One Salt Sea

by Seanan McGuire

  It bothered me that I could be classed with the nobility now. It bothered me a lot.

  The hall was narrow at first, but widened as I got closer to the solarium. It also became more cluttered, with boxes and pieces of broken furniture stacked against the walls. True to her word, Marcia had arranged to have the room emptied for my use. I smiled a little. If she’d been an employee, it would have been time to give her a raise.

  The air tingled around me as I walked, crackling with excited static. The hall marked the dividing line between the Summerlands side of the knowe and the mortal world cave that served as one of the primary anchor points. That made it a liminal space, belonging simultaneously to both worlds, and to neither.

  A recessed doorway was hewn out of the wall at the spot where the static was the most severe—still in the knowe, but close enough to the mortal world to be overlooked, almost hidden. A person could walk down the hall a dozen times and never find the opening. I put my hand on the flat groove worn into the door itself, pushed it open, and stepped through. It was time to do something I’d intended never to do again. It was time to call the night-haunts.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE SOLARIUM WALLS WERE GRAY stone shot through with veins of quartz and studded with fossils. Careful study would show extra legs on the lizards and vestigial wings on the prehistoric mice. This was a Summer-lands mountain, and the secrets it held had no real connection to mortal evolution. The smooth gray floor was patterned with the lacy ghosts of fossil ferns.

  Moonlight streamed into the room through the crystal panels set into a silver cobweb grid high overhead. I took a hook from the wall and walked carefully around the room, using the specially-designed tool to open the windows one by one. The night-haunts could have found a way inside without that small courtesy, but it never hurts to be polite, especially when asking for a favor.

  Once all the windows were open, I returned the hook to its place on the wall. Then I walked to the center of the room, drawing the knife from my belt. Moonlight cast sharp, secretive glints off the silver. I didn’t pause before dragging the blade across the inside of my left elbow. Bright blood welled immediately to the surface. I tilted my arm down to let the blood run down my fingers and began to turn, drawing a bloody circle on the floor around me.

  “I need your help,” I said, quietly. “I need your attention. I need you to come to me. Please, if anything remains between us, please, come to me now. I’ve never needed you more.” The smell of cut grass and copper rose around me, heavy and cloying. I licked my lips, and added plaintively, “Please.”

  Silence fell. I returned my knife to its holster, clapping my right hand over the cut I’d made and pressing down to stop the bleeding. It was already slowing down. Just one more advantage of supernaturally efficient healing, I suppose.

  Seconds ticked past, stretching into minutes. The smell of my magic didn’t fade, and the night-haunts didn’t come. I was on the verge of giving up when the spell surged and burst around me, leaving my head aching and the smell of copper hanging in the air.

  And then I heard the sound of wings.

  A thin stream of night-haunts flowed in through the windows above me, moving with an economy that made sense, considering that half of them were little more than shadows. The more solid members of the flock—the ones that had eaten the most recently—clustered around the outside, keeping their frailer companions from being scattered by the wind. They were all about the size of Barbie dolls, with tattered dry-leaf wings that looked too frail to lift them off the ground.

  As they drew closer, I started to see individuals among the flock. Too many of them were familiar. The night-haunts have no faces of their own, so they borrow the faces of fallen fae, taking on their minds and memories . . . for a while. Seeing them always hurts, but it’s a good kind of pain, like having the chance to see something you thought was lost forever just one more perfect time.

  The night-haunts surrounded me, their expressions giving no clue as to whether they were pleased or aggravated by my summons. Most of them stopped about six feet above the floor, hovering in place while one of the ones I recognized—the one with the face of Devin, my teacher, lover, and betrayer—barked instructions in a guttural language I didn’t know.

  I swallowed, fighting the first tremors of fear. All I could do was hope they were willing to listen, and that I was right about the rules governing their interactions with the living.

  “We didn’t think to see you alive a second time, October Daye, daughter of Amandine,” said the night-haunt with Devin’s face. He landed on the floor, closing his wings with an audible snap as he looked me slowly up and down. “You aren’t what you were.”

  “None of us are what we were,” I said, and frowned. He hadn’t been their spokesman before. I glanced around the flock, but the night-haunt with Dare’s face was nowhere to be seen.

  There were new faces among the night-haunts, some I knew, a few that I didn’t. Oleander de Merelands was there. So was Dare’s brother, Manuel, and Gordan, the only one from ALH Computing to die a “natural” death. There were more Cait Sidhe than I expected. Tybalt never told me how many of his subjects died when Oleander poisoned them. It looked like the casualties were higher than I ever guessed.

  Devin’s haunt followed my gaze and said, “The hunting has been good of late.”

  “Uh, yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Look, I was hoping you’d be willing to talk with me.”

  “That’s usually the reason for a summons.” He looked at my simple circle, eyebrows raising in that old, familiar gesture of silent judgment. “No flowers? No pretty words or symbolic deaths?”

  “Like you said, I’m not what I once was.” I crouched to put myself on his level. “I didn’t send the summons on a whim. I had no other choice. I need your help.”

