The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  “Then we’ll find out.” I gripped his shoulder, squeezing hard. “Tybalt will take you back to the others. Trust him. Until we get back with Peter, it’s his job to keep you alive.”

  “I take my job very seriously,” said Tybalt. “You will be safe in my company.”

  “I don’t care about my own safety,” said Patrick. “Save my son.”

  “We’ll do whatever we can,” I said, and glanced to Tybalt. He offered me a small, tight nod, but didn’t speak, only touched the leather jacket that hung, folded, over one arm. There was nothing left for us to say to each other, not until I had gone and come back. I returned his nod and turned away, offering Quentin my free hand.

  “Now?” he asked.

  “No time like the present,” I said, popping the cork out of my bottle with my thumb. He did the same, even as he took my hand and laced his fingers through mine, holding on as tightly as he could.

  Together, we stepped off the edge of the dock, plummeting toward the surface of the sea. The wind was cold and stung my eyes, sending my hair whipping around my face. I raised my bottle, exactly as we had planned, and gulped down its contents in the instant before my feet hit the water. The liquid was sweet and bitter at the same time, like cherries mixed with battery acid, or honey mixed with snake venom. My body revolted, trying to gag, to spit it out, but it was too late; I had already swallowed, and warmth was radiating out from my belly, filling me.

  The speed of my descent was enough that when I finally hit the water, I just kept going, cutting a trail of bubbles down into the depths, until ten feet, fifteen feet, twenty feet of ocean stretched out above my head. Quentin was gone, his hand ripped out of mine by the impact. So was the bottle, returning to the bottom of the sea, which was probably where the Luidaeg had found them in the first place. They could wait there until she needed them again.

  My lungs were starting to burn. I closed my eyes, fighting against the panic that was threatening to claw its way out of my gut and overwhelm me, and took a breath.

  Water filled my mouth and lungs. I felt like I was choking, the familiar instincts of my body warring with the reality of what I was feeling: water flowing into the places where air had always been before, sustaining and preserving me. I took another breath. The panic began to recede. I opened my eyes, and the water was clear around me, as transparent as the world above. Fae have excellent night vision, and for the Undersea races, that extends to the ability to see a much greater distance underwater. Which makes sense, really. They need to be able to navigate in their watery home.

  Something was thrashing six or so feet below, spinning in the water like it couldn’t tell up from down. I shifted the angle of my torso, trying to remember the swimming lessons I’d received from Dianda the last time I’d done this. My body knew what to do, courtesy of the Luidaeg’s enchantment. All I needed to do was get out of its way.

  My flukes beat against the current, driving me downward as I kicked. I pressed my arms against my sides to cut down on the drag, noticing as I did that my clothes had changed along with the rest of me: my rag-cut dress was gone, replaced by a much simpler short-sleeved shirt, tied at the waist with a woven rope belt that also served as a scabbard for my knife. The Luidaeg really did think of everything, when the world gave her the time to think. Too bad it didn’t do that more often.

  As I grew closer to the thrashing in the water, my suspicions were confirmed: it was Quentin, transformed and panicking, twisting himself into a knot as his body told him he was drowning and he tried to claw his way back to the surface that refused to be in any single, predictable direction. As a Daoine Sidhe, he’d had the same basic density as a human; if he stopped swimming, he would float upward, aided by the air in his lungs. As a Merrow, or a magically-made bootleg of a Merrow, he didn’t have that same buoyancy. If anything, he was designed to sink, to drop lower when he was in the kind of danger that left him unable to swim.

  Real Merrow glow faintly when submerged, their scales generating a soft, luminous light. My scales didn’t glow. That was fine. I already knew what they looked like. Quentin’s didn’t either . . . mostly. There were specks of gold buried in the midnight blue of his tail and streaking his flukes and the fins at his sides, like he’d been briefly dipped in molten metal. Those were glowing, more brightly than a real Merrow’s would have, intermittently lighting up in dazzling streaks.

