“No,” said Marcia. She met the Luidaeg’s eyes and didn’t flinch. “I have other paths to walk, and other roads to run. I can’t do them wrapped in a sealskin that isn’t mine. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the woman who died, and for the people who died before her, all the way back to the boy who died to make the skin in the first place. But me being sorry doesn’t give me the right to take what isn’t mine.”
“Ah,” breathed the Luidaeg. She let go of Marcia’s wrist. Marcia danced back, out of her grasp. The Luidaeg didn’t seem to notice. She was busy opening the basket, sliding her hands into the oil it contained, and pulling out the sealskin I’d found tangled in the kelp beneath the Duchy of Ships.
“His name was Beathan,” she said. “He was my grandson. He was strong and clever and bold and not always good about making the right choices. Most of the futures he saw had to do with fishing. He kept his family fed. He was a good provider. He would . . . I’m sure he’d rather be alive right now than be a part of what we’re to do here, but he would approve of this, I think, if he were asked. He would understand that he was saving people.”
She pulled the skin fully out of the basket and stretched it out across the table, where it clung, gleaming, to the wood. She looked at Pete, and then at me.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said.
“I don’t think anyone has,” I said. “Can you turn the skin over? I want to see the magic inside it.” The top was a shining pelt, sleek and smooth and perfect as if it had just been cut away from the back of the boy who’d grown it. The spell had to be anchored to the leather. It was the only thing that made sense. I’d touched Connor’s skin a hundred times while he was wearing it, and never heard the tempting promises Isla’s skin had made when it was hanging across my arms.
The Luidaeg and Pete exchanged a look before carefully, oh-so-carefully, grasping the opposite ends of the skin and turning it so that the burnished leather underside was toward the ceiling. It looked perfectly ordinary, the sort of thing that could have come out of any hunter’s stockpile.
Wordlessly, I held my hand out toward Tybalt. He sighed, and the next thing I knew, his claws were drawing hot lines of pain across my palm, splitting the skin. The deepest wound was at the heel of my hand. I brought it to my lips as quickly as I could, and was rewarded with a hot gout of blood, filling my mouth, overwhelming my senses with the taste of cut grass and copper. I could taste the ghost of the Luidaeg’s magic there as well, and that was fine; under the circumstances, that was almost ideal.
I blinked and the magic appeared on the leather like a map, or a fishing net of delicate lines older than any modern nation, any mortal dynasty. They were clearly of the Luidaeg’s making, but they were infused with an ageless anger and a deep, unspeakable grief.
As if in a dream, I leaned forward and rested my fingertips on the air above the skin, the taste of blood still clinging to my lips. The wounds on my hand had already healed. Tybalt would have to hurt me again if I needed more blood.
“There are four places you can cut without breaking the bond between the working and the weave,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own. “No more than that. Divided further, the spell would fail, and it would just be so much dead fur. I can show you where to cut, but I don’t have the power to make the cuts myself. They’d seal over.” So much of the magic was dedicated to preserving the skins, maintaining the immortality that had been theirs by right when they’d been living, vital parts of Faerie, and not memorials to commemorate the lost. Anything short of massive trauma wouldn’t be enough to break the spell or destroy the skin.
In that, we were the same. Both of us had been created by the Firstborn—me in a slightly more standard manner—and both of us were essentially indestructible.
“Four cuts, five skins,” sighed the Luidaeg. She touched the skin with the tips of her fingers. “My brave, beautiful boy. Let’s see whether we’re gambling everything on the right tide or the wrong one. Let’s see whether you get to rest.”
“Where?” asked Pete.
I touched the skin where the spell was thinnest, in four places. Pete nodded, and I stepped back from the table. Tybalt was there, to put an arm around my waist and draw me close. Quentin and Marcia stood nearby, seeking comfort in proximity. All of us were silent, aware that we were present for something that no one had seen in centuries, that maybe no one had ever seen at all. Two Firstborn, a daughter of Maeve and a daughter of Titania, working together to change the world.