  He smiled. The other night-haunts tittered. “My dear October,” he said, in a tone that was pure Devin, oozing charm and danger in equal measure, “why would we ever deign to help you? We’re not in the business of helping people. Really, darling, I don’t understand.”

  Time to deal with the devil. I took a deep breath, and said, “Rayseline Torquill has stolen the children of the Duke and Duchess of Saltmist. I don’t know why—not yet—but I need to find out, or a lot of people are going to get hurt.”

  Devin’s haunt cocked his head, smile twisting into a familiar expression of amused contempt. “And what makes you think we don’t want ‘a lot of people’ getting hurt? We need to eat if we’re to live.”

  “You remember being us,” I said, quietly. “You remember what it was like to live. I know you need to eat. But I can’t imagine you’d wish for war.”

  The night-haunts whispered among themselves, the sound like wind rattling through the branches of skeletal trees. I shivered as I listened to them, and part of me noted, analytically, that the Luidaeg never actually said my circle would protect me. If they decided they just wanted to kill me and be done, I might be in for the fight of a lifetime.

  I was getting tired of being in an endless succession of things called “the fight of a lifetime.” Just once, I’d like to have the fight of a Tuesday afternoon. “Please,” I said.

  The haunt with Devin’s face looked at me solemnly. “You aren’t what you once were,” he repeated, and the words were all the more unnerving because they were spoken in the voice of my old mentor. “You’re becoming what I always thought you’d be. Who are you looking for?”

  “A Selkie. I don’t have a name, and I don’t know whether they’re male or female, but they would have died recently, and without their skin.”

  “She didn’t expect to kill me,” said a voice behind me. I turned, and found myself looking at a diminutive figure—diminutive even by night-haunt standards—with ruddy brown hair and freckles spattered across her heart-shaped face. I recognized her vaguely. We’d probably been at the same formal events.

  I’d never asked her name.

  “Are you the one I’m looking for?” I aske
d.

  She nodded, stepping forward. She stopped with her bare toes just shy of my circle’s edge. “My name is—my name was—Margie. I was in service to Her Grace, the Duchess of Saltmist, these last fifty years.”

  What do you say to someone who’s dead? “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, the words sounding idiotic even as they left my lips.

  “So am I,” she said, smiling very slightly. “Mistress Torquill approached me at the Farmer’s Market, of all mad places, and said she wished to speak with me—said she needed a Selkie’s perspective on some matter of great importance. I spoke with her because I thought she wished to make peace with Connor. I began to hope she might have found it in herself to come home to her husband, to begin to make amends.”

  That was a more charitable view of Rayseline Torquill than I’d been able to maintain in a long time. I tried not to let that show on my face as I asked, “So you went with her?”

  “Not right away, but I went to meet with her that night, yes,” said the night-haunt who’d once been Margie. Regret danced behind her eyes. “She asked me if I would be willing to meet with her near the docks behind the ballpark. I saw no harm in it. I went. And while she was standing in front of me, and us all alone, someone struck me from behind, and everything went black.”

  I felt my brief sense of hope wither and die. There was no way Raysel was keeping the children at the docks. They’re big, but they have a high fae population, and the Lordens had been sending people out looking for the kids for days now. If the boys were alive and at the docks, they would have already been found.

  “Is that where you died?” I asked.

  The Margie haunt blinked, looking surprised. “No, it’s not. I woke again in a room with walls of stone and straw strewn on the floor. The air smelled of spices, like we were near some sort of a kitchen, or maybe a restaurant. I was bound, hand and foot.” Her expression darkened. “Mistress Torquill was there. She had an arrow in her hands. A black arrow, barely the length of a knitter’s needle.”

  “Elf-shot,” I guessed aloud.

  “Yes. She said she was going to make me sleep for a while—a long, long while—and that while I slept, my skin would be out, making mischief in the world. Then she stabbed the arrow into my shoulder, and everything went away again.” The night-haunt’s face crumpled like she was going to cry. “I don’t think she meant to kill me. She merely meant for me to be blamed for her crimes until the day I woke.”

  Selkies without their skins are basically humans with a strange fondness for the beach. “You died when she took your skin,” I said.

  Margie’s haunt nodded. “I did.”

  “Did you see anything that might help me find the place where you were being held—anything at all? Did you hear something, smell something . . . ?”

  “There were the spices . . . redwoods. I smelled redwood trees, and old earth, earth that had been let to decay without disturbance for a long, long time. The place I was in, it was underground, and it felt like a knowe, but not like a knowe.”

  “Could you have been in a shallowing?” A proper knowe is built entirely in the Summerlands, where the laws of Faerie reign supreme. Sometimes, these days, that isn’t possible. There’s not enough land for that. So knowes get built in the shallow space between the worlds, dug out of ground that’s neither here nor there. They can scramble things, just because the words don’t exist to properly describe them.

  The night-haunt looked thoughtful. “I rather think it could have been, yes.”

  A shallowing in a place with redwood trees and old earth. There was one more thing: “Did you smell the sea?”

  “No.”

  That meant it was somewhere inland. Maybe Dean Lorden was still alive after all. “I will do my best to avenge you, Margie. I’m sorry you died.”

