Hell and High Water

by Charlotte E. English

  That thought nauseated me. Mea’s hopelessness and helplessness, so fresh in my mind, blended themselves with a vision of Fionn as I’d last seen her. Front and centre at the auction, acting the part of a soulless captive far too well.

  I should never have taken Fionn there, but that, too, was a thought for another time.

  ‘Wasn’t up to you to decide that,’ said Phélan unexpectedly.

  I looked sideways at him. ‘What?’

  He pointed a finger at my face. ‘I recognise that look. If you’re going down a guilt spiral because we took Fionn to the auction, forget it. She would’ve gone anyway, and it wasn’t up to you to tell her she couldn’t.’

  Phélan’s always so bracing. I nodded. ‘At least her skin’s safe. However Brianne’s holding Fionn, it’ll be with manacles and bars, not—’

  Not the subjugation of her entire soul by way of her sealskin. I couldn’t say it.

  ‘You’re sure about that, are you?’ said Phélan.

  ‘No, but Fionn was. Utterly certain.’

  ‘Her sealskin’s that well hidden, is it?’ The look all over his still-gaunt face was sceptical. ‘Could you work out where it is?’

  ‘… Probably,’ I allowed. ‘But I know her better than anybody in the world. Brianne… I can’t see how Brianne could possibly…’

  ‘Better hope you’re right,’ said Phélan, giving voice to the unease unfurling within me.

  ‘Shit,’ I sighed. ‘Okay. We find Brianne. And luckily, I do have an idea about that.’

  ‘Oh?’ Phélan fell in beside me as I kicked myself into motion again, swimming up this time. Out.

  ‘It might be a long time since I considered her a friend,’ I said. ‘But some things don’t change. We’re somewhere in Brianne’s territory right now, and Brianne Lamarre loves one thing above all others: luxury. There’ll be a palace. There’ll be an inner sanctum in said palace. It’ll be dripping in pearls and gold and I’m pretty sure that’s where she’ll be.’

  ‘With Fionn.’

  ‘With Fionn.’ Something about that juxtaposition of ideas nudged a faint thought, somewhere in my mind. We knew Brianne had some kind of an obsession with the glittering pearls a selkie like Fionn could make: it was the properties they possessed that interested her, more than the shining outer shell they came in. But she was a sea-creature, too: she didn’t need those things. Was she selling them? She wouldn’t be the first person to try that. An occasional selkie, fallen on hard times, would sell a pearl or two of their own; they were highly prized.

  But all Brianne would gain by that was money. More gold, more jewels, and she was already drowning in both.

  I still couldn’t make sense of it, and for the present, I gave up the struggle. When we found Brianne, I could beat the answers out of her myself.

  Until then, I had a palace to infiltrate.

  Chapter Nineteen: Fionn

  It is a process I used to enjoy — spinning up pearls out of nothing. A swirl of clearwater and salt, of air and deep magic, and something beautiful emerges. Something powerful. No dense, glossy nuggets of disharmony, these, resentfully expelled by beleaguered oysters; these glitter with promise, shine with all the layers of ancient magic I have in me.

  If there is one capacity humankind and fae share alike, it’s this: to take a brightness and darken it. To turn a joy into agony.

  Brianne’s morrough bodyguards — or whatever they were — had dumped me in what I supposed were the crystal waters she’d spoken of. The name was apt enough, the place enchanting. The waters never ceased moving around me, a fluid whirling, soft and restful; clear as new ice, tinted with colour, they were crystal indeed, were such a thing transformed into dulcet ocean.

  They were also, effectually, a cage. Clear as the waters may be, I could not see beyond them, and while the gentle kaleidoscope of hues had beauty enough to delight the soul, the relentless motion had the latent power to turn a person sick, in time. Eventually.

  I did my best not to repine, as I drifted alone in the midst of this mesmerising whirlpool. I had been given no instructions at all by my new mistress, save for the fashioning of pearls — or more rightly, powers, mine to conjure up, hers to take and use. And fashion I did, the only power left to me that of deliberate slowness. I could justify it, easily. She had told me not to exhaust myself. To keep myself alive.

  Still, it exhausted me. Each new pearl siphoned off another drop of my soul, turned it to bejewelled enchantment for Brianne. Draining me.

