Page 59 of Saved By the Selkie

Athos frowns at me. “Have it your way,” he murmurs. “But don’t blame me when it takes you months to get an audience with him.”

“I don’t think it will take months,” I offer hotly. “Maybe it escaped your notice, but I’ve been gone for years. I’m sure his lordship will be very eager to meet with me when he learns I didn’t squander his last gift.” I don’t add that I think my uncle will be inclined to see me when he learns I’m notdead.

Athos smiles, and I bristle. “You have been gone for years,” he says. “Things have changed quite a lot, Aramis. My father has become almost a recluse in his old age, seeing almost no one at all. He hardly entertains me these days; he prefers the company of his personal confessor.”

I frown. “Why—”

Athos shrugs. “He’s dying,” he says simply, but he won’t meet my eye. “Or, at least, the doctor has him convinced he’s about to depart for the next life. He has become quite concerned with the state of his soul—and I’m afraid sailors such as ourselves don’t have the most sinless of reputations, now do we?”

“Still, I can’t imagine what my lord uncle has to worry about.” I’d always thought my uncle an upstanding sort of man. At the very least, he’d been very kind to his sister and his nephew, to take us in. He had been strict with Athos and me, certainly, but not cruel. And he’d never taken to piracy, not like we had.

Athos gives me a tight smile. “There’s the issue of your parents, for one thing,” he mutters, and I start.

“What do you know about that?”

Athos almost chokes on his wine. He waves a hand. “Nothing much,” he says as he clears his throat, “except that it was my father’s intervention that prevented their marriage. And he may have been responsible for your father’s departure.”

I let my shoulders fall. “What?”

Athos shakes his head. “You’ll have to ask him—if he’ll tell you. Perhaps he’ll be inclined, if he grants us audience at all. One less burden on his immortal soul.”

“Still—”

“And there’s the guilt he bears over the death of my mother.” Anger simmers behind Athos’s words. He has never forgiven his father for the deaths of his mother and sister. Athos is quite convinced that the Count was well aware of the dangers of getting his wife with child a second time. “And countless other things, I’m sure—much as it’s difficult for us to imagine, he was once a young man himself, as reckless and inconstant as we ourselves.”

“Don’t lump me in with you,” I mutter, and Athos laughs.

“But Aramis,” he says, “you’ve been the instigator, more so than I have. All these years, you’ve been beset by a highly active mind—always churning with schemes.” He holds up his glass in toast. “After all, who else would have thought to sail north to find a fairy tale?”

I grit my teeth. He’s mocking me, which means he doesn’t believe me about Lir being a selkie. I’m half-tempted to march Lir in here and force him to demonstrate.

I won’t do that to Lir though. “If we’re done here.” I grip the table.

Athos sighs. “Oh, don’t be like that, Aramis,” he murmurs. “Drink with me—shouldn’t we? You were the one who pointed out that you’ve been missing for years. You know, in Paris, the ladies mourned you. I didn’t, of course, because I didn’t believe you, of all people, were dead.”

“I’d like to check on my family.” I lift my chin a little, knowing exactly how deep that will cut.

Athos regards me for a moment, then sets his glass down. “Fine,” he says, but it’s sharper, angrier than it needs to be. “Go. Be where your heart wills you.”

The words are meant to sting—as though I don’t care for Athos at all. That’s not true. He might aggravate me, but he is still my brother. I cannot thank him for the countless times he’s saved my hide from one disaster or another. He’s not wrong that I’m an ideas man. He, on the other hand, tends to be a cautious soul. I get us into scrapes, and he gets us out.

Lately, though, I’ve been wishing that I might get myself out of more scrapes. After all, if I can dream up how to get into them, I should be able to dream up how to get out of them, right?

And I have gotten myself out of scrapes. But Athos is always there, and nobody will give me the credit. It took everything I had to get Sellegue to give me the money to fund my madman’s journey to find Mythos.

And here’s Athos bailing me out once more. And that’s all anyone will see when we dock in New York. They won’t see how I survived two mutinies and convinced a selkie to come south with me after finding Mythos. No, they’ll only see the part where I was stranded in some backwaters little village and Athos happened to pick me up and bring me home.

I curl my hands into fists, then stalk below deck to find Lir, Anna, and Porthos.

There’s a commotion below deck when I get there, and I watch as the crew bellows around me. Some of them are shouting; some of them are pointing. Others are cowering in the corner, and others still are wielding pikes and long punting poles.

At the center of it all is Lir, with Blizz in his arms.

Or, well, as best he can hold Blizz in his arms when Blizz is in his seal form—he’s much longer than a human infant, although Lir doesn’t really seem to be having much trouble. Anna and Porthos have formed a rotating circle around Lir, Anna with her own short sword and Porthos with a dagger in his teeth, his hands tensed like he’s imagining squeezing someone’s throat.

“What happened?” I ask, perhaps brainlessly, because I can guess. Blizz obviously transformed, and judging from the state of the crew, he did it in front of them.

“They’re witches!” Jans cries.