The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  “Sorry.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not your fault. It’s just that these are things that should be common knowledge—the Roane should never have been lost—and now I have to explain them like they’re trivia. Like they’re trivial. I hate everything about this. I even hate doing this to the Selkies, although that’s not going to stop me. Faerie needs the Roane.”

  “Why?” asked Tybalt. The Luidaeg whipped around to stare at him, and he put his hands up. “Peace, lady, please. I only ask because . . . because this doesn’t return your children to you. This doesn’t put their hands in yours, or their eyes upon your face. Why do this, when the ones who broke faith with you are so long gone?”

  “I made a promise, and thanks to my stepmother, I can’t break them,” she said. “I could try. Some people might even argue that I have tried, with as long as I’ve put off calling in this debt that is due. I could have grabbed October here when she was a child, raised her as my own, raised her to think doing this was the most important thing in the world.” She glanced at me before resuming her forward progress. “And don’t think I didn’t consider it. Amy had no right to do what she did to you. No right. But I wasn’t ready to be a mother again, and Sylvester was glad to step in when I told him he was needed, and I gave the Selkies another fifty years. I’ve put this off as long as I can. Anything more would be cruel.”

  “Ah,” said Tybalt, with what sounded like genuine sorrow. “My apologies for your unfair predicament.”

  The Luidaeg sighed and kept walking.

  The shacks grew denser around us, until there was no space between them. Sand began appearing on the deck, adding a level of grit and grip to the waterlogged wood. And then, without warning, the lane opened up, becoming a wide, artificial cove, like something out of a Coney Island fever dream.

  We were still in the Duchy of Ships: that much was clear from the way everything continued to shift and creak around us, ancient wood settling deeper and deeper into its questionable moorings. But the decks and walkways were gone, obscured by a layer of fine white sand that would have looked exactly like an ordinary beach, if not for the five-foot drop between it and the waterline. The shacks were replaced by tidy little houses built in an almost Cape Cod style and painted in ice cream pastels, their windows thrown wide and their shutters painted in contrasting colors.

  There were children everywhere. Small children, two and three years old, rolling in the sand and building complicated castles that collapsed at the slightest touch. Awkward prepubescent children goading each other into diving off the beach’s edge, pulling themselves back up to the sand by way of rope ladders, or scaling the pylons that held the whole construct in place. Teenagers, who looked at us, took note of our clothing, and looked away, although I couldn’t say whether it was out of dislike of strangers or judgment of our fashion choices.

  There were adults as well, moving more sedately, and every other one I saw had a seal’s pelt tied around their waist or shoulders. They were the ones who went pale at the sight of us—or, in some cases, froze in place, seemingly unable to even breathe.

  “Annie!”

  The cry came from our left. I turned to see a freckled teenager with brown-and-silver hair and green, green eyes running across the sand, arms already open for the hug she knew she was certain to receive. The Luidaeg didn’t move as Diva barreled into her. She didn’t return the hug, either. She just stood there, implacable as the tides, while the girl clung to her.

  “I knew you’d come, I just knew you would, I told Mom you had to, we were all summoned and that means you, too, and you wouldn’t dare go against the sea witch—have you seen her? She’s supposed to come here, she’s supposed to come tell us what happens next, and I’m excited but I’m scared, too, because what if she’s not nice? What if she called us here to hurt us? I’m not even in line for a skin, I don’t need one, not with the magic I got from Dad, but I had to come anyway, and—Annie?” Diva caught herself mid-sentence and pulled back, squinting at the Luidaeg. “Annie, what’s wrong? What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “I love you,” said the Luidaeg softly. My breath caught. The Luidaeg can’t lie. “I’ve loved you since the moment I met you. You were this little wrinkled screaming thing, you were Liz trying to apologize for what she’d done to me, and you were everything. Blood of my blood, bone of my bone. I’ve never met your father, but I don’t need to meet him to know who he’s descended from. Your great-great-grandfather’s name was Aulay, and he died along with the rest of the Roane, and one of these people is wearing his skin tied around their bodies like a belt, and he deserved better, and so do you. I love you, Diva Ryan, but if you don’t take your hands off me right now, I will have to remove them from your body as a warning to everyone watching us. Please. Let go.”

  Diva stumbled backward, staring at the Luidaeg. Her face had gone pale, freckles standing out like brands. “Annie?” she whispered.

  “My name is Antigone of Albany, daughter of Maeve, daughter of Oberon,” said the Luidaeg. Her voice was soft, but it carried, oh, how it carried. All around us Selkies turned, faces wan and shoulders shaking as they beheld the instrument of their creation and destruction. “I am here to call the Convocation of Consequences.”

  “Annie?” Diva whispered again, her voice breaking.

  The Luidaeg looked at her with sorrowful eyes, and said, “Get your mother, Diva. It’s time.”

  Diva turned and ran away across the strand, leaving the three of us standing there, surrounded by staring, shivering Selkies. I moved a little closer to Tybalt, who put his arm around my shoulders and didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say.

