The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  I hate drowning.

  Chicory. Not René’s chicory, which was sweet, mellow, well-aged, like a spice that had been sitting in a kitchen cupboard for years, waiting for the chance to be used. This was sharper, more bitter on the tongue, fresh-wrung from the root and still grieving for its marshy home. I followed it across the sand, and when the scent told me to turn left, I did, feeling Tybalt’s hand briefly clamp down on my shoulder to protect me from some unseen danger. It was good to have people I could trust like this. There was a time when I wouldn’t have been able to make this walk, because there would have been no one to stop me from going over the edge of the world.

  Had Isla been alone when she’d walked this way? She’d been bleeding magic, but that isn’t uncommon for fae in fae spaces. We’re as twitchy and unfocused as the humans are, when we’re not forced to stay on edge to protect ourselves from discovery. She had probably been making illusory balls to toss from hand to hand, or filling the air with small sparkles. Selkies have limited magic by pureblood standards—most of their strength goes into their skins, into keeping them alive and capable of transforming—but they have enough to fidget with.

  Had Isla known she was heading toward her own death? I hoped not. I hoped she’d been calm and casual, maybe a little nervous, since the Luidaeg had essentially declared open season on Selkie skins, but confident in her own ability to keep her skin safe. I couldn’t bring her back, and so I had to believe she’d been caught unaware, that it had happened quickly and completely and left her with very little time to realize what was happening.

  I knew I was lying to myself. Her actual death told me that much. Unless she’d been unconscious when she hit the water, her death had been neither quick nor peaceful, but had been an agonizing struggle for survival, surrounded by an element that had, until not long before she fell, loved her. Selkies loved the sea; the sea loved Selkies.

  The scent of chicory and phlox grew stronger, until I felt like I wouldn’t lose it even if my eyes were opened. I couldn’t take the chance. I walked and kept walking. The smell grew stronger still. René gasped. It was a small, strangled sound, powered by pain.

  I opened my eyes.

  We were standing under a boardwalk. There was still sand beneath our feet, but this was no longer the peaceful artificial beach designed to keep visiting Selkies comfortable: this was a part of the Duchy of Ships, and not the nicest, or best-maintained part. The wood around us was slick with water and ripe with rot, blotching the structure in lurid greens and oranges. As soon as I acknowledged the presence of the decay, I could smell it, mundane odors overpowering the magical. That didn’t matter. We were where we needed to be.

  The sand in front of us had been disturbed, thrashed up by what looked almost like a localized whirlwind. The wind couldn’t reach it here to smooth the damage away. A string of cheap glass beads lay off to one side, a few rolling loose to mingle with the sand. That was where René’s attention was fixed, not on the damage, but on the little glass beads.

  “I . . . I want those when you’re done,” he said, in a strangled voice. “Most of them were our mother’s. She used to wear them braided in her hair, just like Isla did.”

  “I appreciate you not grabbing for them,” I said, beginning to circle the disturbed area.

  He made a small sound that I might have interpreted as a laugh under other circumstances. “I watch a lot of police procedurals with the kids—I’m one of the teachers in Beacon’s Home. We need to prep our children for the mortal world, since most of them will wind up living there, and television helps. Gives them a sort of skewed idea of America, but since they’ll never move that far from home, that’s fine. Let them think it’s a dangerous wasteland full of guns and drugs and murder.”

  “To be fair, that’s pretty close to my experience, and I do live there,” I said, continuing to circle.

  There weren’t as many distinct strains of magic here: this was a place where most people didn’t go. That made sense. It was dark, gloomy, and decayed, which would put off a lot of the locals, and it wasn’t dark, gloomy, or decayed enough for the rest of them. This was a liminal ground, splitting the difference between so many factions that it wound up equally inimical to all.

  Breathing shallowly in through my mouth and out through my nose brought me the mingled scents of our magics, musk and pennyroyal and steel and heather blended with my own copper and freshly cut grass, and the nearly-twinned scents of René and Isla, but nothing else distinct enough for even me to name. Whoever killed Isla, they had done it without using magic.

