The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  “It’s always harder when there haven’t been other people with human blood making the transition,” I said. My eyes widened as a sudden, horrifying realization hit me. “Marcia!”

  “What?”

  I whirled. She was right behind me, a politely quizzical expression on her face. The moonlight glinted off the faerie ointment around her eyes, making them seem huge and guileless. She wasn’t breathing hard. She wasn’t even paler than usual.

  Gillian was behind her, making her introductions to Rodrick. I gestured toward the two of them, keeping most of my attention on Marcia. “The crossing,” I said. “Didn’t it knock the wind out of you?”

  “Um, no?” Marcia glanced up, eyes widening. “Oh, wow, look at all those moons. Are we in the Summerlands? I guess we must be. Earth doesn’t go around adding moons for fun.”

  “Yeah,” I said faintly.

  She flashed a quick smile before trailing after Dean and Quentin, who had gone to find a seat atop some nearby barrels. I looked back to the gangplank. Gillian was now safely on the ship, and two more sailors—a Merrow and a Candela—had appeared to get us ready to cast off. Everyone looked perfectly content with the situation, and with their role in the journey ahead.

  Tybalt touched my elbow. “What is it?” he asked.

  “That’s the problem. I don’t know,” I replied. “But something’s wrong.”

  He nodded and stepped closer as we pushed away from the pier—still visible through a wavering, crystalline curtain, like it was on the other side of a heat haze rising from a highway in the summer sun. As soon as we were no longer in contact with it, it winked out, and we were sailing on an endless, wine-dark sea, bound for an unknown destination, and everything was water all around us, and there was no turning back.

  FIVE

  IT TURNS OUT SAILING is intensely dull when you’re just riding the boat, not actually doing anything to drive it. There were cabins belowdecks, but as we were supposed to arrive at the Duchy of Ships before sunrise, they hadn’t been prepared for our use, and the crew didn’t like us hanging out down there. Worse, there were no beds—not even cots. The rocking that suffused the whole ship was worse on the deck, and there was nowhere else to be. I heal quickly enough for injuries that would be game over for most people to be only minor inconveniences for me. Somehow seasickness, like migraines from excessive magic use, didn’t care. Once my stomach went into rebellion, that was all she wrote.

  I hoped the barnacles lining the ship’s hull and sides didn’t mind being vomited on, because it was happening. It was happening a lot. I gripped the rail, trying to keep my eyes closed so the roiling water below wouldn’t set me off again. Footsteps warned me of someone’s approach. I wondered, half-eagerly, whether this was a surprise assassination attempt. Drowning couldn’t have been worse than the nausea.

  Actually, I had drowned before, at least once, and it hadn’t been worse than the nausea. I hate puking. Almost as much as I hate being shot, stabbed, covered in my own blood, and everything else that happens to me on a horrifyingly regular basis.

  “Did you not bring any Dramamine?” Marcia sounded concerned, but not like she was about to lose everything she’d ever eaten over the side of the ship.

  I decided to hate her a little. “Didn’t think of it,” I wheezed, allowing my head to loll forward, so if I did vomit again—I couldn’t possibly vomit again, there was nothing left inside me—it would follow the path of the existing mess. “Never been seasick before.”

  “Have you ever gone sailing before?”

  I shook my head. The motion was enough to set my temples throbbing and make my stomach do another slow tuck and roll. I groaned.

  “Poor Toby.” Marcia put her hand against my back, rubbing in small, concentric circles. It helped. Not enough to make me feel like I could let go of the rail, but it helped. “We’ll be there soon. Miss the Luidaeg says the Duchy of Ships doesn’t sway nearly this much. It’s too big for that. Well, except when there’s a major storm, but the Merrow have agreed to sing the storms away for as long as this meeting is going on. Which could be days. I hope you remembered to clean your fridge before we left.”