  Every time, I fought. The compulsion was not so strong, this time, I told myself. She who had taken my sealskin was nothing to me, not even a friend. An enemy, now. I need not suffer under lingering ties of love and loyalty; I had no obligation to please, no confusion of feeling.

  Even so. It is a curious power, the selkie skin. Why the mere transferral of an object should bind my actions so, I could not say, but nor could I conquer it. Until my skin was once more my own, I’d do what Brianne said.

  I’d hate it, but I would do it. My body moved on its own, no longer obeying my commands but receptive to another’s.

  And so the string of pearls grew longer, each new jewel a shade dimmer than the last, but radiant enough.

  I wondered, dimly, when I would stop. At what point would Brianne’s parting command — preserve your own existence, please, darling — take effect? How bone-deep would this weariness have to go before, at last, I could rest?

  The answer was far too long in coming. I fashioned pearls of mist and magic until I wept with fatigue, and still I went on. I spun jewels of coldwater and gramarye until I’d have severed my own fingers rather than make another, and still I did not stop.

  Only when I’d lost the strength to move, to think, to do more than wearily exist, did my wretched factory of pearls come to an end. My thoughts, sluggish as a silted river, barely formed words; the only word I could remember clearly was not even my own name, but another’s.

  Tai.

  I drifted in slow circles, too weak even to hold myself steady against the currents. Perhaps I slept.

  Time passed.

  ‘Is this all?’

  The words snapped me out of my daze, brought me back into my miserably bound flesh with a jolt.

  Brianne.

  She held my hard-won pearls in her thin hands, turning them over greedily, dissatisfied. ‘Twelve,’ she said. ‘Only twelve, and look at you.’ She did look at me then, a hard, cold stare, taking in my state of exhaustion. ‘Perhaps, with rest—’

  ‘No.’ I said the word with a freezing coldness to match hers, but the word emerged too faintly. I’d barely strength enough left to speak.

  ‘I was under the impression,’ said Brianne, ‘that I had eradicated defiance.’

  So she had. I couldn’t defy any command she chose to issue me, for where my own will used to be, now there was only hers. ‘But not truth,’ I managed.

  Rest wouldn’t restore the magic she’d forced me to drain for her benefit. Not in the way she meant: a good night’s sleep or two, and back to work. It would be months — perhaps years — before I’d have it in me to fashion even a single jewel.

  ‘I don’t accept that,’ said Brianne crisply. ‘How often I’ve seen you decked in the things.’ She made a sweeping gesture, indicating the flowing, water-drowned length of her hair. True. I sometimes appeared so, in my true state; mist-wreathed, rain-infused, with a hundred pearls woven into the black mass of my hair. But they were baubles, nothing more. A glamour only, a seeming.

  ‘Not those,’ I said, meaning the fruits of my exhausting labours, the precious dozen she now held so cheap.

  Brianne gave a short, irritated sigh, her fingers closing tightly around my handiwork. She’d had me moved, somewhere in my slumber. The crystal waters remained, but they were lessened, here; a fleeting flurry of colour out of the corner of my eye, a gentle tug of movement and magic, scarcely felt.

  I was in a chamber of spectacular grandeur. The walls shone with the pearlescence of mothe
r-of-pearl; the distant ceiling gleamed shell-white. There were no windows, no glass here below; instead, arches through which the saltwater flowed freely, tangled in kelp and moss-green weed. Gold-and-silver gilding limned statuary in gentle fire, sun-and-moonglow. The floors were tiled mosaic.

  I was on a dais, raised up like a queen, save that I remained bound by that silvery thread. A purposeless feature now, I thought with distant puzzlement, for I wouldn’t run away. I no longer had that power.

  Perhaps she just enjoyed the visual reminder of my servitude.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Brianne, regarding me with her elegant head tilted, her green-malachite hair tossed softly by the currents. ‘What next to do with her, hm?’

  The question not being directed at me, I was not obliged to answer. I remained silent, waiting.

  Wondering. Whom was she addressing with the words? For I saw no one about save for the two of us; the water was heavy with silence.

  Nonetheless, after a time, an answer came. ‘I care not.’

  The words were coolly spoken, in a voice feminine, if rather low. Something about the cadence of it tugged at my memory, but the feeling of familiarity faded. I hadn’t the energy to pursue it.

