One Salt Sea

by Seanan McGuire

  I nodded. “We’re moving.” I gestured for the others to follow me, and drew my knife as I slipped past the Luidaeg, into the door in the tree.

  Entering a shallowing isn’t quite like entering a proper knowe. The separation between the worlds isn’t as pronounced, and the disorientation passes faster. This passage was even more subtle than the norm, since the air in Muir Woods was already so clean, and the night was already so silent. We moved from the mortal world into the fringes of the Summerlands without missing a step. The Luidaeg’s spell of silence must have broken when she spoke, because I could hear our footsteps again, little scuffs against the hard-packed clay of the tunnel floor.

  There were no sounds but our footsteps as we walked through the dark of the shallowing. The clay under our feet gave way to smooth gray stone. I shivered and sped up. We were getting closer to the children—we had to be. This was the place, and this was the type of stone I’d seen through Dean’s memories. They had to be somewhere up ahead, waiting for rescue.

  And then there was light.

  It was subtle at first, the faintest decrease in the darkness surrounding us. It grew brighter until I could see the walls of the tunnel without needing to be right up against them. There was a corner just ahead; whatever was casting the light had to be on the other side. I sped up, sticking close to the wall in case someone was waiting with a lantern and a crossbow. When I reached the corner, I stopped, listening. There was no sound. Gripping the hilt of my knife a little tighter, I stepped forward.

  A hallway with oak-paneled walls and the same stone floor extended on the other side of the corner. That wasn’t what caught my attention. The light was coming from a lantern hanging from a hook on one wall, and it seemed to be moving. I took a step closer, and realized that it was lit, not with a candle or an oil wick, but with three live pixies. They were crammed into the tiny glass rectangle, leaving them with barely enough room to move their wings. Quentin’s breath hissed through his teeth as he saw them, and Tybalt scowled. Connor looked away.

  “Well?” whispered the Luidaeg, stepping up behind me. “What do you want to do about that? We can’t have them alerting Rayseline to our presence. And we could use the light.”

  “Hang on.” I stepped forward and took the lantern down from the wall, bringing it close to my face. The pixies inside looked at me with mingled hope and terror. Keeping my voice low, I said, “I need your help. We need to have light to find the people who put you in this lantern. If I let you out, will you stay and help us?”

  The pixies eyed me suspiciously before turning to each other and starting to speak in their rapid, high-pitched language. Finally, the smallest of the three turned to me and nodded, folding her arms to punctuate the gesture.

  “Here goes nothing,” I whispered, and opened the panel on the side of the lantern.

  All three pixies immediately flew out, performing an elaborate series of aerial acrobatics in the narrow confines of the hall. Then they turned and zoomed over our heads, vanishing into the hallway up ahead.

  “Oh, good call,” grumbled Connor.

  “Wait.” The pixies in Goldengreen were pests, thieves, and tricksters . . . but they kept their word. I had to hope these pixies would do the same.

  The seconds ticked by. I was about to admit defeat and move on into the dark when the light came racing back along the tunnel, and our three pixies flew back into view—now joined by six of their cousins. Quentin grinned.

  “They just wanted to get their friends out,” he said.

  “Let’s hope Rayseline wasn’t using one of those lamps,” said the Luidaeg . . . but she was smiling to herself as one of the pixies landed on her shoulder. The other pixies found perches on the rest of us, their multicolored wings casting a soft glow through the hall.

  “Come on,” I said, and started walking again.

  The pixies stayed with us as we made our way through the darkened hall, pausing only to free more of their people from lanterns. The sight of them crammed in there was enough to turn my stomach, and only intensified my need to find Gillian as soon as possible. Pixies are essentially defenseless when they’re not swarming. Using them as living light bulbs wasn’t just wrong; it was unnecessarily cruel. There are plenty of spells and plenty of candles in the world.

  We’d been walking through the shallowing for a good ten minutes when we came to the end of the hallway. A large oak door filled most of the final wall, standing ever so slightly open. I gestured to Connor, who nodded and slotted an arrow into his crossbow, raising it to shoulder height. Quentin and Tybalt stepped back, pressing themselves against the wall. Only the Luidaeg stayed where she was, arms folded, scowling.