  “May and Jazz are home, and the wards are keyed to Raj,” I said. “Food doesn’t have time to spoil in my house.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” said Marcia cheerfully, still rubbing my back. “Tybalt is having a serious conversation with one of the ship’s cats, or at least that’s what it looks like. I don’t know whether the cat is Cait Sidhe or not. I guess it doesn’t matter much. And the prince is up in the rigging. He climbs really well, for a prince. If I were a prince, I think I’d spend all my time sitting around waiting for people to bring me things. Bonbons and stuff like that.”

  I finally took my eyes off the water, peering at her through the disheveled curtain of my hair. “Are you just babbling at me until I start feeling better?”

  “Yup!” Marcia beamed. “Is it working?”

  My stomach was no longer roiling. I didn’t trust myself to stand up on my own, but I also didn’t feel like I was about to introduce the barnacles to my breakfast. Again. I blinked. “Actually, yes.”

  “Sometimes you need to take peoples’ minds off their problems if you want those problems to resolve themselves,” said Marcia. “Focusing on things can make them worse.”

  “Not all problems go away if you ignore them. Most don’t.”

  “No, but not all problems can be fixed. Sometimes you have to wait until the situation changes.” She smiled sympathetically. “Like if you’re on a boat and you get seasick.”

  “I don’t like water.” I closed my eyes, trying not to think about the fact that I was completely surrounded by my least favorite element.

  “Which explains why you’re marrying a cat,” chirped Marcia. When I opened one eye to look balefully at her, she grinned. “I know you don’t like water. It’s a real good thing you’re doing here.”

  I opened my other eye. “Did Dean explain why we’re doing this?”

  “He did. He’s good about making sure his people are kept in the loop. He’s trying, you know? They do things differently in the Undersea, and it’s not like he can ask any of the local nobility for help without weakening his position, but he’s trying.” She turned so she could rest her elbows on the rail, facing the ship while I faced the sea.

  When she spoke again, her voice was softer. “I meant what I said. It’s a real good thing you’re doing. There are so many broken parts to Faerie, and sometimes I don’t know if they can ever be fixed. What happened to the Roane wasn’t just a tragedy, it was . . . it was unforgivable. I know the Firstborn are supposed to be judged by a different standard, but I can’t think of any standard that makes killing an entire people because you don’t like your sister the right thing to do. This doesn’t bring back the ones who were lost. This doesn’t make things right. But it makes things better than they’ve been, and maybe that can be enough to let us move forward, you know? Maybe this is where some of the broken bits get fixed.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. More delicately, I said, “The Undersea doesn’t have many changelings. Humans tend to drown before they can get too involved. Aren’t you worried?”

  She shrugged. “Aren’t you?”

  I was still mulling over my answer when Rodrick shouted, from the helm, “Harbor ahoy!”

  Marcia turned. So did I. So did all the others, and together we beheld the Duchy of Ships breaking through the mist ahead of us.

  At first it looked like an island, like some natural combination of rock and sand and location had formed the perfect spot for the Undersea to claim. As we sailed closer, I realized that what I’d taken for trees was a forest of masts, their sails furled and tamped down to keep them from catching the wind; what I’d mistaken for the shore was a conglomeration of docks and hulls and wooden bridges, all of them built over, around, through the bodies of the ships that
had come to anchor here and would never sail away again.

  “All hands to stations,” called Rodrick, and sailors swarmed for the sides, grabbing ropes, hauling on lines, doing a hundred incomprehensible things to get us ready for docking. The cat Tybalt had been speaking with stood on two legs, shaking off her fur in favor of a bipedal form, and ran to join one of the rope crews.

  “Huh,” said Marcia. “Cait Sidhe after all. Cool.”

  The other members of our little party—parties, really, since Gillian was here to stand with the Selkies, and Nolan and Cassandra were here to witness this whole thing on behalf of the Kingdom in the Mists—drifted toward us, until we were grouped together once again. The Luidaeg flashed me a smile filled with concern, mostly concealed under a thin overlay of malice.

  “Done feeding the fishes?” she asked.

  “For now.” I kept my eyes on the Duchy of Ships. There was a lighthouse among the masts, an actual lighthouse. I pointed to it. “What is that standing on? Did someone build it on their deck?”

