The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  The sealskin was getting better at tempting me. I shoved those brutally appealing thoughts away and kept swimming. What’s an ocean but a bigger pond? No, thank you. I was not choosing to run away from my responsibilities only to return to a larger version of the prison I’d fought so hard to escape.

  My lungs were still burning and I knew I was going to take an involuntary breath soon. I started to turn toward the surface, and stopped as my flailing hand struck something rough and fibrous. The net. I’d reached the net.

  Slinging the sealskin over my arm, where it continued to murmur wordless enticements to me, I put my fingers through the netting and began pulling myself up, hand over hand. Fish thronged inside the net, packed together until they could barely do more than twitch and flop. The feeling of their cold, scaled sides against my skin almost made me lose my grip in disgust. I pushed the feeling aside and kept climbing.

  My head broke the surface and I took a huge, greedy gulp of air, filling my lungs with what felt like equal parts oxygen and seafoam. I coughed and wheezed, trying to clear the spray out of my throat as I climbed. Somewhere above me, a voice shouted dismay and displeasure at my ascent. I ignored it and kept climbing. What were they going to do, stab me when I reached the dock? Fine. Whatever. I’ve been stabbed before, by better people than some confused deckhand who doesn’t know what to do with a half-drowned hero.

  Tybalt, Quentin, and René were waiting at the top of the net. René was engaged in a vigorous argument with several of the people who’d been working the pulley, shouting at them in a dizzying mixture of French and English that I couldn’t even dream of following. Not that I would have had the chance. Tybalt grabbed me as soon as my feet were on the dock, pulling me into a tight, unyielding embrace.

  “Never, never do that to me again,” he hissed, lips up against my ear, creating a shell of semi-privacy for the two of us to occupy. “Bleed if you must. I know you’ll recover from that.”

  “I recover from drowning, too,” I protested, but didn’t pull away or ask him to let go. He was warm and dry—or had been dry, before he’d put his hands on me—and most of all, solid. Real.

  I hadn’t realized how long I’d gone without an anchor before I’d found one. Life was so much easier when I wasn’t constantly afraid that I was on the verge of drifting away.

  “Do you recover from being swept out to sea, gnawn upon by sharks, drowned again, trapped in a discarded fishing net, and prisoned at the bottom of the ocean for a hundred years? Because even if you do, I fear my heart could not.” He thrust me out to arm’s length. His pupils had expanded to their widest point, wiping away all but the thinnest sliver of green. “Do not do this to me again, October. Do not. I can lose . . . so many things. I can’t lose you. I would, unquestionably, fail to survive it.”

  Silence fell. I turned to see René and the dockhands staring at us. Quentin, for his part, had rolled his eyes skyward so hard that I suspected there was a good chance they were going to roll clean out of his head.

  “Is he always like that?” asked René.

  I nodded. “Most of the time. Sometimes he gets flowery and overblown, but I don’t mind. It’s sort of soothing at this point, you know?”

  “Ostie,” muttered René. “They should offer the man in shops to inspire our husbands to be better.”

  “Please, no,” said Quentin. “I’ll jump into the ocean if we start acquiring extra Tybalts.”

  “You don’t appreciate the finer things in life,” said Tybalt.

  “I appreciate not watching five of you fight over one of Toby,” Quentin countered.

  That was an image worth revisiting later, and at length. Right now, however . . . “I have Isla’s skin,” I said. It seemed to shiver in my hands, like it was protesting the lost opportunity to sway me toward the sea. I shuddered, a bigger motion that made its small twitches easier to dismiss as my own bone-deep chill. I can heal from practically anything. I still get cold.

  René’s face immediately sobered. He took a step toward me, one hand partially outstretched. He hesitated then, looking at my face. “May I?” he asked.

  “I’d prefer it if you did, as long as you understand that if you try to run, Tybalt will chase you down and make you stop,” I said. “It keeps talking to me. Do Selkie skins always talk?”

