The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  All things considered, the heavy object slamming into the back of my skull was even more disconcerting. Something cracked, bone giving way under the brutal force of the assault, and I dropped back into the water, which was suddenly veiled red with my own blood. Quentin thrashed below me, trying to pull me down. I pulled my flukes out of his grasp, keeping him from doing more than tugging.

  The attack had come from behind. My skull was already healing, flesh and bone knitting back together with horrifying speed, and the blood in the water was focusing me, filling my nose and mouth as I breathed it in, creating an invigorating feedback loop. My strength is in the blood, even when it’s my own.

  Whatever hit me, it had been too wide and blunt to be anything other than an improvised weapon. Someone was trying to keep us out of this room. That was a good thing. Torin’s guards had been carrying tridents, brutally pointed, with barbed, cutting edges. If I’d taken a trident to the head, I would be in a lot more pain. Logically, whoever had just attacked me wasn’t one of Torin’s men.

  My head didn’t hurt anymore. Here went everything. I turned around in the tight tunnel, so I’d be facing the direction the last attack had come from, and pulled myself up for a second time, spitting out water as fast as I could.

  “Dianda sent me!” I said, once I could form words again. They still came out a little garbled by the water in my throat and lungs. “Dianda sent me to find Peter!”

  The room was small, and dark, and lined with shelves, each of them filled to bursting with supplies that did better when kept dry, flour and sugar and beans and rice. There was even a shelf of what looked like office supplies, which made a certain amount of sense. The Undersea Kingdoms didn’t exist in total isolation. They needed a way to communicate with the land, and paper messages sent by courier was probably easiest, as well as being fairly traditional.

  A surprising number of fae nobles have email these days, mostly due to the efforts of Countess January O’Leary and her daughter, April. But there’s always going to be a place for the traditional ways.

  The room was also apparently unoccupied. I couldn’t see any sign of the person who’d assaulted me before, although I was pretty sure I could see the weapon: a large box of pancake mix was near the edge of the hole, dangerously close to the water. I thought of the Cephali guard I’d seen before, the one who’d been able to blend into the wall until he decided he didn’t want to. We weren’t alone. We just seemed to be.

  I closed my eyes, spat out the last of the water, and breathed in, tasting the air for traces of fae blood. Someone doesn’t have to be actually bleeding for me to read their heritage; they just need to be close enough for me to pick up on their presence.

  My first breath was all saltwater and the lingering scent of my own blood. My second blossomed bright with Cephali. Not Helmi—it wasn’t a familiar flavor, for all that I recognized its source—but Cephali all the same.

  “I know you’re here,” I said, opening my eyes and squirming farther out of the hole, until I was sitting on the edge. My scales glittered in the gloom. I tried to remember what Dianda had taught me about transformation, about knowing who I was and who I wanted to be and letting that be enough. The scent of cut grass and copper rose around me, faint but clear, and my scales melted away, replaced by my more familiar legs. My rag-cut skirt also returned, shorter now, stopping just above my knees. Well, that was efficient.

  Carefully, I pulled my legs out of the water and stood, barefoot and unsteady on the storeroom floor. Quentin’s head broke the surface a second later, hair slicked down and dark with water. I bent to offer him my hands.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’re being watched, but it’s cool. I think they’re a friend.”

  “They tried to smash your head,” he objected, coughing up water. Somehow, he managed to look dignified and elegant even with water running down his chin. Sometimes I hate purebloods.

  “Sure, but whoever it is, they’re protecting something really important, and they didn’t realize it was me. There’s no harm done.”

  Quentin looked dubious. “I don’t like you acting like major head trauma is ‘no harm done.’ It would have been a lot of harm done if they’d hit me.”

  “And that’s why I go first.”

  Quentin snorted, taking my hands and pulling himself up onto the edge of the pool. His scales gleamed in the open air, even more beautiful now that they were out of the water and thus not part of their environment. He eyed my legs with open avarice. “How are you standing?”

  “Think about how it feels to stand, how it feels to have the body you know you’re supposed to have, and then just . . . get up.” I shrugged. “Sorry if that’s not as helpful as it could be. I had Dianda to walk me through the process, and she was a little more accustomed to the idea than I am.”

  Quentin gave me a baleful look before closing his eyes and taking a deep, slow breath. Then, planting his hands on either side of the hole in the floor, he stood.

  His legs had brought his pants with them when they came back. It was nice of the Luidaeg to consider our desire not to be running around an unfamiliar knowe filled with potentially hostile forces without any clothes on. He didn’t get shoes either. I suppose the Luidaeg hadn’t thought they were important enough to include them in her spell.

  Quentin wiped the water out of his eyes as he transferred his baleful look to the rest of the room. “I wish whoever it is would just come out. I don’t like sharing space with invisible people who’ve already attacked my knight.”

  “I don’t think the Cephali have turned on the Lordens,” I said. “Not yet, anyway. I guess they’d have to if Torin kept the knowe, but since we know that’s not going to happen, they may be waiting to see. And keeping Peter safe, of course. Dianda entrusted Helmi with her younger son, and the Cephali have a strong sense of honor. They’re going to protect the boy until they can’t do it anymore.”

