The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  The beach opened before us as we came down the final stretch of dock, its sands shimmering in the moonlight. There were no children playing outside now. There was no one. The whole place was empty, and if not for the candles flickering in the windows of the little Cape Cod-style houses, I would have thought there was no one here at all. I stopped, squinting at the houses.

  Selkies didn’t tend to use much magic beyond that which came to them from their skins. The Roane were prophets and storm-singers, almost as skilled at controlling the waves as the Merrow, but none of that had carried down to the people who’d stolen their place in Faerie. We were probably going to have some nasty weather patterns when the Roane were reborn and had to rush to learn how to keep their natural gifts under control.

  That was a problem for another day, and frankly, for someone else. I was just here to bring the Roane back into the world—and now, to get justice for one Selkie woman who hadn’t deserved to die the way she did.

  I stopped, squinting at the row of small, semi-identical houses. Tybalt and Quentin waited patiently, until I raised my hand and pointed.

  “There,” I said. “Elizabeth came out of that one.” Out of all the Selkie clan leaders, Liz was the one I actually knew and felt like I could talk to. She might listen to what I was going to propose. The fact that the Ryan clan had claimed responsibility for Gillian didn’t have anything to do with it, honest.

  All right. Maybe it had a little bit to do with it.

  We trudged across the sand, the waves crashing against the pillars of the boardwalk and the wind whistling around us, and we could have been anywhere; we could have been in Santa Cruz, or Half Moon Bay, or Ventura Beach, any place where people lived alongside the sea. It was a cunningly constructed little community, allowing the people who lived there to pretend that they weren’t on a floating duchy in the middle of the empty ocean. It was probably good for the mental health of the Selkies, who could, as we had seen so brutally demonstrated, drown.

  The curtains were drawn at Elizabeth’s house. There was no doorbell, which made sense, given the level of technology around us. Raising my hand, I knocked briskly.

  There was no answer. I knocked again.

  When there was still no answer I sighed, leaned closer, and called, “The Luidaeg isn’t with me, Liz. It’s just me, Toby, and a few of my friends. Let me in. This is important.”

  There was a long pause, long enough to make me question whether she was there at all. Maybe she’d gone somewhere. Maybe all the Selkies had gone somewhere, choosing to flee rather than stay here and face the Luidaeg’s justice. Maybe—

  The door swung open, just a crack, wide enough for me to see a single blue eye peering out at me. Like all Selkies, Elizabeth Ryan had stopped aging when she’d received her skin. She was a woman in the prime of her life and always would be, unless she elected to pass her own skin along before the deadline passed and it was too late. And for all of that, she had never looked older, or more exhausted.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not really up for visitors right now,” she said. “You should go.”

  “We can’t,” I said. “Let me in, or we’ll do this with me standing on your front porch. I don’t think either one of us is going to enjoy that, do you?”

  There was another pause, even longer than the last, before she huffed and pulled the door all the way open. “Fine,” she said. “Come on in.” She turned and stomped away, not waiting for us to enter.

  I exchanged a glance with Tybalt. Liz seemed antsy, but that made sense. She didn’t seem scared.

  She didn’t know.

  “Nice place,” I said, stepping inside and looking around the room. It was larger than it looked from the outside, decorated in a quaint, old-fashioned style that managed to look almost modern when contrasted with the rest of the Duchy. While Pete’s quarters, and the quarters we’d been assigned, were like something out of a period drama about piracy, Liz’s house was all white wicker and faded damask. It looked like the sort of place that should come with a kindly grandmother pre-installed. The only piece that carried any of the shipwreck aesthetic of the other rooms I’d seen was the table, wide and ragged around the edges and apparently carved from a single piece of some sunken vessel’s side. There were even barnacles on the bottom, dried out until they became ashen and cracked.

