Hell and High Water

by Charlotte E. English

  Fi said even less than Ghian. Personally, I thought her tremors had little to do with her body temperature; Fi’s a water-creature, a mere dunking in the ocean doesn’t touch her. She sat in rigid silence with two sealskins wrapped over her shoulders — her own, and Narasel’s — and grimly gripping the mug I’d given her without seeming to understand what to do with it.

  I watched her, but I left her alone. She didn’t need to be clucked over, or hassled with questions. Silise had thrown her into a state of minor trauma. It would take her some time to come out of it.

  I hoped it was minor. The lost look in her eyes didn’t encourage me. Wherever she was in her head… she was far, far away from my comfy cellar, and from me.

  I wasn’t surprised when, after an hour or so, she rose, and excused herself with a polite nod to Daix’s guests. She gave me a hug on her way past — an actual hug, or, well, half a one. A brief pressure around my shoulders, her head tilted towards mine.

  Then she was ghosting away up the stairs.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, hastily handing off the fresh mug of tea I’d been ferrying to Anat. ‘Uh. Fi?’

  She didn’t seem to hear me.

  I ran after her, caught up with her at the top of the stairs. ‘Fi. Where you going? Home?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m… tired. I need to sleep.’

  I wanted to go home, too. I wanted to see Mea with my own eyes, talk to her. Make sure she was all right. But she was with Coronis; she didn’t need me, and I’d be a third wheel.

  The cellar was almost as good as home, at least when it had Daix and Ghian and Anat in it. I wanted Fi to stay, too, but I couldn’t oppose her desire to go.

  ‘I know you’ll hate my casting aspersions on your ability to cope,’ I said. ‘But. Are you going to be okay?’

  ‘Fine.’ She said it firmly, calmly.

  ‘I’ll be here if you need me.’

  Fionn only nodded, not really looking at me. Not really listening.

  So I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. Only a little bit; just enough to get her attention. ‘Fi. Hear this. You’ve been alone for eighty years but that’s over. Don’t withdraw into silence. You don’t have to deal with this by yourself anymore.’

  It was too dark to be certain, but I thought I saw a sheen flicker over her eyes. Saltwater. Might be tears… might be some weird selkie thing I still didn’t understand.

  Fi would prefer explanation B, so let’s say it’s that one.

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ she said, and since she met my eyes that time I more or less even believed her.

  ‘Call me soon.’

  She smiled, faintly. ‘Don’t you have a show to do?’

  ‘So what? I’ll always have time for you.’

  Fionn’s smile grew slightly bigger. Slightly.

  ‘Call me, or I’ll be showing up at your door,’ I warned her. ‘Frowning. Fiercely.’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  ‘Actually, I think I’ll do that anyway. Maybe without the frown. Definitely with cake.’

  ‘And Daix?’

  ‘I don’t know, do you feel lucky? Your flat may not survive.’

  At last: a glimmer of a real smile, even a little laugh. And when I pulled her into a hug, she returned it.

  ‘I don’t like where my head went, tonight,’ she admitted, pulling away from me. ‘It’ll take me a while to bring it back.’

  ‘I understand.’

  She turned, and opened the door leading back to the street.

  ‘Fi?’ I called after her.

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘I love you. So does Daix, even if she can only show it by stalking.’

  ‘Love you, too,’ answered Fionn. ‘Both of you.’

  And she was gone. I resisted a temptation to pull a Daix myself, and follow her home — just to make sure she got there all right. She wouldn’t thank me.

  I went back down the stairs smiling, following the sounds of Daix’s laughter. It had been a hard week, but I liked the outcome. Fi and Daix and I, friends again. Working together, laughing together. Punching people in the face together.

  It wasn’t enough to erase eighty years of silence; nothing could ever do that.

  But it was a start.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Fionn

  I wasn’t altogether surprised, when I reached my flat, to find it somewhat less empty than expected.

