The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  “We didn’t know at first,” said the Luidaeg. “My mother wasn’t a megalomaniacal bitch who thinks of her kids as useful pieces in a century-spanning game of chess, but that didn’t make her a great communicator, and sometimes she’d make children out of random stuff when Dad was away. When Pete showed up, she was just this skinny kid with kelp in her hair and fish guts in her teeth, and we all assumed Mom had fallen in love with the story of a shipwreck or something. It wouldn’t have been the first time. When we realized she was one of Titania’s get, it was too late; we were already fond of her.”

  “Good thing, too,” said Pete, a look of deep melancholy settling over her face. “Maeve’s children were my brothers and sisters, too—most of them, anyway, the ones who didn’t have shipwrecks or stories for fathers—and they were kind to me, and they were dying. If I hadn’t been their little curiosity, I think they might have killed me, just to even the scales a bit.”

  “Which would have been a pity, since I like most of the Merrow I’ve met,” I said. “Although speaking of Merrow, you want to explain why Dean’s still asleep?” I was starting to get nervous about that. He’d never been prone to fainting, and from the pinched, worried look on Quentin’s face, he was going to say something stupid if his boyfriend didn’t wake up soon.

  “Sorry,” said Pete unrepentantly. “The Merrow think I’m dead. Most of them, anyway. The few who realize I’m still up here do their best to pretend I’m not, because if they admitted I was alive, they’d have to listen to me, and I’d tell them to stop tormenting the rest of the ocean to make my mother happy. Titania can go hang as far as I’m concerned.”

  “That doesn’t explain why he won’t wake up,” said Quentin.

  Pete gave him a thoughtful look. “You’re a prickly little spirit,” she said. “No merry wanderer of the night. What family line are you from?”

  Quentin’s worry melted into an even deeper discomfort. “I’m not supposed to say,” he said. “I’m on blind fosterage.”

  “Right now the only family line that matters is mine,” I said, before he could dig his way any deeper into the hole. “He’s my squire, I’m responsible for him, please don’t turn him into a school of sardines or anything else that makes it difficult for me to finish his training.”

  “Presumptuous thing, aren’t you?” asked Pete. At least she sounded amused. “Your half-breed is unconscious because he wasn’t prepared to look upon my glory. Merrow tend to respond like that when they see me without warning. Or they get really, really pissed and try to kill me. It’s almost always one of the two. Does Eira know about him? Is it just killing her to know that one of her precious Daoine Sidhe went and lowered themselves to sport with a fish? Please tell me she knows. I’ll forgive you for being annoying if you do.”

  “She knows,” I said. “Dean has a little brother, too. Their parents are very happy together.”

  Now Pete looked surprised. “Wait, they did it more than once? Okay, my blessings on their household, solely because it cheeses Eira off.”

  “You don’t know that,” said the Luidaeg mildly.

  “I’ve met our sister,” said Pete. “I do know that.” She looked around our group. “So this is your glorious crew, sailing for the unknown horizon, out to destroy the Selkies. They claim the protection of the waves, you know. I have Selkie families living here.”

  “There are families everywhere,” said the Luidaeg.

  “Not like this,” snapped Pete, and for a moment, her scales were darker, like stormlight on the water, and I didn’t want to look at her too closely, for fear I’d somehow drown in her mere presence. “When I say families, I mean families. Human families. Selkies who come here draped in sealskin and then set it aside, and stay, because they’re mortal but they’re not completely human. They’ve been touched by Faerie, and they can’t go back to being what they were before they held their breath and dove. So tell me, sister dearest, sister mine, why I should side with you instead of with them?”

  “Because you love me and want me to be happy?” suggested the Luidaeg.

  “If love alone dictated the actions of the Firstborn, our world would be a very different one,” said Pete.

  “I’ll drink to that.” The Luidaeg picked up her mug and drained it in a single long pull, slamming it back down on the table and glaring at her sister. “Why should you side with me? Because you know what their ancestors did. What our sister used them to do. This is healing a wound in the world almost as old as Faerie itself.”

