The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  Tybalt and Quentin stayed by the door, not saying anything. They’d insisted on coming with us when we went to speak in private, and I’d been happy enough to have the moral support, even if neither of them entirely knew what I was about to do. The fact that they had my back was more than enough to put a little strength into my spine, keeping me upright as I waited for the Luidaeg to turn and focus on me.

  When she did, I almost wished she hadn’t. Her eyes were a clear driftglass green, and tired. So very, almost infinitely tired.

  “Well?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes,” I said. My tongue felt thick and my throat felt tight. I didn’t want to do this to her. I didn’t want to stand here and make things harder, for either one of us. I didn’t want to look the sea witch in the eye and tell her that I didn’t want to serve her.

  Sometimes heroism sucks.

  “What you want to do to the Selkies, what you want me to do to the Selkies . . . it isn’t fair.”

  Slowly, the Luidaeg blinked. Slowly, she stepped toward me, until we were almost nose-to-nose, until I could feel her breath against my skin. I stood my ground. It was the only thing I could think of that might keep this from getting even worse.

  “What do you mean, ‘fair’?” she asked, voice barely above a whisper. “Is it fair that my children are dead? Is it fair that the night-haunts found them butchered on the shore, their magic and hearts carved away, so there was no sustenance for the flock in the feasting? I called my sister’s children to me when my own were lost, hoping to see their beloved faces on the wings of the wind, and all I found was weeping, because they weren’t there. Was that fair? When did you become so concerned with fairness?”

  “When people kept pushing me into situations that demanded I figure out how to be a hero,” I said. “It’s not fair. The Selkies here aren’t the ones who killed your children. Most of them wouldn’t have any idea how to hold the knives. They’re scared and confused and they don’t want to give up everything they’ve ever known for the sake of a single day’s repayment, but they’re not your enemies. They’re your descendants. Sort of. Technically.” They belonged to her as much as the Roane had, as much as the scarce surviving Roane still did. They were her creations and her responsibility.

  “Whether or not it’s fair is beside the point,” said the Luidaeg. “I said I’d do this. That means I have to do this. That’s the way it works for me. I can’t lie, and breaking my word on purpose would make me a liar. Do you want to see what happens to me if I try to break my geas? Because I don’t. I’ve . . . I’ve seen it before, and there was no point in you saving my life if you’re going to make me throw it away on some wild fit of idealism. Do you understand? I don’t have a choice. There’s no reason for us to have this conversation. It can’t change anything.”

  “It doesn’t have to change everything, but I think we can change something,” I said doggedly. “I ran with Devin for years, remember?”

  The Luidaeg lifted an eyebrow. “Okay, I’m used to following your wild and slightly ridiculous leaps of logic—sometimes I even enjoy them—but this one is losing me. Why does your criminal past make a damn bit of difference here?”

  “Devin carved out a place for the changelings in the Mists when the Queen was actively anti-changeling, when no one wanted to give us the time of day.” When me being knighted had been the scandal of the century, despite the service I’d performed for that same Queen—and despite who my mother was. If I needed any proof that prejudice was unthinking and irrational, it was that. Too many people had known Amandine was Firstborn. I should have been treated like a princess, and instead I’d been a pariah. “He didn’t do it by lying, not all the time, not to everyone. Liars get caught. He did it by twisting the truth until it screamed, but never lying.”

  The Luidaeg was ageless, immortal, and had been cursed for centuries with an inability to lie. How did she not already know this? But she was looking at me with a blankly inquisitive expression on her face, like nothing I was saying made any sense to her.

  “Look,” I said, desperately, “you joke. You say things that aren’t flat statements of truth. You must have learned how to do that after you were geased. Right?”