  I crouched, making myself as small a target as possible, and pushed the door slowly open. Then I straightened, all caution forgotten, as the scene in front of me made my mouth go dry and my blood start to boil all in the same instant.

  Gillian was sitting in front of me, dressed in bloodstained sweatpants and an over-sized T-shirt. She wasn’t sitting up on her own; no, she was held upright by loops of rope, tied into thick knots and binding her to a heavy chair. Her ankles were tied to one of the chair legs, and her hands were bound behind her. She raised her head at the sound of the door opening, and her eyes widened when she saw me standing there. We must have looked like something out of a fantasy novel to her, all pointed ears and inhuman eyes, surrounded by the constantly-moving swirl of the pixies.

  “M-Mom?” she whispered, her voice raspy and dry. “Is that—are you—Mom?”

  “Oh, baby.” I took a step into the room, trusting the others to watch for any dangers. All I wanted was to get to Gillian as fast as possible, to cut her free and hold her, and never, never let her go. “It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

  “Mom . . .” She swallowed hard, the gesture seeming to take everything she had. Then she whispered, in a barelyaudible voice, “Run.”

  “It’s too late for that,” said Rayseline, her voice coming acid-sweet and oily from the hallway. We all turned, even the Luidaeg, to see her standing behind us with a longbow in her hands, an arrow nocked and ready to fire. Four Goblins stood behind her, their weapons raised. “It’s been too late for quite some time, don’t you think?” Her smile was radiantly bright. “I’m so glad you could come to my party. We’re all going to have so much fun together.”

  THIRTY

  “RAYSEL—�� CONNOR BEGAN. “Shut up, Connor. I have nothing to say to you. As for the rest of you, stay where you are, or the girl dies.” Raysel took a casual step forward. “And you, sea bitch, you have no power here. I am a descendant of Titania, and I deny you the right to stand against me, or to aid those who would. Do you hear and honor my words?”

  “. . . yes,” hissed the Luidaeg, fury dancing in her eyes. “I hear and honor your words.” The glance she cast in my direction confirmed my sudden fear: she wouldn’t be able to help us. Power like hers always comes with a price. The phrase Rayseline uttered was apparently part of the price the Luidaeg had to pay.

  “Then stand to the side and hold your tongue. This is not your business anymore.” Raysel lifted her chin, jerking it imperiously toward the wall. Silently snarling, the Luidaeg moved as she was ordered, glaring daggers all the way.

  “Rayseline.” I tried to put my body between her and my daughter without it being too obvious that I was doing it. If I’d had any doubts about her willingness to kill Gillian before, her own words had destroyed them. “Shut up or the girl dies” didn’t leave much room for argument. “We just want to talk.”

  “Talk? You want to talk, so you come skulking through my new home in the dark, carrying weapons, damaging my things? I don’t know what kind of fool you think I am, October, but no one brings the sea witch and the King of Cats when they just want to ‘talk.’ ” Rayseline’s smile slipped, revealing the fury behind it. “You never had any intention of talking. You came to steal, and I don’t take kindly to thieves.”

  It took a moment for me to realize that “da
maging my things” meant freeing the captive pixies. My stomach rolled. The pixies had vanished the moment Raysel came into the room, diving for whatever cover they could find. One of them was hiding in my hair. Its body was plastered against my neck, wings vibrating with every anxious breath. As for the rest of them . . . I just hoped they could escape before Raysel bottled them up again.

  “I don’t think we have the same definition of theft,” I said, struggling to keep my voice as level as possible. “Gillian’s my daughter.”

  “She’s your daughter, and my honored guest.” Raysel took another deliberate step forward. “We have so much to talk about, after all. You failed us both. Why, we’re practically sisters, aren’t we?”

  Gillian whimpered.

  “Shut your mouth,” I snapped, all attempts at reason forgotten in the face of the sudden, fierce need to protect my little girl. “Don’t make this harder on yourself than it has to be. Put down the bow, call off your Goblins, and come quietly. I’ll ask the Queen to go easy on you.”

