Seanan McGuire - Ashes of Honor

“Then we go up,” he murmured back. I nodded, and together, we began making our way up the stairs.

Nothing stopped us as we climbed to the next landing, where another floor like the one we’d been kept on was waiting. Again, I motioned for Etienne to remain where he was while I stepped forward and checked for Folletti; again, if they were present, they weren’t close enough for me to detect them. I waved Etienne forward, and together, we made our way down the hall, looking for doors.

What we found was an empty room above the one where I’d been kept, and a locked one above where Etienne had been. I pulled a piece of bracken from my hair and dropped to my knees, getting to work. This lock went even faster than the prior two. Practice was definitely making perfect. I tucked the half-bent piece of bracken back behind my ear, and pushed the door open gingerly.

Then I yelped, only remembering to swallow the sound at the last moment, and ran to where Tybalt lay motionless on his side in the heaped-up brush. He’d been beaten as badly as Etienne, if not worse; he was stripped to his trousers, barefoot and shirtless, as if to guarantee that he had no hidden weapons. His wrists and ankles were bound. Our captors must have seen him as more of a risk, because unlike us, they hadn’t used twine.

Tybalt’s wrists and ankles were bound with iron.

I dropped to my knees next to him, the bracken barely cushioning my fall, and grabbed his shoulder, trying to ignore the way the heat off the iron baked into my skin. “Tybalt? Tybalt, can you hear me?”

He didn’t respond. That didn’t strike me as a good sign.

Iron isn’t just a way of hurting the fae: it’s a way of torturing us, distorting reality and cutting off access to the magic that normally permeates our days. The stink of it rose from him, iron death and poisoned blood. I shuddered, pulling away enough to shove my hands into the bracken and search for something sturdier than my little makeshift lock picks. I didn’t even hear Etienne’s approach until he spoke from behind me, saying, “We shouldn’t linger. The iron—”

“Go without me if you can’t handle it,” I said, yanking a piece of broom from the pile. I stripped the leaves and smaller twigs from it with quick, businesslike motions, forcing my hands to stay steady. “I can’t leave him here.”

“October—”

“ I can’t! ” We both froze as we realized I’d yelled. I turned to look over my shoulder at Etienne, who was staring at me, wide-eyed and stunned.

Then he nodded stiffly. “I understand,” he said, and turned away. My heart sank a little, even though I’d been half expecting it. He was looking for his daughter, after all, and Tybalt, while an ally, had never been a friend of his.

Etienne closed the door, sealing us inside the room with Tybalt, and the iron.

“Work quickly, if you would be so kind,” he said. “I don’t know how long it will remain safe for us to be here.”

“Watch the door,” I said. Gritting my teeth against what was about to come, I bent over Tybalt, grasping his wrist just below the iron cuff, and touched the twig of broom to the lock.

Most of the dangers in Faerie are worse for changelings than they are for purebloods. Changelings are the ones with less magic, less physical resilience, and less to protect them from whatever’s decided to eat them for lunch. The one time this really falls down is when iron gets involved. Iron doesn’t hurt humans, and so the more human a changeling is, the less it hurts them. There was a time when I could handle iron with relative ease, even going so far as to carry an iron knife on a regular basis. That time has passed. I’m a lot less human than I used to be.

When my fingers brushed the cuff around Tybalt’s wrist, the metal burned and froze at the same time, an impossible contradiction of sensations that my nerves had no way of processing. Since they couldn’t translate it into anything else, they turned it into searing pain, bad enough that I bit down on my lip until I tasted blood.

That helped steady me, and I forced my hands to keep moving despite the pain, twisting the sprig of broom inside the lock. I was about to let go and step back to recover when something deep in the mechanism clicked over, and the first cuff snapped open. I repeated the process with the second. When the lock released I yelped, more out of shock than anything else, and jerked away, letting the cuffs fall to the floor. They landed in the bracken with a soft thump, and lay there, gleaming dully in the thin light. My temporary lock pick stuck out of the open keyhole. I left it there.

“October…”

“I’m almost there, Etienne.” My fingertips were charred, and it was harder to bend my fingers than it should have been. I shook my hands, trying to get some of the feeling back, before I started digging through the bracken again, looking for a fresh lock pick.

Tybalt groaned. I froze.

“Tybalt?”

The sound wasn’t repeated. I swallowed, hard, and dug down into the brush until I found a sprig of broom that suited my needs. Then I scooted down, bending to begin fiddling with the locks holding his ankles together.

Some pains get better with exposure, familiarity breeding a sort of physical contempt. The pain of flesh touching iron isn’t one of them. You’ll eventually go numb from all the poison being pumped into your system, but that isn’t the same thing. Gripping the cuffs on Tybalt’s ankles was just as bad as gripping the cuffs on his wrists had been. At least this time I knew that I’d eventually be able to get the locks open. I bit my lip harder still, and somehow got the first of the ankle cuffs unlocked. I kept working.

“Almost…there…” The last lock let go. The cuffs fell away. I scooted back in the bracken, clutching my burned fingers to my chest and trying to figure out what I was supposed to do now.

And Tybalt opened his eyes.

Cait Sidhe can see through don’t-look-here spells. I don’t know why; maybe it’s something to do with that whole “a cat can look at a King” thing. “Tybalt?” The question was half-whisper, half-plea, as if I didn’t know whether I wanted to hear the answer. I bit my lip, scooting a little closer, careful to avoid the fallen cuffs. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he sat up slowly, touching the burned places on his wrists with shaking hands before raising his head and looking at me. His pupils were so wide they all but devoured his irises, making his eyes inhuman and strange.

I could hear Etienne moving in the room behind me, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was Tybalt, looking at me like he didn’t know me at all. “Tybalt, it’s me, October…”

Tybalt moved almost too fast for my eyes to follow, closing the distance between us in less than a second. His hands caught my shoulders as he crushed his lips against mine, tasting of sweat and crushed broom as well as the more customary pennyroyal and musk. I returned the kiss without thought or hesitation, molding myself into him, trying to express my relief without words. We didn’t need any words. Not anymore.

His teeth cut my lip. I welcomed the taste of my own blood, letting myself draw strength from it. The wound had healed by the time he pulled away from me, and the burning sensation in my fingers was fading, replaced by a numbness I knew couldn’t last. My body could recover from almost anything. Iron poisoning isn’t “almost anything.” The pain would come soon.

And that didn’t matter, because Tybalt was looking at me, eyes returning to normal as his breathing evened out. “October,” he whispered, and the sound of his voice was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard. “I was afraid…”

“So was I.” I put my hand against his cheek. “Don’t scare me like that.”