“Uh . . . no. I don’t think I do.”
“Right, right. That’s expected, I suppose. You’ve had quite a shock, and you’ll be hungry again soon enough. If you’ll go back in your room now, I’ll go tell ma’am that you’re awake.”
I hesitated. “What if I don’t want to go back in the room?” I wasn’t going to call it mine. That was a step too far.
“Then I’ll have to put you back, and we’ll both be sorry, no question of that.” Poppy looked at me sorrowfully. “I’m still not used to bigness. Please don’t make me use it against you.”
“None of this makes any sense.”
Poppy nodded. “That’s a truth if ever I heard one. It didn’t make sense to me, either, when I first came here, and sometimes it still doesn’t. We’ll be good friends as long as you have confusion to clear. Now will you go back in the room?”
She didn’t refer to it as mine this time either, and I was almost ashamed to realize that I was grateful.
“I want to know what’s going on,” I said. “Toby had to go, and Miranda . . . ” I trailed off. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Miranda. She was my mom. She had raised me. I loved her. From the crown of my head to the tips of my toes, I loved her. But she had also lied to me, and the shape of those lies made it look like she had pushed Toby aside to make more room for herself.
I had spent so much of my life hating my biological mother that it was like a physical pain in my gut to realize that she might not be the villain of the piece after all. How many things was I going to need to rethink before this ended?
Poppy nodded enthusiastically. “I can help with that. If you go back in and make it a promise that you’ll stay there, I can go and get ma’am for you. She can explain if anyone can.”
“And ma’am is . . . ?”
“The sea witch, yes, she is.”
Firtha’s mother, the one she’d called Antigone. I took a step backward.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll wait.”
Poppy beamed. “Good, good. I’ll go let ma’am know.” She turned and started hopping down the stairs, neither flying nor walking, but a strange hybrid of the two. Her wings fluttered wildly, never generating quite enough lift to do more than keep her from landing a few steps farther down.
I watched her go, wondering if she realized that I hadn’t actually gone back into the room. I couldn’t decide whether she was flighty or just distracted by everything around her, possibly including the air. It was like talking to a kitten that had somehow acquired thumbs. In no time at all, she was out of sight. I still counted to ten before I started sprinting down the stairs after her.
She thought I was going to sit up here and wait for a woman people consistently referred to as “the sea witch” to come and get me? Fuck. That. She had at least three names—the one I couldn’t pronounce, the one straight out of a Greek tragedy, and the one that belonged to a Disney villain—and she had somehow bound her dead daughter’s skin to me to keep me alive, and I was not going to hang out to see what she was going to do to me next. I was getting the hell out of here.
Everyone else knew about the fae, and it wasn’t hurting any of them. Dad would understand, especially once I showed him the webs between my fingers. He would find a way to fix this. It might mean tracking Toby down and making her undo whatever she’d done, but whatever. He’d tracked her down before. He would do it again, for me.
The stairway was curved, like something out of a castle. I realized, with dull surprise, that the little round room where I’d been sleeping was actually the top of a tower. Maybe getting to my father wasn’t going to be so easy after all.
I’d been descending for maybe thirty feet when a woman blocked my passage down the stairs. She was young, around my age, and I wouldn’t have given her a second glance if I’d seen her on campus. Everything about her screamed “average,” from the faint pocks of old acne on her cheeks to her hair, which was thick and curly and pulled into two fat ponytails tied off with strips of electric tape. The sight was enough to make me wince in involuntary sympathy. She was going to pull half her hair out when she took those down.
She was wearing overalls and nothing else, not even a bra, and when she looked at me I stopped dead in my tracks, some buried predatory instinct warning me that no, this was not a good thing; no, this was not a fight I could win.
She sighed, and said, “Poppy is going to be disappointed in you. She’s still pretty new to this whole ‘conversing with human-sized people’ thing, and she tends to take things at face value. Did you have to start by kicking my puppy? Couldn’t you have gone easy on her and just stolen her candy or insulted her hair?”
