Hell and High Water

by Charlotte E. English

‘It isn’t much good, is it? This notion of leverage. Once you’ve killed Phélan and Tai, what do you propose to do next?’

  ‘A bluff! Charming. But I might think, after a century or so, you’d come up with something new.’

  ‘Old habits die hard.’

  ‘But old sirens die very easily, darling.’

  ‘So, go kill her.’ I shrugged. ‘What’s stopping you?’

  For the first time, her face registered a flicker of uncertainty. ‘You can’t be serious.’

  I looked her in the eye, hard as steel. ‘You appear to have changed, Brianne. So have I. Eighty years is a long time.’

  ‘True,’ she said softly. ‘But then, it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve thrown a partner under the bus, now would it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Once there were four,’ she said, drifting down, and nearer. ‘Then there were three. Shall I make you a duo? Shall I really, darling?’

  ‘A good tactic,’ I said, as steadily as I could. ‘Tormenting us over Silise. It did throw us for a moment or two, I will admit that much.’

  ‘She was worth twenty of you.’

  That gave me pause. ‘I did not know you were at all acquainted with the matter.’

  ‘The matter of Silise? No, of course you wouldn’t. You were too… distracted, weren’t you? You and Tai, wrapped up in each other. Best friends forever, and the others could go to hell for all you cared.’

  I watched her through narrowed eyes, silent. Never would I admit that her words hurt, that she had found, with remarkable instinct, a sore point.

  ‘I rather wonder that Daix bothers with either of you,’ she went on. ‘What could possess her to go on playing sidekick to your leading lady duo?’

  ‘Where exactly are we going with this?’

  ‘Silise would have left you,’ said Brianne. ‘Eventually.’

  ‘She did,’ I said, icily. ‘She died.’

  Brianne didn’t answer immediately. She looked down at me with something like contempt, and when she spoke at last, it was no longer on the subject of Silise. ‘Those pearls. Now.’

  ‘No amount of threats will render the impossible achievable, Brianne.’

  Brianne shook her head, sending her malachite-green locks floating in a flurry around her face. ‘Pity, really. For all your faults, I do have some standards, darling. I was really hoping not to have to do this to you.’ She lifted her voice, called over her shoulder, ‘Bring that here, please. Thank you.’

  A pair of morrough appeared behind her, carrying something between them. I knew instantly what it was; I didn’t need to watch as they spread it out for me to see, showed me the length and breadth of it, the sleek, brown-furred contours of it, shot through with silver. I knew it the way I know the shape of my own face.

  My sealskin.

  The two morrough carried it to Brianne, who was looking at me with something like genuine pity in her face. ‘I am sorry,’ she said, and she sounded sincere. ‘I don’t think you altogether deserve this, but what choice have you given me? Hm? I need those pearls. If you won’t do it even to save Tai — and really, all things considered, I shouldn’t be surprised — well then, darling, I’ll have to resort to desperate measures.’

  She took up my sealskin, then, and she did it with all the malicious, self-serving intent I’d always known she possessed.

  The moment she grasped it in her hands, clutched it tight, I felt trapped, caught, like an invisible net had been thrown over me. I breathed, and I could move, if I wanted to. But I couldn’t remember why I might want to. I would do nothing until I received instructions from the one who held my sealskin.

  Brianne drifted down and down, until her face was level with mine. ‘Interesting,’ she said, studying my expression. ‘I thought I would feel more… triumph. Power. Something. But really, all I’m feeling is regret.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Now then, those pearls. Make all you can, though you’re to preserve your own existence, please, darling. I don’t need another dead selkie on my hands.’

  Something, deep inside, flinched. Narasel.

  ‘And when we’re finished here, who knows? Perhaps I’ll let you have this back.’ She hefted my sealskin, stroked it with tender fingers. ‘After all,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘Nobody makes gowns quite like you, do they?’

  Chapter Eighteen: Tai

  An undersea cell isn’t that much different from the aboveground variety, as it turns out.

  Superficially there are differences, sure. This one was prettier: all turquoise water and coral, and pearlescent fish that look like they were painted to match the décor (for all I know, they might have been). But bars of water-smoothed stone are still bars, and a locked door is still impassable without a key.