  There was information in the absence. I didn’t know how to interpret it yet, but I knew there was an answer there. It might not be a good one, but . . .

  “If one of the human kinfolk who came here with the Selkie clans had killed Isla, would they already be wearing her skin?” I asked, looking toward René.

  He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I want to say yes—I’ve never known one of our kin to be able to resist the singing of the sea, and we can hear it when we’re near an unattached skin, like it’s trying to lure us into the depths—but I’ve also never known one of us to kill for the sake of a skin. It’s not our way.”

  “Murder is everyone’s way, given sufficient incentive,” said Tybalt. “I’ve never in my life known a person who couldn’t be moved to the killing floor.”

  “You know me,” protested Quentin.

  Tybalt fixed him with a steely eye. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

  “All right.” I can track magic for miles, but Selkie skins don’t have the same sort of personalized scent. The Luidaeg’s spell is a part of them, buried in every strand of fur, and I can’t follow them. Tybalt, on the other hand . . . “We know where Isla’s body ended up. What I want to know is what happened to her skin.”

  “Because whoever has her skin is the killer?” asked Quentin.

  “Not necessarily.” That would be too easy. “Tybalt?”

  He transferred his unflinching gaze to me. “You’re about to ask me to transform and try to sniff out the trail of a killer, aren’t you? How many times must I tell you that I’m not a bloodhound?”

  “Oh, believe me, I know you’re not,” I said. “I want the killer or the skin, or both. Any of the above will help me start figuring out what happened.”

  “Scent doesn’t cling well to sand,” he said.

  “It’s better than nothing.”

  Tybalt sighed, sounding exquisitely put-upon—and slightly relieved at the same time. If I was doing this with him, I wasn’t going to be tempted to run away and do it without him. “As you wish,” he said, and folded forward and inward at the same time, the scent of musk and pennyroyal filling the air as he landed on all four feet in the sand, a tabby cat instead of a nearly-human man. One of his ears was tattered, the artifact of some fight long before we’d come to know each other. His eyes were the same. I would always, always know him, by those eyes.

  Tybalt sauntered over to wind himself around my ankles once, twice, three times before stepping more delicately toward the circle of disturbed sand, his tail low and twitching behind him, his nose pressed close to the ground and his whiskers fanned forward as far as they would go. He sniffed, sneezed, and then began slinking toward the far end of the sand, toward the place where the artificial land dropped away and became all too real ocean.

  At the very edge, he stopped, yowled, and looked back over his shoulder at me. I knew a cue when I saw one. I walked over and looked down . . .

  . . . and there, floating in the tangled kelp that matted around the pylons, was a gray sealskin without anyone to wear it, cast aside like so much garbage. My stomach churned, threatening to bring up my last several meals for a repeat engagement.

  “René, stay back.” My voice was remarkably steady. I wanted to be proud of that. I couldn’t quite manage it.

  Isla’s killer hadn’t been content with r
ipping the skin off her shoulders and pushing her into the sea to die. They had thrown her skin in after her. I wanted to believe they’d thrown them both in at the same time, giving her a fighting chance, even if she hadn’t been able to stay alive long enough to benefit from it. I couldn’t. I knew, without any proof beyond the gnawing in my gut, that her killer had waited until she went under before they threw her skin after her. Selkies learned to swim while they were still human. They had stood here, skin in their hands, watching her drown. Only when there was no chance the sea could still be kind had they thrown her skin in after her, willing to let it be lost forever.

  Maybe that had been the plan for Isla and her skin alike. Let the leader of one of the Selkie clans disappear the day before the Luidaeg’s long-delayed judgment was finally to be passed, and see what that did to the rest of them. Could any of the Selkies resist the urge to run, if they believed Isla had been able to get away clean?

  And if they had run, if they had believed . . . who would have benefitted from that? Who would have stood to gain from having the Luidaeg’s oaths broken?

