The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  “Okay, Luidaeg,” he said.

  She walked out of the dining room. A moment later, I heard the front door open and close. I leaned against Tybalt, closing my eyes.

  “Well, damn,” I said, and that seemed to summarize the situation perfectly, because no one said anything else. We just stood there, a small, silent cluster, and waited for the world to start making sense again.

  We were going to be waiting for a while.

  THREE

  THIS IS THE TROUBLE with time. No matter how much you think you have, it always passes faster than you expect. The Luidaeg had come to me at the beginning of March to tell me I had a job to do on Moving Day. We had all looked at the calendar, me included; had looked at the almost two months between the ask and the action, and thought we’d have plenty of time to deal with things.

  There’s no such thing as “plenty of time.” We’d sliced those two months up and devoured them one piece at a time, spending their precious hours on shopping and cleaning, doing odd jobs for Arden and dodging uncomfortable questions from everyone who knew enough about my debts to the Luidaeg to ask them.

  Only May, oddly enough, didn’t have any questions. Only May had looked away when I tried, haltingly, to explain what was going to happen, and said, in a subdued tone, “Well, it’s about time this came to an end. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t come with you. I don’t like being in open waters.”

  I could have pressed the subject. I chose not to. We all have our secrets, and if May currently has more secrets from me than I have from her, I’m sure that will change with time. Our shared memories end at the moment of her transformation from night-haunt into Fetch. Gradually, they’ll become less and less of who I am now, and I think we’ll both be happier if we’re in the habit of letting each other hold our tongues by then.

  Arden had been somewhat less sanguine about the situation. Arden had, in fact, spent most of an evening shouting at me. Surreally, that had been an almost comforting reaction. Arden Windermere, daughter of Gilad Windermere, rightful Queen in the Mists, had been denied her throne for more than a century by Evening Winterrose and the imposter Queen. When I’d first convinced her to take up her birthright, Arden had been fairly sure she’d never be able to live up to her family name, much less do her job correctly.

  Watching her berate me for being willing to take orders from one of the Firstborn, I was fairly sure Arden was going to be fine. She was learning the limits of her responsibility. She had her brother back, and while Nolan wasn’t ready to formally take up his position as her heir, just having him around had already proven to be a steadying, stabilizing influence on her.

  Going with the Luidaeg to the Duchy of Ships wasn’t the sort of thing that ought to be life-threatening—although Quentin was happy to remind me that I could make a trip to the movies life-threatening when I really tried—but even if something went wrong and we all wound up lost at sea for a year, Arden would be able to keep going without me. She didn’t need a hero. She had a household, and a demesne, and she was going to be okay.

  I was trying not to think too much about that whole “lost at sea” possibility. I don’t like water. As in, “I take showers, not baths, and the one time Tybalt offered to take me to the hot tubs for a romantic evening, I damn near had a panic attack.” I blame it on spending fourteen years as a fish, since I certainly didn’t have any issues with water before that happened.

  Sadly, knowing where trauma comes from doesn’t magically heal it. Only time and effort can do that. The fact that I was even able to consider getting on a boat said a lot about how much I’d recovered since that initial injury; as long as I didn’t drown or something, this trip would probably help me to recover even more.

  Days ticked by, and plans were made as we inched toward Moving Day. May first had a lot of power and significance once, back in the days of the Three. There was a time when they’d formed a stable triad, keeping Faerie safe and secure. But something had changed. Whatever it was had happened early on, before changelings existed, before the Firstborn had children of their own, and it had resulted in Oberon splitting his time between two very different Courts. That was when the Divided Courts earned their name. Starting with their split, on May first, Oberon would kiss Maeve good-bye and return to Titania’s bower. On November first, he’d repeat the trip in reverse.