  It was a pretty effect. I had no idea what it meant. I just knew I needed him to stop panicking. I swam closer, reaching out and grabbing his hands by the wrists. He stopped thrashing almost instantly, staring at me with wide, terrified eyes. There were streaks of gold in his normally blue irises. It was striking and strange. I smiled encouragingly, and he managed to summon a wavering smile of his own, although his eyes were still too wide. I guess “knowing I’m giving the sea witch consent to transform me” and actually experiencing it are very different things.

  But then, I already knew that from experience.

  I hooked a thumb upward, indicating the surface. We couldn’t talk while submerged. Real Merrow have a separate language designed for use beneath the waves. It sounds like whale song, like a heartbreaking melody from another world. It’s beautiful and elegant and complex and it spreads along the currents like ink through paper, and I had no idea how to even start. English doesn’t have the right shape for use underwater.

  To my surprise, Quentin shook his head and pointed outward instead, away from the dark shadows of the Duchy’s support pillars, toward the gates that would take us out to sea, toward Saltmist. He wanted to get this over with.

  So did I. I nodded my understanding, let go of his hands, and began swimming away, trying to let my body do what it already knew how to do. Quentin followed, surprisingly clumsy in his new shape. I rolled onto my back and half sat up in the water, watching him. He seemed to have the basics of kicking and fluke placement down, but the rest—where to put his arms, how to keep his hair out of his eyes—was escaping him.

  I’d been clumsy the first time this had happened, but not that clumsy. Was that another side effect of being Dóchas Sidhe? I was easy to transform, but I also adapted more quickly to the changes? I couldn’t decide whether that was a good thing or not. I could vanish into another species in an instant, undetectable, concealed.

  Like I had when Simon had turned me into a fish and left me in the pond. Panic threatened to overwhelm me again. I was surrounded by water. I had scales and fins and there was water in all directions, pressing down on me, smothering me. This was a trick, this was all a trick, I was never going to go home, I was never going to stand on dry land again, this had all been a trick, I—

  Quentin grabbed my shoulder, shocking me out of my spiral. I glanced at him. Concern was written clearly across his face, shining in his blue-and-gold eyes. I offered a wan smile in reply, and flashed a thumbs-up.

  He didn’t look like he believed it. Still, he let go of my shoulder—and my panic had had at least one helpful side effect: he was swimming more naturally now, allowing his body’s new instincts to take over and move things where they needed to go.

  I wished I had a camera. His parents were never going to believe this one.

  The water lightened as we passed out of the shadow of the Duchy’s foundations. We shifted to swim directly downward, descending with a speed that would have been unbelievable if we’d still been in our natural forms, even if we’d been using SCUBA gear to speed the process along. The pressure around us mounted without becoming unpleasant; it was like the entire ocean was taking us in a loving hand, holding us close and keeping us safe.

  Fish flashed by, silver and blue and a thousand other colors, a fearless living rainbow that moved with casual nonconcern. I didn’t see anything that looked dangerous. That was probably part of the ducal wards, keeping sharks and other predators at a distance. Did it apply to the more predatory Undersea fae? Merrow could be plenty dangerous when they wanted to be
, and clearly the wards let them through. Maybe the wards were keyed to the absence of sentience, which implied some fairly complicated spellwork.

  I was concentrating on something irrelevant to keep myself from dwelling on the fact that we were diving deeper and deeper into the literal ocean, moving away from light and air, and doing it while we had a ticking clock counting down the amount of time we had to do this safely. We couldn’t move any faster, but I couldn’t afford to freak out again.

  Water and I are not friends. I was respectful of the stuff before I spent fourteen years as a fish, but that turns out to be the sort of thing that leaves a girl with a complex that verges on becoming a phobia. It wasn’t that bad, thank Maeve. It was still bad enough to make me distinctly uncomfortable, and now that I didn’t have Quentin’s struggles to focus on, I needed to keep myself from getting wrapped up in the existential horror of it all.

