Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

It’s just ink, I told myself firmly and wiped my fingers on what was soon to be yet another ruined pair of jeans.

It says something about Faerie’s sense of humor that the daughter of the best blood-worker in Faerie can’t stand the sight of her own blood. At least the effort of wiping the blood off distracted me from the vague itch of my wrists healing themselves.

Once the pain was gone and my hands weren’t quite so sticky, I bent forward and untied the twine around my ankles. The knots were tight, but not so tight I couldn’t unpick them with my fingers. Carefully avoiding the puddle of puke to my side, I braced one hand against the blood-dampened wall, and stood. My head spun one last time as I adjusted to being upright. Then everything settled, and I was loose, relatively uninjured…and entirely unarmed.

“Crap,” I said, and scrubbed at my eyes with the back of my hands. The movement caused my jacket to shift, and something in my pocket went “clink.”

I dropped my hands.

When Duchess Riordan’s guards knocked me out and took me away, they’d confiscated my knife, but they hadn’t searched my pockets for less obvious dangers. I still had the Luidaeg’s Chelsea-chaser, which was currently glowing neutral starlight pale. And I had both the power dampener and its counteragent tucked into their respective pockets. Which meant that Quentin and Tybalt, wherever they were, probably also had theirs. Things were looking up.

Speaking of looking up…I crossed to the window, leaning onto my toes as I looked out on the moon-washed moor. I was definitely in Annwn, and I just as definitely wasn’t looking up: the waves of heather and broom that stretched out around the tower where I was imprisoned were way, way down. Far enough down, in fact, that I couldn’t even consider jumping a viable means of escape. If it had been only fifty feet, I would probably have broken the bones in both my legs, but I would have recovered. This was more like two hundred feet, and no matter how quickly I heal, a drop like that would kill me.

When all else fails, try the direct route. I dropped back to the floor and walked to the door, a heavy oak monstrosity barred with magic-dampening rowan wood. This must be the humane dungeon. They didn’t want prisoners using magic to open the door, but they hadn’t resorted to barring it with iron. Thank Oberon for that. The last thing I needed to add to my day was a bad case of iron poisoning.

The door was locked. That was no surprise; I would have been more surprised, and substantially more concerned, if it hadn’t been. I bent to peer through the keyhole, making sure there was nothing unexpected in there. Then I went back to the pile of bracken, selected a particularly green piece of woody stem, and set to work.

My old mentor, Devin, fancied himself a cross between Fagin and Peter Pan—a thief and con man with an army of eternal children to do his bidding. Most of the lessons I learned while I was with him were the sort of things I’ve spent the years since then trying to forget. Some of them, on the other hand, have proved to be surprisingly useful. Like how to pick a lock with improvised tools when I couldn’t use magic to make the process any easier.

It probably says something about my life that I’ve been in a position to use this particular lesson more than once. And I bet not even Devin imagined I’d one day be using his techniques to pick a tower lock in Annwn. That’s me. Always doing my best to surpass expectations.