  “That isn’t their fault,” said Pete. She sounded sympathetic. She didn’t sound like she was going to yield. Suddenly, it was very difficult to ignore the fact that we were sharing this pleasant, somewhat archaic room with two of the Firstborn, or to pretend their goals were exactly aligned with my own.

  I glanced at Tybalt. He met my eyes, nodded, and shifted position slightly, so he was prepared to grab Quentin by the shoulders and haul him away if it proved necessary. Our places around the table meant he couldn’t get to us both, but he was smart—and more importantly, tactical—enough to know that of the three of us, I was the most likely to survive anything Pete and the Luidaeg wanted to sling at each other.

  Did I particularly want to be the only hero standing when two of Faerie’s greatest monsters decided to go toe-to-toe? No. But I wanted the boys out of the line of fire even more. I only wished there were a way to safely extract Dean before things went sideways.

  “They agreed to this consequence,” said the Luidaeg.

  “No, their ancestors agreed. We’re not humans, Annie. We don’t live and die by the sins of the father, nor should we, given the amount of mischief our forebears got up to when allowed. You told a bunch of shivering children who’d just killed their own parents to allay your wrath that they weren’t done paying, and they agreed, because they were terrified. You’re terrifying, you know. Sometimes you even frighten me.”

  “Then why are you arguing with me?” The Luidaeg wasn’t smiling anymore, and when she spoke, the teeth I glimpsed beyond her lips were too sharp and too plentiful to be ignored.

  “Because the Selkies who live here are under my protection, and many of the Selkies who are swimming this way to answer your summons are members of the same clans; they could claim that protection for themselves, if they wanted to. If they thought to do it.” Pete leaned forward. “Tell me why letting you do what you came here to do doesn’t betray that protection. Please.”

  “Because no one’s going to die,” I blurted.

  They slowly turned to look at me. I forced myself not to flinch under the weight of their gaze. I was accustomed to being the full focus of a single Firstborn’s attention. Two was . . . well, it was a bit much. I could feel their anger crawling across my skin like the static charge before a storm, and I wanted nothing more than to apologize, to throw up my hands and tell them I was sorry, anything to turn that befuddled disapproval aside.

  I didn’t. Instead, I squared my shoulders, raised my chin, and refused to look away.

  “We’re not here to kill the Selkies, or their families,” I said. “I mean, we’re here to make it so there won’t be any more Selkies in the future, and I can see where that probably sucks if you’re someone who’s been waiting to receive a skin from a parent or grandparent or whatever, but those skins never really belonged to the Selkies. They belonged to the Roane. When the Selkies agreed to carry them, they did it knowing this was the way things were going to end.”

  “And they don’t get to pretend they forgot,” said the Luidaeg, seamlessly picking up the explanation. “I’ve been there, Pete. Every time a Selkie parent passes a skin, at least on the West Coast, they’ve done it with me watching over them. This entire generation saw me on the shore, judging them for what they’d chosen. They know about the promise their ancestors made, about the blood on their hands. They know how my babies died. They take their skins with full understanding of the
blessing and the bargain, and they don’t get to say they didn’t know, because they knew. They did this knowing that one day, there’d be a price to pay. I can’t lie, because of your mother, and I told them this was coming. I’m not going to say I’m sorry that price fell to this generation. It always sucks to be the one who catches the bill.”

  “Yes, it does,” said Pete. She was talking to the Luidaeg, but her eyes were on me, deep and cold and surprisingly sympathetic. “It’s terrible to be the one who has to set things right when you didn’t play any part in breaking them.”

  She sighed then, and it was like some terrible tension snapped, leaving the room smaller and less dangerous. Tybalt relaxed. Quentin frowned, looking between Pete and me, trying to understand what had just happened.

  “You can do what you came here for, so long as there’s no fae blood shed in my waters,” said Pete. “I maintain a safe harbor for the people with nowhere else to go. And I’ll be wanting some faerie ointment from you, and the promise of more. Some among those families may want to stay here. Why shouldn’t they? They’ve never known anything else.”

