The Unkindest Tide Read online

  I remembered the look on Simon Torquill’s face in the moment before she ripped his sense of home from his chest, and I was afraid.

  “I can charge more than a thing costs, as long as the price is in harmony with the request,” she said. “I could ask you to bring me the moon and the stars and not violate this geas, but I can’t give you things for free that I can’t spin around to being selfish. I’ve tried. It never works. Will you hear the fee?”

  I could almost feel Tybalt staring at me. I squared my shoulders and said, “I will.”

  “All right.” She sighed, a sound so deep that it seemed to rise up from the soles of her feet and shudder its way through her body. “First: when next I call on you to aid me, you can’t refuse. No matter what I ask of you, no matter how little you want to do what I demand, you can’t refuse. Your own magic won’t allow it.”

  “Done,” I said.

  “Second: I want blood. When this is done, you will come to my home, and I will bleed you until a full day has passed or I feel satisfied with what I’ve taken, whichever comes first. You will not ask me why I want the blood, or what I intend to do with it. Good or ill or in-between, it’s none of your concern.”

  I hesitated. Magic lives in blood. In Faerie, having access to someone’s blood is almost as good as having access to the person themselves. By giving the Luidaeg my blood, I was giving her the ability to mimic or recreate almost anything I could do, including my ability to heal myself. I’ve been dead at least once, and probably more often than that, and the magic in my blood has refused to let me stay that way. What could the Luidaeg do with as much blood as she could strip from my body in a full day’s time?

  It didn’t matter. Peter mattered, and Patrick and Dianda mattered, and ending this before it interfered with the salvation of the Selkies mattered. “Done,” I repeated, with somewhat less force this time.

  At least the Luidaeg didn’t look surprised. She simply looked at me and said softly, “Third: I want you to bring Simon Torquill home. He’s suffered long enough.”

  I jerked away from her like I’d been shocked. “Luidaeg . . . do you know what you’re asking me to do?”

  She smiled. There was no joy there. “I’m the one who helped him get lost. So yes, I do. I know exactly what I’m asking you to do.”

  Damn. I closed my eyes long enough to take a deep breath. Then I opened them and nodded. “Yes. I’ll bring him home.”

  “I knew you would.” She leaned to the side, looking past me. “Squire, kitty-cat, come. You’ll both want to be here for this. Count Lorden, Duke Lorden, Marcia, Poppy, you all stay out here. If anyone from the Duchy comes to see how we are, make something up.”

  “Lie?” asked Dean blankly.

  The Luidaeg nodded. “Yes, lie. Fiction is a great gift I no longer share, but which you may indulge in to your heart’s content. Invent things. Spin wild stories and back each other up. No one’s going to come to me for clarification; they’re all too afraid I’m going to eat them.” She turned her attention back to me. “Well? Why are you still standing there? Move.”

  I moved. Tybalt and Quentin were close behind me, the three of us crowding into her apartment, which was the same small, cozy, maritime design as the ones we were sleeping in. The Luidaeg slammed the door once we were all inside, resting her head momentarily against the wood before she wrenched it open again, revealing her kitchen at home in San Francisco.

  “Luidaeg,” I said, carefully. “That’s your kitchen.”

  “Yes,” she said, stepping over the threshold and heading for the fridge. “Your point?”

  Quentin and I exchanged a glance. “If you can summon your kitchen, why did we have to take a boat to get here?” I asked.

  “Because I can’t just snap my fingers and take away distance for no good reason; the magic doesn’t work like that, and let’s all be grateful,” said the Luidaeg. “There have to be limits, even on the Firstborn. We can’t be gods. The world would shatter and turn to dust beneath our feet.”

  “Some of you would be gods if they were allowed,” said Tybalt.

  “And all the ones who would be gods are the ones who shouldn’t be gods. My kitchen is here because I need it to do my job, and that gives me the leverage to bridge the distance.” The Luidaeg opened the refrigerator door and started rummaging around inside. “Last time I used one of Ketea’s scales to manage the transformation, but that’s not a good idea when I need your blood to remember that the form isn’t yours.”

