Page 21 of The Unkindest Tide

“Maybe,” I agreed. More delicately, I said, “The Undersea doesn’t have many changelings. Humans tend to drown before they can get too involved. Aren’t you worried?”

She shrugged. “Aren’t you?”

I was still mulling over my answer when Rodrick shouted, from the helm, “Harbor ahoy!”

Marcia turned. So did I. So did all the others, and together we beheld the Duchy of Ships breaking through the mist ahead of us.

At first it looked like an island, like some natural combination of rock and sand and location had formed the perfect spot for the Undersea to claim. As we sailed closer, I realized that what I’d taken for trees was a forest of masts, their sails furled and tamped down to keep them from catching the wind; what I’d mistaken for the shore was a conglomeration of docks and hulls and wooden bridges, all of them built over, around, through the bodies of the ships that had come to anchor here and would never sail away again.

“All hands to stations,” called Rodrick, and sailors swarmed for the sides, grabbing ropes, hauling on lines, doing a hundred incomprehensible things to get us ready for docking. The cat Tybalt had been speaking with stood on two legs, shaking off her fur in favor of a bipedal form, and ran to join one of the rope crews.

“Huh,” said Marcia. “Cait Sidhe after all. Cool.”

The other members of our little party—parties, really, since Gillian was here to stand with the Selkies, and Nolan and Cassandra were here to witness this whole thing on behalf of the Kingdom in the Mists—drifted toward us, until we were grouped together once again. The Luidaeg flashed me a smile filled with concern, mostly concealed under a thin overlay of malice.

“Done feeding the fishes?” she asked.

“For now.” I kept my eyes on the Duchy of Ships. There was a lighthouse among the masts, an actual lighthouse. I pointed to it. “What is that standing on? Did someone build it on their deck?”

“There’s an island,” she said. “A very small one. Big enough for a single lighthouse and a single dock, where a single ship could be moored. The rest of the Duchy grew up around it. Piece by piece, they found ways to anchor the structures they’d need. Merrow placed the stones for their foundations, and Cephali tied the pylons into place, and the Duchy took shape, like a pearl being formed a single layer at a time.”

“But why?”

“Because some things are better when discussed in the open air, and not every resident of the Undersea can breathe beneath the waves.” The Luidaeg indicated the Duchy with a sweep of her hands. “We claim sailors and their lovers, merchants and those who find no peace on land, and we keep them as safe as storm and sky allow. Here, they can be home. And here, we can discuss things on somewhat neutral ground. We’re technically in Leucothea, since the closest mortal cognate is the Pacific Ocean, which means we’re in Dianda’s waters, if you squint. Queen Palatyne has, quite wisely, ceded rulership of the Duchy of Ships to the Duchy of Ships. The people who live here make their own law, maintain their own order, and don’t cause problems for the Crown, which means Queen Palatyne can mostly pretend they don’t exist, sparing her from needing to justify all these air-breathers to her more traditionalist subjects.”

“Ugh.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I hate politics.”

“If you didn’t, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to make you deal with them.”

I glared at her. She smirked, and looked like she was about to say something when the ship gave a mighty lurch and a pair of vast, red-shaded tentacles reached out of the water, wrapping around the ropes that had been prepared for docking.

Screaming would have been the sensible thing to do. Gillian, Poppy, and Quentin certainly thought so, although their screams had widely different qualities. Gillian sounded terrified. Poppy sounded delighted, like a kid on her first roller coaster. Quentin was somewhere in the middle, although his scream faded into puzzled silence as he realized none of the sailors looked concerned. They were tossing more ropes to the tentacles, which seemed to be guiding us ever closer to the ramshackle conglomeration of ships, docks, and gangplanks.

I shot the Luidaeg a sharp look. “Not funny.”

“Pretty funny,” she said. She blinked, and her eyes were no longer blue. They were green, like shards of broken bottle rolling across the bottom of the sea, like light reflecting through kelp. I’ve always wondered if that was the true color of her eyes, assuming anything can be said to be “true” when it’s referring to a shapeshifter’s appearance.

“Not hiding anymore?” I asked quietly.

“No.” She shook her head, eyes on the rapidly approaching Duchy. “If the Selkies die here, Cousin Annie dies with them. She was never anything but a useful reflection, a face in the water. I loved being her. I loved the freedom of knowing people weren’t listening to every word I said, waiting for the moment when malice turned into murder. I loved just . . . being. When you’re as old as I am, when you have as few friends left as I do, there’s something beautiful about just being. I was playing pretend but I was never lying to them. It was a loophole, you know? A way for me to breathe. And now it’s over.”

The Luidaeg chuckled, and the sound was dry and mirthless, bones rattling in a forgotten cave. “I can never have my children back. I’ll never be a mother again. I’ll be a grandmother, and a great-grandmother, and so on, for a dozen generations, but I’ll never look someone in the eyes and know that the ocean they carry inside of them remembers the ocean I carry inside of me. My sister stole that. And I’ve been stealing it from the Selkies since the day I made them. I trapped them between worlds. They don’t get to see their grandchildren born to the waters; they pass their skins, they die, they end. For the sake of my children and for the sake of the Selkies themselves, we’re going to make that stop. No more Selkies. Not even Cousin Annie.”

I wanted to say something. My throat was dry and my lips wouldn’t move, and so I put my hand on her shoulder, pretending not to see the surprise and relief in her eyes when she glanced at me, and we sailed the rest of the way into the artificial harbor of the Duchy of Ships, pulled along by the vast tentacles of the great beast that had us in its embrace.

As soon as the hull came to rest against the dock, the tentacles withdrew, vanishing into the water without a sound. Rodrick barked orders that his sailors rushed to obey. I paused.

“Luidaeg,” I said. “That man, Rodrick. He said he wasn’t the captain, that he sailed at the captain’s grace. Did this ship not have a captain?”

“There’s only one captain in the Duchy,” said the Luidaeg. Seeing my confusion, she shrugged. “The Duchy of Ships is a Duchy because it needs to be something, but there’s no Duke or Duchess of Ships. It’s the captain who keeps things running. Hands on the helm, sails to the wind, all that fun stuff. The other ships have first mates, to keep them under a clear chain of command, but they don’t have captains.”

“That feels unnecessarily confusing,” objected Quentin, who had inched up on us while she was speaking.

The Luidaeg granted him a warm, if brief, smile. “Says the boy who grew up in a system of kings ruling kings. The high kingship is no more confusing than a single captain with a whole passel of first mates. It’s all in what you think is normal. Here, this is normal. Now shut up. It’s time for us to be announced.”

Rodrick, who had apparently been waiting for us to be quiet, bowed extravagantly as he lowered the gangplank. He stepped up onto it, hooves clopping against the wood, and called, in a loud, carrying voice, “The Jackdaw is returned safely to port, carrying our contracted cargo!”

A cheer went up from the people on the dock and hanging out of the portholes of nearby ships. I turned, taking them all in. Where had they come from? It felt like there were dozens of them present, all watching us like we were the most interesting animals at the zoo. I hadn’t seen any of them during our approach. Either they’d gathered in a serious hurry, or the Duchy of Ships had some unpleasant tricks up its sleeve.