  “It’s not mine,” said Liz, with a careless flap of her hand. She kept walking until she reached a sideboard and picked up a green glass bottle, its sides too clouded to let me see the liquid inside. She considered it for a moment before setting it aside in favor of another bottle, this one red and equally obscured. “It belongs to whoever leads the Ryan clan. Which, I suppose, means it’s about to belong to no one. We won’t need clans anymore, not once you’re done with us.” She laughed unsteadily as she uncorked the bottle and poured a stream of dark purple liquid into a tumbler. “Anybody want a drink?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No,” said Quentin at the same time.

  “I would be delighted to have some of whatever you’re having,” said Tybalt. Quentin and I both turned to stare at him. He rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “I’m not ‘on duty,’ as you might so quaintly put it; I’m not the hero here. I’m merely an onlooker, raised in a time where, if someone offered you a drink, it was considered polite to accept their hospitality.”

  “I like you slightly more than I like the company you keep, which means I still don’t like you at all,” Liz informed Tybalt, filling a second tumbler and thrusting it toward him. “Why are you here? Come to laugh at the wake, when there’s never going to be a funeral?”

  “Where is everyone?” I asked, as Tybalt took the glass and sniffed curiously at its contents. His nose wrinkled. I did my best to ignore him, focusing as much as I could on Liz. “There were children earlier. Playing in the sand. Remember?”

  “How could I forget?” She fixed her gaze on me, and it was all I could do not to recoil. We had never been friends, had only met in the company of the Luidaeg, but she had never looked at me like that before. She looked at me like I was her executioner, come to drag her away from everything she’d ever known. “That was when my lovely Annie, my dear, beloved, only true love Annie, stood before a council of my fellows and said there’d be no punishment for anyone who wanted to steal a skin. You didn’t seem overly concerned about the children then. You just stood there and let her do it.”

  “She’s the sea witch, Liz. It’s not like I exactly have a lot of leverage with her.”

  Her laugh was low and bitter and more than a little inebriated. The drink in her hand was far from her first. “You have more leverage than any of the rest of us do, and substantially more than you think. She needs you, liar’s daughter, or she’ll never be rid of my kind. So yeah, you could have said something.”

  “She said the children were exempt.”

  “Because they don’t have skins to steal, for the most part,” said Liz. “Doesn’t mean it won’t hurt them to see their futures stolen, or to see their families attacked. Just because no one attacks them, that doesn’t mean they’re going to get out of this unscathed. You could have said something, and you didn’t. You cared more about your own hide than you did about theirs.” She laughed again, wildly this time. “Hide. What a good word for this mess. We should all be doing it, in order to save it.”

  “Okay, so she’s discovered the joy of homonyms and it’s a little creepy,” said Quentin.

  Tybalt shot him a fond look. “My lady love has ruined you for courtly matters.”

  “I wasn’t trying to,” I said, and focused on Liz. “Liz—Elizabeth—I need you to listen to me, please. It’s important that you listen to me. When was the last time you saw Isla?”

  “Isla Chase? Oh, that would be shortly after she tried to stab me in the shoulder so she could knock me down and peel the sealskin from my body. Clumsy scag.” Elizabeth sipped her drink, trying to
look nonchalant. “I kicked her in the groin and ran. Most of us are hiding in our homes, if we made it clear of the fray. Things aren’t really bad, not yet. The deadline is still far enough away that most are biding their time, waiting for the rest to get here. Newcomers will be easy targets for the rest of us, right? Show up late, don’t get all the information, lose. Lose big time. Mostly, right now, it’s people looking to settle scores, and people going after the easy targets. The weak. The unaffiliated. No one’s taking care of them.”

  There seemed to be a stone stuck in my throat. Something about the way she looked at me when she said the word “weak” was setting off alarm bells in the back of my mind. “And Gillian?”

  “See, she’s the reason I would have expected you to say more than you did when Annie decided to put a bounty out on my entire clan—and not only because those skins my darling love traded for your daughter’s education are what kicked off this whole mess.” Liz’s lip curled as she lowered her glass. “If I were a more vengeful woman, I would have left that girl standing on the sand when I pulled the rest of my people to safety. You’re lucky I take my responsibilities seriously. You’re lucky one of us knows what it means to be a mother.”