“I . . . ” I stopped. “You’re the sea witch, aren’t you?” I knew her voice. I had heard it in my dreams, had been hearing it in my dreams since the first time someone had decided to use me as a bargaining chip against my biological mother.
She nodded. “You’re quick on the uptake. Good. That’s going to be useful. You can call me the Luidaeg.”
Sometimes I get fear and bravery confused. Dad says Toby was the same way. I’ve never been sure whether it was a gift or a burden, but either way, when I opened my mouth, what came out was, “What if I want to call you Antigone?”
The sea witch raised an eyebrow, and for a moment, it seemed as if the unremarkable blue of her eyes was somehow bleeding into green, like Firtha’s eyes, like algae on a dead man’s bones. “Where did you hear that name?”
“Firtha told me.”
Silence fell between us, heavy and immovable. The sea witch’s eyes stopped bleeding green. Instead, they bled black, becoming twin voids from which no light escaped.
“Go back to your room,” she said.
There was no arguing with that voice. Honestly, I didn’t even want to try. I turned and fled back up the stairs, to where the open door beckoned me back to the pretense of safety. I dove through it, slamming it behind myself, and toyed with the idea of locking it. No: bad idea. If she wanted to come in, she would come in, and while she might accept a closed door as being an honest expression of fright, something told me that I wouldn’t have time to regret it if I locked the door against her.
Would she kill me after she had gone to so much trouble to save me? She seemed to like Toby, and killing me would definitely upset my mother. Then again, I was the one who had dropped her dead daughter’s name—which I couldn’t possibly have known, and her reaction to hearing it proved that I hadn’t dreamt that ocean, that cliff, that naked woman with the green, green eyes—and if her temper was short enough, that might well have been enough to get me killed.
I didn’t want to die. I dove back into the bed, wishing I’d had the sense to leave the curtains alone, and pulled the covers over myself, hiding like a child who believed the monsters couldn’t see her if she couldn’t see them. It was the only thing I could think of to do.
My heartbeat was like thunder in my ears. I held my breath . . . and hoped.
The door opened. The door closed. Footsteps crossed the floor, stopping just shy of the bed. “I’m not sure whether to be ashamed of you for thinking this was a good way to hide from me or pleased that you didn’t go out the damn window. Your mother would do her best to murder me if I let you die that stupid—and honestly, she might succeed. I’m pretty hard to kill, but October is terrifying when she gets upset.”
I stayed under the covers. It was a childish response to fear, but a woman’s eyes turning black in front of me was something out of a little kid’s nightmare. I was comfortable with my choices.
She sighed. “I am the sea witch, daughter of Oberon and Maeve, Firstborn and first among my mother’s children. I am unable to lie, no matter how much I want to, and I say to you now that I am not here to do you harm. Because I don’t have time for your weird formerly-mortal mood swings, I will make you a promise I have made to few others: I swear, on the rose and the thorn, that
when my grace is lifted, I will tell you. If I am to become a danger, I will say so in as many words. Now will you come out from under the damn blankets?”
I poked my head cautiously out of my nest of bedclothes. The sea witch was standing a few feet away, eyes still black, arms folded. She kicked a bit of torn-down drapery.
“I see you didn’t like my decorating,” she said dryly. “You know, most people, when they don’t like something I’ve given them, suck it up out of fear that I’ll turn them into a bushel of sea slugs and scatter them at sea. So this is novel.”
“Can you do that?”
She nodded. “If I wanted to. I usually don’t want to. There are much better, more endangered things to transform people into. Now do you want to tell me how you know my name?”
“I thought—”
“There’s no way you could have heard the name ‘Antigone’ unless someone told you. October knows it, but she never uses it, because she’s worried I might rip her lungs out.”
“Would you?”
“I might.” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re not answering me.”
“I . . . Firtha told me your name.”