  I was making wild guesses, based on what I knew of Dianda’s relationship to Helmi and what I knew about the Cephali as a whole. They’re loyal, like the Hobs in the land Courts, but they’re more militant than any of the household spirits I’d grown up with. They make their decisions based on the needs of their households and their lieges, and they’re devoted to the people they choose to serve. Helmi was sworn to Dianda, not Saltmist, and that meant the rest of the Cephali might have chosen the same carefully-worded loophole.

  Merrow, like the Daoine Sidhe, seemed to assume everyone wanted what the Merrow wanted, and thought like the Merrow thought. If I was right . . .

  A tentacle uncoiled from the ceiling, already changing colors from chalky shadow-gray to a vibrant shade of green. A moment later, a Cephali girl dropped down to the floor, flipping over in midair, so she landed on her tentacles and not on her head. The octopus half of her body was bright green at the tentacle-tips, shading to a deeper shade of pine near the waist; the skin of her human half was a very pale green, like newly sprouted leaves. She was far too young to be Helmi, but she was armed, holding a wickedly jagged knife in either hand.

  “You say you come in the name of the Lorden family,” she said. “Prove it.”

  “A reasonable request, but I can’t,” I said. “Dianda has been arrested for treason, so it’s not like she could give me a token to show you. Patrick and Dean are safe with allies. We’re here for Peter. My name is October Daye. I’m the one who found Peter and Dean when they were kidnapped. I’m the former Countess of Goldengreen. I gave up my title so Dean could be Count, and we could solidify the alliance between our domains. I can bleed for you, if you can read the truth in my blood.”

  “Blood magic isn’t a strength of the Cephali,” she said. “All our bleeding is spent on growing back our limbs.”

  “Right,” I said. Cephali regenerate. That’s a good thing, since their usual response to disappointing the people they care about involves chopping off their own tentacles. “In that case,
all I can give you is my word. By the root and the branch, I swear, we’re not here to harm Peter. We’re here to get him back to his family before someone else can hurt him.”

  “Who’s the boy?” demanded the Cephali, nodding toward Quentin.

  “My squire, Quentin,” I said.

  “He armed?” asked the Cephali.

  “We’re both armed,” I said. “Come on. If you want to fight us, fight us. But if you want to see Peter Lorden safe and out of here until his parents can take their Duchy back, you need to take us to him.”

  The Cephali hesitated. I held my breath until finally, she lowered her weapons.

  “Follow me,” she said. “If we’re caught, I’ll slit your throats myself to show my loyalty to the invaders.”

  “Must loyalty always mean blood on the floor?” I asked, already stepping toward her. “All right. Let’s go.”

  She eyed me warily as she moved toward the door, not walking so much as undulating, her tentacles gripping and releasing so she flowed across the damp marble like something out of a dream. Quentin and I followed silently, letting her lead the way. It would have been a stretch to say we trusted her, but we didn’t have much of a choice. Time was short, for everyone.

  I’m not sure how much of the average Undersea knowe is pressurized and filled with air. Because the Selkies are air-breathers, and several Undersea races are equally comfortable in both, I’ve always assumed air chambers were a standard feature: it’s easier to sip wine and preserve royal decrees when you’re not trying to do it underwater. The hall the Cephali led us along would have looked perfectly reasonable in Goldengreen or Shadowed Hills. It was laid out in a vaguely medieval style, its organic nature betrayed only by the places where the walls met the ceiling, which were gentle slopes of polished, bonelike coral rather than hard edges. The floor was pink; the walls were white; the décor was elegant, and almost managed to obscure the fact that the place had been grown rather than built.

  “Is the knowe alive?” I asked, voice pitched low to keep us from being overheard.

  The Cephali nodded but didn’t slow. “Grown from a seed by the Duchess Lorden’s grandmother,” she said. “My parents helped protect it when it was young and small and could have been easily uprooted. Now, it will outlive us all and remember our bones when they fade into its roots.”

  Quentin and I exchanged a glance. It’s one thing to know that attitudes about life and death are very different between the land and sea. It’s another to hear a pureblood talking frankly about bones and mortality. Fae are supposed to live forever. That’s how they’re made. I’m a changeling, and I’ll still live for centuries if no one figures out a way to kill me.

  Things in the Undersea followed their own patterns. Sometimes that was more jarring than I would have thought possible.

  Voices echoed up ahead. The Cephali jerked back, and looked over her shoulder to us. “Hide,” she hissed. Then she was swarming up the wall, changing colors as she went, until she was the same white as the coral around her, wrapping her body around a decorative light fixture and fading utterly from view.

  I turned to Quentin. “Hide or fight?” I asked.

  He bit his lip. “What happens if we hide and they find us?”

  “We fight anyway.”

  “Can we try?”

  I nodded. “We can always try,” I said. I started to grab for the air, then paused. “You’re the Daoine Sidhe. You should do this.”

  Quentin nodded tightly before snatching the air and pulling it toward himself, whispering rapid-fire, “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck ten, the mouse didn’t care because rodents have no sense of time, hickory dickory dock.”