  The seafloor came into view, studded with homes shaped from water-treated wood and living coral. Fae moved in and around them, or tended the farmlands that dotted the open space between the structures. Some crops grew in open water. Others were enclosed in artificial atmospheres—the covered gardens Pete had mentioned before. They were growing everything from apples to potatoes, and they were doing it at the bottom of the sea.

  Luna would probably have been fascinated. Then again, that would have required Luna to be speaking to me long enough for me to explain what I wanted her to see, and she hasn’t been speaking to me for a while now. Not since I chose my daughter over hers; not since her daughter chose Daoine Sidhe over Blodynbryd; and certainly not since I’d asked that Sylvester allow me to wake his brother, only to lose him in the process of finding my sister.

  Families are complicated. Other people’s families are even more so.

  We swam over the farmlands, and the gates Patrick had described began to appear, like giant funhouse mirrors tethered to the bottom of the sea by ropes carved from literal wood; oak and ash and rosewood and elm. Each was carved with its own pattern of oceanic images, fish I didn’t recognize, sharks, sea dragons, even hippocampi. We swam on until we found the gate Patrick had told us to look for, carved with sea otters and kelp, ringed with irregularly shaped natural pearls. From one angle, it was just a ring in the water, simple, easy to swim through. From another, it was filled with a glistening mother-of-pearl film, betraying the presence of some lasting transportation gate.

  I’d never seen anything like it. There are fae who can teleport, the Tuatha and the Candela. There are fae who can access otherwise impossible roads, like the Cait Sidhe and the Shadow Roads. But permanent gates? Maybe those had been possible once, when there’d been fewer humans and we’d had the space for larger workings, designed to span longer periods of time. Not anymore. Even in the Summerlands, things were too crowded, and the taint of iron was too omnipresent, clinging to everything humanity touched.

  Down here, there were no humans. Pollution spread more slowly, and the dawn never reached the delicate foundations of the sealing spells. There was more time, for everything.

  Quentin and I hung in the water in front of the gate for a long, solemn moment. Then we joined hands and swam through, together.

  The transition was about as jarring as that of moving from the mortal world into a knowe that had been closed for years. Everything twisted around us, until it felt like we were on a roller coaster bent on separating us from our lunches and our sense of equilibrium. Even Quentin felt it; his hand tightened on mine, and when I glanced at him, he looked like he was considering the virtues of being sick. What would happen if he threw up in the middle of a bespelled gate?

  I so did not want to know.

  As quickly as it had started, the feeling of disorientation passed, and we emerged into warmer, brighter waters. We were closer to the coast. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did, just like I knew that the light slanting down on us from above had nothing to do with the sun, but was somehow a reflection of the health of the duchy as a whole. The king is the land in Faerie, and the Lordens had always done their best to do right by the land—or the waters—in their keeping.

  Farms still spread out around us, but there were none of the airy domes, and the crops seemed to be, on the whole, both wilder and denser, forming veritable forests of sea pears and undulating kelp.

  They were also utterly abandoned. No farmers tilled the soil; no farmhands gathered the ripe fruits; no children played hide-and-seek through the greenery. The fields we’d passed beneath the Duchy of Ships had been alive with the denizens of the Undersea. These were lush and healthy and ready for the harvest, and there was no one there.

  Resisting the urge to draw my knife—for comfort, if nothing else—I descended through the water, gesturing for Quentin to follow. The palace stood in the distance, an elegant construct of stone and coral rising from the sea floor in gravity-defying spires and towers that would never have been possible on land. Smaller buildings clustered around the foundations, tucked safely behind lacy walls of living coral. We dipped lower and lower as we approached, until we were swimming along causeways that I suppose technically could be considered streets, although they weren’t paved; the ground was sometimes decorated, sometimes cultivated in flowering plants or elaborate playgrounds, but it wasn’t meant for walking on.

  And still there were no people. I thought I saw motion in some of the windows we passed, but no one came out to either greet or attack us.

