The Unkindest Tide (October Daye)

by Seanan McGuire

  “She died human,” I said, making no effort to keep the sadness from my voice. If I couldn’t be sad over a needless death, a fae death, I was one step closer to becoming the monster I had never wanted to be. “Someone stole her skin and then they threw her overboard.”

  There were no obvious signs of injury. If she’d been human when she went into the water, she had drowned, the same way any human could have drowned if thrown into a sea that was unwelcoming to mortal kind.

  The night-haunts would have come for her as soon as she’d washed up on shore. With their filmy wings and delicate bodies, they couldn’t have come for her in the water; they would have been bogged down and drowned. That was something, at least. We were still dealing with the original Isla, and would be until we left her body alone for the night-haunts to collect. She could still tell us her secrets.

  I drew my knife, ignoring Peter’s voice asking shrilly what I was intending to do, and sliced the flesh of her right wrist. It was a shallow wound, and I was lucky, according to some definitions of the term: she hadn’t been dead long enough for her blood to fully settle.

  “I hate this part,” I said, and bowed my head, and drank.

  I came to, flat on my back, with the others standing around me in a circle. Peter looked terrified. The Cephali looked bemused. Quentin looked like he couldn’t decide between the two states, and so had settled on furious as the best way to split the difference.

  “You just drowned,” he informed me, voice a little too shrill. “On the deck. With no water. You drowned.”

  “That explains why my throat hurts,” I muttered, sitting up and coughing. A little more water was dislodged by the movement, and ran down my chin to soak into my shirt. I grimaced. “Okay, one, that’s disgusting, and two, I don’t think I can ride Isla Chase’s blood.”

  “What was your first clue?” asked Quentin, voice still too shrill.

  “The drowning was too traumatic for her, and for me. It’s blocking out everything else.” I looked at the body. “I could wait and try to talk to the night-haunts, but they’ve asked me to stop doing that, and I don’t have what I’d need to make a safe summoning ritual. The risk is too great. I’m sorry. I should be braver.”

  “I think I’m glad you’re not,” said Quentin. He took a short, sharp breath through his nose. “What do we do now?”

  Go the hell home and let the Luidaeg deal with this, I thought, and stood. Aloud, I said, “We find out who did this. Whoever it was has to pay.”

  “Pay how?” asked Peter. He was showing far too much interest in the body, watching it with an avid fascination that was barely balanced by Quentin’s restraint. It was true that he’d grown up in a more militant part of Faerie, but still. Childhoods in the Undersea were clearly very different. “It’s only against the Law to kill purebloods, and sometimes not even that.”

  I opened my mouth, prepared to answer. Then I froze, really thinking about his question.

  The Law, Oberon’s Law, is very simple: no one kills purebloods. Not changelings, not other purebloods, and certainly not humans, not unless they feel like finding out how cruel Faerie can be when it comes to devising punishments for people with no one to speak for them. There are exceptions, like wartime, or like the deal the Cait Sidhe made with Oberon when it came to their fights for succession. The Cait Sidhe are allowed to kill each other, providing they can come up with an explanation that satisfies their Kings and Queens. The denizens of the Undersea are allowed to kill each other, as long as they declare a state of war before they draw their weapons. Anyone’s allowed to kill a changeling, any time they want to, without necessarily facing any consequences.

  And anyone can kill a human. Humans have even less protection under the Law than changelings do. At least we’re a part of Faerie. Humans are . . . in the eyes of many purebloods, humans are livestock. They’re animals, here to die, and so helping them along the way to their inevitable destination is not a big deal.

  Isla was human when someone pushed her over the rail. Isla was human when she hit the water. In the eyes of Faerie, the only thing her killer had done wrong was an act of theft.

  I stood where I was, looking at her body and swallowing the bile that threatened to rise up in the back of my throat. I hadn’t lost my lunch at a crime scene since the supposed death of Evening Winterrose. I certainly wasn’t going to do it now.

