The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  The guard reeled backward, blood gushing from her nose and split lip. I grabbed the shaft of the trident and yanked it out of my body before the skin could start healing around it. Then I swung it as hard as I could, slamming the end of the shaft into the side of her face, just below her eye. There was a sickening cracking sound. Her eyes went wide before she collapsed, bleeding and motionless, on the hallway floor.

  The other armed guard seemed to shake off his disorientation—or maybe he was just too angry to notice how dizzy he was. He bellowed and charged at me, trident lowered, like he thought he might have better luck skewering me than his partner had.

  He never reached me. The Cephali dropped from the ceiling, landing on his head and wrapping her tentacles around his face, cutting off all air supply. He grunted angrily and clawed at her, only for her to wrap two more tentacles around his wrists. His struggles slowed and finally stopped, and he fell, not visibly bleeding, next to the first guard.

  All this had taken less than a minute. Maybe that was why the guard with the map hadn’t moved. He turned slowly, eyes gone wide and face gone pale, and I realized how young he looked. He didn’t even look as old as the still-invisible Quentin . . . and he didn’t have a weapon.

  “Hi,” I said. “We’re from the other team. I have a proposal for you.”

  He swallowed hard. “I will not swear fealty to a woman I’ve just met,” he said. His voice shook. I realized he thought I was Merrow, and that, as a Merrow, I was allowed to kill him if I wanted to, thanks to his own liege’s declaration of war.

  “Not what I’m looking for, so don’t worry about it,” I said, trying to make my voice as soothing as I could. “My squire—who’s still invisible, and could be behind you right now, so don’t even think about running—my squire is pretty good with knots. You give me the map, not because we need it, but because I don’t want you to have it anymore. He ties you up and shoves you into a storeroom. When someone finds you, you get to tell them you fought just as hard as your friends here.” I prodded one of the fallen guards with my toe. It would have been nice if the Luidaeg’s spell had left me with my shoes.

  “I refuse to sit by while my comrades in arms are killed,” he said stiffly, and closed his eyes. “Do me this mercy, and kill me quickly, so I may be ready for the night-haunts to arrive.”

  I glanced at the place where I assumed Quentin was standing, wishing that he were visible, so I could see him roll his eyes. Then I looked back to the guard. “We’re not killing anyone. We’re here for Peter Lorden. Once we have him, we’ll leave, and you can tell whatever story makes you happy. Be the hero who fought off twenty invisible attackers, or just say you kicked your friends’ asses. I don’t care. Give me the map, let us tie you up, and this ends.”

  He opened his eyes, looking uncertainly from me to the Cephali still sitting serenely on the other guard’s face, and back again. Then he held out the map.

  “Good choice,” I said, and grabbed him.

  It only took us a few minutes to get all three of the guards securely bound and chucked into the nearest small storage room, which was mostly filled with dried beans and packages of instant ramen. Quentin appeared in a wafting cloud of my magic as the last of the don’t-look-here gave way. He picked up one of the ramen packages, wrinkling his nose.

  “Really?” he asked. “There’s so much salt in these things.”

  “I bet when you live at the bottom of a literal ocean, you don’t care as much,” I said, taking the ramen away from him and tossing it at one of the unconscious guards before closing the door. “We should have a while before the next patrol comes looking for this one. Let’s move before we have to do this whole routine over again.”

  “How are you not dead?” demanded the Cephali, finally breaking her silence. “I saw them stab you. You’re covered in blood.”

  “That’s pretty normal for her,” said Quentin. “Her fiancé is going to be pissed.”

  “Not if it all washes off in the water,” I said. “There’s no need to tell Tybalt I got impaled.”

  “Again,” said Quentin.

  “Again,” I agreed.

  The Cephali’s eyes widened. “No wonder the Duchess Lorden chose you as allies,” she said. “Not even she would want to face you in open waters.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” I said, and started walking.

  Quentin paused long enough to pick up one of the discard tridents before he followed me.