  “I’m a better brewer than you anyway,” said the Luidaeg.

  Pete punched her in the shoulder, and she laughed, and for a moment, they were just a pair of siblings seeing each other again after a long and not entirely voluntary separation. It was odd seeing the Luidaeg with a family member she didn’t hate. There was no love lost between her and Eira—probably even less now that Eira had successfully killed her once, not counting on my occasional, unpredictable ability to exhaust myself by raising the dead—and while I hadn’t actually seen her with my mother, from the way she talked about Mom, I didn’t expect them to be braiding each other’s hair.

  The door banged open. Every head in the room, except for Dean’s, swung around. Marcia, standing in the doorway, flushed a bright, embarrassed red. She was holding a tray in her hands, which explained the force with which the door had hit the wall; she must have bumped it open with her hip.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I had to find the canteen, and then I had to explain what I wanted, and then I had to go through this long, irritating process of barter, and—”

  Pete groaned. “They didn’t just give you the stuff when you said it was for my account?”

  Marcia blinked, eyes wide and worried. “You didn’t tell me it was on your account.”

  “I’m the reason the lad won’t wake up. It seems only fair I should pay to bring him back to the world of the living.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Anyway, it didn’t cost me much once I’d made people understand what I wanted, just some pennies and a ribbon from my hair—none of my actual hair, I cleaned that off before I handed it over.” Marcia looked briefly smug about that. “I know better than to give people bits of me that they could use against me later. I’m no fool.”

  “Yet here you are, on a floating structure in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by beings who could send you to the depths in an instant,” said Pete, rising from her chair. “That seems a little foolish to me.”

  “Foolishness and bravery look a lot alike if you’re not paying close enough attention,” said Marcia. She watched nervously as Pete approached, but stood her ground; only her white-knuckled grasp on the tray betrayed how difficult that was.

  I wanted to applaud for her. Marcia’s always been reasonably unflappable, especially for someone who knows, all the way down to her bones, that she’s a small, breakable creature moving through a society filled with much larger predators.

  “Is that so?” Pete stopped, cocking her head and looking thoughtfully at Marcia before she said, “You have the protection of my principality until such time as you choose to leave our borders. The next time someone tries to take advantage of you during simple barter, tell them as much. They may sing a different chantey after that.”

  Marcia bobbed her head in grateful acknowledgment, holding up her tray as she asked, “May I take this to the Count? He’s my liege, and I’d really rather not give him a reason to think I’m not doing my job.”

  “As you were,” said Pete, with a casual wave of her hand.

  Marcia curtsied quick and shallow, and continued across the room to Dean, settling on the edge of the bed. Quentin moved to join her—not, I noted with amusement, asking anyone’s permission—and together they shifted Dean into a sitting position and pressed the brim of a rough ceramic mug to his lips. Quentin pinched Dean’s nose closed and tilted his head as Marcia raised the mug. A moment later, Dean sputtered and reared back, opening his eyes.

  “Oh, good,” said Marcia. “You’re not dead. Drink this.”

  “What is it?” asked Dean, so fixated on the contents of the mug that he didn’t seem to realize the rest of us were in the room. That was probably for the best, since Pete was watching the whole scene with faintly malicious amusement.

  “No idea.” Marcia sounded entirely too happy about that. “I know there’s honey in there, and saltwater, but the rest? Who knows. I bought it from a man who said it would wake you up, and—hey presto—it worked. He also said you needed to drink the whole thing if you wanted to be ‘inured to the majesty,’ which sounds like a good plan to me.”

  “It is,” said the Luidaeg. “Trust me, and drink the damn tincture.”

  Dean briefly looked like he wanted to argue—but Dean was a son of the Undersea, and the understanding that arguing with the Luidaeg was a swift, not necessarily painless form of suicide had been all but baked into his bones. He grasped the mug with both hands and drained its contents in a long, pained-looking gulp, dropping it back onto the tray with a gasp.

  Marcia picked up the bowl that had also been on the tray and thrust it at him. “Here.”