  “That’s not an option. You know that, or you’d never have made the offer.” Raysel shook her head. I thought I saw a flash of regret in her eyes, there and gone in an instant. “Not even the High King could go easy on me now. Could he?” None of us said anything. Fury contorted her face as she turned to aim her bow at Quentin, shouting, “Could he?!”

  “No,” Quentin said. I shifted to get a look at him. He was standing with his chin up and his shoulders squared, staring down the length of his nose at Raysel. “But he could show clemency. You didn’t mean to kill the Selkie. You could be granted a sentence other than death.”

  “A century decorating some garden as a marble statue doesn’t appeal to me,” she spat. “I chose this. I’ll see it through.”

  “Did you choose it, Raysel?” I asked, shifting my weight to put myself a bit more solidly between her and Gillian. “Or did someone offer it to you? We know you didn’t do this alone. What did Dugan promise you? Did he tell you this would make everything better? It won’t.”

  Raysel’s fury slipped as she turned back to me, and for a moment, I saw the little girl I used to know in her face, a child trapped within the prison of her own induced madness. “Whether this plan was wise or not, it’s mine now,” she said. “Something had to be. This will be enough.”

  “Will it? Or is he just using you to get what he wants?” I shook my head. “No honor between thieves, remember? He’s going to clean up his loose ends, just like Oleander tried to do.”

  “Then he’ll die. Just like Oleander did.” The momentary vulnerability passed, replaced by a smug little smile. “I have to thank you, October.” She put a poisonous spin on the word “thank.” “You’ve collected everyone I need to kill in one place. It makes things so much more efficient.”

  I was surprised enough that I laughed out loud before I thought better of it. Raysel’s eyes widened, making her look like a startled child. “Do you really think this is everyone you’ll have to kill? Seriously? Oak and ash, Raysel, stop posturing and think. If you want to make this go away, you’re going to have to kill a lot more than just us.”

  “There’s my nephew,” said Tybalt calmly, “and a large percentage of my Court.”

  “The Duke and Duchess of Saltmist,” said Connor.

  “Danny and Walther,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure Danny knew about the dead Selkie. The look of alarm on Raysel’s face was promising; I just had to make it worse. “Oh, and most of Goldengreen.”

  “Shut up,” said Raysel, without conviction. She licked her lips, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Her Goblins murmured behind her, starting to look concerned. Maybe they were realizing how unlikely their promised payday really was. “All of you, be quiet.”

  “Your parents,” I said.

  That was the wrong card to play. Raysel’s eyes narrowed this time, and her grip on her longbow steadied. “They already chose you over me,” she said, pulling the bowstring tight. “They can rot for all I care.”

  I froze. I may be faster than I used to be, but I knew better than to believe I could outrun an arrow. If she let go, I was going down—and worse. Elf-shot is normally small, sized to fit in a handheld crossbow . . . but the tip of Raysel’s arrow glittered poisonously. Clearly, she’d been making some adjustments.

  Raysel smiled at the terror on my face. “So maybe killing you won’t make this go away. So what? I’m going to be Queen when the war is over, and there’s plenty of space on the battlefield to arrange for an ‘accidental’ death or two. You’ve given me a list to work from. I’ll just think of it as a challenge before my coronation.”

  Still not daring to move, I asked the only question I could think of that might buy us a little more time: “How were you planning to kill the Luidaeg? She’s Firstborn. I only know one person who knows how to kill a Firstborn, and you’re talking to her. If you kill me, the Luidaeg lives.”

  “Even the Firstborn can be . . . incapacitated for a little while. I only need a hundred years or so. After that, she can say whatever she likes. I’ll have my throne. She won’t be able to hurt me.”

  “Then there’s May, and the night-haunts—I mean, this is a lot of killing.”

  Raysel scoffed. “The night-haunts are nothing. I own flyswatters.”

  “The Court of Cats will hunt you to the farthest marches and beyond,” said Tybalt. He sounded almost bored. That was a dangerous tone coming from him. A cat that looks bored is a cat that’s getting ready to pounce.