  René moved to stand next to me. I gave him a careful sidelong look. He was staring at the skin with open avarice, and I had to wonder at the coincidence of it all. The murdered clan leader was the sister of another clan leader’s husband, one who had been seen publicly questioning the Luidaeg. If he got his hands on his sister’s skin, would we ever see it again?

  The chain of evidence matters, even in Faerie. I shrugged out of my jacket, offering it to Quentin, who had appeared—as expected—by my shoulder. “Keep René up here,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t let him into the water.”

  “What are you—”

  His question cut off mid-sentence as I did the only thing I could do and leapt off the edge of the dock, arms pinwheeling wildly as I plummeted toward the waiting sea. Two immersions in one day. Three, if I counted entering and leaving the knowe at Saltmist as separate incidents. Lucky, lucky, lucky me.

  The wind whipped at my face as I fell. I barely had time to close my eyes and hunch my shoulders before I slammed into the water like a stone flung through a window. The impact knocked the air out of my lungs and shoved me well below the surface. I gasped, unable to help myself. Water filled my mouth and throat, and for a moment, I knew what it had been like for Isla when she drowned, betrayed by a world she had believed would always, always love her.

  The Luidaeg’s magic flared around me, and my body changed without my urging it to do so, acquiring fins and scales and most importantly, gills. I took a grateful breath, feeling the water fill me as a source of life, not death. It seemed lighter now, more welcoming. I turned over, getting my bearings back, and flicked my tail to drive me toward the surface.

  Isla’s sealskin was there, tangled in the kelp. I took it in my hands, and nearly let it go again as it began singing through my skin, offering me the waves, the world—an escape.

  Put me on, and you won’t have to worry about the prophecy made for your mother’s sake, it whispered. Only a child of Amandine’s line can be so bound. You could be free. You could be with your daughter forever, for eternity, for always. Put me on, and be remade.

  It was tempting. Of course it was tempting. The skin wanted to be worn. Whether it was a compulsion charm or simple self-preservation, the skin wanted to be worn, and I was the closest available wearer.

  No wonder the Selkies had always worked so hard to make sure their skins were passed hand to hand, and not left to sit fallow on a shelf, waiting for a worthy bearer. An unworn skin was a skin seeking a shoulder to wrap itself around.

  Well, it wasn’t going to be mine. I knew how Selkie skins worked, thanks to the Luidaeg tying one around my daughter. If I draped it over myself, even for a second, everything I was would be remade, Dóchas Sidhe replaced by Selkie-maid forevermore. It would be a way for the Selkies to save themselves: without me, the Luidaeg wouldn’t be able to resurrect the Roane. My place in Amandine’s line would end, leaving only Mom, and August, to play whatever role Faerie intended for our messed-up little family.

  “They have to be taken voluntarily,” I muttered to myself, tightening my grip on the skin, resisting the urge to cast it aside as fiercely as I could. “They aren’t leeches, they can’t just latch on.” For all that the skin felt hot and vital in my hands, it wasn’t moving. It couldn’t grab me.

  Now there was just the question of how I was going to get back up. I twisted in the water, looking toward the edge of the dock high above me. Tybalt and Quentin were both leaning over the edge. Tybalt was back in his human form, making no effort to hide his displeasure as he glowered down at me. I raised one hand in a small, sheepish wave.

  “Hi,” I called. “Either of you got a rope?”

  SEVENTEEN

  THEY DID NOT, in fact, have a rope. Or a ladder, or even so much as a pool floaty. What they did have was a traumatized Selkie who wanted his sister’s skin back, and was perfectly happy to jump into the water after me. Since that wasn’t currently an option, a bunch of yelling followed, while Tybalt and Quentin tried to restrain him without looking like they were restraining him. Fun for the whole dysfunctional family.

  After consulting with René, it was determined that the fastest way to get me back into the Duchy of Ships without causing a panic among the rest of the Selkies would be to swim around to the merchant docks and hitch a ride in a fishnet. Surrounded by fish. Because that wasn’t going to give me nightmares for the remainder of my semi-immortal life.