“Uh-huh. How did my dead daughter tell you my name?”
I sat up, fingering the knot of my sealskin with one hand. The feel of the fur soothed me. “She was there the first time I woke up, in the middle of this big field near the ocean . . . ”
Bit by bit, I stumbled through the story of what had happened by the cliff’s edge: waking up, meeting Firtha, learning the story of the Selkies. The sea witch listened in silence, not questioning me, not urging me on when I faltered. It was like she wanted to get the story as uninfluenced by her presence as possible, and I was grateful and resentful at the same time. This would have been easier if she’d been willing to help.
But maybe it would have been less honest. And I got the feeling, looking at her face as the blackness bled back out of her eyes, that honesty was something that really mattered to her.
When I was finished, she nodded, and said, “I always wondered if I’d trapped a fragment of them when I enchanted the skins. Our bodies aren’t supposed to linger here like that. There are old bargains that come into play. But it’s been so long that there was no one left for me to ask.”
“Your eyes,” I blurted.
She tilted her head to the side. “What about them?”
They were green now, as green as Firtha’s eyes, a color that belonged in glass bottles and young leaves, not looking out of a seemingly-human face. I bit my lip, trying to figure out what to say that wouldn’t risk offending her. I didn’t want to make her angry.
Finally, I said, “They’re green. But they were blue before. Why were they blue?”
“Because after my children were slaughtered for the crime of belonging to my bloodline, I tried my best to cut myself off from the ones who remained, to make sure they wouldn’t be targeted again for reasons beyond their control. When you ask someone what defines the Roane, they’ll always say ‘their eyes,’ because there’s nothing else in all of Faerie with eyes like theirs. You can’t tell a Roane by the slope of their ears or the shape of their hands, but you can always tell them by their eyes.”
“You’re hiding.”
“Yes.”
“If all your children are . . . if they’re gone, why are you still hiding?”
“Habit? Protecting the few Roane who still remain? You’ve got a lot to learn, kiddo, and you’re at a major disadvantage; I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone joining Faerie as a full citizen this late in their life. Humans, sure, they can get snatched at all stages of their lives, but you? You’re one of us. You’re more fae than your damn mother is, and don’t think that’s not going to itch at her. Pureblood girl.” There was a sympathetic note to those last two words, like she was sorry but couldn’t say it.
I touched the knot again. “Firtha said that all the other . . . the other Selkies had a choice.”
“They did,” the sea witch agreed. “The first ones chose to protect their families by taking on the burden of their parents’ crimes. They left siblings and spouses and children and went to the sea, and in exchange, I didn’t slaughter every person who shared their bloodlines. Please don’t let the fact that I’m wearing clothes and not drenched in blood fool you: I earned the title of ‘monster’ fair and square, and those were different times. If they hadn’t come to me to seek a way to make things right, I would have pulled the bones from the bodies of every man, woman, and child I could lay my hands on.”
“That’s horrible.”
She shrugged. “That’s Faerie, kid. Humanity’s past isn’t much better. It’s just that they’ve had some personnel changes, while we’ve kept most of the same players on the board. Go back far enough and everything comes down to blood and fire.”
I shivered.
“So yeah, those first Selkies chose, and every time they’ve passed a skin since then, the new Selkie has had the chance to choose. They hear the story, and they either take the skin and the guilt that comes with it, or they go to the sea, and they don’t come back. The deeps near a Selkie rookery are a treasure trove of bones left by the ones who chose innocence over eternity. And skins pass surprisingly often. It’s like people think that giving their sins to their children will make them somehow easier to bear.” She shook her head. “It’s always death or the sea, once a skin is passed along. You just didn’t have the opportunity to say that you would rather die.”
I swallowed. “I took it off.”
Her eyebrows rose. “You’re not dead. You must not have taken it off for long.”
“I landed on it when I fell.”