  Patrick had said the people of Saltmist would have changed sides as soon as the palace was seized. I was starting to wonder how true that was. It was like we were swimming through a ghost town.

  I had no idea how much time had passed since we’d gone into the water. I assumed it was about an hour, but I needed to err on the side of caution, given the circumstances. I picked up the pace, urging Quentin to do the same.

  There were openings around the base of the palace, tight little tunnels designed for use by servants and household staff. Torin would never have demeaned himself to use them, or even to send his forces through them; according to Patrick, if we were going to find Helmi holed up with Peter somewhere in the palace, it would be in the storerooms of the lower levels. If they weren’t there . . .

  Saltmist was a Duchy. It spanned miles, and all that territory was unfamiliar. I’d been here once before, and most of my time had been spent in the palace. Quentin didn’t even have that much to go on. If Helmi and Peter had been moved, or had fled, we were going to be hard-pressed to find them before our time ran out.

  We were almost to one of those entrances when something moved, warning us we were not alone. I drew myself back in a hard stop, putting out an arm to force Quentin to do the same, and watched as what I had taken for a piece of masonry uncurled itself, becoming a Cephali man.

  He looked like a Merrow from the waist up, and like an octopus from the waist down. The skin of both halves was lemon yellow, although large blue rings marked his octopus half. His hair was an even brighter blue, verging on neon. He looked at us warily, hands moving in a quick, interrogative gesture.

  Shit. It made sense that there’d be some sort of sign language in the Undersea, for use when having every word broadcast for miles wasn’t a good idea. But if I couldn’t speak their verbal language, there was no way I could fake their silent one.

  Cephali. Dianda had several Cephali in her employ, including the missing Helmi. Here goes everything, I thought, and mouthed, with exquisite care, ‘Duchess Lorden sent us.’

  It felt silly, like trying to perform a mime show where the price of failure was death. But slowly, the Cephali man nodded. He indicated Quentin with one tentacle.

  I nodded back, with substantially more enthusiasm. ‘Yes,’ I mouthed. ‘Both of us. Looking for Peter.’ Grammar seemed less important than getting my point across.

  The Cephali man nodded again before withdrawing up the wall, into the shadows. The yellow and blue faded until he l
ooked like part of the wall once again, just another piece of decorative molding.

  We didn’t have time to wait and see if this was a trick. I dove for the hole, Quentin close behind me, and tried to ignore the way the walls pressed in against us. There was always the chance that we were swimming into a dead end, catching ourselves like crabs in a pot.

  I didn’t think so. From everything I’d heard, Saltmist was considered a thriving Undersea domain, and part of that could be credited to Patrick’s presence. Yes, being married to a Daoine Sidhe meant Dianda wasn’t as socially high-ranking as she could have been, if she’d married another Merrow and kept to the standards of her own kind. But it also meant Saltmist was less cruel than it might have been. Her people liked her. They liked her family. They might not be willing to fight against Torin, but did that mean they were going to turn on the people who had taken care of them for so many years?

  I didn’t think so. And so I kept swimming, until I had to stop kicking my tail and start pulling myself along with both hands. Quentin was so close behind me that the top of his head kept brushing the sensitive edge of my flukes. I was almost grateful for that, since I couldn’t turn around and check on him anymore, not with the walls pressing in around us. As long as I could feel him, we were okay.

  Unless that wasn’t him, and he’d been grabbed by one of Torin’s people while I’d been swimming. I started pulling myself along faster, gripped by the need to see my squire. When we reached the top, we’d be all right. I’d be able to confirm that it was him, and we’d be all right.

  There was no way to know how long we spent forcing our way through that tight, unforgiving space before my questing hand broke through the surface of a still pool and into the air. I grasped the pool’s edge and pulled myself up, gasping as water ran from the gills on my neck and my lungs suddenly ached for air. That transition might have felt natural to a true Merrow, but to me, it was disconcerting in the extreme.