  The scent of pennyroyal and musk reached me a heartbeat before Tybalt did, giving me sufficient warning that I didn’t tense or pull away when an arm slid around my waist, pulling me close. I might normally have objected to that sort of distraction while I was looking at a body, but under the circumstances, I welcomed it, letting my head sag to the side until it rested against Tybalt’s shoulder. I allowed my knees to buckle a bit at the same time, not enough so as to drop me on my ass, but enough to take some of the tension off. I knew he wouldn’t let me fall.

  “She was a fair lady,” he said, eyes on Isla. “We met her on the beach, did we not?”

  “We did,” I confirmed. “Isla Chase. She was the head of one of the Selkie clans. She was sort of snippy, but I guess I can understand, under the circumstances.” I paused as a thought struck me, and pulled away, twisting until I was looking at Tybalt.

  He met my gaze without flinching. Then he blinked, looking briefly bewildered. “Your eyes,” he said.

  “What about them?” I somehow managed not to reach up and touch my face.

  “They’re not meant to be so colorful.” He shook his head, a wry smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I suppose if the sea witch can dress you in scales, she can tint your eyes to match. Still, it will be a pleasure when the fog rolls in, and you look at me like yourself again. What question can I answer for you?” I must have looked confused, because his smile lost its edge of wryness, turning genuinely amused. “You only look at me so when you have a question gnawing at your tongue. Out with it, then, before it chews its way free.”

  “Yeah, well, you only talk this much like a period drama when you’re worried,” I said, and took a deep breath. “The Cait Sidhe have the authority to rule themselves, correct?”

  “Granted by Oberon himself,” he said, smile fading into wariness. “Why do you ask?”

  “What would happen if one of your subjects killed someone, another Cait Sidhe, for no good reason? I don’t mean if they challenged you for rank and one of you didn’t walk away, or anything like that. I mean a murder. Oberon’s Law wouldn’t necessarily apply if it happened in the Court of Cats.”

  “No,” said Tybalt slowly, choosing his words with evident care. “Were I to slit another King’s throat in a knowe of the Divided Courts, an argument might be made that I had, through murder, disturbed the peace, but it would be a difficult needle to thread. When a cat kills a cat, there are no consequences.”

  “No consequences under the Law,” I said, stressing my words. “I know you don’t let your subjects go around killing each other willy-nilly. I’ve been to your Court. Things are too steady for that.”

  Quentin had realized where I was going with this. He was leaning forward, watching Tybalt with a silent intensity that I realized, with a start, he’d learned from watching me. I was shaping the next High King of the Westlands in ways that might or might not be good for him.

  Oh, well. Too late now.

  “There would be . . . consequences, yes,” said Tybalt. “There aren’t so many of us that we can afford to waste lives on petty arguments. The killer would be brought before me, or before their liege if they were not of my Court, and a punishment would be devised.”

  “Gotcha.” I whirled, facing Peter. “Who’s in charge of the Selkie clans?”

  He blinked. “What?”

  “They skirt the line between land and sea, between human and fae. They’re purebloods under the Law when they wear a sealskin, but they care for and protect their human kin, and they’re allowed t
o tell those kin about the existence of Faerie. So who’s in charge of them? If a Selkie is murdered, who gets involved?”

  “They’re our subjects when they’re in the water, but they belong to someone else on the land,” said Peter. “They mostly govern themselves, I guess. Mom never talks about it. She says the Selkies are someone else’s problem.”

  “Meaning the Luidaeg’s, but she’s not here right now, and we don’t have time to wait for her,” I said, and glanced at Quentin. “How about you. You ever hear of someone claiming to be in a position of absolute authority over the Selkies?”

  Quentin shook his head. “No. They fall under the jurisdiction of the Divided Courts when they quarrel with others among the fae, but when they keep to themselves, they’re allowed to go about their business as they see fit.”