  “I’m not,” she said sweetly. I was still staring at her when she continued, “I may look like the Selkie lass whose death I wear, but without that death, I’d look like nothing at all. Don’t forget that we are two things at once, and never only the thing you can see.”

  “This can’t be the only reason you called us.” The night-haunt with Devin’s face flew around the circle to land next to Margie. “You take your work seriously—in part, I think, because you have so little skill for some of it—but this is too big a danger for this stage in the game, over something as small as two children that you’ve never met. What else is going on, October? What else is wrong?”

  “It’s my daughter, Devin.” The name slipped out before I could stop it. I blinked back sudden tears and kept going, saying, “She’s missing. Rayseline took her, and she’s probably holding her with the Lorden boys. I have to get her back. I have to.”

  “Oh, October.” He looked at me gravely. “Keep hope. She is not among our number. Her blood is thin, but her death would call us all the same.”

  My eyes widened. “I . . . really?”

  “Really.” I felt his hand brush my knee. The gesture was so much something Devin would have done when he was alive, before he went crazy, that I stopped being able to keep my tears from falling. “Keep hope.”

  “I’ll try.” I wiped my eyes with my left hand, remembering the blood too late. Oh, well. I’ve had worse things on my face. “I don’t know how free you are to go where nothing has died, but . . . if one of them dies . . . can you find me? Can you tell me?”

  I didn’t want to think of any of the three missing children as expendable. Two of them would start a war, and one of them was my only daughter. But if it happened, if one of them died . . . maybe I could get to the other two in time.

  The night-haunt with Devin’s face turned to the others. Buzzing and rattling filled the room, like a thousand dead branches scraping against each other. Finally, the susurrus faded, and he turned back to me. “We will,” he said. “This one time, we will.”

  “I . . .” Biting back the urge to thank him was almost impossible. I swallowed hard, and said, “This is very kind of you. I know you don’t have to do this.”

  “So return the kindness,” he said. “Answer a question for us.”

  I blinked. “Of course. What do you want to know?”

  “Why aren’t you dead?”

  I hadn’t expected the question, or the naked confusion in his voice. I stared at him for a moment before managing to say, “I’m alive because . . . well, because I haven’t died. I don’t know why. How the hell am I supposed to know?”

  “A Fetch was called for you,” he said. “We sent her off with weeping and all proper ceremony. But here you are, and your Fetch is still alive.”

  “The natural order of things is not preserved,” said the night-haunt with Margie’s face, punctuating the statement with a snap of her wings. “You can’t exist like this.”

  “Since when does the natural order of things have anything to do with Faerie?” A soft grumbling swept through the night-haunts. I sighed. “The natural order of things is going to have to cope, because I need May to keep paying her share of the rent.”

  “This isn’t right.” The night-haunt with Oleander’s face muscled her way forward, glaring at me. We didn’t part on the best terms. I killed her, after all. “You should be dust and memory. Your Fetch should be a rattle on the wind, a warning to our children.”

  “She’s not, and neither am I,” I snapped, tucking my hair back to display the recently sharpened point of one ear. “See? I died. Mom just refused to let it stick.”

  “Must your line forever be so cavalier with death?” asked the Devin-haunt. The others sighed, like dry leaves brushing together. “We’ll come to you if we learn anything, but you can’t do this again, Toby. The courtesy we can afford for the sake of the life you saved can only extend so far. We’ll be going now.” The flock began to rise.

  “Wait!” I said. “What are you—”

  I was too late. The night-haunts left as quickly as they’d come, leaving me standing alone in my rough circle of blood.

  “—talking about?” I finishe
d, to the silence.

  The silence didn’t answer.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MARCIA WAS WAITING in the throne room when I emerged. Her easy pose against the wall must have taken some serious thought—she could only have looked more casual if she’d been wearing a bikini and sipping a cocktail. I stopped where I was, raising an eyebrow.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “How did it go?” Marcia abandoned her faux relaxation in favor of standing up straight, turning the full focus of her attention on me. “Did they tell you anything good?”

  “The night-haunts were obscure and unnerving, but they told me some things I needed to know,” I said, walking past her. She fell into step behind me. “The Selkie Raysel killed was named Margie, and the Lorden kids aren’t dead.”

  “That’s good—the boys, I mean, not the dead woman.” She walked a little faster as she pulled up alongside me, and frowned, studying my face. “That is good, right? Because you look like it’s really bad.”

  There was no point in trying to conceal the truth forever. I’ve never been any good at that sort of thing, anyway. “My daughter’s missing.”

  “Wait—what? You have a daughter?”

  “Yeah. Gillian. She lives with her human father. Rayseline took her, and I need to find her, fast, before there’s time for her to suffer any permanent damage.”

  Marcia took a short, sharp breath, like she was biting off an exclamation. Then she went quiet, walking with me across the courtyard and down the hall to the kitchen without saying a word.

  It wasn’t until I was reaching for the pot of coffee that simmered gently on the stove that she said, very softly, “What makes you think she hasn’t already?”

  I paused for a moment, my hand just shy of the handle. Then I finished the motion, trying to let the familiarity of it soothe me. It wasn’t working. Sometimes, even ritual has no comfort left to give. “What do you mean?” I asked.