  “What’s this?” he asked. He still took the bowl. He had long since learned that doing what his seneschal said was easier than the alternative. Clever boy.

  “Kelp and salmon stew,” she said. “There’s potatoes in there, too. How does a floating duchy in the middle of the Pacific get potatoes?”

  “We grow them,” said Pete. “We have special bubbles anchored to the bottom of the sea, keeping the water out, and we grow all sorts of things that air-breathers like to eat, because we take care of our own. Hello, little half-Merrow. Ready to look at me now?”

  Dean paled as he raised his head and met her eyes. Then he blinked, looking baffled. “I’m still awake.”

  “You’ve been inured to the majesty,” she said, with amusement. “I’ll be honest, you surprised me when you went down like that. Most Merrow attack me on sight. The fainters have almost been bred out of the line. By which I mean, the fainters never get the opportunity to breed, because the other Merrow kill them for being weaklings.”

  “You’re going to like my Mom,” said Dean, in a dazed voice. He paused before asking, “Are you really my . . . ?”

  “One of them,” said Pete.

  “I met the other one, too,” said Dean. “The Daoine Sidhe Firstborn. I didn’t like her.”

  “Congratulations: you are now a member of a large and not at all exclusive club,” said Pete. “Eat your soup and I’ll show you all to your quarters. Welcome to the Duchy of Ships. Don’t make trouble, don’t pick fights with people who don’t deserve it, and for the love of Oberon, don’t make me regret letting you in.”

  “Would we do that?” I asked.

  She raised an eyebrow, looking at me flatly. “You, Amandine’s daughter, hero, king-breaker? In a damn heartbeat. So let’s at least pretend you respect my authority, shall we?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  The Luidaeg laughed, and Dean drank his soup, and the world had never been stranger, or safer, than it was in that moment. I was surrounded by water on all sides, but I had people I loved and trusted with me; I would do my job, go home, and everything would be fine.

  Really.

  SEVEN

  A
LL THE MEMBERS of our party—save Gillian, who was still off with the Selkies—had been assigned quarters carved from the belly of the same cargo ship, with individual apartments made from sections of hull. They radiated out from the tiny courtyard that had once been the ship’s upper deck, making it impossible for any of us to sneak away without the others knowing. I found that oddly comforting. This was a big, unfamiliar place, and while I was statistically the most likely to wind up covered in blood, I liked to have a sense of where they were.

  Tybalt and I had taken the apartment closest to the gate on the left-hand side of the entrance, with the Luidaeg taking the apartment on the right-hand side. Quentin was next to me and Tybalt; Dean and Marcia were next to the Luidaeg; Poppy and Cassandra were on the other side of them, and Nolan had an apartment entirely to himself. Small tables made from a ship too damaged to be repurposed as housing dotted the courtyard, accompanied by mismatched chairs and lovingly crafted planters. Each played host to an assortment of plants, ranging from kitchen herbs to lush tomatoes to patches of strawberries the color of candied violets that glowed with their own strange inner light.

  The Luidaeg saw me eyeing the strawberries and said, “Those found their roots first in Emain Ablach, which was my sister’s country before our father decided we had to be exiled to the Summerlands. They’re not like goblin fruit. They won’t hurt you. But they do make excellent jam. Breakfast here is going to be a treat.”

  “See, you say ‘my sister,’ and I can’t help thinking of Evening,” I said.

  The Luidaeg shook her head. “Here, I’ll mostly be referring to Amphitrite. You can trust her, for the most part.”

  “For the most part?”

  “There’s no one in this world you can trust all the time. Not even the people you love, not even the people who love you.” The Luidaeg looked briefly, terribly tired. This had to be so hard on her. She had moved among the Selkies for centuries, pretending to be their loving, uncomplicated Cousin Annie, a woman whose ancestry contained some life-extending fae heritage but whose shoulders would never be draped in a Selkie’s skin. They had loved her and pitied her and let her into their homes, and now she was betraying them. She had never been the woman they believed her to be.