  Of course, that all ended when the Three disappeared. Moving Day has been symbolic for centuries. The smaller inhabitants of Faerie, the pixies and the bogeys and the so-called “monsters,” still respected Moving Days. Even the ones who didn’t necessarily pack up and go would at least rearrange their nests and shift their belongings in symbolic recognition. The larger fae, however, the ones who liked to pretend we didn’t miss the Three, or that we hadn’t been affected by the dwindling of the First in their absence, mostly ignore the significance of the holidays. They’ve been reduced to excuses for feasts and grand celebrations in the modern world, Beltane Balls and Samhain revels, and no one really talks about what those days originally meant, to us or to anyone.

  I don’t have many fond memories of my mother these days. I never had a lot of them, but the more I learn about her, the more even the good ones wind up tainted as I realize what she was to me. Still, I remember her waking me early on Moving Days, with scones and jam and bowls of berries in sweet cream. I remember her taking me around the tower grounds, telling the stories of travel, the migratory fae, the way we used to wander the worlds, until one by one, our Firstborn put down roots and wove themselves a homeland. Sometimes we’d go to watch the pixies in flight, but we’d always wind up inside, and spend the bulk of the day cleaning everything we could reach before moving our beds from one side of the room to the other, symbolically renewing the spaces where we lived, making them seem new again.

  Those had been good days. Maybe the best days, as I measured the interactions between my mother and me. I lay in my bed three days before the end of April, Tybalt snuggled against me, his breath slow and even and peaceful, and wondered whether whatever the Luidaeg had planned for us was going to result in ruining those last few happy memories of my mother.

  If I don’t have a lot of fond memories of my mother, I have even fewer illusions about her. Most of them died a long time ago, and I can’t say I was necessarily sorry to see them go. But it would be nice to still believe she had occasionally cared about me, even if it was only in the way a farmer cares about the dog who herds the sheep back into their barn at the end of the day. Maybe I’d never been anything more than useful to her. Given how much I did know, I wanted that to be enough. Oberon’s eyes, I wanted that to be enough.

  My elderly Siamese cats, Cagney and Lacy, were curled up on my pillow, keeping me solidly between them and Tybalt. They liked having him around in much the way I imagined they would have liked having a tame lion around: a larger predator that wasn’t interested in eating them kept them at least a little bit safer, but that was no real guarantee that tomorrow, the lion wouldn’t decide it wanted a meal of domesticated feline. They were technically subjects of the Court of Cats—all cats belong to the Court of Cats—but they weren’t fae, and they couldn’t reason with him the way a fae cat would have.

  Cagney purred and pressed herself against my head. Lacey did the same. I closed my eyes, trying to convince myself I could go back to sleep. It didn’t work. I’d gone to bed shortly after dawn, and while it had only been about seven hours, part of me was all too aware that midnight was approaching fast. Once the clock struck twelve . . .

  We didn’t have any carriages to turn back into pumpkins, but there were going to be some uncomfortable transformations all the same. Nothing was going to stop them now, short of another kidnapping or murder, and I wasn’t actually sure either of those would be enough to get me out of this. The Luidaeg had been waiting centuries for the chance to avenge her children. She wasn’t going to let something that someone else could handle force her to wait any longer.
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  “I know you’re awake, little fish,” said Tybalt softly. “Would you like to discuss what’s troubling you, or would you prefer to play at slumber?”

  I winced. “How long have you been awake?”

  “Not long,” said Tybalt. He ran a hand across my hair. The cats made small grumbling noises and got up, prowling down to settle at the foot of the bed, well away from any potential activity.

  “Are you lying?” I rolled onto my side, so we were almost nose-to-nose.

  Tybalt smiled. “Small untruths between lovers are not necessarily lies; sometimes they can be considered a form of kindness.”

  I considered this and sighed. “Right. Kindness. I’m . . . I’m all right, I think. This is a good thing. We’re bringing back the Roane. We could use a little prophecy in our lives right now. Maybe if we hadn’t lost them, we wouldn’t have been caught flat-footed when Janet broke Maeve’s last Ride, and things wouldn’t be so messed up.”