  Quentin’s father was the High King of North America. If anyone on the continent claimed absolute authority over the Selkies, Quentin would have known about it. “Meaning the clans handle their own shit. Excellent.” I flashed the group a thin-lipped smile. “Poppy, please lead our Cephali friends to our quarters. Patrick will be relieved to see Peter is alive and well.” I should probably have felt a little bad for making him wait to find that out. Feeling bad wouldn’t make Isla any less dead. “Helmi, can you take the body with you?”

  I hated to tote a corpse around the Duchy like a sack of potatoes, but I hated the idea of leaving her here for someone else to stumble across even more. The fae don’t do well with the idea of death. Most purebloods refuse to even acknowledge that it’s something that can happen to them. And until Captain Pete got back, I wasn’t sure whether there was anyone within the Duchy itself in a position to take responsibility for the body. First Mate Rodrick? Someone else? Better to keep Isla with us, at least for the moment.

  Helmi looked at Isla thoughtfully before she nodded and said, “We are strong. We have to be, to serve our purpose in the Courts. We can take her.” The other two Cephali nodded as well, echoing her sentiment if not her statement.

  I spared a brief thought for how Cassandra and Nolan were going to react when a bunch of half-octopus guards came strolling into the courtyard with a dead woman in their tentacles, then waved it aside. There wasn’t time to worry about the details right now.

  “Quentin, Tybalt, you’re with me,” I said.

  Tybalt turned his eyes heavenward. “Thank Oberon,” he said. “The lady sees sense.”

  “Quiet, you, or I’ll come up with a good reason for you not to come,” I said, earning myself a disdainful look. I swallowed the urge to laugh. A little levity was fine—the urge to whistle past the graveyard is a very normal one, and one that’s served me well in the past—but Isla deserved better. I’d barely met the woman. She could have been a terrible person, cruel to children and animals, and that didn’t matter. Someone had murdered her. She was going to receive whatever justice I could provide.

  The three Cephali wound their tentacles carefully around Isla, lifting her off the wood of the dock, building a bier from their own bodies until she was perfectly supported, hanging between them like a jewel on a string.

  “I suppose that’s mine to lead them, then,” said Poppy, voice shaking with nerves. She offered Peter her hand. “Come, young lord, and I’ll take you to your father and brother, and to tea and cakes and whatever else we can shake out of the larders. Young lords like that sort of thing.”

  “We do,” Peter agreed, and slipped his hand willingly into hers. I let out a slow breath, my shoulders relaxing. Poppy knew where to go, and Helmi wouldn’t let anything happen to Peter. Between the two of them, he was as safe as he could possibly have been.

  That didn’t make me feel any better about walking away from him. Which meant it was time to go. I turned before I could come up with another excuse to stay, walking away from the little corner where I’d done my examination, heading into the maze of docks.

  “We could take the Shadow Roads,” said Tybalt, matching his pace to mine. “It would be swifter.”

  “I want you to conserve your strength, and my hair is wet,” I said. “My body heals. My hair doesn’t.”

  “Vanity, little fish?”

  “Practicality. I’m practically sure Stacy will murder me if I wind up bald this close to the wedding. She’s looking forward to braiding things into my hair, and I know better than to disappoint her.”

  Tybalt blinked, looking startled. “You think . . . you truly believe we’re close to our marriage?”

  “Well, yeah.” I glanced at him. “You said you didn’t want to wait forever. I mean, I don’t think we’re going to elope tomorrow, but I figure I wouldn’t have time to grow my hair all the way back.”

  “You better not be eloping,” said Quentin. “The High King has offered to host the ceremony. You don’t run off and leave the High King with an outstretched hand and no vassal to hold it. It’s not done.”

  “I am a King of Cats,” said Tybalt. “Your High King has no authority over me.”

  “Maybe not, but he has authority over me, and I’d rather not piss him off.” Making an enemy of the High King of North America would be impressively stupid, even for me. He could call Quentin back to Toronto any time he wanted. That meant keeping him happy was essential.

  “I suppose I accepted certain complications when I elected to tie my future to a daughter of the Divided Courts,” said Tybalt without rancor. He sounded oddly pleased, and was smiling as he reached over to twine his fingers with mine.