  Tybalt took a step forward, toward her. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. Out of everyone in the world—everyone except for me, and May, who remembered being Gillian’s mother even if she never had been—Tybalt understood the best how much it had killed me to let her go, even when she’d been demanding I do exactly that.

  I caught his arm, preventing him from going any further. Liz looked at him impassively, either too drunk or too resigned to her fate to be concerned about the fury in his eyes.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “It’s not like you’d be casting my clan into chaos. Hundreds of years of governing ourselves, keeping ourselves safe and tucked away and not violating the laws of either Faerie or humanity, and this is how it ends. No more need for Selkie clans, not when there aren’t any Selkies anymore.”

  I forced myself to take a breath, in through my nose and out through my mouth, focusing on how much we needed Liz to help us voluntarily, and not how much I wanted to punch her in the face. It wasn’t easy. Quentin looked as furious as Tybalt, but he was channeling it into a perfect stillness, one that spoke of his early training in his parents’ Court, where he’d been expected to be the perfect prince at all times, poised and polished and deadly.

  Sometimes I think Faerie is way too hard on our kids.

  Finally, I said, “Elizabeth Ryan, I’m here because the Selkie clans are permitted to govern themselves, at least so far as their relationship with their mortal kin. But you need to tell me where my daughter is and whether she’s all right before I can continue.” If she said Gillian had been hurt—if she said Gillian had been killed—I was going to—

  I didn’t know what I was going to do. Except possibly go looking for the Luidaeg and get myself killed trying to challenge the sea witch. The Luidaeg had always said she was going to kill me one day. If Gillian was dead, that day might well be today.

  “Your brat is fine,” said Liz. She took another drink from her tumbler, deeper this time, almost gulping. “She’s with a bunch of the kids, showing them how to make paper cranes. She’s still new enough to be good with her hands. The webs’ll slow her down soon enough.”

  Connor’s hands had always been a little clumsy, hampered by the webs that connected his fingers to the first knuckle. But he’d done well enough. Gillian would, too. I forced my shoulders to relax as much as possible, letting go of Tybalt’s arm.

  “What do you do when someone hurts one of your human clan members?”

  Liz blinked slowly, finally putting her glass down. “What do you mean?”

  “You take care of them, you protect them, you tell them about Faerie—the Law doesn’t cover them, because they’re not purebloods, but that doesn’t matter to the Selkie clans. What do you do when someone hurts one of your human clan members? It’s not a difficult question. Or should I go looking for an alchemist who can mix you something to sober you up? Because we don’t have a lot of time here.” Isla, dead in the water, shorn of her sealskin and left to drown like any other human. That wasn’t what the Luidaeg had approved. She’d given the Selkies permission to steal from each other. She’d never given them permission to kill. Sure, once a Selkie lacked a skin, they were exempt from the reach of the Law, but if I was right about Selkie governance . . .

  “The Law.” Liz laughed again, bitter and unsteady, like she couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. “Did you know, I didn’t even know there was a Law until I received my skin? My parents always told me to stay away from the rest of the fae, said they wouldn’t understand how a human girl could consider herself part of Faerie, or worthy of speaking to them. My mother said if I ever wound up in a situation where I couldn’t hide what I knew, I should pretend to be the au pair of some noble house. They steal humans for that. Almost always girls. I can’t decide if that’s tradition or chauvinism.”

  “A little bit of both,” I said.

  “There was a time when stolen girls were less likely to be missed,” said Tybalt. He had the good grace to sound ashamed, even as he kept talking. “A time when sweeping them away into Faerie might have been considered a blessing for all concerned, as they could be fed and safe and not subject to the affections of the first man to make their fathers an offer he felt he couldn’t turn down. In those days, it was tradition. Now, when someone insists they must have a woman to tend their young, because their parents did, and their parents’ parents before them, it’s pigheadedness and a refusal to understand that times have changed, and keep on changing.”