  “There’s an island,” she said. “A very small one. Big enough for a single lighthouse and a single dock, where a single ship could be moored. The rest of the Duchy grew up around it. Piece by piece, they found ways to anchor the structures they’d need. Merrow placed the stones for their foundations, and Cephali tied the pylons into place, and the Duchy took shape, like a pearl being formed a single layer at a time.”

  “But why?”

  “Because some things are better when discussed in the open air, and not every resident of the Undersea can breathe beneath the waves.” The Luidaeg indicated the Duchy with a sweep of her hands. “We claim sailors and their lovers, merchants and those who find no peace on land, and we keep them as safe as storm and sky allow. Here, they can be home. And here, we can discuss things on somewhat neutral ground. We’re technically in Leucothea, since the closest mortal cognate is the Pacific Ocean, which means we’re in Dianda’s waters, if you squint. Queen Palatyne has, quite wisely, ceded rulership of the Duchy of Ships to the Duchy of Ships. The people who live here make their own law, maintain their own order, and don’t cause problems for the Crown, which means Queen Palatyne can mostly pretend they don’t exist, sparing her from needing to justify all these air-breathers to her more traditionalist subjects.”

  “Ugh.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I hate politics.”

  “If you didn’t, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to make you deal with them.”

  I glared at her. She smirked, and looked like she was about to say something when the ship gave a mighty lurch and a pair of vast, red-shaded tentacles reached out of the water, wrapping around the ropes that had been prepared for docking.

  Screaming would have been the sensible thing to do. Gillian, Poppy, and Quentin certainly thought so, although their screams had widely different qualities. Gillian sounded terrified. Poppy sounded delighted, like a kid on her first roller coaster. Quentin was somewhere in the middle, although his scream faded into puzzled silence as he realized none of the sailors looked concerned. They were tossing more ropes to the tentacles, which seemed to be guiding us ever closer to the ramshackle conglomeration of ships, docks, and gangplanks.

  I shot the Luidaeg a sharp look. “Not funny.”

  “Pretty funny,” she said. She blinked, and her eyes were no longer blue. They were green, like shards of broken bottle rolling across the bottom of the sea, like light reflecting through kelp. I’ve always wondered if that was the true color of her eyes, assuming anything can be said to be “true” when it’s referring to a shapeshifter’s appearance.

  “Not hiding anymore?” I asked quietly.

  “No.” She shook her head, eyes on the rapidly approaching Duchy. “If the Selkies die here, Cousin Annie dies with them. She was never anything but a useful reflection, a face in the water. I loved being her. I loved the freedom of knowing people weren’t listening to every word I said, waiting for the moment when malice turned into murder. I loved just . . . being. When you’re as old as I am, when you have as few friends left as I do, there’s something beautiful about just being. I was playing pretend but I was never lying to them. It was a loophole, you know? A way for me to breathe. And now it’s over.”

  The Luidaeg chuckled, and the sound was dry and mirthless, bones rattling in a forgotten cave. “I can never have my children back. I’ll never be a mother again. I’ll be a grandmother, and a great-grandmother, and so on, for a dozen generations, but I’ll never look someone in the eyes and know that the ocean they carry inside of them remembers the ocean I carry inside of me. My sister stole that. And I’ve been stealing it from the Selkies since the day I made them. I trapped them between worlds. They don’t get to see their grandchildren born to the waters; they pass their skins, they die, they end. For the sake of my children and for the sake of the Selkies themselves, we’re going to make that stop. No more Selkies. Not even Cousin Annie.”

  I wanted to say something. My throat was dry and my lips wouldn’t move, and so I put my hand on her shoulder, pretending not to see the surprise and relief in her eyes when she glanced at me, and we sailed the rest of the way into the artificial harbor of the Duchy of Ships, pulled along by the vast tentacles of the great beast that had us in its embrace.

  As soon as the hull came to rest against the dock, the tentacles withdrew, vanishing into the water without a sound. Rodrick barked orders that his sailors rushed to obey. I paused.

  “Luidaeg,” I said. “That man, Rodrick. He said he wasn’t the captain, that he sailed at the captain’s grace. Did this ship not have a captain?”

