Silver and Lead by Seanan McGuire (October Daye #19)
Something is rotten in Faerie. In the aftermath of Titania's reality-warping enchantment, things are returning to what passes for normal in the Kingdom in the Mists—until it's discovered that the royal vaults have been looted, and several powerful magical artifacts are missing. None are things that can be safely left unsecured, and some have the potential to do almost as much damage as Titania did, and having them in the wrong hands could prove just as disastrous.
At least the theft means that Sir October "Toby" Daye, Knight errant and Hero of the Realm, finally has an excuse to get out of the house. Sure, she's eight and a half months pregnant, but that doesn't mean she can’t take care of herself. But with the sea witch offering to stand godmother to Toby's child, maybe there are greater dangers ahead for Toby and her family than it appears....
Old enemies will resurface, new enemies will disguise themselves as friends, and Queen Windermere must try to keep her Hero on the case without getting herself gutted by the increasingly irritated local King of Cats. Sometimes, what's been lost can be the most dangerous threat of all.
PUBLISHER: Tor Books
YEAR: 2025
LENGTH: 400 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: Highly
Queer Rep Summary: Lesbian/Sapphic Secondary Character(s), Gay/Achillean Secondary Character(s), Bi/Pan Secondary Character(s), Trans Secondary Character(s).
*I received a free review copy for an honest review of this book.
SILVER AND LEAD keeps the October Daye series fresh by subverting some likely expectations and handling stressful topics with McGuire's usual attention to her characters. Just because Toby is pregnant doesn't mean she's suddenly fragile... if only Tybalt would understand that.
After four months of ignorance as to her body's pregnant state, and several more where her loved ones haven't left her alone for fear of some unspecified harm to the baby, Toby is as desperate to do something, anything at all, as Tybalt is for her to stay away from the slightest hint of danger. With two weeks before the baby is due, Arden comes to Toby asking for her to be a hero of the realm once more. The treasury was looted sometime during the months of Titania' spell, and several of the dangerous artifacts within it are being used to deadly effect. Arden wouldn't ask Toby if it weren't urgent, but the damage is already too high to countenance. It's generally a bad idea to go on a dangerous mission while eight and a half months pregnant, but this is supposed to just be a few chats, maybe an investigation, to find out why several items are missing from the royal vaults. Instead, things start going awry almost as soon as Toby and Quentin start looking into the thefts.
Narratively, Toby's pregnancy was an opportunity for high danger in few steps traveled and McGuire pulls it off flawlessly. Given the sheer number of items known to have been taken, I had anticipated a wild goose chase across the kingdom, a thing that would have been difficult for Toby in her body's current state. I was surprised and intrigued when the trail was surprisingly short in a logistical sense, without compromising on peril.
I have noted with good humor the increasingly detailed logistics involved in getting Toby, Quentin, and the others wherever they need to go in each book, and vaguely expected another story in this vein. Instead, danger and distance in Toby's world turn out to be not so highly correlated as earlier books would have had me believe. SILVER AND LEAD manages to be the bloodiest book so far (at least by my reckoning), a feat which is especially impressive in a series where the protagonist regularly drinks her own blood to access aspects of her magic.
I love McGuire's writing and have long trusted her sense of which stories require gruesome scenes to tell their stories, and what can be represented sufficiently by mere acknowledgement in the text. That trust paid off here with McGuire's handling of Toby's pregnancy. Pregnancy is a personally triggering topic for me, and I knew before picking this up that Toby was far enough along that this book would heavily feature her pregnancy, and was likely to contain its end through some combination of birth and tragedy. I read SILVER AND LEAD, despite that apprehension, and I'm glad I didn't skim the text or shy away, even knowing that I was likely to have a stressful reading experience.
With any long-running series that maintains continuity (such as this one), it is necessary to maintain some kind of balance between stories that can draw in new readers, and advancing the overarching narrative for longtime ones. As nearly always, my recommendation is to, if possible, read this series from the beginning. It truly is worthwhile to go through this journey with Toby, watching the way that she has grown so much as a person, becoming a builder of community, and confident as someone who refuses to let harm stand unchallenged. For new readers, McGuire leverages the sheer number of characters in the series to occasionally provide opportunities for something to be explained which longtime readers will know, but is new information to someone at that moment. Every author who writes long enough in one world will find their own equilibrium in this aspect of storytelling, and McGuire's style works very well for me. It helps that there are enough characters within the text to whom some detail is new information that Toby or others can get them up to speed while the reader listens in if necessary. It keeps the information diegetic and relevant, explaining some combination of what happened and how it affected things, often giving wholly new information such as how someone processed what occurred, or how they think of it now that much time has passed.
SILVER AND LEAD is best read, at minimum with the backstory provided in BE THE SERPENT, SLEEP NO MORE, and THE INNOCENT SLEEP. To read it without that minimum level of backstory is to lose some of the tension and catharsis provided by those three books in the leadup to this one. However, I suspect that once just one more book is available in the series, this will serve very well as an entry point for someone who wants to start the series in this particular phase of Toby's life. SILVER AND LEAD is simultaneously 1) the latest step in a story that began eighteen books earlier, 2) an early step in the arc that is Toby and Tybalt's married life together, 3) a reminder of the still-painful distance between Toby and her liege, 4) the only book where Toby understands the whole time that she even is pregnant, and 5) the first book to take place wholly after Titania's spelled was shattered. Toby's pregnancy and the anticipated child means that this is an inflection point for Toby, Tybalt, their relationship, and the larger narrative. It is one that could end with birth, death, happy parents, a grieving spouse, an orphaned child, or any number of permutations thereof. It's also the first real test of what their life will be as a married couple with Toby still a knight, beholden to her (estranged) liege and the Queen. Though Tybalt and Toby married several books ago, Titania's spell disrupted their honeymoon phase and reignited Tybalt's concerns about losing Toby to death or worse.
This is not Toby's first time being pregnant, but she fears that if something happened to her or the baby, let alone both, lonely Tybalt would rend apart the world in his grief. While her tone ranges from acknowledgment to annoyance at the slowly rolling parade of body horror that is pregnancy, she regards very little of it with surprise, occasionally remarking on how something aligns with or diverges from what it was like to be pregnant with Gillian. Due to her accelerated healing, Toby is spared many (but not all) of the most uncomfortable aspects of pregnancy as an experience, even ones which happened the first time when she was more human.
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- Chosen. Again. by J. Emery
Graphic/Explicit CW for kidnapping, confinement, pregnancy, childbirth, violence, blood, injury detail, medical content, medical trauma, self harm.
Moderate CW for grief, excrement, vomit, body horror, murder, death.
Minor CW for genocide, suicidal thoughts.
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