE,” I whispered. “Oh, sweet Oberon, he locked us in.” I was dimly aware that Tybalt was trudging up the stairs behind me, but in that moment, I didn’t have the capacity to care. If he needed help, he would ask for it, and I . . . I needed to think. I needed to find a way out of this. The lock. I could pick the lock, I could—
There was no keyhole on this side of the door. No one sealed inside was ever intended to make their way out under their own power, and anyone who was sent to retrieve a prisoner would of necessity have a team of people waiting to pull them out if they succumbed to iron poisoning. There was no reason to put a keyhole inside the prison.
“Now they get smart about their dungeon design?” I turned to see Tybalt stepping onto the landing. “We’re trapped. He double-crossed us, and we’re trapped.”
“I know,” he said. He sounded calmer than I did, but I could see the panic gnawing at the edges of his composure. If he was keeping it in check, it was only because he knew that letting go would result in completely losing control. Like most cats, he didn’t like being boxed in.
Boxed in . . . “Tybalt, can you access the Shadow Roads from here?”
“No. There’s too much iron.” He walked past me to prop Nolan against the wall. This high up, it was just iron-laced stone, no more dangerous than the air. Then he turned to me, holding out his free arm in a mute plea.
It was one that I was more than happy to answer. I stepped forward, and he wrapped his arm around me, kissing my forehead before resting his head against my shoulder. We stood there, shivering, holding each other up.
I don’t know how long we’d been standing that way when he said, “I need you to do something for me, October.”
“What?”
“The hope chest. I need you to use it on yourself.”
I pulled away from him, eyes wide. “What?”
“I asked you this the last time I saved you from this dungeon: please, for me, make yourself human.” He let me go in order to hold out the hope chest. “The iron can’t kill you if it can’t hurt you.”
“Tybalt, no.”
“Please—”
“I said no!” I held up my hands. “Oak and ash, we just spent how long turning me fae, and you want me to undo everything so you don’t have to watch me die? You think I should have to watch you die? Was there a contest somewhere along the way to decide who loved who more, and I lost? I won’t do it. I’m not going to change myself just to survive a little bit longer.”
“But we know you can use the hope chest,” he said, pleading. “You don’t have to turn all the way human. Just enough to buy yourself some time, and let you figure out another way . . .”
“If I tell that chest I want to be human, it’s not going to stop,” I shot back. “I’ve never touched it when I was this weak. I won’t be able to control it, and it’ll burn the fae right out of me. We don’t even know if the goblin fruit is still in my system! Maybe I’d just be condemning myself to an even worse death, with no escape clause. And it doesn’t matter, because I won’t do it. I won’t leave you like that. I can’t. Stop asking me.”
“Oh, October.” He pulled the hope chest away again. I’ve never been so relieved by such a little gesture. Then he chuckled. “Sometimes I wonder if we’re good for one another.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked, forcing a smile. “We’re great for one another. Who else would show you awesome things like the Queen’s secret iron torture room? Admit it. I’m the best girlfriend you could ask for.”
“You are definitely the only girlfriend I have asked for in a long time,” said Tybalt. He put his head back down my shoulder, sighing. “This seems like a very anticlimactic death. I am afraid I do not approve.”
“Yeah. Me neither.” I closed my eyes. We were all going to die in here. A Cait Sidhe, a Dóchas Sidhe, and a Tuatha de Dannan, and there was nothing we could do to save ourselves.
My eyes snapped open.
“I can do this,” I breathed, and pulled away, pulling the knife from my belt in the same gesture. Tybalt looked at me in alarm. I shook my head. “No, not that. I mean, I’m not going to stab you. I mean . . . look, if this works, be ready to move.”
“October?” he asked, bemused.
“No time.” I knelt next to Nolan, grabbing his hand and turning it, palm upward, in mine. Then, as carefully as I could under the circumstances, I slashed a line across the meaty part of his thumb and clamped my mouth down over it.
A red veil slammed down over my perceptions as Nolan’s memories overwhelmed my reality. Arden doesn’t want to challenge for the throne, but she’s wrong. This woman isn’t our sister, and she’ll lead the Kingdom into ruin. If Arden won’t listen, I’ll go myself. For Father’s sake, and for my sister’s sake, because this so-called “Queen” will never leave us in peace—
There was nothing there that I didn’t already know, and so I forced my way past it, trying to filter through his disjointed, dreaming memories. I’d never done anything like this before, but I’d moved through memories, and the principle was the same: all I had to know was what I was looking for.
I found it buried in a memory of Nolan and Arden playing hide-and-seek through Muir Woods on a beautiful starry night years before I was born. They were chasing each other from tree to tree, and every time one of them was about to be tagged by the other, they would disappear, Arden leaving the scent of blackberry flowers and redwood bark in her wake, Nolan leaving the scent of fresh blackberries and sap. I grabbed the memory of that moment as hard as I could, clinging to it. This was just like pushing strength into Tybalt, or letting May guide me through changing one of the Queen’s transformations. I could do this. I could do this.