  The palace was designed in a series of gentle, organic spirals, which made sense, since it had apparently been grown from a seed coral, not built like the knowes I was used to back on land. I still got the feeling of patient presence from it that I got from the more familiar knowes; it was alive, if not exactly in the way quick-moving, hot-blooded creatures understood living.

  If I’d thought it spoke the same language as the land knowes, I would have tried to plead with it for Peter’s life. It’s a weird trick, but one that’s served me well in the past. Instead, I put a hand on Quentin’s shoulder, saying, “Don’t let me walk into any walls,” and closed my eyes.

  Blood magic can take many forms, and most of those are shared between the Daoine Sidhe and the Dóchas Sidhe. The Dóchas Sidhe just got them in a stronger form, because our blood magic isn’t diluted with flowers. I opened my mouth as I walked, tasting and testing the air, trying to focus on the unique blend of Daoine Sidhe and Merrow that the Lorden boys represented. As far as I’m aware, that’s a blending that has never happened before, in all of Faerie, and may never happen again, given how reclusive the Merrow tend to be.

  I breathed in and tasted the steel and heather traceries of Quentin’s heritage, which made so much more sense to me now that I knew his mother had been born a changeling and given up her human heritage in order to marry her true love. Steel had never seemed like a logical element of a pureblood’s magic, but we carry our parents in our veins—sometimes even the pieces they, themselves, have chosen to give away. I tasted the Merrow guards behind us, and the Cephali, a delicate blend of sweet seagrass and something tart and salty that I automatically identified as plankton and filed away for future reference. My internal catalog of magical signatures defies proper description, and is filled with things I’ve never actually experienced.

  I breathed in again, letting Quentin guide me down the hall . . . and there, under the heavier, more present scents, I found a thin thread of Merrow mixed with Daoine Sidhe. It tasted like stonecrop blossoms and young kelp, and I could almost follow those traces back to Patrick and Dianda, and farther, all along their family lines. I’d never gone looking for someone by dowsing through their parents before, and the possibilities were both endless and intoxicating. I shook myself loose, opening my eyes, and pointed down the hall.

  “This way,” I said.

  Together, we hurried toward our destination, and I didn’t say anything about the fact that, for me to pick up the scent that strongly, Peter must have been bleeding at some point. I just walked as fast as I could and hoped that I wasn’t already too late.

  TWELVE

  THE HALL CURVED and the smell of Peter’s magic grew stronger, until I could pick it up without even really trying. Then it began growing fainter again. I paused.

  “Quentin, give me the map.”

  He held it out silently. I grabbed it, running my finger along the curves of the carefully drawn hallway walls until I was sure what I was seeing—or wasn’t seeing.

  “Look: there’s a door every ten feet or so on this level. They’re evenly spaced, probably because the coil of the architecture here supports it. This whole hall matches the map.”

  “So?” said our resident Cephali. “Maps should be accurate, or they’re useless.”

  “So there should have been a door a few feet ago, and there wasn’t.” I walked back the way we’d come, studying the walls as I went, until I reached a patch that was a little too smooth,
a little too regular, compared to everything around it. “It doesn’t make sense for the architecture to start getting weird on us now, not when it’s been this regular. Which means someone is trying to hide something.”

  “You think it’s Peter?” asked Quentin.

  “Can you think of a better explanation?” I touched the wall. It felt ever-so-subtly wrong, slick and almost icy under my fingers. I smiled. “Aw, good boy, Peter. Look, Quentin, put your hand here. Feel it?”

  Quentin pressed his palm to the wall, face scrunching up in concentration. Then he relaxed, slanting a smile in my direction. “It feels like flower petals.”

  It didn’t feel like flower petals to me. It felt like a glacier, like something that was doing its level best to reject my presence. I wasn’t going to argue. Quentin had flower magic in his veins, the same as Dean, and I had only blood. Of course things would feel different to me.

  “Now, the sensible thing to do here would be to knock,” I said, running my fingertips across the holes in my shirt. The bleeding had long since stopped and the flesh had long since healed, but there was still blood there, thick and ropey and coagulated. I slathered it on my fingers, then pressed my palm against the wall.