  Tybalt grinned, putting teeth—literally—behind my threat.

  René cast an anxious glance at the dockhands, who were working the pulley, ostentatiously ignoring us. He looked back to me. “Talk, no,” he said, gently taking the skin from my hands. “Some can form words, but most can’t at this point. They’re worn smooth, like driftglass, like stones in the sea. The elders say their elders could converse with the spirits of their skins, but if that’s true, and not just some foolish fancy, that time passed very long ago. Before my mother’s mother’s mother swam the seas.”

  Meaning the Luidaeg had been draping the Selkies in ghosts all this time. Hungry ghosts, no less, who wanted the chance to live again, no matter how limited their form. I shivered, this time not from the cold. What did the night-haunts make of the Selkies? They were wrapped in magically preserved slivers of the Roane, who had faded from the flocks centuries ago—but when they’d been lifted up on autumnal wings, had they done so with fleshless faces, flensed and left to rot?

  It was a chilling thought. I didn’t like it, and so I shunted it aside. “René, I know you want to pass Isla’s skin, but I need to ask you not to do that,” I said. “It has to stay with us until this is settled. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want to let my sister’s skin out of my hands,” he said reluctantly. “I’d trade it for Isla, alive and human and here, but since I can’t have that, I don’t want to let it go. And yet . . . I think you’re right. It wouldn’t be safe with me. Too many people are desperate, for their children, their loved ones, all the ones who’d been content to wait when they thought that waiting could be fruitful.”

  “I understand,” I said—and I did, I really did. To be a changeling is to be something like to a Selkie, inside and outside Faerie at the same time. The hope chests offer us a way to cross that line and become fae forever, if that’s what we want. That’s what they were created to do, and that’s the reason they’ve all been locked away, hidden from the people who need them most. We’re not seen as worthy, and part of that supposed unworthiness comes from the fact that we have to fight for everything we get. Faerie has never given us anything freely.

  I took a step back, so I could see all three of my traveling companions at the same time. “We’ll take you, and the skin, to our quarters. There’s always someone there, and we’re traveling under the Luidaeg’s protection. No one will interfere with us.” I pitched my voice a bit louder than necessary, to be sure the dockhands would hear me. From the way their shoulders tightened, they did. Good.

  It wasn’t that I thought they were necessarily dishonest. I didn’t know them well enough for that. It was simply that we were out in the open, and there was no way to be sure we hadn’t been listened in on. Once we got the skin home, we could keep it safe until things were settled.

  And we could let René see his sister’s body.

  “Do you know how to get to the visitor’s apartments from here?” I asked.

  René shook his head. “Selkies have their own space. We don’t travel deeper into the duchy when we don’t have to.”

  “I know the way,” said Tybalt. I blinked at him. He smirked, although the expression lacked his usual heat. “I had plenty of time to explore while you and your boy wonder were off playing at being merfolk. Follow me.”

  He turned on his heel and started walking, a little faster than normal, but not so fast that I couldn’t keep up. He was annoyed, not actively angry. That was fine. Annoyed, I could work with. Angry meant yelling and apologies and pain, and I was way too tired for that.

  We walked through the Duchy of Ships in a ragg
ed line, fixed on our destination, trying to ignore the way people pointed and whispered behind their hands. Whatever temporary “ignore them, they’re strangers” field we’d started with, we’d lost it somewhere between rescuing the son of an imprisoned Merrow Duchess and pulling a drowned woman from the sea.

  Tybalt glanced my way, annoyance melting into a far more welcome wry amusement. “I see your reputation is spreading. You have fans again.”

  “I never asked for fans,” I said, walking faster, as if that would be enough to shift me out from under the weight of all those staring eyes.

  “Yet you charm everyone you meet in the same unfaltering manner,” he said. “It seems difficult to believe that it is entirely accidental.”

  I hit him in the arm. He laughed, and things were, if not okay again, at least a little better.

