The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  Kirsi shot me an amused look. I ignored her, motioning for Quentin and Peter to follow me. They did. Kirsi fell in behind them. Helmi and the stranger fell in behind her, and we swam as fast as we could back toward the gate that would see us safely out of these waters.

  In Faerie, the king is the land. That’s not just a pretty phrase: it’s a reality of the way the magic that anchors us to the Summerlands works. A noble can control the weather, the season, even the overall feeling of their demesne. A forest that seems creepy and unwelcoming in the hands of one noble may be airy and open in the hands of another; a place where it never stops snowing may blossom into eternal summer when the head that wears the crown is changed. How extreme the effect is depends on how tightly the landholder is tied to the land. It would take time for Saltmist to adapt completely to being held by Dianda’s brother.

  But it was already underway. It felt like the water was getting colder, like it was rejecting our presence. The fields still grew green, but there were strands of what looked like an underwater species of briar growing around their edges, reaching upward with thorny, gravity-defying tendrils to catch and claim anything that came too close. We swam by one of the thicker brambles and I saw fish trapped inside, impaled and motionless, their bloodless bodies left by circumstance to rot.

  Peter shivered, swimming faster, until he was pacing me through the water. I expected him to pull ahead, but he didn’t. Instead, he matched the motion of his tail to mine, pacing me, so I’d be able to protect him if something attacked us. I blinked, surprised, and barely resisted the urge to glance back and see how his Cephali guard had taken this change. There wasn’t time. Anything that could slow us down was something to be avoided.

  Then the gate was there, appearing out of the gloom like the welcome anchor that it was. I grabbed Peter’s hand, ignoring his startled look, and swam even faster, pulling him with me into the glimmering disk.

  The world dipped, whirled, and spun, remaking itself as something new. Nausea threatened to overwhelm me. Before it could, the water warmed around us, suddenly pierced with brighter shafts of shimmering sunlight that couldn’t possibly have been visible this deep, not according to the rules of the mortal world. Faerie works differently, thank Oberon.

  I let go of Peter, who looked frantically around before kicking as hard as he could, arrowing toward the surface like a shot. I took off after him, unwilling to lose sight of him when we were this close to our goal. “I had your son, but I don’t know where he went” wasn’t the sort of thing that was going to play very well with the Lordens. I didn’t know what Patrick’s breaking point actually was. This wasn’t how I wanted to find out.

  Peter swam, and I followed, and Quentin followed me, and the Cephali followed him, until together we sketched an arrow across the slope of the sea, six people fleeing from an uncertain future, heading for the questionable safety of a duchy that could still decide that Torin had been in the right to do what he’d done. A duchy filled with anxious Selkies and inscrutable Firstborn and seriously, there are days when I feel like I need a vacation from my life. Is it too much to ask for things to stop being hard for just a few hours? Please?

  The shadow of the Duchy of Ships cut through the water, seeming to loom out of nothingness with a speed that shouldn’t have been possible. Then the long chains of the anchors and the thick sweeps of the pylons were all around us, turning the formerly open waters into an obstacle course. There were no guards. Pete apparently trusted her people to take care of themselves, and didn’t see any point to holding off an invasion that was never going to happen. I couldn’t decide whether that was arrogance or confidence. For the Firstborn, I guess the difference doesn’t matter as much as it does for the rest of us.

  Peter broke the surface first, propelled by his own anxieties. I was close behind. I took a gulping, almost involuntary breath when I broke back into the air. Quentin did the same. The Cephali were more decorous, rising silently, their tentacles curling around them. Then we were looking up at the smooth wooden side of the Duchy, and Poppy was looking back at us, one orange-skinned arm raised in a vigorous, amiable wave.

  “There you are!” she chirped. “I was getting worried you wouldn’t come back before everything ran out and you drowned yourselves dead, bones at the bottom of the sea and everything!”

  Peter looked nonplussed. I nudged him with my shoulder.