  Brianne’s guards had installed Phélan and I in the same cell, and while it’s been some time since he and I have had to escape a confined situation together, I’m going to go ahead and call this a mistake on her part.

  ‘I’m fastened to the wall,’ I observed to Phélan, once the morrough had gone. I had a manacle, of sorts, attaching my left wrist to the craggy rock face around me: silvery and slender, it looked like it wouldn’t hold a child, but when I tested it, the thing tightened around my skin and bit. I stopped trying to pull free.

  Phélan was on the other side of the cell, glaring at me.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You were right. I shouldn’t have followed Fi down here. But you didn’t have to come with me, did you?’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to come with you,’ Phélan growled. ‘I was trying to stop you.’

  ‘Oh…’

  ‘I, too, am fastened to the wall.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Any idea how long before we drown?’

  I shrugged. ‘Not a clue, but that sounds like a problem for future me.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Current me is more interested in getting out of this unusually pretty prison.’

  Phélan visibly swallowed whatever of his irritation remained unvoiced, and set to work. I watched him test his own silvery bindings as I had, with the same result.

  ‘You hang onto any of your knives?’ I asked.

  ‘Course not. What, you think we’re dealing with a bunch of amateurs?’

  I gave that due thought. ‘Probably not,’ I conceded. ‘Though I don’t know that Brianne was expecting this part.’

  ‘She certainly wasn’t expecting me.’

  I opened my mouth, and let loose with a cacophony of shattering notes. The sounds sliced through the silence; behind me, rock splintered. The clear waters grew cloudy with rock-dust, but when they cleared, the silvery manacle remained unaffected.

  ‘And that would be why I’m not gagged,’ I observed. Damned Brianne. Whether she had expected me personally to end up down here or not, she’d proofed her arrangements against siren-song pretty well.

  Phélan favoured me with a string of curses, and a couple of unflattering reflections upon my personal character and capabilities.

  ‘All true,’ I agreed. ‘But I had to try it, didn’t I?’

  ‘Can’t hear you,’ he replied. ‘Some idiot has shattered my eardrums.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  It occurred to me that he was looking rather pale. I watched with fascinated interest as he grew visibly paler by degrees, his dark eyes and hair turning ink-black against paper-white skin.

  ‘Cool,’ I breathed. ‘I haven’t seen this in ages.’

  Phélan ignored that. The waters around him darkened and began to churn, storm-tossed. I glimpsed vague shapes in the choppy currents, pale wraith-figures, moon-bright and, by the looks of it, pissed off.

  Par for the course. You set up a direct line to the departed in somebody’s prison cell, you’re going to get a few enraged ghosts on your hands.

  Phélan wasn’t having an easy time of it. The storm grew rapidly out of hand, trapping him at the centre, buffeting his suddenly frail figure about like a leaf in a hurricane.

>   Tsk. He hated it when they did that.

  ‘ENOUGH!’ he roared, followed by a string of echoing words in a language I didn’t know. The dark syllables rang out, clear as a bell, compelling.

  ‘We’ll make a siren of you yet,’ I complimented him.

  The storm, though, did not much abate. ‘Tai,’ I heard him gasp. ‘A little — fucking — help?’

  ‘Right! Sorry.’ I began to sing, wordless stuff; it isn’t the lyrics that matter, it’s the melody. I strung three voices together in a soothing harmony, added a fourth with penetrating, commanding notes. I wanted to calm, and compel, and it worked: the wraiths trying to tear Phélan to pieces began to slow, the waters gradually settling back into their former tranquillity. As the tumult faded, I discerned, more distinctly, the wraiths: half-invisible in the clearwater, restless, drifting.

  Phélan drifted with them, near motionless, breathing hard. And, let me tell you, breathing water when you aren’t used to it is not easy. It feels wrong, even if it functions; you fight yourself for every breath, overcoming the panic reflex — this is water, this is death — only by force of will. I’m prepared to believe that would fade in time, but I wasn’t doing a great job of it yet, and neither was Phélan.