  “Ah, but if not for Janet, your mother would never have been born, and if not for your mother, you would never have been born, and perhaps I am a selfish man, but I prefer a world that has you in it.” He leaned closer, until his nose actually touched mine. “Must I begin quoting sweet William before you’ll believe me?”

  “How did I wind up falling in love with such a nerd?” I asked.

  He smirked. “Luck.”

  I laughed. “Right. Luck. Luck, and bleeding all over you way too many times for comfort, and a lot of other unpleasantness, but we’ll roll with the one that doesn’t ruin the upholstery.” I sobered, looking at him. “Don’t you wonder, sometimes, what it would have been like if we hadn’t lost them? If, I don’t know, Janet had broken the Ride but not so badly that Maeve . . . well, that whatever happened to Maeve happened? Maybe things would be better.”

  “Or perhaps you would never have been born because your mother would have been treated as a proper Firstborn princess, regardless of her maternity, and never encountered a human man, nor deigned to let him touch her.” Tybalt ran a hand almost reverently down my cheek. “I am younger than the loss of the Three, but older than you.”

  “Very aware, and just human enough that it sort of creeps me out if I think about it too hard, so if we could not talk about your age in bed, that would be awesome,” I muttered.

  Tybalt laughed, once, sharply. “Oh, October, I look forward to the day when there are so many centuries between us that the existence of the years I spent without you is no longer of any importance or concern.”

  “That day is not today,” I said.

  “Indeed.” He stroked my cheek again. “When I was a boy, quests to find our missing King and Queens were common. A good way of burning off extra, unwanted heirs, on the chance that your bed was blessed enough to get them. Too many good fae were lost, and not only from the Divided Courts, for with the loss of the Three, the surviving Firstborn began to go as well, and we were not as settled in the idea of ruling ourselves then as we are now.”

  I blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean there has never been a High King of Cats, but once, men such as my father would have been unable to run their Courts as petty dictatorships. Malvic himself would have stepped in and stopped the cruelties, and he would have been allowed to do so, because we were in the habit of obedience. Our Firstborn, when they walked the world, did so as judge and jury—and while they may have kept us kinder with one another, they also kept us as children. We never learned the ways of self-control, for there was no need to do so.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Evening must have loved that.”

  “Given her descendants, I’d suppose she still does.” He offered a small smile as he sat up. “Now that you’re well and truly distracted, are you prepared to tell me what’s actually bothering you, or shall I dredge up more ancient history and pretend it passes for pillow talk?”

  “Bastard.” I swatted him in the arm as I sat up.

  His laughter was sincere, and enough to melt away a bit more of the tension in my shoulders and back. If Tybalt was laughing, the world couldn’t be that bad. “My father took no wife, and I never met my mother. He bought me from her when I was but a kitten, and my eyes not yet opened. My sister went back when she was older, after I was King in my own right, but it was too late; the woman who bore us had already stopped her dancing.”

  Meaning, in the often complicated parlance of the pureblooded fae, that she’d died. I blinked once, trying to decide whether saying I was sorry would be appropriate. He didn’t seem upset, and there was no way of knowing how many centuries ago this had happened. Not without asking, and that would take us even farther down the path of “things I really would prefer not to discuss in the bedroom, thanks” than we’d already gone.

  Pushing the covers back, I swung my feet to the floor and looked at my knees as I said, “I’m out of time. I have to go see Gilly today, and I’m not ready. I was . . .” I hesitated. Admitting this felt like cowardice; lying to Tybalt after everything he’d been through at my mother’s hands felt even worse. “I know she’s been going to see Elizabeth Ryan to learn how to be a better Selkie, and I guess I was hoping Liz would let something slip about what was coming. I mean, it would make sense, right? For her teacher to be the one who told her.”