  EIGHT

  THE FIRST PERSON TO approach us wasn’t Elizabeth Ryan, but a tall, distinguished man with dark skin and black hair shading to silver at the temples. Like Diva, he had freckles across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, mimicking a seal’s spots. Somehow, they failed to detract from his overall air of solemn dignity. He wore a brown linen suit, which seemed timeless to my modern eye, and was probably shockingly gauche to everyone older than me.

  “Mathias Lefebvre,” he said to the Luidaeg, bowing deeply. “I represent the Lefebvre clan, from the waters off the Kingdom of Beacon’s Home. I am at your service, and your disposal.”

  I glanced at Tybalt, mouthing “Beacon’s Home?”

  “Halifax,” he mouthed back.

  Ah. One of the Canadian Kingdoms. One of the East Coast Canadian Kingdoms, even. With my reputation for causing political chaos every time I leave the house, it was a pretty good bet that I was never going to be invited over for a casual visit. Although given that Quentin’s parents were offering to host my wedding, who knew? Maybe I’d have the chance to annoy a few more kings before I got myself confined permanently to the Mists.

  The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow. “Bold,” she said, in a perfectly neutral tone. “What makes you think you have the right to approach me as you do, wearer of a stolen skin? Why should I hear whatever it is you have to say?”

  Mathias was unflustered. “The Convocation has yet to begin, Lady; we stand in a liminal space,” he said. “I am here to speak with you before the formal commencement of our funeral, to beg a boon.”

  “I hardly think you have any stones beneath your feet, but continue,” said the Luidaeg. “Only be aware that I reserve the right to slit your throat if you cease to amuse me.”

  “I suspected your nature long before I became head of my clan and learned your name,” said Mathias, and tensed, apparently aware that what he was saying was pretty much guaranteed to annoy the Luidaeg. Her inability to lie to anyone except the Selkies was a sore spot, and she had always treasured her identity as “Cousin Annie,” the person no one was afraid of.

  Her eyes narrowed, traceries of darkness moving through the green of her irises. She said nothing.

  To his credit, Mathias stood his ground, although I could see
him fighting the urge to take a step backward. I liked him a little for that. He’d decided to walk right into the arms of the sea witch, and now that he was here, he wasn’t going to pretend he hadn’t been aware of the risks.

  “Why are you telling me this?” asked the Luidaeg.

  “Because we are all criminals in your eyes, heir to the crimes of our ancestors, and we are yours to keep and command. You have a Firstborn’s duty toward us, for so long as we swim these seas.” His voice became more formal as he spoke, taking on a tight, clipped cadence that fit surprisingly well with his maritime accent.

  “And?”

  “And you favor the Ryan clan over the rest of us, because their waters are so close to your own.” He met her eyes and somehow didn’t flinch. “Elizabeth Ryan has come into possession of eighteen of the Lost Skins. She increases the size of her clan, and guarantees Faerie to eighteen of her family, while the rest of us receive no such bounty. So I approach you, Lady, to ask you do the same for the other clans, who have always done our best to keep our side of the ancient bargain, who have lived and died knowing we did so solely at your discretion. The bargain comes due. Let us save our children, as we were unable to save yours.”

  “Elizabeth Ryan received those skins for doing me a favor outside the scope of the bargain between the Selkies and the sea witch,” said the Luidaeg. “How many children do you think I had, Mathias? How many grandchildren? How many Roane would you hope were slaughtered, if it means you can drape their physical remains around the shoulders of your own descendants and mark them for immortality? You’re lucky I don’t rip the skin from your shoulders merely for suggesting it.”

  Mathias said nothing. Instead, he dropped to his knees in the sand, reaching up and tugging the knot resting at the hollow of his throat, where I would normally have expected a tie to be. It came easily undone, and he pulled the sealskin from beneath his jacket, holding it out to the Luidaeg with shaking hands.

  This time, she raised both eyebrows. “You think this impresses me?” she asked. “You think I can be impressed by an offer to return something that has always been mine? Your gesture isn’t ‘grand’ so much as it’s misguided. Be grateful I don’t find it insulting.”

  “Lady, please,” he said, in a low voice. “I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to make amends for a loss you suffered centuries before my birth, knowing it was futile. I have asked you for nothing. I have sought to be beneath your notice. I have devoted myself to you. Please, please, I beg. If there is anything to be done, if there are any more skins held in secret, please. Give me only the gift you have given to Elizabeth Ryan. Let me save my clan.”

  “Get up,” she said, and her voice was low and tight and unreadable, even to me.

  Mathias scrambled to his feet, the sealskin still resting on his hands. The Luidaeg looked at him flatly, more of those dark threads curling through her irises, chasing away the green.

  “Leave,” she snapped.

  For a moment, I thought he was going to argue with her. For a moment, I thought I was going to find out whether she’d been right when she said that any of us would stand calmly by and watch her commit a murder. Then he backed away, taking three long, quick steps, before turning and running toward the row of neat little Cape Cod-style houses. He didn’t look back.

  We had gathered a small crowd while he was speaking, Selkies and Selkie-kin pausing in whatever they’d been doing before we came in order to drift closer and listen in as hard as they could. The Luidaeg turned to look at them, and they paled and fled, some following Mathias, others simply retreating along the artificial beach. All but one.