  The Duchy of Ships bustled around us as we walked, and if some people cast curious glances in our direction, they were smart enough, or well-mannered enough, not to say anything. I surreptitiously checked my shirt, and was pleased to see there wasn’t any blood from my earlier fight with Torin’s guard. The water had washed it all away.

  “Don’t think you’re escaping judgment quite so easily,” said Tybalt, in a pleasant tone. “I can still smell it. Not strongly, but enough that I know it’s your blood, and not the poor drowned woman’s.”

  “Also there’s a big hole in your shirt,” chirped Quentin.

  I shot him a baleful look. “You’re not helping.”

  “Sure I am. I’m making sure there are consequences when you let yourself get stabbed in the stomach. Maybe that way, you’ll do it less, and I’ll have fewer nightmares. Everyone wins.” Quentin shrugged, unrepentant. “You’re the one who taught me how to cheat. Just think, if you’d been more scrupulous about following protocol, I might not be betraying you now.”

  “I can’t believe you’re using the ‘I learned it from watching you,’ excuse,” I muttered. “I can’t decide whether I’m proud or pissed off.”

  “See, I’m happy either way,” said Quentin.

  I huffed and kept walking.

  The shops we’d seen before were open now, and the marketplace bustled with people—merchants hawking their wares, customers sorting through them, looking for the perfect pearl, or lobster, or pearl-encrusted lobster. Everything I could think of needing was for sale somewhere, with the obvious exception of electronics; this far into the Summerlands, even April’s modified cellular service didn’t work. That was sort of nice, since it meant she had actual limits. It was also sort of vexing. It would have been nice to be able to call home and summon as much backup as we could cram into a rowboat.

  I narrowed my eyes and focused on the people. Most belonged to the Undersea races, Merrow and Sirens and people with pearlized eyes or shimmering scales dusted across their skin, whose heritage teased my tongue with signals I didn’t quite know how to puzzle out. I might be a walking encyclopedia of magical signatures, but that doesn’t give me the ability to recognize types of fae I’ve never seen before. They were a mystery to me, their shoulders draped in fishnets and strings of coral beads, their brows covered with bandannas or graced with curving seashell horns that grew directly from the bone.

  Every time I br
eathed in, the part of my magic that was dedicated to tracing the magic of others tucked their individual scents neatly away, earmarking them for later. I’d be able to follow a single spell cast by any of these people halfway around the world. It was a slightly unnerving thought. The more I learn about what it means to be Dóchas Sidhe, the more I wonder how many of my choices—becoming a private investigator, following trails I probably shouldn’t have followed—have been guided by my magic trying to find a way to assert itself on the world.

  It was an unnerving thought, and so I shunted it aside and focused on what I wasn’t seeing around the stalls. I wasn’t seeing any Selkies. With as many as I knew were in the Duchy, they should have been everywhere. Selkie children should have been getting under the feet of the merchants; Selkie adults should have been poking through the available wares. Keeping the still technically human relations back at the beach would have made sense, but the absolute absence of the Selkies as a people was strange. I didn’t like it.

  Tybalt and Quentin frowned at my expression, then at each other, and kept walking. They’d done enough of this sort of thing to know that I’d speak up when I felt it was safe to do so, and not before.

  “Are you sure we’re going the right way?” asked Quentin.

  “Even with as overwhelming as the magic in this place is, I can’t lose the Luidaeg’s trail,” I said. “It’s like a fishhook in my nostrils. I could follow her anywhere.” The scent of her magic wasn’t normally this strong. She also wasn’t normally this open about her true nature. The more of her masks she set aside, the easier it got for me to track her.

  That explained a lot—including why August hadn’t been able to find Oberon when she’d run off on her fool’s errand and gotten herself lost for more than a century. If the Firstborn can mask themselves to the point that their terrifyingly powerful magic becomes nothing more than a vague parlor trick, how much more than that can the Three do? Can they disappear so that no one can follow them?