Magic gathered in the corners of the room, gently at first, like a wave lapping at the shore, and then with more and more strength, until it was everywhere, until we were drowning in it. I leaned against Tybalt and struggled to keep breathing as the magic chased the air from the room. The Luidaeg and Pete bent over the skin, their movements silent and precise and nowhere near as fascinating as the magic they were generating. I closed my eyes and inhaled.
The Luidaeg’s magic was familiar to me, more familiar than it had any right to be. It smelled of brackish water, of the point where sea meets shore, where freshwater blends with salt. It smelled like peat and moss and loam, like blooming bog myrtle and sweet bluebell. Its complexity was dizzying, and enough to remind me that Faerie gets simpler with every generation. Most of us only have two elements to our magic. She had an entire world.
Pete’s magic was softer, gentler and crueler at the same time, because it wasn’t a cudgel, wasn’t a hammer: it was a knife slipped between the ribs and into a lung, it was a blade in the dark that cut and cut and never stopped slicing. It smelled like clean sea air immediately before a storm, wind and wave and ozone and impending doom. It smelled like driftwood, bleached bone-dry on the shore, and like sand bathed in moonlight, like ambergris and mist. Half those things shouldn’t have been scents, but I knew them all the same, and as I breathed, they blended with the Luidaeg’s magic, tying complicated knots all around the room.
The Luidaeg moaned when she made the first cut in her grandson’s skin. It was the sound of something dying. Pete hummed in wordless encouragement, and it was the sound of that same thing rising from the depths of the sea, coming back to life, coming home. I opened my eyes again. It was the only way to keep myself from being overwhelmed.
I could have stayed there forever, bathed in the painful radiance of their magic. I could have turned and run and never looked back. In the end, I needed to do neither of those things. In the end, the Luidaeg dropped her knife and put her hands over her face. Pete stepped back.
Five sealskins lay on the table, each shining, perfect, and as large as the original. They weren’t quite identical; their spots and striations had apparently spread out from the piece of Beathan’s skin that had been used to make them, creating five subtle but genuine variations.
“Come on, Annie,” said Pete gently. “Let’s go see if these work.”
The Luidaeg nodded, and said nothing.
We walked together through the Duchy of Ships. The Luidaeg carried Marcia’s basket, now containing all five skins, against her chest, keeping her eyes fixed on the dim, distant line of the horizon. Nolan and Cassandra met us at the start of the shopping district. The Lordens didn’t. Their ties to the Undersea were too strong: this wasn’t for them to see. This was for the Luidaeg, and the few people she was willing to share it with, and for the Roane, who had been lost for so very long.
It was hard not to wonder whether the Roane had seen this moment. Whether some of them might have wept over the sight of their mother, their grandmother, walking with a basket clutched in her arms, her shoulders bowed by the weight of centuries they hadn’t been able to set aside. The future can always be changed. There’s never once been a prophecy that couldn’t be somehow undermined or averted. Why hadn’t the Roane set their own deaths aside?
What about this moment had been worth losing so very much?
The Selkie clan leaders were waiting when we reached the ar
tificial beach. René stood alongside the others, his hand clasped in Mathias’. I was glad to see that. One way or another, they were going to find a way through this. They had to.
The rest of us slowed our steps, even Pete, until the Luidaeg approached the Selkies alone. She stopped a few feet away from them, the wind whipping her hair around her face, even though it barely ruffled the others. Her eyes were still green. Still so green.
“I promised on the day the Selkies were created that I would see the Roane swimming freely in the seas once more, and I keep my word,” she said.
Joan closed her eyes. Claude clutched his webbed hands into fists. Mathias and René shifted closer together, until there was barely any room between them. Only Liz remained exactly as she was, watching the Luidaeg with the mixture of longing and loathing that always stretched between them.
“But words are malleable,” continued the Luidaeg. “I was reminded of that today. I was reminded that sometimes, justice and mercy can exist in the same breath, in the same shining space.”
Joan opened her eyes.