  “That’s Poppy. She works for the Luidaeg, and she’s as close as you can get to harmless without becoming a parody of yourself.” Cupping my hands around my mouth, I called up, “We need something to help us get out of the water! I don’t think I can focus enough to go back to having legs while I’m still wet!”

  “We will help,” said Helmi gravely, and proceeded to begin climbing the side of the ship, her tentacles pulling her easily along while her upper body remained as graceful and seemingly motionless as a noblewoman making her grand entrance during a summer ball. The male Cephali followed her, and the two of them ascended with apparent effortlessness. Kirsi remained behind, hanging protectively in the water next to Peter.

  “I wish I could do that,” said Peter. “Cephali get to have all the fun.”

  “Can’t argue, kid, although I, personally, will be happier when I have knees again,” I said.

  Quentin didn’t say anything. He’d shifted in the water, until he was so close to me that our shoulders were almost touching. I glanced at him, frowning at the hint of dark confusion in his eyes. Something was really bothering him.

  Well, there’d be time to figure out what it was later, when asking didn’t mean involving his boyfriend’s little brother in whatever he was feeling. Quentin would tell me if he felt like whatever he was dealing with would interfere with him performing his duties as my squire. As long as he didn’t say anything along those lines, I could give him space until we could sit down and talk about it privately.

  Helmi reached the top and vanished over the rail, followed a moment later by the man—I was really going to need to learn his name before too much longer. Poppy stepped back, out of sight. Peter made a small, unhappy noise. I flashed him a quick smile.

  “It’s okay, bud,” I said. “Your dad’s going to be thrilled when he sees you’re safe. He wanted to come with us, but we convinced him not to.”

  “Why?” he asked, a whine in his voice that betrayed his still-heightened anxiety. I couldn’t blame him. Being held hostage twice before you turn sixteen has got to be hell on the nerves.

  I shrugged. “I’m scared of your mom,” I said.

  Peter cracked a smile.

  “What? It’s true! I like her a lot, she’s great and everything, but she’s also terrifying, and I’m not doing anything that might upset her. Taking your father on the kind of adventure that might get him killed would definitely upset her.”

  “You took him,” said Peter, pointing at Quentin.

  This seemed like a strange place for this conversation, but whatever; it wasn’t like we could go anywhere before Poppy and the others tossed us a rope. “Quentin is my squire,” I said. “That means it’s my job to take him places that might kill him, at least until he’s learned everything I have to teach and can go off to be a hero in his own right.”

  “Not a hero,” said Quentin hastily. “I never want to be a hero.”

  “I didn’t exactly sign up for this,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything.

  Peter, on the other hand, looked almost excited. “So Quentin won’t be your squire forever?” he asked. “You’re going to need a new squire one day?”

  A horrifying possible future unfolded in front of me like the petals of a large, potentially carnivorous flower: one where, as soon as I was no longer responsible for the care and well-being of the next High King of the Westlands, I had to start taking care of the younger son of the Duchess of Saltmist.

  “No,” I said firmly. “Quentin was
a special case, and I only agreed to take him on because my liege was the one who asked. Once he graduates, I’m done with squires. I’m bad for their health.”

  “Oh,” said Peter. Any potential protest he might have made was cut off a beat later, when a rope ladder dropped from the side of the ship and splashed down right in front of us.

  “Come on up if you’re coming!” shouted Poppy, leaning over the side and waving enthusiastically. “You’ve missed buckets and buckets of nonsense!”

  Of that I had absolutely no doubt. “You go first,” I said, to Peter. “Kirsi, go up with him, make sure he doesn’t lose his grip or something.”

  “Of course,” she said. The Cephali guided Peter to the ladder, wrapping the tip of one tentacle delicately around his wrist and guiding it to the lowest rung. He gave her an amused look and began pulling himself up, at first by upper body strength alone, and then, as his magic shimmered around him, putting his legs into it.