  “If it’s not a good idea now, why was it a good idea last time?” I crossed my arms, fighting the urge to scowl. It was born of nervousness; I don’t like it when people transform me into things. It didn’t seem to matter that this time, I’d asked to be turned into something I wasn’t supposed to be. It was still a transformation, and I still wasn’t comfortable with it.

  “You were more human last time.” She pulled several bottles of fluid off the shelves and set them on the counter. One was white and sparkled like liquid starlight, one was so black it seemed to steal all light from the room, and the last was a swirling, pearlescent red, somewhere between blood and strawberries. “Humans don’t understand what it means to lose themselves in a new shape. They’re born in one body, they die in the same body, and all the changes they make to it are cosmetic. The bones remain the same.”

  “And?”

  “And you’re Dóchas Sidhe, children of the last Ride—and you have no idea what a relief it is to be able to say that, to not be waiting for you to figure out the right question to unlock your own family tree—and your blood knows how to become something it’s not. Tam Lin isn’t your grandfather, thank Dad, or you wouldn’t be standing here now, but the magic my mother threw at him splashed onto your grandmother, and it changed her, too, somewhere deep beneath the skin, where the world couldn’t see it. It’s easy to convince you to be something other than you are. Simon Torquill would never have been able to turn kitty-boy there,” she hooked a finger toward Tybalt, “into a fish for more than seven years, and Cait Sidhe are natural shapeshifters. With the brat, he’d have been lucky to get seven months.”

  “My grandfather turned a man into a linden tree for a hundred years,” said Quentin.

  “Trees are different.” The Luidaeg produced a large glass bowl and began dumping her various liquids into it, doing the measurements by eye. “Trees are slow. A hundred years as a tree is less than a decade as something that has a heartbeat. There’s a reason most punishment-through-transformation involves trees. Everyone gets to look impressive, and no one has to live with the long-term consequences of having a pissed-off enemy popping out of the decorative water feature. Toby, you got your knife?”

  “Do you even have to ask?” I wearily produced the knife from beneath my skirt, holding it out to her hilt-first.

  The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow. “I don’t want it. You’re all going to be bleeding for me in a moment. I needed to know we had a way to make that happen.”

  “All?” asked Quentin nervously.

  “Well, kiddo, since your lady knight wants to go hang out in the Undersea like a big asshole, you’re going to go with her.” The Luidaeg flashed a toothy smile. “Call it a learning experience. You’re going to learn why you need to get yourself a better knight if you want to live long enough to be High King.”

  I gaped at her. “I’m not taking Quentin.”

  “She’s not only taking Quentin,” added Tybalt. I turned my gape on him. He raised an eyebrow. “Don’t look so offended, little fish. If you must go submerge yourself in a watery nightmare, it’s my duty to be by your side.”

  “Hilarious as the idea of transforming you into a giant catfish is—and believe me, it’s funny as fuck—no,” said the Luidaeg. “You’re here to provide the shapeshifter’s spark to my spell and nothing more. I’m too protean to power this. You have two forms, and that’s the number we need.”


  Tybalt narrowed his eyes. “I’m going with her,” he said.

  “No, you’re not,” said the Luidaeg. “If you try to negotiate for passage, I’ll set the price so high that your own betrothed will stab you in the kidney before she lets you pay it.”

  “That sounds like me,” I said. “But why? Why do I have to take Quentin, who doesn’t want to go, and not Tybalt, who does?”

  “She’s right: I don’t want to go,” said Quentin.

  “Because, currently, this is a two-way war,” said the Luidaeg. She plucked a hair from the crown of her head and dropped it into the swirling liquid in the bowl. It dissolved with a faint hissing sound, and the smell of quinces spread through the room. “Land and sea, Divided Court against Divided Court. We’re used to this. It hasn’t happened often in the last hundred years, but oh, the war of wall and wave used to be practically a sporting event. Taking your squire with you means you’ll have backup, and means he’ll have a little more understanding of what he’s going to be in charge of one day. Add a King of Cats, even one who isn’t sitting on his throne, and you complicate things. You make them messy. You make this look calculated, like you were gathering allies before you even set foot in the Duchy of Ships. Trust me, all right? I know what I’m doing.”