  “I love you,” I said, before returning my attention to Liz. “Oberon’s Law doesn’t protect changelings, and it doesn’t protect skinless Selkies, but you don’t go around murdering your human kids and dumping their bodies in the Summerlands where the mortal authorities would never find them. So what do you have?”

  “We have our own covenants,” said Liz. There was a suspicious glint in her eye. She could tell I was getting at something, even if she hadn’t figured out precisely what it was. Boy, was she going to be surprised. “We don’t kill our human kin, if that’s what you’re asking. We sometimes imprison them in our clan homes, for their own good, when they cross certain lines. And when they . . .” She stopped and swallowed. “When they seem like they might become a threat to Faerie, we have ways of stopping their tongues. We don’t like to do it. It’s small and petty and cruel and unfair, but it’s sometimes necessary.”

  “Magically, you mean,” I said.

  Liz glowered. “Yes, magically. What do you take us for? The fact that our place in Faerie has to be earned doesn’t make us less a part of it than you. If anything, it makes us more a part of it. We chose.”

  So had every changeling, ever, but somehow that never seemed to get us a better place at the table. I looked at her expression and decided it might be better not to point that out. “So is it ever, under any circumstances, acceptable to kill one of your human kinfolk? Just so I know we’re on the same page here.”

  “No,” she said, utterly affronted. “A Selkie without a skin is still a Selkie where it counts. We respect the Law among our own kind, even if no one else will.”

  “Wait,” blurted Quentin. We turned to look at him. His cheeks flared red, but he pressed on, saying, “I thought if a prospective Selkie refused to accept the skin, you, um, drowned them. So they couldn’t go back to the others and tell them the truth about where you all come from.”

  I didn’t remember the Luidaeg telling him that part, but that didn’t mean anything: I wasn’t always there, and the two of them had a relationship that existed outside of their mutual relationship with me. I turned back to Liz, waiting for her response.

  “We drown our children, yes,” she said. “It kills me that we do, but it’s the agreement we mad
e with the sea witch when she put the enchanted sealskins into our hands, and we keep our word. If you’re asking whether I’ve ever drowned a child, the answer is no. I had to have an heir when I became head of my clan, but I sought out a Roane man, and I lay with him to get my Diva. She’ll never need a sealskin to reach the sea, and so there was never any need to offer her the betrayer’s bargain. And before you say it, yes, I know I cheated, and yes, I know the sea witch would be within her rights to strike me down for going against the spirit of her deal with us, and no, I don’t care. I was never going to sacrifice a child to the water.”

  “Okay, that’s . . . really awful, but given what the Divided Courts do to changelings who choose their human parents, I don’t think I get to judge you,” I said.

  “Nor does the Court of Cats,” said Tybalt. “It’s rare for our children to choose anything aside from Faerie, and those who are born in feline skins never need to make the choice at all, but when it happens that a human-born child selects the mortal world as their home, their blood is on our hands. You shall find no censure here.”

  Liz looked briefly startled. “Well, good,” she said, voice gruff with unshed tears. “Why are you asking me this?”

  “I have one last question, and then I can explain,” I said. “What would happen if someone killed one of the skinless Selkies? Not Diva—I’m not sure she’s technically a Selkie at all, if she doesn’t need a sealskin to be part of Faerie—but one of your mortal kin.”

  “If the killer was of Faerie but not of the clans, we would approach the local regent,” she said. “In Roan Rathad, that would mean approaching Baron Aberforth and hoping he was in the mood to listen to our petition. Not because that person would have done anything wrong in the eyes of the Law, but because sometimes, we can convince those in charge that our human relations are our property, and at least get the perpetrators fined for their crimes. It’s not enough—it’s barely this side of wergild—but it means they don’t do it casually.”