  The door to our courtyard appeared ahead of us like a beacon, offering the promise of safe harbor. We kept going until we could smell the fresh green scents of our private garden, and hear the sound of voices. Patrick, and Peter, both talking loudly enough that I could tell them apart even before we were close enough for me to pick out words.

  “—not the land, Father! You can’t keep thinking of it like it is!”

  “We don’t have an army right now, Peter. You have to slow down.”

  “Mother has been imprisoned!”

  “Does it help at all if I say the sea witch is working on it, and is just as annoyed as the rest of us?” I stepped around the edge of the courtyard.

  Patrick and Peter, who had both frozen in place at the sound of my voice, turned to look at me. They were virtually nose-to-nose, Patrick towering almost a foot over his son, yet still seeming somehow evenly matched. Dean and Marcia were off to one side. Neither of them made any effort to hide their relief at my appearance. Cassandra and Nolan were on the other side, looking utterly, profoundly confused. I guess suddenly being dropped into Undersea politics without a primer would do that.

  “And where’s Poppy?” I asked.

  “She’s in her apartment with the—with the thing you found,” said Dean, haltingly.

  “The body,” I said. “You mean she’s with the body.”

  He nodded, looking like he was about to be sick. Getting that boy out of the Undersea was the best thing I ever did. He was a good Count, thoughtful and patient and fair. Staying in Saltmist would have eaten him alive.

  I turned to René. “We can take you to your sister momentarily,” I said. “Will your traditions allow you to leave the skin with her body until this is resolved? Even if the night-haunts come for her, they won’t touch the skin.” If they’d been able to find sustenance in Selkie skins, all chance of the resurrection of the Roane would have been eliminated ages ago.

  Looking sick, René shook his head. “The skin can’t be given to the dead,” he said. “The magic won’t allow it. Some of the first Selkies tried to have their skins buried with them, thinking that was a way to break the bargain, and their children and siblings found those skins draped over chairs at the kitchen table the next day.”

  “Delightful.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “René, may I introduce you to Duke Patrick Lorden of Saltmist, his son, Peter Lorden, Count Dean Lorden of Goldengreen, his Seneschal, Marcia, and Crown Prince in the Mists Nolan Windermere, and his ‘please don’t cause a diplomatic incident because you don’t understand what’s happening’ Cassandra Brown.”

  “I feel I may have just been insulted,” said Nolan, sounding puzzled.

  “Aren’t you supposed to introduce princes and the like first?” asked Marcia.

  “Not when we’re in an Undersea fiefdom, surrounded by ocean on all sides,” I said. “There’s etiquette and then there’s common sense, and they don’t always agree. Everyone, this is René. He’s married to the head of the Beacon’s Home Selkies, and Isla was his sister.”

  “I am terribly sorry for your loss,” said Nolan. He managed to make the proclamation sound like it actually meant something, and wasn’t just the sort of thing people said when they didn’t know what else to do.

  “If we can’t leave the skin with the body, what are we supposed to do with it?” asked Quentin. “Can you stick a Selkie skin in a closet?”

  “The Luidaeg does, but I don’t know how you keep them there,” I said.

  “I may be able to help,” said Marcia. We all turned to stare at her. She flushed red, the color traveling all the way up the sides of her ears, and said, “Lily had custody of a Selkie skin for a few years, while she was waiting for its owner’s daughter to be old enough to claim it. The, uh, owner had been clanless, so he handled the dispensation of his own skin.”

  “We allow people to select their heirs,” protested René.

  “Even when someone dies, and their chosen heir is too young?” asked Marcia. Her voice was cold and gentle at the same time, like the first swirl of snow on a winter morning. She looked unflinchingly at René. “He came to Lily because he was afraid that if something happened to him, his skin would be given to the ‘most deserving,’ and his daughter would have to wait until someone else died without an heir—assuming that if and when that happened, she’d be found more deserving than everyone else in her position. I don’t know why he was so sure he was going to die. Maybe he’d found an actual seer, or maybe he just had a bad feeling. Whatever the reason, Lily agreed to safeguard his skin if anything happened, providing we could get to it before the Selkies did.”