  “And not her still semi-estranged mother. I can understand that.” Tybalt shifted positions, settling next to me and rubbing my back with one hand, forming small, concentric circles. I was never going to get tired of the way he wanted to be always touching me, taking the social grooming of cats and extending it in a form my bipedal mind could easily comprehend. “But you are her mother, October. Whether she’s mortal, fae, or in the middle, you’re the one who bore her, and you never intended to give her up. That means something. That means you have a responsibility to her, and she a responsibility to you. If you come to her with information, she should listen.”

  I took a deep, shaky breath, leaning into his hand. “Will you go with me?” I asked. “To tell her she’s going to have to choose whether she wants to die or lose her humanity forever?”

  “Certainly, I will.” He pressed a kiss to my temple. “But you’re better equipped for this conversation than you think you are, my love. You’ve faced this choice, and you chose survival. She’ll choose the same. She may not care much for your company at the moment. She’s still your daughter, and that makes her a fighter.”

  “I hope so.” I got up. “No time like the present, I guess.”

  Selkies, like seals, are largely diurnal. It was a problem back when Connor and I were dating. Connor O’Dell had been a Selkie diplomat, assigned to the Court of Shadowed Hills back when assigning diplomats to the Queen’s Court had been a waste of time and resources. He’d been good at his job, so good that he’d eventually wound up married to Sylvester’s daughter as part of a carefully orchestrated political alliance. We’d become lovers after the marriage ended—and very nearly before, a fact that I wasn’t entirely proud of.

  He’d died saving Gillian’s life, and while the skin she wore had never belonged to him, sometimes I felt as if it had. Lose one Selkie, gain another. That’s the way things had always worked for them. And I was going to be part of bringing that to an end. Their whole social structure, their way of life . . . it was about to die. I might not be the hand that killed it, but I was the weapon that hand was wielding.

  Selkies were diurnal. Were Roane? Was Gillian about to find herself separated from her humanity for the rest of her long, long life, unable to keep her eyes open in the middle of the day, leaving her human father wondering what had changed?

  Sometimes I felt like the person I really needed to apologize to was Cliff. He’d loved me once. He’d been a good man—still was, according to Gillian and Janet, who had never found themselves banished from the walled city of his heart—and he’d loved me, and what did he have to show for it? An ex-lover he thought of as a deadbeat, a d
aughter who couldn’t tell him why she was pulling away, and a wife who’d been lying to him since the day they met.

  I grabbed clothes without paying attention to what they were, yanking them on and pulling my hair into a rough ponytail. It’s not that I don’t care how I look. It’s more that I’ve learned that the more attention I pay to my appearance, the more likely I am to wind up ruining something I actually like when I get covered in blood. Again. At least the blood is usually my own. I’m not sure why that’s better, but it is.

  Tybalt remained on the bed, watching me dress. Finally, he yawned and asked, “Am I permitted to be your boyfriend on this visit, or must I play the acquaintance if your former swain is present?”

  “I’m hoping Cliff will be at work this time of day, but even if he’s not, you can be my fiancé,” I said.

  Tybalt blinked. “Really?” He sounded pleased.

  Too pleased. I nodded firmly. “Really. I’m going to marry you. Cliff moved on a long time ago, and if he doesn’t like hearing that I’ve done the same, I don’t think I actually care.”

  “You are an endless delight,” he said, and stood, retrieving his own trousers from the floor. He hummed to himself as he pulled them on. The smell of musk and pennyroyal gathered in the air, twining around him until my Cait Sidhe lover was gone, replaced by a human man who looked very much like him, even down to the delighted twinkle in his green eyes. He was wearing a T-shirt with Shakespeare’s face on the front, and his trousers had gone from linen to denim, but I would still have been able to recognize him in a crowd.

  “No shoes?” I asked, amused.

  “My own shoes can pass for mortal, and I refuse to appear before your ex-lover looking like the sort of man who wears sneakers,” he said. There was a faint, arrogant sneer in his voice, and I’d never been so happy to hear someone being a snob.