  “I hate water,” I muttered, kicking along with my head just above the surface. Several enterprising waves had already slapped me in the face, but it was better to be able to see my people pacing me on the dock above than to potentially get myself lost somewhere under the Duchy and be stuck there when the Luidaeg’s spell wore off.

  Another wave slapped me, as if in response to my comment. I spat out saltwater and glared at the ocean, which was generally unimpressed.

  “I hate water, I hate waves, I hate fish, I hate everything about this.” I spat again for good measure, trying to get the salt out of my mouth. It didn’t work. Everything tasted like brine, and probably would until the next time I ended up with a mouthful of blood.

  I would have preferred that at the moment, and that alone was a terrible statement about my situation.

  Quentin and Tybalt didn’t look any happier than I felt. Tybalt kept casting sharp looks in my direction, and had twice caught Quentin before he could throw himself over the side. I understood why Quentin wanted to—the Luidaeg had enchanted us at the same time; if I was safe in the water, so was he—and was still thankful Tybalt was stopping him. The spell was due to wear off at any time. I could drown and recover from it. Quentin couldn’t. For him, dead was dead, and I did not want to try explaining that to his parents.

  As if in answer to my thoughts, the water grew colder around me, like it wanted me to remember that this was not my natural environment. My gills stung in my throat, feeling less like a part of my anatomy and more like an injury that was somehow refusing to heal. I swam faster, conscious of the need not to outpace my guides, but equally conscious of the fact that if I reverted to my normal shape while I was submerged, I could be in a whole new world of trouble.

  Please, Maeve, I don’t ask for much, but I’ve heard your daughter call on you: please, let me reach the nets, I thought.

  Ships began appearing in the water up ahead, some large and stately, ready to take on cargos of both material and passengers, others small and swift and low to the water. I could pull myself into one of those smaller ships, if I really needed to. I might, depending on what happened next. I could see the nets René had mentioned now, long systems of ropes and pulleys helping the individual fishermen bring their catches up to the level of the dock itself. Taking a deep breath, I ducked under the water and swam as fast as I could toward my goal.

  I was almost there when the spell wore of
f.

  It began with a tingling at the tips of my flukes, spreading through my scales until, with a wrenching, shuddering sensation that was distressingly akin to being sliced in half, my tail split in two, transforming back into legs. I kept kicking, less effectively now. My gills sealed over and my lungs began burning, alerting me in no uncertain terms to the fact that they desperately wanted air. I kept swimming. It was all I could do.

  The Selkie skin draped over my arm seemed to sing even louder now, promising hope, promising harbor, promising—most importantly of all—freedom from the threat of drowning. All I had to do was put it on and the burning would stop. All I had to do was put it on and the water would welcome me as a friend and confidant, as a part of its greater self, and all my troubles would go away.

  That’s not true, I thought fiercely, still swimming. The water was colder now that I had a less maritime metabolism. It was biting into my skin, seeming to burrow all the way down into my bones. It was getting harder to keep thrashing. My troubles wouldn’t go away. I’d just wind up with all new troubles.

  But oh, it was tempting. I wouldn’t have to remake the Roane and destroy Selkie culture for the Luidaeg’s sake: I wouldn’t be able to. She’d have to talk August around, and good luck with that, since Mom was currently protecting her older daughter like she’d never been willing to protect me. I could learn the things that Selkies knew. People would stop asking me to be a hero, because I wouldn’t be Oberon’s anymore. Gillian and I would be the same. For the first time in her life, she’d have a mother who was actually exactly like she was, a mother who wouldn’t keep disappearing.

  Of course, I’d need to break that nasty habit I had of getting covered in blood every time I turned around, but I’d gone years with nothing more than a few flesh wounds. It was only since I’d come back from the pond that I’d developed a tendency to ruin my favorite jeans with bloodstains. I could do better. I could be better.