“That makes sense. The skin is part of you now, until you choose to set it aside. If you were an ordinary Selkie, you’d be fine. You could say ‘this was fun, but I want to be human now,’ drop the skin on the nearest sucker, and run as far inland as your legs would carry you. But I gave you my daughter’s skin for a reason. You’d been poisoned.”
“Toby said.”
“She’s your mother, you know. You could acknowledge that.” I turned my face away. She sighed. “Whatever. Your family bullshit is your business, not mine. Elf-shot is tricky. It’s magical, alchemical, which means it’s brewed like a human drug, but it doesn’t always follow the rules. Your mother cured you of it once before, by burning it out of your blood when she turned you human. Technically, she shouldn’t have been able to do that. Technically, you should have died as soon as the elf-shot realized you weren’t fae anymore. Her type of fae, though, they can do almost anything with blood when they’ve got something to hold onto.”
“So why couldn’t she cure me this time?” The anger in my words was surprising even to me. It shouldn’t have been. Toby kept turning my world upside down, and she never seemed to care, and she never stuck around to pick up the pieces.
You didn’t tell her you wanted her to stay, whispered a small voice in the back of my mind. I didn’t know if it was mine or Firtha’s, and I was ignoring it either way.
“She couldn’t cure you because she couldn’t change your blood. There was nothing fae left in it for her to grab. I’d say, ‘Isn’t it nice to know that she has a few limitations after all,’ but under the circumstances, I guess it sort of sucks for you.” The sea witch shook her head. “I couldn’t cure you because the only cure we have doesn’t work on humans, and elf-shot is my sister’s work: I am incapable of picking it apart on my own.”
“But I’m not human now,” I said. “You keep saying that. Doesn’t that mean I’m cured, and I should be able to take off the skin?”
“You’d think, and you’d be right, if we weren’t trying to navigate our way through a cascade of loopholes. A Selkie without a skin is a human, plain and simple. They’re not even changelings, because the people who started the Selkie lines were the children of merlins, too far removed from the
blood of Oberon to have magic of their own.”
I stared at her blankly. She sighed.
“It doesn’t matter. Look: when I gave you the skin, my magic superseded my sister’s, because the creation of the Selkies was effectively a blood sacrifice, and you’ll be awake if I damn well want you to be. While you’re wearing it, the elf-shot can’t touch you. Sadly, that also means we can’t cure it. If you take the skin off, the elf-shot remembers it’s supposed to be killing you. You just need to stay a Selkie until the poison works its way out of your system. Then you could go back to being human if you wanted to.”
She glanced away from me on the last sentence, creating the distinct impression that there was something she wasn’t saying. She’d already told me that she couldn’t lie. So what was she trying to hide?
Maybe it wouldn’t matter. “How long do I need to stay like this?”
“Not long,” she said. I started to relax. “A hundred years should do it, although I’d go a hundred years and a day, just to be safe. Wouldn’t want to take the skin off and drop dead within sight of the finish line.”
“What?!” I was on my feet before I had a chance to think about it, the covers thrust aside, staring at her.
She raised an eyebrow. “Did I stutter?”
“A hundred—that’s ridiculous! I’ll be dead before I can go back to being normal!”
“No, you’ll be alive, because this is your new normal. Ever wonder how your mom could vanish for a decade and a half and come back looking exactly the same? Ever ask yourself when it stops being good genes and starts being a little bit ridiculous? You’re not immortal. You can be killed. Easier than a lot of us, honestly, because the Selkies are sort of a makeshift solution to a problem I didn’t have a lot of time to deal with. But as long as that skin stays on your shoulders, you won’t get any older, and you won’t die of natural causes.” She paused, cocking her head thoughtfully to the side. “Okay, well, you may get a little older. Most of us stop aging when we’re somewhere around twenty-five, so you have a few years yet of new developments and hormonal changes. All that fun stuff. But when it’s done, it’s done. We grow up. We never grow old.”
Night and Silence (October Daye) Page 40