  ‘No?’ said Brianne, her gaze shifting from me, a frown creasing her brow. ‘But I got her for you.’

  ‘No. You got her for what she could do for me, and she’s done it.’

  My head came up, for the feeling of recognition returned, strengthened. I knew that ringing, confident voice, knew the arrogance of it. I’d once drawn courage from the unflinching certainty of those tones, but not for years, not for eighty years, because she’d been gone.

  I couldn’t see her. I turned in the water, but she was hidden from me.

  Brianne was watching me again. Watching with a cruel, amused glitter in her hard eyes. ‘Something bothering you?’ she smiled.

  ‘Silise.’ I half choked on the word, near overwhelmed with the wealth of memory, of pain, of confusion; of sheer feeling the brace of syllables provoked.

  ‘No, darling, no,’ said Brianne, all soothing softness, though the cruel smile widened. ‘How could that be? She being so very dead.’

  ‘She is dead,’ I breathed. ‘I know she’s dead. How are you doing this?’

  How was this possible? She’d already summoned a vision of Silise to torment me, back at the old car factory. A conjuration of movements, of scents, of nameless cues, all so perfectly reminiscent of Silise.

  Now her voice. Her voice. Not just the contralto smoothness of it but her inflections, the lingering hint of Irish brogue, the personality of it.

  ‘How?’ I said again, a mere whisper, exhausted anew by my efforts to find what couldn’t possibly be there.

  ‘Dead, hm?’ said Brianne, drifting nearer to me. ‘Are you sure of that, Fionn? Entirely sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No possibility of mistake?’

  ‘I… yes.’ I was. I had to be.

  ‘Did you see her body?’ Brianne pursued. ‘Did you see it with your own eyes, snapped like a twig? Did you see those grey eyes emptied of life? All the stone-dead, inert meat of her corpse?’

  I had to answer; my mistress desired it. ‘Yes. I…think.’

  ‘You think.’ Brianne wasn’t smiling now. Some intense emotion I couldn’t read churned behind her eyes; her mouth was a hard line. ‘Then you don’t know, Fionn?’

  ‘This is… mind games,’ I said, with as much energy as I could muster. ‘Spare me that, at least.’

  ‘I don’t see why I should.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ came Silise’s voice again. ‘I am thoroughly enjoying the spectacle, I confess.’

  She was right behind me, or so it seemed, her voice very near. I began to turn, but Brianne’s order stopped me cold, fired from between clenched teeth like a bullet: ‘Don’t move.’

  Silise spoke again, so close I could feel the disordered currents of the waters, the soft displacement she made with her words.

  ‘You left me.’

  ‘No,’ I said, instantly. ‘No. We came for you.’

  ‘You came too late. You left too soon. Am I to thank you for the gesture?’

  I was silent, bewildered.

  Silise had disappeared, late in the second world war. We’d been in Austria, attempting to extract a pair of alven who’d got themselves into hot water. But the two alven had vanished before we’d managed to get them out, and so had Silise.

  They’d ended up in Ravensbrück. A German concentration camp, just for women.

  Silise was more than equal to the challenge, at least at first. When Tai, Daix and I got ourselves in, we found Silise had already got herself out — after a fashion.

  But she never got the two alven out. She got caught, and executed.

  So we’d thought.

  We’d heard her death-song, her terrible ban-sith wail, and we’d known, somehow. This song was for her.

  We’d seen… no. I’d seen nothing. But Tai had, and Daix. That eerie song, cut abruptly short, and a bleeding body that looked like hers…

  Nothing had been the same after that. Recrimination, guilt and regret had torn the surviving fatales apart. We’d failed Silise, and none of us had ever forgiven ourselves — or each other.

  And yet.

  Could we have been wrong?

  I said nothing; I couldn’t have formed words under threat of my life. I waited, bowed with a nameless sense of dread, as Brianne stared coldly down upon me and something spoke behind me.

  ‘I relied on you,’ Silise went on, or the thing that spoke with Silise’s voice. ‘My fellow fatales, the unstoppable trio who’d always have my back. Isn’t that right? But it wasn’t you who came for me, in the end.’