Gathering every ounce of strength I could find in myself or borrow from Nolan, I raised my hand and transcribed a circle in the air. The smell of blackberries and sap followed my fingers, faint but there. I pulled my mouth away from Nolan’s hand, and whispered, “Now.”
Tybalt grabbed me a split second later, somehow managing to lift both me and Nolan off the floor as he leaped. He didn’t have to hold us for long. The world dipped and wove—
—and we
were landing hard, in a pool of something viscous and sticky. The smell of it hit me a moment after the floor did: blood. My blood, to be specific. We were in the treasury. Groaning, I pushed myself onto my elbows and opened my eyes to find Nolan sprawled a few feet away and Tybalt climbing to his feet. His eyes were wide. He looked stunned. I was proud of myself for that. It’s hard to really shock Tybalt.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“Magic is in the blood. Nolan’s magic includes teleportation,” I said, holding out my hands. Tybalt tugged me to my feet. “I just borrowed it for a little bit.”
“That is absolutely terrifying.”
“Tell me about it.” I turned to look at the room around us, my head throbbing in time with the motion. “This is a treasury. This is where you put rare and important things. If you had something that could treat iron poisoning, this is where you’d put it.” The gray spots at the edge of my vision were intruding again, threatening to block everything out. I ignored them in favor of pulling my phone out of my pocket.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m calling information.”
The phone was answered on the fourth ring. “Hello?”
“Li Qin, hi,” I said. “Remember when you called the Library to ask if I could come in? I need that number.”
“Toby? You sound terrible!”
I looked around the bloody, trashed treasury and fought the urge to laugh. That would have been taking black humor too far, even for me. “Things have been a little messy here.”
“Is there really a challenge to the Queen’s throne?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, closing my eyes. “Okay, Li, I would love to explain everything right now, but I honestly can’t, because I’m about to keel over from iron poisoning, as is Tybalt, as is the Crown Prince in the Mists. Please, please, can you just give me the number for the Library?”
“No,” said Li.
“What?!” I opened my eyes to find Tybalt staring at me, apparently startled by my outburst.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t—the Library doesn’t have a number in that sense. But I can have Mags call you.”
“Please,” I said, swallowing the urge to yell. “Now.” I hung up before Li Qin could ask any more questions. In my current mood, I would have started screaming, and that wouldn’t have done either of us any good. Losing my temper would be just one more complication.
Speaking of complications . . . I looked around the treasury, feeling the pit drop out of my stomach, and finally voiced something that had been nagging at the edges of my awareness since we escaped the dungeon. “Where’s Dianda?”
“There are two possibilities,” said Tybalt. “Either she is unaware of the guard’s duplicity and calmly awaiting our return, or she has been overpowered. No matter which it is, we will do her little good in our current condition.”
“I know, but—” My phone rang. I answered without hesitation. “Hello?”
“Toby?” This time the voice was less familiar, and had a British accent. I let out a relieved breath, taking a split second of comfort before snapping back to business.
“Mags, Tybalt and I are in the royal treasury. We’ve both been exposed to a lot of iron—I’m not sure how we’re still standing, but I don’t think it’s going to last much longer. Is there anything in here that we could use to treat the symptoms? Anything you’ve heard of the Queen confiscating, or that was traditionally in Gilad’s custody?”
Mags paused. “You know, I don’t usually get questions this interesting.”
“I’m thrilled to have made your day more fun, but my day is the opposite of fun. Please. What should I be looking for?” If she said “nothing,” that was it; we were done. The fuzziness was spreading, and we needed medical care if we wanted to avoid collapsing in the Queen’s knowe and missing the fight completely.
“Um . . . there should be a gray earthenware flagon somewhere in there. The current Queen confiscated it from the reigning monarchs of the Kingdom of Silences when she overthrew their government. There will be a cruet with it.”
“Hang on.” I lowered the phone, turning to Tybalt. “Look for a gray earthenware flagon, and something called a ‘cruet.’ What the hell’s a cruet?”
“A smaller pitcher, of a very specific design,” said Tybalt, already moving away from me, toward the shelves. “Ask if they match.”
I raised the phone. “Do they match?”
“Yes.”
“They match!” I called. Into the phone, I said, “What do we do once we find them?”
“Fill the flagon from the cruet,” she said. “It should be a thick green liquid. Drink it.”
“That’s always the answer when we’re talking about thick green liquids, isn’t it? Okay. We’ll get right on that. If Quentin asks, tell him we’re fine.”
“Will I be lying?” Mags asked dubiously.