  The smell of heather and steel rose around us, so strong that I cringed. Surely anyone who came down the hall would be able to smell it and guess where we were standing. Quentin didn’t look concerned. I tried to hold onto that. Daoine Sidhe are blood-workers and can detect the scent of a person’s magic when it hangs in the air, but they’re not as sensitive as the Dóchas Sidhe. If Quentin wasn’t worried, we’d be fine. We were going to be fine.

  We had to be fine.

  The spell settled around us like a fine mist and Quentin disappeared, becoming a part of the wall, much as the Cephali had. If I squinted, I could almost make out the shadow of his outline, but it was difficult, and I was only getting that much because I knew where he was. If he moved while I wasn’t looking, I’d lose track of him completely.

  Good. A strong don’t-look-here should protect everyone involved, even from each other. I pressed myself hard against the wall, getting as far from the center of the hall as possible, and drew my knife, holding it low and close against my hip. If we had to fight, I’d fight. I just hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.

  I’d barely gotten settled when three guards in Torin’s livery came around the corner. Two of them were holding those nasty tridents from before; the third was peering at an oiled parchment map. I couldn’t see the whole thing, but what I could see made me fairly sure that it was a map of the knowe. It had the right twisting, curving lines, and it looked like it had been treated to stand up to being submerged.

  “There are eight storage rooms on this level,” said the one with the map. “If we search them all, we can go back to someplace decent.”

  “Can you imagine having a palace this defensible and sacrificing half of it for air-breathers?” The second guard sounded utterly dismissive. “The county where I did my training had a single chamber set aside for the Selkies, and even that, they knew we could flood in an instant. Kept them in their places.”

  “Do you really think the Lady is in Ships?” asked the third, nervously. “Rumor says she’s come to slaughter the Selkies for what they did. The water will run red, and we’ll have to find new couriers.”

  “Or we could cut off communication with those lander fools entirely, and watch them tear themselves to pieces worrying about war,” said the second. He chuckled. “Frightened fish, every one of them. They’ll leave the coasts in droves once they realize they can’t keep tabs on us any longer—and good riddance. The farther we are from those air-breathing weaklings, the better.”

  “I heard she was intending to resurrect the Roane,” said the guard with the map. The other two turned to look at him. He raised his head and looked impassively back. “Didn’t you wonder why the Selkies would be gathering in Ships, and not running for the deepest waters they could find to shelter them? She’s not slaughtering them, she’s empowering them. Uplifting them. The Lady is bringing back the Roane, and then they’ll be bought by the strongest nobles, and we’ll finally have the future in our hands again.”

  Right. That was quite enough of that. We didn’t know where Peter was; we couldn’t allow these arrogant, careless people with their sharp, sharp tridents and their nasty ideas to get to him before we did. I stepped away from the wall, aware that Quentin wouldn’t be able to see me moving until he spotted the consequences of that motion. That was fine. He could catch up.

  One nice side effect of healing the way I do: I’ve basically gone through a massive crash course in humanoid anatomy over the past few years, as people have stabbed, skewered, and otherwise damaged literally every internal organ I have, and a few I’m not sure actually exist. If there’s a way to hurt a body, odds are good that I’ve experienced it, and that makes me uniquely well-suited to challenges like incapacitating three guards without bringing the rest of the invading forces down on my head. Being invisible didn’t hurt either, in the moment.

  Sliding my knife back into its sheath, I crept up on the two guards with the tridents. Neither of them was wearing a helmet. That would help. Knocking a person unconscious is a lot more difficult than most people assume it is, especially if you’re set on doing the job without opening any skull fractures. I found that I was less concerned about skull fractures than I maybe should have been. Dianda
had healers on staff, which meant right now, Torin had healers on staff; any damage I did, short of killing somebody, could be undone in short order.

  After the things they’d been saying about selling the Roane to the highest bidder, they might be happier with a little head trauma than with me telling the Luidaeg what they’d said.

  Silently, I reached up, taking advantage of my invisibility to align my hands at the perfect angles before I slammed the two guards’ heads together. They shouted, startled and hurt by the blow, although neither of them went down. That was all right. I hadn’t been expecting to take them out with a single hit, although it would have been nice. I slammed their heads together again before they could react, and this time the guard on the left reeled back, clearly injured.

  The guard on the right spun around and stabbed her trident at the space where she assumed I was standing. She wasn’t wrong. The don’t-look-here, already strained by my interaction with the world around me, broke in a haze of cut grass and copper as the tines pierced my stomach.

  The pain was incredible. I swallowed it as best I could, grabbing the trident and yanking it toward myself. That drove the tines deeper in, which was bad. It also caused the startled guard to lose her grip on the shaft, unable to handle what she was seeing. That was good.

  “Someone call for a hero?” I asked, and punched her in the face.

  Merrow are militant and violent and always ready for a fight. Dianda is considered a relatively peaceable example of her breed, and I’m pretty sure she’d challenge the wind to a brawl if she had the opportunity. But here’s the thing about having a reputation as the biggest badass in existence: people mostly stop hitting you. I had never seen anyone with any sense try to start a fight with Dianda in what I would consider the smart way, by sucker-punching her before she had a chance to respond.