  That one—a child, maybe six years old, dressed in a shapeless tunic, with pale blonde hair cut in a pageboy bob—approached the three of us, head cocked curiously to the side.

  “Are you really the Lady?” they asked.

  The Luidaeg nodded. “I am.”

  “My mother says the Lady bound Merlin in a tree for a thousand years because he was mean to her.”

  The corner of the Luidaeg’s mouth twitched. “That’s not quite how it happened, but you should listen to your mother. Mothers have many clever things to say, if you listen closely.”

  “She says we came here because the Lady is tired of there being Selkies, and she wants the Selkies to stop.” The child looked at us solemnly. “Is that so?”

  “Almost.” The Luidaeg crouched, putting herself on a level with the child. The dark lines vanished from her eyes between one blink and the next, leaving them a clear, untroubled green. She looked heartbreakingly at ease. She must have been one hell of a mother. “I’m here because a very long time ago, the first Selkies made me a promise, and it’s time for that promise to be kept. Do you ever make promises?”

  The child nodded.

  “Is it always easy to keep them?”

  The child shook their head.

  “Well, then. So I have to talk to all the grown-ups, your mother and the man who was just talking to me and all the grown-ups, and they have to talk to me, and together we’re going to figure out what happens next. These are my friends, October,” she gestured to me, “and Tybalt. They don’t get to decide what happens because they’re not Selkies, but they get to help make sure everything is as fair as it can be.”

  The child studied her face carefully before asking, “Does that mean you don’t hate us?”

  The Luidaeg sighed. I tensed.

  The Selkies—and, I suppose, the Roane—are the only people the Luidaeg can lie to. They’re her descendant race, and powerful as Titania is, or was, she’s not powerful enough to get between a Firstborn and their children. But she couldn’t lie to Tybalt, or to me, and we were standing right there. Whatever she said, we’d hear her. Would that be enough to bring Titania’s geas into play?

  Would that even make a difference?

  “Sweetheart, I don’t know you,” she said. “You haven’t been alive long enough to make any choices you might regret. No matter how long you live, things are never going to be as simple as they are right now ever again. So run. Run and play and try to forget that I’m here. Everything will be complicated soon enough.”

  The child wrinkled their nose. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I’m the motherfucking sea witch. I don’t have to answer your question.”

  The child’s eyes widened. “You said a swear.”

  “Again, sea witch. I’m allowed.”

  The child nodded, apparently satisfied, before turning and wandering off down the beach. The Luidaeg straightened, giving me a challenging look.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Nothing,” I said. “You’re good with kids.”

  “I can’t stand them.” She smoothed her dress with the heels of her hands, not looking up as she continued, “I haven’t been able to since my own went and died on me. So many children in the world, and not one of them is mine. It’s not fair.”

  I bit my lip, and said nothing.

  It’s not entirely clear how the Firstborn create their descendant races, not even to me. Supposedly, every time they take a lover, they have the potential to create a new facet of Faerie, but it can’t be that straightforward. August and I have different fathers and the same Firstborn mother, and we’re both Dóchas Sidhe. The Luidaeg has never identified all her children by name, but there must have been at least a dozen of them, if not more. There’s no other way for the Roane to have been as well-established as they were by the time Evening decided to arrange for their destruction. It seemed a little unreasonable to assume they had all had the same father.

  Maybe if the Luidaeg had gone out and gotten pregnant again as soon as Evening instigated the slaughter of her children, the Roane would have been with us all along. Or maybe she would have created something entirely new. I didn’t know, and something about that lack of knowledge worried me. There was a piece I didn’t have yet.
I’ve learned, to my regret, that missing pieces now almost always mean pain later.

  This wasn’t the time to dwell on it. The doors on several of the Cape Cod houses opened and a line of Selkies appeared, walking across the sand toward us. The scattered people who’d still been wandering the sands vanished into other houses, pausing only long enough to snatch up any children who happened to be out in the open. I took a deep breath and braced myself.

  That was a wise decision. The Luidaeg raised her head as the Selkies approached, and her eyes were dark as the depths of the ocean, and her skin was underscored with a faint bluish tint, like she’d somehow managed to drown on dry land while I’d been standing right next to her. Even her bones had shifted, rising too close to the surface of the skin. She was unspeakable, a deepwater dream of drowning and despair, and her skin radiated cold.

  I didn’t know her with this face. But I recognized my friend in the downturned corners of her mouth and the tension of her shoulders, and I didn’t pull away.

  Three women and two men walked at the head of the group of approaching Selkies. I recognized Elizabeth Ryan and Mathias Lefebvre. The other three were strangers. All five stopped some distance away, forming a loosely curved half-circle, like they feared to come any closer, but feared stopping out of hearing range even more.

  “I am Antigone of Albany, mother of the Roane, creator and keeper of the Selkie clans,” said the Luidaeg. She sounded almost bored. Only the pulsing cold rolling off her skin betrayed how tense she was. “These are my companions, Sir October Daye, Knight of Lost Words and daughter of Amandine, and King Tybalt of the Court of Dreaming Cats. They stand here under my protection, and are not to be challenged. Who comes to represent the Selkies?”