  Then I saw her. Silise in truth, in the flesh: ragged red hair, eyes as grey as a cold morning. Thinner, even, than she used to be, gaunt and pale: ban sith, a spectre made of flesh and blood.

  She’d used to be vivid and bright, for all that. Warm and energetic, cocky and brittle. Always laughing.

  Now she looked like death itself.

  ‘Who do you think came to my rescue, in the end?’ said Silise, unsmiling. ‘Who was it who loved me enough to brave hell itself? It wasn’t you.’

  ‘It was me,’ said Brianne.

  I understood, then. How Silise was here, here, under the water, where she’d no business but to drown. Why Brianne had wanted every pearl of magic I could muster, why she’d grabbed every selkie in London. How she’d known what we would do, the three of us: me and Tai and Daix, why the scheme had seemed designed to bait us, torment us.

  How Brianne had known where to find my selkie-skin.

  Silise.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I gasped. I had no other words in me, nothing else I could say around the fresh wave of horror, of guilt.

  She’d been alive. Silise hadn’t died at all, but we’d left her there, left her in Ravensbrück. If it hadn’t been for Brianne, she probably would have been killed.

  She was right to hate us.

  ‘Sorry,’ Silise repeated. She looked down upon me, chill as winter, hard as stone. ‘Is that all? Sorry?’

  I bowed my head. She was right: the mere word could never express the extent of my regret, nor hope to make up for the extent of our neglect. Sorry had no power here. Nothing could.

  Silise gave a sigh, curiously tinged with annoyance. ‘The thing is,’ she said, not to me: to Brianne. ‘If we keep her, we’ll have to do something with her. Feed her. Find a use for her. Look at her.’

  ‘A good point,’ Brianne agreed. ‘Let’s get rid of her.’

  The idea had a finality to it. I thought, with despair, of Tai and Daix. Would they ever know what had become of me? Would my body wash up in the river tomorrow morning, my selkie-skin thrown after? Would they know why I’d died?

  Would they know Silise lived?

  I hadn’t the energy to argue, to persuade, even if I’d had the power. I had no options left, and I deserved none.

  Some part of m
e, deep down, doubted, even then. Would Brianne kill me? Could Silise? However angry she was — however justly angry — we’d been the best of friends, once. Closer than sisters.

  Looking at those wintry faces, those hard eyes, I couldn’t be sure.

  But I wasn’t destined to find out.

  Whatever Silise might have said in reply was lost in a raucous wall of sound, a wail as sharp and discordant as Silise’s dread death-song. It shattered the smooth currents, turned the gentle flow to juddering waves.

  A shock of crushing agony tore through me, slicing through my focus. I lost consciousness, perhaps, for a scant few seconds; when I revived, it was to a different scene altogether.

  Brianne and Silise remained, but their tyranny was over. They were thralls, now, held spellbound by a new mistress altogether: Tai.

  If I thought to see shock, or even surprise, when Tai came face-to-face with Silise, I was mistaken. I saw only a livid anger. She drifted upon the wave-tossed currents like an avenging fury, and if I’d thought Silise intimidating, well, she had nothing on Tai.

  ‘Well! You’ve pissed me off pretty thoroughly, haven’t you?’ Tai said. ‘Should’ve cut out my damned tongue while you had the chance, bitch.’

  Chapter Twenty: Tai

  ‘Tai,’ sighed Phélan. He was lurking somewhere behind me, for some reason. If he thought he was out of range of my songs there, he was an idiot.

  ‘Yes?’ I snapped.

  ‘Don’t gloat. An efficient hunter dispatches the prey quickly.’

  I stared at Silise. Did I want to dispatch her?

  I did. I really did. This hideous excuse for a friend hadn’t bothered to tell us she’d survived Ravensbrück, instead choosing to spend eighty years nursing a pathetic grudge followed by some fucked up revenge mission? She thought this poisonous scheme was deserved, did she?

  She and Brianne had hurt Mea. They’d caused the death of Narasel. And, most unforgiveably, they’d enslaved Fionn.

  And they’d got to her. I knew that look on Fionn’s face. They’d broken her damned spirit, first by taking her sealskin and second by taking her peace of mind.

  I paused to take a slightly petty pleasure in the vision of the two of them, enthralled by my siren-song. Puppets. I could make them do anything.