“René Lefebvre, your sister has stopped her dancing. For that, I am truly sorry. I granted permission to the Selkies to steal from one another out of bitterness. I did not grant permission for a cruel Merrow to slay your sister. It was wrong and unfair.” The Luidaeg held the basket out toward him. “I can’t bring her back to you. But I can let you see what we’ve made of her loss.”
René bit his lip before letting go of Mathias’ hand and stepping unsteadily forward to remove the basket’s lid. He slid his hands into the oil, eyes widening with surprise before he pulled out a sealskin.
“It’s hers,” he said. “But it’s not hers at the same time.”
“The rules have changed,” said the Luidaeg.
René blanched. He didn’t hand the skin back. The Luidaeg didn’t reach for it.
“The tide is flowing out on the Selkies,” she said. “I made a promise, and I’m bound by Titania’s own grace to keep it, whether I want to or not. But I can bend the way it’s kept. Each of you will give me your skin. All the gathered Selkies. Every single one. I know you’re all here; I know none of you could avoid my summons.”
The Selkie clan leaders drew closer together, horrified and afraid. All, again, save for Liz, who didn’t move.
“My sister and I will split it along the seams of the spell that has kept it alive,” continued the Luidaeg. “It will happen today. We’ll make as many new skins as we can. After that, I’m banished for seven years.”
Hope was dawning on the faces of the clan leaders.
But the Luidaeg wasn’t done. “Your skin will be returned to you, as will the new skins we’ve made from the substance of it. They’ll be passed as you see fit, and all but one will be bound to their holders. The Roane return. Tonight, the Roane return. And the Selkies remain: one for each original skin. You’ll have time to settle your affairs. Some of you may still choose to set aside the sea. In seven years, when my exile is ended, we’ll come here one more time, and the final binding will be done.”
“I’m sorry,” said Joan. “I don’t understand. Are you saying we don’t have to be Roane?”
“No. I’m saying I understand it was unfair of me to give you all this time to learn how to be Selkies, and then to be angry when you had forgotten how to be Roane,” said the Luidaeg. “The tide is going out. I can’t catch it, any more than you can. I can’t keep it here. But I can grant you time to make this an easier transition. I can give you gentler waters.”
“When do we start?” asked René.
The Luidaeg smiled. “Right now.”
TWENTY-FOUR
SELKIES FILLED THE BEACH. Some were grown, as old as Liz, if visibly no older; like all fae, their clocks stopped upon reaching physical maturity, even if, for them, that stop was artificially induced. Not for very much longer. Soon, most of them would be as bound to the sea as the Luidaeg herself.
Others were children, wide-eyed and wondering and clutching their newly-split sealskins around their shoulders like they were a lifetime of birthday gifts rolled into a single narrow piece of fur. Some of the teenagers were crying, stroking their sealskins with shaking fingers, clinging to their parents. It was the end of an era. It was the beginning of a new one.
Not every skin had been divisible by five. Some could only split into two or three; a few rare ones had been divisible by as many as seven. In the end, only Gillian had a fully intact skin wrapped around her shoulders, because losing contact with it even for the duration of the spell would have killed her. There were still humans in the crowd, family members without a skin to call their own . . . but most of them had refused the offer, had chosen humanity and everything that came with it. They got to choose, and they got to live, and somehow, that seemed like a miracle.
The Luidaeg put a hand on my shoulder. “Well, here we go,” she said. “The largest expansion of Faerie since Dad’s day. You feel up to this?”
“No,” I said flatly. “I do not.”
“Too bad,” she said.
“I think it’s beautiful,” said Marcia dreamily. “Faerie should always be like this, fluid and changing and willing to work for a better world, for everyone.”
The Luidaeg glanced at her. “It’s not too late. We could find you a skin.”
“No.” Marcia shook her head. “No, it’s another ballad for me. I won’t sing the song of the sea, not right now, not today.”
“Suit yourself.” The Luidaeg turned to fully face me, taking a deep breath. “I know you don’t have a choice about this. I’m still grateful. I’m glad to know you, October.”