  Finally, he drew breath enough to speak. For me he spared only a withering flick of those black eyes; I made apology gestures.

  To the wraiths, he said: ‘Any idea how to get out of this mess?’

  There followed a lot of bargaining, by the looks of it. When the wraiths answered, they spoke in the same jagged, rippling language he’d used before, and Phélan answered in kind. I didn’t understand a word, but I knew a negotiation when I saw one. The wraiths remonstrated with Phélan, and Phélan did a lot of head-shaking in denial, followed by some kind of counter offer.

  My attention wandered. Not that it isn’t hellishly cool to watch Phélan bargaining with the souls of the restless dead, but I’ve seen it a time or two before. He’d be devilishly hungry later, and angry; it always soured his temper. I could see why.

  A soft sound distracted me, not coming from Phélan and his wraiths. A sound like a sob, half-stifled. It came from somewhere behind me. I drifted that way, found to my interest that the silvery manacle lengthened itself as I moved. It didn’t like me trying to take it off, then, but it had no objection to my travelling away from the wall.

  Interesting.

  ‘Hello?’ I called, once I’d gone as far as I could go. The smooth stone bars blocked my progress any further; beyond them I could see only turquoise water. ‘Anyone there?’

  The sobbing sound stopped.

  ‘I’m a friend,’ I offered. ‘Here, I’ll prove it: Brianne Lamarre can go die in a fire.’

  Silence followed. I began to think I’d imagined the sounds, or scared the maker of them away.

  Then came an answer.

  ‘You sound like someone I know, but that’s unlikely, so! I’m going mad. Good choice. At least I’m hallucinating nice things.’

  I knew the speaker before she’d uttered more than three words. ‘Mea!’ I shouted. ‘At fucking last! Where are you?’

  ‘See, that’s exactly what Tai would say,’ Mea agreed. ‘Purposeless expletives and all.’

  ‘It’s been a bad week, okay? I’ll swear all I want.’ I reconsidered. ‘Actually, no. You’ve had a far worse week, and I’ve missed you, so if you don’t want me to swear I’ll try to control myself.’

  ‘That… isn’t something I’d picture Tai saying.’ Mea’s voice, when she spoke again, seemed a little nearer. ‘Am I mad?’

  ‘Possibly! But it is really me. I’m stuck at the moment, but we’ll be getting you out soon.’

  ‘We?’ The voice sharpened. ‘Coronis isn’t with you?’

  ‘Coronis is safe at home. I’ve got someone else with me, though, and he’ll have us out in a trice.’

  Phélan spoke, immediately behind me. I jumped. ‘I don’t know how you’ve survived all these years without me.’

  I turned. He looked exhausted, like he hadn’t slept or eaten in a week. ‘I figured something else out,’ I told him. ‘Like always. You look like you could use some help.’

  ‘Manacle’s off,’ he said, and he was right, it was. It had melted away so seamlessly I hadn’t noticed it was gone. ‘Your turn,’ he added.

  ‘What do you — oh. Right.’ Phélan had got us unfastened from the wall, but the bars were still between us and open water. And Mea.

  I sang. Phélan had the sense to clap his hands over his ears this time, not that I imagine it helped all that much. I sang in discordant, destroying four-part harmony and the walls shuddered and cracked around me. When I’d finished, the pretty, sea-smoothed bars lay shattered in a hundred pieces, and the water was thick with debris.

  ‘Hey, we’re not dead,’ I enthused, delighted by the lack of Tai-crushing rubble.

  Phélan must have been tired, for he let this perfect opportunity for an acid comment pass. He merely fell in beside me as I swam out past the confines of our cell, somewhat graceless, wishing futilely for fins. Even in her woman shape, Fionn’s a creature of perfect grace in water. Phélan and I did the best we could.

  My song had shattered the bars of Mea’s prison as well, but she hadn’t come out. I found her lurking at the back, hands over her head to protect herself from falling debris.

  She was still shackled to the rock wall.

  I looked at Phélan, but he shook his head, exhausted and mute.

  Okay. The deal he’d struck with the wraiths only covered our bindings, not everyone’s. I noticed, for the first time, that the souls had not all disappeared again; one stuck to Phélan like an incorporeal burr, wound vine-like about him. Couldn’t be healthy, that, but I knew better than to question it.

