Page 49 of The Unkindest Tide

The Cephali nodded but didn’t slow. “Grown from a seed by the Duchess Lorden’s grandmother,” she said. “My parents helped protect it when it was young and small and could have been easily uprooted. Now, it will outlive us all and remember our bones when they fade into its roots.”

Quentin and I exchanged a glance. It’s one thing to know that attitudes about life and death are very different between the land and sea. It’s another to hear a pureblood talking frankly about bones and mortality. Fae are supposed to live forever. That’s how they’re made. I’m a changeling, and I’ll still live for centuries if no one figures out a way to kill me.

Things in the Undersea followed their own patterns. Sometimes that was more jarring than I would have thought possible.

Voices echoed up ahead. The Cephali jerked back, and looked over her shoulder to us. “Hide,” she hissed. Then she was swarming up the wall, changing colors as she went, until she was the same white as the coral around her, wrapping her body around a decorative light fixture and fading utterly from view.

I turned to Quentin. “Hide or fight?” I asked.

He bit his lip. “What happens if we hide and they find us?”

“We fight anyway.”

“Can we try?”

I nodded. “We can always try,” I said. I started to grab for the air, then paused. “You’re the Daoine Sidhe. You should do this.”

Quentin nodded tightly before snatching the air and pulling it toward himself, whispering rapid-fire, “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck ten, the mouse didn’t care because rodents have no sense of time, hickory dickory dock.”

The smell of heather and steel rose around us, so strong that I cringed. Surely anyone who came down the hall would be able to smell it and guess where we were standing. Quentin didn’t look concerned. I tried to hold onto that. Daoine Sidhe are blood-workers and can detect the scent of a person’s magic when it hangs in the air, but they’re not as sensitive as the Dóchas Sidhe. If Quentin wasn’t worried, we’d be fine. We were going to be fine.

We had to be fine.

The spell settled around us like a fine mist and Quentin disappeared, becoming a part of the wall, much as the Cephali had. If I squinted, I could almost make out the shadow of his outline, but it was difficult, and I was only getting that much because I knew where he was. If he moved while I wasn’t looking, I’d lose track of him completely.

Good. A strong don’t-look-here should protect everyone involved, even from each other. I pressed myself hard against the wall, getting as far from the center of the hall as possible, and drew my knife, holding it low and close against my hip. If we had to fight, I’d fight. I just hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.

I’d barely gotten settled when three guards in Torin’s livery came around the corner. Two of them were holding those nasty tridents from before; the third was peering at an oiled parchment map. I couldn’t see the whole thing, but what I could see made me fairly sure that it was a map of the knowe. It had the right twisting, curving lines, and it looked like it had been treated to stand up to being submerged.

“There are eight storage rooms on this level,” said the one with the map. “If we search them all, we can go back to someplace decent.”

“Can you imagine having a palace this defensible and sacrificing half of it for air-breathers?” The second guard sounded utterly dismissive. “The county where I did my training had a single chamber set aside for the Selkies, and even that, they knew we could flood in an instant. Kept them in their places.”

“Do you really think the Lady is in Ships?” asked the third, nervously. “Rumor says she’s come to slaughter the Selkies for what they did. The water will run red, and we’ll have to find new couriers.”

“Or we could cut off communication with those lander fools entirely, and watch them tear themselves to pieces worrying about war,” said the second. He chuckled. “Frightened fish, every one of them. They’ll leave the coasts in droves once they realize they can’t keep tabs on us any longer—and good riddance. The farther we are from those air-breathing weaklings, the better.”

“I heard she was intending to resurrect the Roane,” said the guard with the map. The other two turned to look at him. He raised his head and looked impassively back. “Didn’t you wonder why the Selkies would be gathering in Ships, and not running for the deepest waters they could find to shelter them? She’s not slaughtering them, she’s empowering them. Uplifting them. The Lady is bringing back the Roane, and then they’ll be bought by the strongest nobles, and we’ll finally have the future in our hands again.”

Right. That was quite enough of that. We didn’t know where Peter was; we couldn’t allow these arrogant, careless people with their sharp, sharp tridents and their nasty ideas to get to him before we did. I stepped away from the wall, aware that Quentin wouldn’t be able to see me moving until he spotted the consequences of that motion. That was fine. He could catch up.

One nice side effect of healing the way I do: I’ve basically gone through a massive crash course in humanoid anatomy over the past few years, as people have stabbed, skewered, and otherwise damaged literally every internal organ I have, and a few I’m not sure actually exist. If there’s a way to hurt a body, odds are good that I’ve experienced it, and that makes me uniquely well-suited to challenges like incapacitating three guards without bringing the rest of the invading forces down on my head. Being invisible didn’t hurt either, in the moment.

Sliding my knife back into its sheath, I crept up on the two guards with the tridents. Neither of them was wearing a helmet. That would help. Knocking a person unconscious is a lot more difficult than most people assume it is, especially if you’re set on doing the job without opening any skull fractures. I found that I was less concerned about skull fractures than I maybe should have been. Dianda had healers on staff, which meant right now, Torin had healers on staff; any damage I did, short of killing somebody, could be undone in short order.

After the things they’d been saying about selling the Roane to the highest bidder, they might be happier with a little head trauma than with me telling the Luidaeg what they’d said.

Silently, I reached up, taking advantage of my invisibility to align my hands at the perfect angles before I slammed the two guards’ heads together. They shouted, startled and hurt by the blow, although neither of them went down. That was all right. I hadn’t been expecting to take them out with a single hit, although it would have been nice. I slammed their heads together again before they could react, and this time the guard on the left reeled back, clearly injured.

The guard on the right spun around and stabbed her trident at the space where she assumed I was standing. She wasn’t wrong. The don’t-look-here, already strained by my interaction with the world around me, broke in a haze of cut grass and copper as the tines pierced my stomach.

The pain was incredible. I swallowed it as best I could, grabbing the trident and yanking it toward myself. That drove the tines deeper in, which was bad. It also caused the startled guard to lose her grip on the shaft, unable to handle what she was seeing. That was good.

“Someone call for a hero?” I asked, and punched her in the face.

Merrow are militant and violent and always ready for a fight. Dianda is considered a relatively peaceable example of her breed, and I’m pretty sure she’d challenge the wind to a brawl if she had the opportunity. But here’s the thing about having a reputation as the biggest badass in existence: people mostly stop hitting you. I had never seen anyone with any sense try to start a fight with Dianda in what I would consider the smart way, by sucker-punching her before she had a chance to respond.

The guard reeled backward, blood gushing from her nose and split lip. I grabbed the shaft of the trident and yanked it out of my body before the skin could start healing around it. Then I swung it as hard as I could, slamming the end of the shaft into the side of her face, just below her eye. There was a sickening cracking sound. Her eyes went wide before she collapsed, bleeding and motionless, on the hallway floor.