  “When Titania laid the binding on my tongue, it took me years to be able to answer anything more complex than a yes-or-no question,” she said slowly. “I couldn’t even say my name unless I was in the presence of the Roane, because I didn’t know what it was. I could lie to them. I could tell them my name was ‘mother’ in whatever language I liked, and my breath didn’t stop, and my senses didn’t dim. They were the ones who carried my name back to me, until I could say I was the Luidaeg, the sea witch, that I was Antigone of Albany, and that I was not going to forgive Titania for what she’d done. Not then. Not ever.”

  I started to speak. She wasn’t done.

  “She was the one who told the sister I can’t name to put those knives into the hands of my children’s killers. She was the one who wanted to see the children of Maeve wiped from the world. It’s her fault my babies are dead. And I won’t forgive her. I can’t forgive her. Not while she still binds me, because she forbade me to be a liar, and it was in honesty that I pledged to hate her until the stars went cold, and it’s with honesty that I hate her now.”

  “The Selkies are not Titania,” I said. “Are you going to stand there and tell me the sins of our parents are things we can never, ever put down, no matter how hard we try? Because Pete is Titania’s daughter, and you seem to love her. I’m Amandine’s daughter, which is awful, and Janet’s granddaughter, which might be worse. People keep attacking Gillian because she’s my child, even though she’s never done a thing to any of them. Where does it end, Luidaeg? When do we stop even seeing each other, because we’re so busy attacking over the crimes of our ancestors? When do we get to rest?”

  She stared at me, threads of black drifting through her seaglass eyes, and asked, “Would you be this calm if someone were standing here talking about your child’s body, your child’s murder? Would you be willing to listen to mercy masquerading as reason? Or would you want to raise the seas and drown them all?”

  “That last one,” I admitted. “At least at first. I like to think that after a couple of centuries, I’d be able to see things more clearly—and you’ve had a lot more than a couple of centuries. But most of all, I believe, I truly do, that I could forgive the children of the children of the children of the people who hurt her. We have to start forgiving somewhere. If we can’t even do that, why are we still bothering?”

  The Luidaeg took a deep breath, and then another, visibly composing herself. Finally, in a light tone, she said, “I should turn your organs into fish and watch you die as they suffocate inside your skin for speaking to me like that.”

  “Should, but won’t,” I said.

  She pulled her lips back in a snarl. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because you were lonely. When I showed up on your doorstep chasing a killer, you let me in, even though it was Luna who sent me, even though you didn’t have a lot of love lost for her. You let me in, because you were lonely, and you let me keep coming back, because you were lonely, and you let Quentin in, and Raj, and even Poppy. You don’t like being by yourself. I don’t think many people do. Your family died or left you or turned out to be assholes, and that sucks, I can’t even start to say how bad that sucks, but Luidaeg—Annie—there’s a lot of different ways to make a family. We’re your family, too. All of us.” I waved a hand, encompassing Quentin and Tybalt. “We’re your weird, dysfunctional, foundling family, and we love you, and I think you love us. So you’re not going to turn my intestines into eels or my heart into an octopus. You’ve spent too much time grieving to do that to someone you’d have to mourn.”

  For a moment—just a moment—she looked stricken. Then, in a small voice, she said, “You know I can’t lie.”

  “Yes.”
/>   “You know I’ve said I was going to kill you. Repeatedly.”

  “Yes.” I shrugged. “I try not to think about it most of the time. When I have to think about it, I figure we’ll find a way to break Titania’s geas before you get too close to the knives. It’s going to be okay. I really do believe that. But we need to figure out what to do about the Selkies. We can’t punish them for the crimes of their ancestors.”

  “And I can’t let them swim free,” said the Luidaeg. “I made a promise. I have to keep it. We’re trapped, Toby. This is a closed cove: no one who swims here gets away.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “We’re fae. We’re not trapped. I refuse to be trapped. We’re just not sure yet where the exit is.”

  “May I?” asked Tybalt. His voice was surprisingly timid.

  I turned.

  He had moved forward a bit, closing half the distance between us and himself, so that we formed a line across the room: the Luidaeg, me, Tybalt, Quentin. His hands were out in front of him, palms turned toward us in a beseeching gesture that was oddly theatrical, like he was getting ready to deliver a grand soliloquy. I guess it was someone else’s turn for a change.