I blinked. “I . . . okay.”
I glanced over my shoulder toward Tybalt and Quentin. Quentin flashed me a quick, anachronistic thumbs-up, and it was all I could do not to laugh. Then the Luidaeg was leading me to where Gillian was waiting, her sealskin tied over her shoulders, a haunted look in her eyes.
“Gilly,” I said. “I—”
“No.” She shook her head. “I still don’t want to talk to you. But I want to live. So do this. Make it last. Make it forever.” Her laugh was small and tight and uneven. “I can’t spend the next seven years wondering if I’m going to die for the crime of tying a bad knot—not if I don’t have to. Especially not when the end result is going to be the same. I’m Roane either way.”
I bit my lip and nodded, reaching out to take her hands.
Gillian was my daughter, blood of my blood, even if her own blood had been sea-changed by the sealskin around her shoulders. I wondered, briefly, how the Luidaeg had been planning to accomplish this change before I had a child among the Selkies, and put the thought firmly aside. I couldn’t be distracted. Not right now.
The Luidaeg set her hand on my left shoulder, and the air around us crackled with the smell of cut grass and copper, my magic amplified and thrown into the wind, surrounding the assembled Selkies, seeking out their similarities to Gillian.
Somewhere, Torin was locked away, waiting to be cast out of everything he’d ever known. Isla’s blood would still be on his hands, but he wouldn’t hurt anyone else in these waters. It was a small condition. It had to be enough.
On the beach behind me, the Lordens stood, all four of them, together for this short stretch of time as they watched me change our world forever. They had arrived as a group, and while I couldn’t turn to look at them, I knew Patrick and Dianda would be holding onto each other, as inseparable as salt from the sea.
To the side, a bit apart from Tybalt and Quentin, Nolan and Cassandra watched, waiting to see what this would mean. We were all together, here in this place beyond the end of the world, where the waves clawed at the pillars holding us away from the sea, where one of the last Firstborn held her sway.
I reached for the magic in Gillian’s veins, and when I found it, I reached for the magic in the skin around her shoulders. They were tang
led but distinct, two parts of a greater whole. I bit my tongue, filling my mouth with blood, filling my mind with the feel of it. Then I swallowed, and said, as softly as I could, “Blow, oh, blow ye winds blow, the world’s greatest graveyard’s one more soul to keep: I said blow, oh, blow ye winds blow, the star of the west is at rest in the deep.”
The magic caught, seeking sympathy, fueled by blood, cast wide by the Luidaeg’s net. Gillian made a small sound of dismay. I closed my eyes and kept chanting, kept casting, kept pulling the strands of magic in flesh and in sealskin and tangling them together, until there was nothing but the braided unity, until there was nothing but the single greatest piece of blood magic I had ever performed.
If only my mother could see me now, I thought, and there was an edge of hysteria to the idea, a fraying. I pushed harder. The spell gathered, crested—
—and shattered around us, raining down on the beach full of laughing, weeping, rejoicing, grieving Roane. I opened my eyes. Gillian ripped her hands out of mine, raising them to the level of her face and staring at the delicate changes in the webbing between her fingers as the dried-out husk of her sealskin slipped from her shoulders and fell to the sand, unheeded. Her eyes were so green. No one in our family had ever had that much color to them.
I staggered, a wave of dizziness sweeping over me, and there was Tybalt, catching me and pulling me into the safe harbor of his embrace. I mustered a wan smile. My head was pounding.
“Ow,” I announced.
“Ow, indeed, you infuriating woman,” he said, and propped me against him so I could watch the waves of joy and grief and confused, giddy relief passing through the figures on the beach. The doors of the little Cape Cod houses were opening, the Selkies who’d been chosen to spend another seven years dancing between land and sea pouring out to exclaim over their changed kin.
The world was different now. We had done this. There was no taking it back.
I let myself relax against Tybalt, closing my eyes again, and wondered how much more the world would change before it was finished. Would I even recognize it when all was said and done? Would I even want to?
The Unkindest Tide Page 36