  The liquid, for all her mixing, was still swirled in three colors, like the scales of a calico koi. I suppressed a shudder. “And you’ll go find your sister?”

  “Yes. I’ll go find my sister, and do what I can to convince her to come back and rein in her descendants. I can’t promise she’ll listen, but I’ll try.” The Luidaeg sighed. “Now’s when you bleed for me. All of you. Toby, I’m going to need a lot of blood from you; Tybalt, Quentin, I need seven drops. Each. Once that’s done, the compact is sealed, and everything proceeds.”

  “What if I refuse?” asked Tybalt stiffly. “If you won’t send me with my lady, perhaps I think she shouldn’t go at all.”

  I swung around to stare at him. “You don’t get to make that call.”

  “October—”

  “No. No. You don’t get to make that call. Not now, not once we’re married, never. We can discuss things, absolutely. I can make an effort to tell you before I go throwing myself into mortal danger, sure. But you don’t make that call, because that call is not yours to make. Peter Lorden is . . . best case, Peter Lorden is in a lot of trouble. He’s a kid, and he’s alone and he’s scared and his parents can’t help him, and maybe I can. So you don’t get to decide for me. I’m a hero, remember? I didn’t want to be, but I am, and that means when a kid is alone and scared and in danger, it’s my job to try and make things better. If you think you get to make that call, we’re going to have to have a conversation. And I don’t think either of us is going to be happy with the results.”

  My heart was beating too fast and my skin felt too tight and everything was wrong, wrong, wrong. After everything Tybalt and I had been through together, the idea that he could try to stop me from saving someone, from saving a child, was—

  It was—

  I couldn’t do this. If he really wanted me to walk away when Peter was in danger, I couldn’t do this. And I couldn’t do it if he only changed his mind out of the fear of losing me. We had to be in this together, even when it was hard, or we weren’t really together at all.

  Tybalt sucked in a sharp breath, pupils narrowing to slits. Then, slowly, he nodded.

  “I’ve long since resigned myself to the idea that immortality will never be your saving grace,” he said, voice even more formal and stilted than usual. “Not because of the human blood in your veins, but because you insist—you demand—the world be less unkind. One day, you’re going to go up against something you can’t conquer, and the only way I make my peace with this is by telling myself, over and over again, that when that day comes, I’ll be there to fight by your side, to do whatever can be done to save you. It’s not that I . . . I fell in love with a hero, October. I fell in love with you. I would never dream of asking you to change that essential part of who you are. I don’t want you to stop fighting. I just want to be fighting with you.”

  “Right now, you fight by staying in the Duchy of Ships and protecting Patrick and Dean,” I said softly, reaching up to touch his cheek. “They’re going to need allies. Clever allies. Allies who can pull them into the shadows if Torin’s guards come back. Can you do that for me?”

  “Can you come back to me?” he asked.

  “I can try,” I said.

  Tybalt nodded, glancing to the Luidaeg. “Lady sea witch, if you would grant me a moment’s time?”

  “Clock’s ticking, kitty-cat, but you do you,” she said.

  He nodded, and turned back to me, and leaned in, and kissed me.

  It wasn’t a kind or gentle kiss. It was the kiss of a man afraid of drowning, already trapped by some relentless riptide and being dragged farther and farther from the shore. He kissed me hard and fierce and unrelenting, and I kissed him back the same way, both of us fully aware that this could be the last kiss we ever had the chance to share.

  But then, we always knew that. Our lives weren’t exactly safe, and one day, one of us wasn’t going to come home. We were both panting when we broke apart. His pupils weren’t slits anymore; they had widened until they almost consumed his irises, drinking in all the available light. I offered him a wan smile. He returned it, and together we turned to face the Luidaeg.

  The blade of my knife was cool against the skin of my palm. I slashed downward, opening my flesh like a flower, and stepped into the Luidaeg’s kitchen, positioning my bleeding hand above her bowl. She watched impassively until she could be sure I wasn’t making a mess; then she plucked the knife from my hand and beckoned the boys forward.