  “When I watched the players of the Globe, they were forever mending their costumes,” he said. “Money was never so plentiful that a thing could be discarded when it still had life left in it. A gown would be cut down to become a cloak when it was too well-worn at the seams, and that cloak might go on to become a doublet, a vest, a jerkin. Nothing was thrown away until its time was over.”

  “Yes, people know how to sew,” said the Luidaeg, with more confusion than impatience. “It’s sort of vital if you don’t have magic and don’t want to be naked all the time.”

  “But if you asked someone who wore a vest made from a cloak made from a gown if their vest had been used in the production of Romeo and Juliet, they would tell you ‘yes,’ and proudly, because their vest had been used in that production, merely in another form.”

  “I genuinely hope that you’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting; that whole ‘intestines into eels’ thing is still on the table,” said the Luidaeg.

  “It wasn’t that specific when you said it,” I said.

  “I like your style.”

  I kept my eyes on Tybalt, puzzling through what he’d said. Then I turned to the Luidaeg, and asked, “Where did the Swanmays come from?”

  She looked suddenly, inexplicably tired. “They’re descended from Aiofe of the White Wings. Another of my sisters. As far as I know, no one’s seen her in centuries. She doesn’t have some mystical stockpile of feather cloaks to hand out; Swanmays are born with their wings wrapped around their shoulders, where they can be easily set aside.”

  “Were they the first skinshifters?”

  Slowly, the Luidaeg nodded. “Yes. They were born first, and then the Artio came after.”

  “When were the Ravens born?”

  “They weren’t.”

  For the first time since we’d entered the room, Quentin spoke. “That doesn’t make sense,” he objected. “We live with a Raven-maid.”

  “The first of them weren’t born.” The Luidaeg was speaking more slowly, like each word was an effort. I wondered how many older prohibitions against speech, either magical or personal, Titania’s geas was overcoming. “Aoife had a sister, born at the same time. Aine. And Aine didn’t like people touching her. Ever. At all. Aine wanted her own descendant line, but the thought of getting pregnant, of being with someone in that way, for long enough to conceive, was repugnant. So she and Aoife pooled their thoughts and their strength, and they wove a cloak of raven’s feathers to match the cloaks of swan’s feathers that Aoife’s children wore. They made the Ravens. Their wings are proof of a sister’s love and a mother’s determination.”

  “You used that working to breathe life back into the skins of the Roane,” I said.

  The Luidaeg nodded.

  “But you did it alone. Selkies aren’t born holding their skins; they have to depend on the skins they’re offered. Why?”

  “Because my sister—my sister, my eldest sister, who I foolishly thought might care about me—had just orchestrated the destruction of my entire world, and I didn’t trust anyone,” snapped the Luidaeg. The blackness was entirely gone from her eyes. Even her pupils were green, the color of kelp in deep water. I couldn’t help feeling like this might be the closest I’d ever come to seeing the real Antigone. “I poured everything I had into those skins, so one day I could stand here with the answer to resurrecting my children. So I could bring them home. That’s all a mother wants. To bring them home.” Her voice broke on the last word, turning hollow.

  “My mother hadn’t been born yet.”

  “No.”

  “You had no way of knowing I’d be born.”

  “No. Only something one of my daughters had said to me. That it was all right to be scared when I was lonely, because the answer would always come, given time.”

  That felt more like the sort of thing a massage therapist would have cross-stitched and hanging on their wall than a good reason to create and then destroy an entire fae race. I decided not to say so. It wasn’t going to make things any better.

  “What if you had help?” I asked carefully. “What if another Firstborn was willing to help you do what Aoife and Aine did? To make more cloaks, only out of sealskin, not feathers? They’d still be the skins of your children. There’d just be . . . more of them, like there should have been all along. The Roane haven’t been making more Roane, because there are too few of them to successfully regenerate their race, and they haven’t been making more Selkies, because there were only so many skins to go around.”