  I waited until he was about halfway up, Kirsi pacing him on the hull, before I nudged Quentin. “Go on,” I said. “Get moving.”

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “I’m pretty sure that, as your knight, I’m literally obligated to stay down here until I’m sure you’re not going to fall,” I said. “Call it acclimation therapy. Maybe if I float in the middle of the ocean for long enough, I’ll be able to enjoy hot tubs again.”

  Quentin snorted and began climbing. I watched carefully. To be honest, my reluctance to go before him had also been born partially from the desire to see how he managed the transition between shapes. The Luidaeg’s spell gave us some of the instincts and abilities of the Merrow, but it hadn’t come with an instruction manual: while I knew how to change my fins into feet when I was sitting with my butt solidly on dry land, I had no idea how I was supposed to accomplish the same feat while totally surrounded by water.

  The last time this happened, I’d been able to get Danny to pull me onto the dock before I tried to change. That wasn’t going to work now. No docks, and no convenient, long-armed Bridge Trolls to haul me out of harm’s way. I was going to have to manage this one for myself.

  Quentin struggled for the first few rungs, his fishy lower body dangling as he hauled himself laboriously hand over hand. Then there was a shimmer, and he was placing one foot after the other, scrambling nimbly after the rest of our party.

  “Everyone is good at this but me,” I grumbled, and started for the ladder. Then I stopped.

  Something white was floating in the water near the hull, almost hidden by the shadow of one of the many pylons holding the Duchy in place.

  It would have been easy to dismiss whatever it was as a trick of the light, or—if it was something real—as some piece of meaningless flotsam, a dead fish maybe, or a piece of torn-off fishing net. I wanted it to be one of those things. I wanted it to be something I could ignore.

  Instead, I ducked my head under the water, so I wouldn’t be able to hear my friends calling me back, and swam toward the thing that shouldn’t have been there. I was hoping, still, that it would be nothing; it would be a bit of trash, a bit of foam, anything but what my long years of experience were starting to whisper to me.

  Underwater, the scene shifted. Light moves differently in a Summerlands sea than it does in a mortal one, and even the shadows cast by the Duchy couldn’t turn the waves darker than a bright gloaming, like a summer twilight. I swam forward, and what I’d taken for a barnacle-encrusted piece of the foundation eddied in the water, becoming clearer. The white thing I’d seen floating was a starfish shape attached to an elegant stem, pale in the shadows, raised in an arch above a moon-shaped circle, crowned with waterweeds that had no discernable color.

  Then I blinked, and the scarecrow construct of slices of the sea became a woman, wilted, wound about with the shroud of her own sundress, eyes closed and skin softened by the water that had invaded every inch of her. She was barefoot, wearing nothing but several yards of patterned cotton that tangled around her motionless legs.

  Isla Chase. Leader of the Selkies of Belle Fleuve.

  Drowned.

  She was dead: there could be no question of that. Living women don’t hang like statues in freezing water, their chests motionless, their arms moved by the tides around them. But she was a Selkie, and Selkies don’t drown. They need to breathe, sure, but the water cares for them, in a way the Luidaeg can’t, and it tries its best to be kind. I remembered Connor talking about the sea back when we’d been lovers, when he’d stretched the length of himself out next to me in my bed, his webbed fingers playing in my hair, his toes running up and down my calves.

  “Selkies know everything there is to know about drowning,” he’d said. “Back in the days when sailors still thought it was a clever idea to steal our skins, we got really good at making sure they understood that they weren’t supposed to do that. One dead sailor could teach a whole fishing community to leave the seals alone. But we don’t drown. When one of us falls into the water, we wash up on the shore. Maybe we’ll be bruised, maybe we’ll be battered, but we’ll be breathing. Every time. Always.”

  I couldn’t remember why we’d been having that conversation—probably because I’d had another nightmare about my days in the pond, when the water had been above, below, and everywhere, when drowning would have been a mercy—but I could remember the wistful look in his eyes when he’d talked about his own inability to drown. Like he couldn’t have imagined any better end for himself.