  I wasn’t about to ask him to bargain with the dead again. By the looks of him, it would probably kill him.

  Still, that left me with a dearth of options.

  ‘Mea,’ I said. ‘It’s okay, I’ve stopped.’

  She came out from under her uplifted hands, and looked at me with tired eyes. I scarcely recognised her in her current state: she wore some kind of simple shift-dress, nothing like her usual garb, and her hair had, somehow, grown. A lot. More than that, there was something ethereal about her, something other; she looked selkie through-and-through, and I never usually got to see that.

  ‘I can’t go with you anyway,’ she said. ‘My sealskin’s no longer my own.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I have little real idea what it means, to lose your sealskin; Fionn’s never really talked about it, and I’ve never chosen to push the subject.

  ‘No, I can’t just try,’ said Mea, reading some of this in my face. ‘The thing is, I don’t even remember how to want to. My place is here.’

  Her place was here, because whoever owned her had decreed as much.

  To get her out, we’d not only have to break her shackles. We’d also have to find, and retrieve, her sealskin.

  ‘Are the others down here, too?’ I asked.

  ‘Somewhere about,’ said Mea. There was a lifelessness to her demeanour that I despised; it wasn’t even hopelessness, it went beyond that. The too-passive acceptance of a person who had… forgotten what it was like to be anything but what she now was. A slave.

  I mentally added this situation to the list of reasons to eviscerate Brianne. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We’re going to fix this.’

  Mea just looked at me in silence.

  ‘Right?’ I said to Phélan. ‘We can make this better.’

  He, too, looked at me in silence, a hollow-eyed stare that told me, clearer than words, that he was already tapped out. Phélan isn’t the most powerful among the sluagh. He can do some fantastically freaky shit, don’t get me wrong, but it takes a lot out of him.

  I was still floundering around in my own, useless head for a way forward when the currents shifted around me, and grew cold. Colder.

  ‘Again?’ sighed Mea, turning her eyes upwards.


  I looked up, too. A column of vivid, azure water descended, and swept Mea up in its swirling currents, turning her around and around, her pale hair flying.

  ‘That’s the — that’s the portal,’ I said. ‘No. Mea—’ I grabbed at her, trying to get hold of her somehow, but I couldn’t maintain my grip; the current was ferociously strong. In seconds she was gone, spirited away. I tried to follow, ignoring Phélan’s attempts to hold me back, but the waters slipped away from me and vanished.

  Nothing but cool, clear, inanimate water was left.

  ‘Shit,’ I said, numbly. Where the hell had she been taken this time? Back into that wretched auction room, or somewhere else? Somewhere I’d never find her again?

  Phélan, for once, didn’t hassle me about it. He took my arm in a more or less gentle grip, and said nothing.

  I chose to interpret the gesture as supportive.

  ‘Right,’ I said after a moment, pulling myself together. ‘Mission Objective A: Rescue the Selkies, really isn’t going well, but there’s always Mission Objective B.’

  ‘Which is?’ said Phélan.

  ‘Find Fionn. Then descend upon Brianne in righteous, tripartite fury and tear her to pieces.’

  Easier said than done. A pithy little piece of triteness, that, and if I’m honest it could sum up pretty much every area of my life.

  Phélan and I performed a laborious tour of those undersea cells and found every one of them empty. If there had been selkies held there besides Mea, they were gone now.

  We didn’t find Fionn.

  ‘Brianne’s keeping her someplace else,’ I said in frustration, treading water.

  ‘Stands to reason,’ said Phélan. ‘The rest of these people were just detritus.’

  I shot him a glare. ‘Mea isn’t detritus.’

  ‘To Brianne, she is,’ said Phélan brutally. ‘Toughen up, Tai.’

  He was right. I could be as upset as I wanted — later. Right now, I had to be cold. As cold as Brianne.

  And Fionn.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So if Fionn was the real target all along: what does that mean? What does Brianne want with her?’

  ‘No idea. But something about this is personal, and that means she’ll be keeping Fionn close.’