  “There’s only one captain in the Duchy,” said the Luidaeg. Seeing my confusion, she shrugged. “The Duchy of Ships is a Duchy because it needs to be something, but there’s no Duke or Duchess of Ships. It’s the captain who keeps things running. Hands on the helm, sails to the wind, all that fun stuff. The other ships have first mates, to keep them under a clear chain of command, but they don’t have captains.”

  “That feels unnecessarily confusing,” objected Quentin, who had inched up on us while she was speaking.

  The Luidaeg granted him a warm, if brief, smile. “Says the boy who grew up in a system of kings ruling kings. The high kingship is no more confusing than a single captain with a whole passel of first mates. It’s all in what you think is normal. Here, this is normal. Now shut up. It’s time for us to be announced.”

  Rodrick, who had apparently been waiting for us to be quiet, bowed extravagantly as he lowered the gangplank. He stepped up onto it, hooves clopping against the wood, and called, in a loud, carrying voice, “The Jackdaw is returned safely to port, carrying our contracted cargo!”

  A cheer went up from the people on the dock and hanging out of the portholes of nearby ships. I turned, taking them all in. Where had they come from? It felt like there were dozens of them present, all watching us like we were the most interesting animals at the zoo. I hadn’t seen any of them during our approach. Either they’d gathered in a serious hurry, or the Duchy of Ships had some unpleasant tricks up its sleeve.

  “Name your cargo, First Mate,” shouted a voice, female, even louder than Rodrick’s.

  There was no cheer this time. Only silence. Rodrick paled, and for a moment, I thought he was going to turn and run to the safety of his cabin. Then he cleared his throat and stood up even straighter, squaring his shoulders like he thought posture was the answer to all his troubles.

  “From the Court of Dreaming Cats, King Tybalt of the Cait Sidhe,” he announced. Tybalt shot me an irritated glance, apparently not pleased to have been called first, and stepped onto the gangplank, looking along his nose at the assembled crowd. Then he proceeded down to the dock, as was only correct when he had been announced so formally.

  “From the County of Goldengreen in the Mists, Count Dean Lorden, and his seneschal, Marcia.” Dean stepped onto the gangplank, Marcia behind him, dragging
her suitcase. He looked utterly at ease, which made sense; apart from Nolan and the Luidaeg, he was the only one of us who might actually have been here before. Marcia was so busy rubbernecking that I couldn’t tell what she thought about the situation. At least she didn’t slip and fall into the water.

  “From the Duchy of Shadowed Hills in the Mists, Sir October Daye, named Knight of Lost Words, and her squire, Quentin.”

  I took a deep breath. “Chin up, kiddo, it’s time to get judged.”

  “I’ve been judged before,” said Quentin dismissively.

  “Then this should be easy.” I stepped onto the gangplank. The wood was slipperier than it looked, and my feet nearly shot out from underneath me. I saved myself from a nasty fall by putting a hand on Quentin’s shoulder and bearing down hard, trying to make the gesture look as natural as possible. It wasn’t easy, because the smell . . .

  The Duchy of Ships was located entirely in the Summerlands, with no mortal population to hide from. There was no reason for any of these people to keep their magic under wraps or to pretend to be anything other than what they were. The air crackled with dozens, maybe hundreds of magical signatures, and while “oceanic” scents were dominant—wind and waves and sea grasses, kelp and sand and ambergris—there were plenty of conflicting scents that would have been much easier to interpret if we’d been inland. Or near land at all.

  “Toby?” whispered Quentin. “You okay?”

  “Lot of magic here,” I said, holding onto his shoulder. “Get me to solid ground.”

  We descended slowly, people watching and assessing us every step of the way. Tybalt was there as soon as we reached the bottom of the gangplank, taking my other arm with the sort of ostentatious flourish that I knew meant he was flexing his possession of me for everyone to see. I would have been annoyed, except that I understood his reasons all too well. They were very similar to the reasons I wasn’t letting go of Quentin, and the reason my heart sank as Rodrick continued his introductions.