  “Nice thought, but we don’t ha—” The Luidaeg stopped in the middle of the word, looking briefly like she was struggling for air, like she was suffocating. Then she coughed, rubbing her throat with one hand, and looked at me with wide, wondering eyes.

  “We have another Firstborn,” she rasped. “Pete.”

  “Pete,” I agreed. “If she’s willing to help you . . .”

  “It won’t work.” Her face fell. “I swore to destroy the Selkies, and that’s what I have to do.”

  “But did you swear to destroy the Selkies, or to bring back the Roane?” I asked. “Because maybe those don’t have to be the same thing.”

  For a long, seemingly endless moment, the Luidaeg was silent. I held my breath, counting the seconds. If I hit twenty, I thought it might be a good idea to run. The sea witch might extend me more patience than she did most, but it wasn’t limitless, and when it evaporated, I was going to be left high and dry and stranded on the cliffs of her regard.

  Finally, in a low voice, she asked, “What would you have me do?”

  And I told her.

  TWENTY-THREE

  WE BEGAN WITH ISLA’S skin. She’d died without formally passing it along: currently, technically, it had no owner, not even René, who hadn’t been allowed to take it. Marcia carried it into Pete’s receiving room, which seemed larger and eerier without its gathered crowds. Every sound we made echoed up into the rafters, bouncing back and forth between walls and windows until it became the insensate roaring of the sea, stripped of meaning and nuance.

  Pete was there when the rest of us arrived, standing behind a vast round table that looked like it might have started life as a tall ship’s lookout, only to be pulled down from the mast and pressed into a different sort of service. She was back in her pirate’s attire, hat perched on her head, weight resting on her fingertips as she leaned against the table’s surface. She looked at us gravely, studying each of us in turn, before she settled on the Luidaeg, back in white samite, her hair a tempest of black curls that sometimes seemed to flash silver, like they mirrored the ceaseless swirl of an angry sea.

  “Annie,” Pete said, voice barely louder than a sigh. “What stars do you steer by?�
��

  The Luidaeg somehow mustered a smile. “They haven’t bound me or tricked me or anything of the sort, I swear. They just convinced me to try another way.”

  “Another way.” Pete gave the rest of us a dubious look. “Centuries I spent asking you to find a way to talk yourself out of doing this, and these people, these little, temporary people,” her eyes flicked over me and Marcia on the word “temporary,” like it was the kindest way she could find to remind the Luidaeg that we were mortal, “managed to do it in less than a week’s time? I’m dubious. You’ll forgive me for that.”

  “I’ve forgiven you for worse,” said the Luidaeg. “Please, Amphitrite. Because you’re my sister, and my friend, and because I didn’t argue when I let you exile me, help me now. Help me find out whether this is the way forward, or only another anchor to weigh me down.”

  “You know what it’ll cost if you fail.”

  The Luidaeg nodded. “I do. I don’t know why, Dad help me, but I’ve decided it might be worth it. To know. To know whether I’m about to make myself into the monster they’ve all wanted me to become.”

  Pete nodded, expression grave. Marcia stepped forward, putting the willow basket on the table. Its contents sloshed faintly, and my stomach lurched. This was a dead creature’s hide, a skin passed who knew how many times over, and there was no blood left in it. This kind of death existed away from and outside of my sphere as one of the Dóchas Sidhe—but it was also exactly the sort of thing Faerie had made my mother—and by extension, me—to do. It was a spell, tangled and ancient and intricate as anything. Age couldn’t change its essential nature.

  Marcia started to step back. The Luidaeg’s hand lashed out, quick as a striking snake, and latched around Marcia’s wrist. Marcia squeaked, and froze.

  “Weren’t you tempted?” asked the Luidaeg. “A Selkie’s skin, no witnesses, and all the sea standing ready to welcome you home. I’ve seen the way you stand in the shallows, looking toward the deeps. Weren’t you tempted?”