  As I let myself in at the front door, I became aware at once of a faint glow of light somewhere within. Someone sat in an armchair by the window, nearly in darkness, save for the small table-lamp she’d switched on.

  Silise.

  She watched me in silence as I carefully laid my precious sealskin over the back of my sofa.

  ‘I can’t believe you didn’t change your damned hiding-place,’ she said after a while. ‘Really, how easy could you make it?’

  ‘Clearly, I should have,’ I agreed, keeping my eyes on her. ‘Somehow I didn’t expect that my erstwhile best friend might still be alive, and planning to enslave me with it.’

  ‘That wasn’t the plan,’ she countered, sounding annoyed that I could even suspect her of it. ‘Look, nobody wanted to do that to you. All right? Not even me.’

  I remembered Brianne’s words as she’d taken up my sealskin, and the flash of real regret in her eyes. Might be some truth there. ‘Then why did you take it?’

  She shrugged. ‘Insurance. You always used to be stubborn as a mule. Nothing’s changed there.’

  ‘Sil.’ By now it seemed apparent she wasn’t planning to attack me; cautiously, I took a seat. ‘If you’d needed the kind of help I could provide, you could have just asked.’

  She looked long at me. ‘I could have,’ she agreed.

  I waited, but Silise did not seem disposed to elaborate.

  ‘What’s it been for, Sil?’ I said quietly. ‘What were you trying to do?’

  She shrugged again, avoiding my eye. ‘A… game. At first. I was fucking angry, all right? They say everything gets better with time, but this didn’t, and I…’ She paused, and the anger in her faded. A kind of desolation replaced it. ‘I wanted to hurt you. All of you. As much as you hurt me.’

  ‘You enslaved half a dozen people. Sold them like cattle.’

  ‘Please. They were in no real danger. I knew the fatales would save the day.’ Her voice was acid.

  ‘So they were what, a red flag? Some kind of twisted pantomime to get our attention?’

  She actually had the effrontery to grin. ‘You have to admit, it was a good game. We got you at every turn. Daix and her intel! So predictable.’

  ‘Your game got a selkie killed.’

  ‘That wasn’t supposed to happen either.’

  ‘But it did. If you couldn’t call off your games before someone died, that was the point where it should’ve been over.’

  Silise waved this off with an impatient gesture. ‘Spare me your damned sanctimony, please? I know. But we’d gone too far to turn back.’

  I just watched her for a time, trying to read the once-familiar contours of her face. Anger she had aplenty, and… something else. I didn’t think it was regret, or, not much. ‘You’ve had a small taste of what it’s like to be someone’s puppet,’ I said at length. ‘Courtesy of Tai. And while siren-thrall doesn’t even touch the deep wrongness of a stolen sealskin, maybe you’ve a glimmer of an idea of what you did to me. To Mea, and Narasel, and Melly.’

  ‘The thing is,’ said Silise, rising from her chair. ‘I’d do it again. All of it. Just for the sight of you bound and helpless at my feet.’

  ‘What did we do that was so terrible?’ I whispered, appalled by the burning resentment of her tone. ‘We tried, Sil. We tried.’

  ‘It wasn’t enough.’ She walked to the door; I didn’t try to stop her. ‘You abandoned me, Fionn. Left me for dead, walked away. Forgot me. And I won’t let it go.’

  No sense reasoning with her; she couldn’t hear me. ‘Watch your back, Sil,’ I said quietly. ‘We know you’re out there, now.’

>   ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Why stab me in the back once, if you can do it over and over again?’

  The door closed behind her, leaving me alone in the near-dark.

  I bore the profound silence for all of five minutes before I took out my phone.

  Tai answered so fast, she must have been watching for a call. ‘Fi. You okay?’

  ‘Not… not really, no. Are you still at the cellar?’

  ‘All of us.’

  I took a shaky breath, and let it out. ‘Put the kettle on, will you? I’m coming back.’