  Please, Tybalt, be careful, I prayed silently, unsure, as always, if anyone was listening. There’s no telling what she has on that arrow. Elf-shot, treated with a little something extra to make waking up impossible, if Walther was right.

  “I don’t care,” said Raysel. She drew the bowstring back a little farther. Tybalt glanced at me, and nodded, almost imperceptibly. This standoff couldn’t last forever. Raysel’s attention was on me. All I had to do was keep it there.

  I said the only thing I could think of that would guarantee I held her attention. “If you’re going to kill us anyway, you should know that Connor and I have been sleeping together since the day I came back from the pond.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Liar.”

  “Oh, no. I called him from the motel. He came right over—said you wouldn’t notice, that you were too stupid to see that he was cheating on you.” I took a deliberate step forward, baiting her. “We laughed at you.”

  “Liar!” shouted Raysel. Her fingers tensed as she swung her bow up, shifting her aim from my shoulder to my throat.

  “She’s telling the truth,” said Connor. Raysel’s aim wavered, like she couldn’t decide which of us she should kill first.

  “Now!” shouted Tybalt, and leaped for Rayseline.

  He wasn’t moving as fast as I knew he was capable of, but he was still moving fast enough to slam into her before she could react. The impact knocked her off-balance, and she released the arrow, sending it flying to embed itself harmlessly in the ceiling. She shrieked, hitting him with her bow. The Goblins lunged for him, their knives out and gleaming wickedly.

  I pulled the pixie from my hair, whispering, “Help us, please,” before hurling it toward Raysel and the others. It rang stridently as it tumbled through the air. That must have been the pixie equivalent of sounding a cavalry charge, because more pixies came swarming from their hiding places, biting and scratching as they dove into the fray.

  One of the Goblins went for Quentin, and was promptly dissuaded by a baseball bat to the side of the head. Not to be outdone, Connor drew his own bow and shot the Goblin in the arm. It howled and dropped its knife.

  I wanted to help them, but more, I wanted to get Gillian away from all this madness. I turned and knelt by her chair. “Just hold on, baby, I’m going to get you out of here,” I said, starting to saw through the rope binding her ankles.

  “Mom? What are those things?” She sounded terrified.

  “Close your eyes, Gilly,” I ordered. Tybalt was snarlin
g, which meant he’d probably abandoned at least part of his human form in favor of a cat’s claws and fangs. Even my allies probably looked like monsters to her. “This is all going to be over soon, but I need you to close your eyes, because you don’t want to see this.”

  “I don’t understand,” she whispered—but she turned her face away. Thank Oberon for that. She’d already seen too much.

  I’d worry about that later. For now, my biggest concern was getting her out of the shallowing alive.

  The rope holding her feet gave way. I moved around to the back of the chair. “Just keep them closed, baby,” I said, keeping my tone soothing, like I was trying to coax the toddler I remembered her being back to sleep after a bad dream. “I’m almost done here, and as soon as I’m done, I’m going to take you home. I’m going to get you out of here, and I’m going to take you home.”

  “Promise?” she asked, voice barely audible above the sound of fighting. My hands faltered at the work of sawing through the rope, suddenly realizing what she was asking me—and what Raysel had really done.

  Gillian had seen Faerie. Her introduction wasn’t the kind most changelings got, but she’d seen Faerie all the same. When Quentin’s human girlfriend was stolen by Blind Michael, the Luidaeg was able to pull her memories of the fae out of her mind, leaving her whole and undamaged by the experience. Katie was human. Katie had that option.

  Gillian wasn’t human. Gillian didn’t.

  Changeling children can live human until their powers manifest, or until they know too much. Katie’s mind wanted to reject Faerie, because it wasn’t hers. Gillian, on the other hand, belonged to Faerie, at least a little bit; she would never let the memories of something that big, that integral, go. She’d drive herself crazy trying to figure out what was missing from her mind.

  If I got Gillian out of here—when I got her out of here—I was going to have to do the thing I’d thought I had managed to avoid completely. I was going to have to give her the Changeling’s Choice. The one where, if she chose Faerie, she would never see her father again . . . and if she chose human . . . if she chose human . . .