“Right now, I don’t know. Open roads.” I hung up before she could ask any more questions, turning to scan the room. It was a mess in here, a disorganized jumble of stolen treasures and unique artifacts that hadn’t been well organized before we had a major fight in the middle of everything. There was a heap of what looked like old vases in one corner. I picked my way toward them, leaving bloody footprints behind me.
“It’s not here,” said Tybalt.
“Keep looking.” I reached the vases and began moving them one by one, trying to reach the back of the pile. Something this important wouldn’t be right out in the open. “Mags says it was confiscated from Silences. That would mean she took it, what, about five years after King Gilad died? Dig deeper.”
He didn’t say anything, but I heard things clatter behind me as he kept looking. I moved vase after vase, and was on the verge of giving up and looking somewhere else when I pulled the last vase away and revealed the base of what looked like a bookcase. It was covered by a gray silk sheet that had seemed somehow beneath notice until I actually focused on it. “Poor man’s cloak of invisibility,” I muttered, and pulled the sheet aside. Then I stared. “Holy . . .”
The bookcase the sheet had been concealing was the sort of thing that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a royal bedroom. It was made of redwood, carved with a pattern of blackberry vines. “It matches Arden’s wardrobe,” I said, mostly to myself, and stepped closer to study the assortment of small, strange items piled on its shelves. There were gleaming jewels and jars of oddly-colored liquids . . . and on the third shelf from the bottom, there was a gray earthenware jug that I was willing to call a flagon, with a smaller, vase-like jug next to it. “Tybalt! Over here!”
I picked up the cruet with shaking hands, locking my fingers tight to keep from dropping it, and peered inside. It was empty. In Faerie, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Leaning forward, I tipped the cruet onto its side over the flagon. Thick green liquid the color of radioactive wheatgrass poured out. It smelled like a mixture of maple syrup and overcooked broccoli. I wrinkled my nose and kept pouring. Tybalt stepped up next to me.
“Is that it?”
“I sure hope so,” I replied, continuing to pour. “We’re supposed to drink it.”
Tybalt wrinkled his nose. “Delightful.”
“It’s better than dying.” The flagon was full almost to the top. I righted the cruet, setting it back on the shelf before picking up the flagon with both hands. “Here goes nothing,” I said, and raised it to my lips.
The liquid tasted worse than it smelled, adding library paste and overripe banana to the mix. I gagged but forced myself to keep drinking . . . and as I did, I felt my hands stop shaking. The throbbing, bruised feeling that filled my body faded, taking my headache with it. I kept drinking. The taste of the liquid changed, becoming sweeter. As the throbbing stopped, I swallowed a mouthful of what tasted like sugared raspberries and champagne.
I lowered the flagon, holding it out to Tybalt. “When it starts tasting good, you know it’s working. I think. It feels like it worked.”
“It worked,” he
said, and touched my cheek, smiling. “Your color is better, and you’re breathing normally. It worked.”
“Good.” I held the flagon out more emphatically. “Now drink. I’m going to check on Nolan.”
Tybalt nodded, finally taking the flagon. I stayed where I was long enough to see him start to drink—and to see the color start coming back into his cheeks—before walking back across the blood-splattered floor to Nolan. He was only half-lying in the pool of blood, I noticed, which wasn’t going to stop Arden from freaking out when she saw him. I crouched, checking for a pulse. He still had one. That was something, anyway. He also had a vicious case of iron poisoning, if the taste I’d gotten of his blood was anything to go by.
“Bring that over when you’re done,” I said, shifting to maneuver Nolan into a sitting position. “We need to pour some of it down this guy’s throat before he dies on us.”
There was a pause while Tybalt finished swallowing. Then, as he walked toward me, he asked, “Is it safe to give liquids to an elf-shot victim? I’d fear drowning.”
“Drowning is a possibility, death by iron is a guarantee. Hell, maybe we’ll get lucky, and treating iron poisoning will treat elf-shot, too.” I held out my hand for the flagon. “Open his mouth.”
“All right.” Tybalt crouched on Nolan’s other side, putting the flagon into my hand before reaching over and prying Nolan’s mouth open.
“I don’t know how aware you are, but please try not to drown,” I said, and pressed the flagon to his lips, pouring just a little into his mouth before gesturing for Tybalt to close it. “Tilt his head back, see if he swallows.”
Tybalt tilted Nolan’s head back.
Nolan swallowed.
“Well, how about that,” I said. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
Working together, we were able to feed Nolan the rest of the liquid in the flagon. Hopefully, that would be enough, and if not, he’d at least be able to hold up until we were in a position to offer further treatment. He didn’t show any signs of waking up, either during the process or after. Guess that was too much to hope for. I put the cruet into my pocket and tucked the flagon under my arm before helping Tybalt lift Nolan off the floor. Now that we weren’t dealing with an entire room full of iron, carrying him was a hell of a lot easier.