  The shape of the illusion came into view, looking like a sheet of glittering threads woven into a fishnet formation. It was good, solid work. His father would have been very proud.

  “Toby? What are you doing?”

  “Untying a knot.”

  Seeing spells is another Dóchas Sidhe trait, although not the most useful of them, since I can’t do it fast and I can’t do it without bleeding and there’s a lot of “can’t” to balance out a relatively narrow amount of “can.” But I can find the edges of an illusion, and when I find them, I can grab hold of them, hooking my fingers into the fabric of the spell itself. I can pull. I can pull until they come apart.

  I tugged and the spell unraveled, illusion falling into the distinct, ashen smell of magic that had been dismantled by someone it didn’t belong to. A door appeared in the wall in front of us, exactly like every other door in the hallway, except that this door had been magically concealed, and this door was between me and the faint, frustratingly appealing scent of Peter Lorden’s blood.

  Leaning closer, I knocked on the door and called, “It’s October. I have Quentin and a Cephali whose name I don’t know with me. We’re coming in. Please don’t stab us.”

  “If that works, that’s how I want you entering every room from now on,” grumbled Quentin.

  “Ha, ha,” I said, and opened the door.

  It was another storeroom, this one filled with apples and potatoes and onions, piled in bushels that threatened to overwhelm the shelves they rested on. There were no visible people. I sighed.

  “I know you’re scared, and I know you’ve only met me once, so you probably don’t trust me very much, but I promise, I’m here to help,” I said. “Your parents are safe in the Duchy of Ships, Peter. I need to take you back to them. The sea witch gave me and my squire the ability to move through these waters without drowning, but the spell only lasts for so long, and we need to move. Whatever it is you need to hear from me, can you please pretend you’ve heard it already and come out, so we can get the hell out of here?”

  There was a rustling noise from one corner before a tentacle uncurled, slowly shifting from nondescript gray patterned with blotches like a bushel of potatoes to the bright, sugary red of cherry cough syrup. The rest of Helmi uncurled a moment later, sliding to the floor and revealing a skinny boy with green-blond hair, enormous gray eyes, and a tail that shaded from slate gray at the hips to silvery-white at the flukes.

  Peter Lorden stared at us, hiccupped, and began crying. He seemed angry with himself for not being able to keep the tears in, but that didn’t stop them from coming. Helmi put her arms around him and glared, not at me or Quentin, but at the other Cephali.

  “Your loyalties have shifted,” she accused.

  “The knowe has been taken,” the Cephali replied. “We cannot raise forces against the Merrow; we would surely die. But we have not served them. They can’t command what they cannot see.”

  “Okay, this is a great little window on Undersea politics and all, but can we maybe hurry up and skip to the part where you let us take Peter, please?” I spread my hands. “Dianda’s been arrested, Patrick’s panicking—and rightly so, since this all sucks—and I don’t trust Torin not to order Peter’s execution to solidify his own claim. So, please, if you could just come on, we’ll get out of here.”

  “We?” Helmi looked surprised.

  “Of course ‘we,’” I said. “I’m not leaving you here for Torin’s guards to capture. You serve your liege best by going to your liege. That goes for you, too,” I added, to the Cephali at my side. “Hell, that goes for all the Cephali in Saltmist. If your people would rather hide than be forced to serve Torin, they can come with us to the Duchy of Ships.” Hopefully, Pete wouldn’t mind that I was offering the hospitality of her home to someone else’s vassals. At the end of the day, I didn’t actually care. Let her be pissed at me. I’d tangled with the Firstborn before. I could take it.

  The unnamed Cephali stared at me for a moment before executing an elaborate bow that mostly involved her tentacles going in what seemed like an impossible number of directions at the same time. “My name is Kirsi,” she said. “I am honored to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you, too, and if that’s not the right form, I’m sorry; we don’t have time for a lot of etiquette,” I said. Shifting my focus to Peter, I asked as gently as I could, “Do you feel up to changing forms? I know you’ve been dry for a while now, but this will be easier if we don’t have to carry you.”