  “I remember that,” I blurted. “She paid me and Julie to break into a man’s apartment.” It had been small, and dark, and very, very clean, the kind of place I would only later come to appreciate as the loving home it was. There had been a man in the kitchen, bullet wounds in his chest and throat. The night-haunts had already been and gone, replacing the original corpse with a perfect, convincingly human replica.

  The sealskin we’d been sent to retrieve had been neatly folded off to one side, presumably by the night-haunts themselves. It had seemed like an odd courtesy, but they loved the Luidaeg in their strange, windborne way. Maybe they’d been trying to honor her long-dead child as they took care of their latest meal.

  He hadn’t been my first dead body, sadly. I’d been with Devin long enough by that point to have learned the world wasn’t all moonlight and roses. The sight of him had still been enough to wrench my dinner back out of me. I’d made it to the bathroom, barely, and promptly wished that I hadn’t, when I’d seen the colorful flotilla of rubber duckies sitting in the bottom of the dry tub, waiting for a bath time that was never going to come.

  Whoever had killed him hadn’t been doing it for his skin. Julie had been the one to carry it back to Lily’s, maybe because she’d heard it calling to her, maybe because she’d known I—back then, before the pond, before the discovery of my actual heritage, when I’d thought of myself as a defective Daoine Sidhe and not a perfectly functional Dóchas Sidhe—would be vulnerable to temptation.

  I’d never met the daughter. I wondered, suddenly, whether she was here.

  Wrenching myself out of the memory, I focused on Marcia. “What do we do?”

  “We’ll need a willow basket lined with wax and filled with oil,” said Marcia. “I can find the herbs I need here in the garden if someone can get me the basket.”

  “I think I saw a booth selling crab baskets in the market,” said Quentin.

  “Don’t go alone,” I said.

  “I’ll go with him,” said Cassandra. “The air’s a little thick in here.”

  “Meaning my father and brother have been yelling at each other since we all stopped crying,” said Dean, in a dry, weary tone. “I’d go also, if I weren’t afraid of being arrested the second I stepped foot outside the courtyard.”

  “It seems the Lady sea witch’s name carries some weight even with those who would trouble us, as none of the ruffians have been willing to cross our threshold,” said Nola
n. He turned to René. “I can take you to your sister, if you would like.”

  “I would appreciate that,” said René. Nolan beckoned for him to follow, and the two of them walked across the courtyard to the apartment where Poppy was sitting with a dead woman, counting down the minutes of her decay.

  “It makes sense that the people who live here wouldn’t want to piss off the Luidaeg; she’s their own personal nightmare,” I said, as Quentin and Cassandra made their necessary, clearly much-desired escape. “Peter, why are you yelling at your father?”

  “He just—he just stood there and let them take my mother!” he snapped, eyes flashing. “He could have fought for her! If he’d been Merrow, he would have fought for her!”

  “If he’d been Merrow, your uncle would have needed to find a different excuse for arresting an innocent woman.” I somehow managed to say that with a straight face. The thought of Dianda as “innocent” was barely this side of ridiculous. “Also your father would probably be dead, since your parents didn’t bring an army.” I paused, frowning, as I looked around the courtyard. “Where are Helmi and the others?”

  “We decided it would be better if any further attackers received some bad information about how well-defended we are,” said Patrick. As if on cue, what I’d taken for a curling vine lifted away from the wall, its edges tinting orange as it waved languidly in my direction. Then it reattached to its original place, the color draining away.

  If I squinted, I could follow that long tentacle to a motionless shape I was pretty sure was Helmi. The other two Cephali were completely camouflaged, blending so flawlessly into their surroundings that I would have needed to cheat and bleed to have a chance of finding them.

  “That isn’t unnerving at all,” I said, and returned my attention to Marcia. “Do you need anything else?”