  “Kitty-cat first, then Quentin,” she said. “Tick-tock, kids, times a’wasting. You’ve spent too much of it on your petty little feelings, and now you need to hurry.”

  Tybalt narrowed his eyes but stepped forward, watching impassively as she ran the already-bloodied blade of my knife across the tip of his index finger. He hissed a little at the pain, and she moved his hand over the bowl, squeezing out the required seven drops.

  “Shapeshifter’s blood, to make the changes voluntary; they’ll need to move between sea and air until this is finished,” she said, and released his hand. “Quentin?”

  My squire swallowed hard as he stepped forward and held out his hand. The Luidaeg took it gently, and rather than slicing his finger, merely pricked it, holding it above mine.

  “Don’t worry, kiddo, I’m not keeping any,” she said, in a tone that was probably meant to be reassuring.

  The liquid in the bowl sparkled and fizzed as our blood mingled with what was already there. When she judged that it had had enough, she handed me my knife and pushed us both backward, turning to rummage in the nearest drawer until she produced two small bottles. They were the sort of thing a sailor stranded on a desert island might use to throw messages out into the shoreless sea, hoping that someday they would go where they were meant to be.

  “Once you drink this, you’ll have twelve hours,” she said, dipping first one bottle and then the other in the bowl. The first bottle came up filled with liquid so dark a blue that it was almost black, shot through with veins of bright, burning gold. The second bottle . . .

  The second bottle was for me. The liquid it contained was layered like calico scales, white and red and black, and I knew the shape and texture my fins would take when I drank it. My body remembered what Simon had done to me, would always remember, and whenever I went back to the water, I would go in tricolor autumn, painted like the koi I’d been.

  The Luidaeg handed us our bottles, expression grave. “Twelve hours,” she repeated. “You’ll go to the water, you’ll belong to the water, and you’ll be cast from the water all within that span. If you’re not on dry land when your time runs out, you’ll get to experience the wonder and joy o
f drowning. Toby will probably survive, she’ll just wish she hadn’t. Quentin . . .”

  “I’m not as sturdy; I get it,” he said.

  “Heroes raising heroes to do heroic bullshit since the dawn of time,” said the Luidaeg, almost fondly. She poured the rest of her liquid down the sink. “All of you, get out of my apartment. I’ll go seek my sister as soon as I’m sure you’re gone. I don’t want to see your faces again until you’ve had your dance with drowning.”

  I frowned. “Luidaeg—”

  “Go!”

  We went, out of the kitchen and back into her apartment in the Duchy of Ships, and then out of that to the courtyard where our friends and allies waited, impatient and afraid, to see how much we’d paid for a slim shot at salvation.

  ELEVEN

  “I COULD GO WITH YOU,” said Patrick for the third time, his eyes on the bottle in Quentin’s hand. His hands twitched, like he was considering the virtues of snatching the thing from my squire. “I know the way.”

  “It wouldn’t work for you,” I said. I wasn’t sure of that—the Luidaeg’s magic is strong enough to be surprisingly flexible—but I was sure her deal with me had been for myself and Quentin, not myself and Patrick. If he drank the potion, it might work, or it might do nothing, or it might somehow mystically cause my dose of the stuff to curdle and turn useless. If this was going to happen, it would happen according to the Luidaeg’s rules. “Now come on. Tell me what else we need to know. What’s going to be waiting for us when we get there?”

  Patrick sighed heavily. “When you exit the Duchy and swim downward, you’ll find the channels connecting the various Undersea domains to this neutral ground. It’s how the Selkies were able to get here so quickly. The gate to Saltmist is marked with pearls and ancient teak carved in sea otters and kelp. Passing through it will deposit you at our borders. I don’t know what Torin will have done with the guards. Normally, you’d be able to pass through the fields to the palace, and enter through the lowest doors. Right now . . . I don’t know.” He looked at me, briefly, openly hopeless. “They may have destroyed everything. They may have taken it all intact. I don’t know.”