  He’d died on dry land. Isla Chase hadn’t.

  Her body was secured to the pylon with a length of fishing net, so tangled that I couldn’t tell whether she’d been tied there or simply drifted into position after someone had tossed her body overboard. I swam as close as I dared, circling her with deft flicks of my tail, and couldn’t see any knots. I didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad one. Whether her body had been disposed of here on purpose or whether she’d been thrown overboard somewhere else, the message she was sending was the same:

  Isla had been murdered.

  I turned and swam back to where I’d been a few seconds before. When I broke the surface, Quentin, Peter, and Poppy were all staring at me over the edge, while Helmi and the other Cephali stuck to the side of the ship, watching me warily.

  “Where did you go?” called Quentin. “Is something wrong?”

  I opened my mouth. Then I froze.

  Captain Pete had sailed away rather than allow her presence to complicate the process of returning the Roane to these waters. Dianda was under arrest, and for the moment at least, her usurping brother was the ranking Undersea noble onboard. Dean’s title wasn’t in question, but his authority in these waters, this far away from land, certainly was. Involving Nolan would mean saying I thought the Mists had some sort of claim over this floating domain, so far from the shore. So who did I call? Isla Chase was dead. There was no question about that. But as for the question of who had killed her, well . . .

  The Luidaeg had given the Selkies permission to assault and rob each other. Isla could have committed suicide after having her skin stolen. This didn’t have to be murder. Would the Luidaeg even want me to investigate? Or would she want me to leave it alone, and let the Selkies handle their own problems, at least until the moment when they ceased to exist in their current form and became Roane, forever?

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I don’t think it matters what she wants,” I muttered. Hearing my own voice made me feel a little better about what I was about to do. Not much. Not enough. Going against the assumed wishes of one of the Firstborn was the sort of thing only a fool would do.

  A fool, or a hero. The two are so often indistinguishable, after all.

  Raising my voice to be heard above the waves, I called, “I have a dead body down here. I need you to lower some kind of net, and I need you to do it quickly because this water’s getting cold.”

&nb
sp; Quentin’s eyes widened without actually telegraphing any sense of shock. If anything, he looked resigned. “Right,” he said. “Just . . . wait there, okay?”

  I hung suspended in the sea, my temporary fins holding me upright, and watched as my squire stepped away from the rail. My only company was a dead woman—and Oberon forgive me for my heroism, but I was going to find out how she’d died.

  FOURTEEN

  ISLA’S BODY SPRAWLED LIFELESS on the deck, somehow looking smaller than she had either in life or in the water. Without the waves to lift her limbs and support her head, she was limp, motionless. Without the waves to keep her up, she couldn’t help falling.

  The strand of glass beads braided in her hair was broken; half of them were missing. There was something unutterably sad about that. Someone had put them there, whether Isla herself or a loved one. Someone had thought she mattered enough to adorn her before she came here, to the middle of the ocean, to die. She was wearing a sundress and she had glass beads tied in her hair, and that was all she had: her sealskin was gone.

  I crouched down, feeling my knees protest the gesture. The old damage that used to make certain things difficult for me had long since healed; this was a new protest, born from the still too-limber joints of my artificially Merrow form. The spell would wear off soon. Until it did, I’d have to live with gills in my throat and the occasional twinge from a skeleton that was no longer sure it loved the land the way it always had before.

  Gently, I lifted one of Isla’s hands and uncurled her clenched fingers. Her skin was soft and spongy from the water it had absorbed. It would trickle from her for hours, maybe even days, if the night-haunts didn’t come to carry her away. Which, I noted with regret, they didn’t even have to do. There were no webs between her fingers. They would come anyway. Her blood still held memories for them to carry.

  No webs between her fingers, but there were bruises on her wrists. This hadn’t been a suicide.