  “My . . .” He sniffled, wiping his nose with his forearm, exactly like teenagers the world over, before trying again: “My mom and dad are really okay? They’re not . . . they haven’t stopped their dancing?”

  “Your father is fine, if worried about you; your mother has been arrested for treason, which isn’t the same as ‘okay,’ but means she’s probably causing a lot more problems for the people holding her than they expected. She’ll come back with bruised knuckles and cracked ribs and a smile on her face.” I forced a smile to my own face, trying to look as encouraging as possible. “Right now, you’re the one we need to worry about. Your uncle Torin has Saltmist, and that means we have to get you out of here. Can you walk?”

  Peter nodded, sniffling again, and pulled away from Helmi, standing at the same time. Most of his scales shimmered and fell away, or maybe shrank back into his body—it was impossible to tell, it all happened so fast. In less than a second, a skinny boy in rough homespun trousers was standing, still shirtless, where the Merrow teen had been. A few scattered scales shimmered on his wrists and ankles. Peter looked at me shyly, chin tilted downward, so he was staring up through the long fringe of his lashes. It was a soft, vulnerable expression.

  He was still Dianda’s son. I raised an eyebrow. “Are you planning to stab me, or just punch me in the throat?”

  Peter allowed his chin to raise, softness becoming stubbornness in an instant. “My mother says never to trust anyone who’s offering you something for nothing.”

  “Your mother is pretty smart that way, but trust me, this isn’t something for nothing,” I said. “I’m a hero of the realm in the Mists. That means anything that might disturb the Kingdom’s peace is my problem. We like having your parents in charge of Saltmist. They’re allies, and they don’t attack us for no reason. I don’t trust your uncle to show the same restraint. I also don’t trust your mother not to start breaking spines if she finds out you’ve been hurt. Saving you is the best way for me to keep my kingdom calm.”

  Quentin shot me a sharp look, seeming offended by my pragmatic approach to rescue. Peter, on the other hand, looked relieved.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll come with you.”

  I
smiled. “Great,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Helmi had been forced to grab Peter and run when Torin’s forces came spilling into the knowe: there hadn’t been time to collect any of his belongings. That would make things harder eventually, but for right now, it made things somewhat easier: we didn’t have to collect or carry anything. We just had to run.

  So we ran.

  Five of us, fleeing down a hall that technically belonged to the enemy, past closed storeroom doors, past the scuffs and blood on the floor that marked our battle with Torin’s guards. Helmi stayed with Peter, but Kirsi took to the ceiling, somehow keeping up with the rest of us as her tentacles roiled, one over the other, propelling herself along at a seemingly impossible rate.

  We were almost to the storeroom we had entered through when another Cephali dropped from the ceiling and the five of us stopped dead in our tracks.

  He was larger than Helmi or Kirsi, larger than any two of us put together: if the Undersea had a wrestling foundation, he was probably their star attraction. He had a neck as thick as my thigh, and heavily muscled arms that promised a world of pain to anyone who got within reach. That didn’t touch on his tentacles, which were even thicker than his neck at their bases, or the trident in his hands. His smile was thin and cruel, the expression of a man who had been held in check for too long.

  Helmi hissed—actually hissed, like water flicked onto a smoking hot pan—and pushed Peter behind herself, falling into a defensive position. Kirsi dropped down from the ceiling, joining the blockade.

  The Cephali man laughed. It was a deep, rolling sound, and it set my teeth on edge.

  “I had wondered where my kin were swimming when none of you came to our new Lord’s command,” he said, in a voice even lower than his laughter. His skin was a deceptively cheery shade of baby blue, darkening along the length of his limbs, so that his fingers and the tips of his tentacles were cobalt-dark, like they’d been dipped in someone’s inkwell. “Have you lived in peaceful waters for so long that you’ve forgotten what it means to follow a proper warlord? Duke Torin will lead us to greatness, if we allow him to do so.”