Page 51 of The Unkindest Tide

“Quentin, give me the map.”

He held it out silently. I grabbed it, running my finger along the curves of the carefully drawn hallway walls until I was sure what I was seeing—or wasn’t seeing.

“Look: there’s a door every ten feet or so on this level. They’re evenly spaced, probably because the coil of the architecture here supports it. This whole hall matches the map.”

“So?” said our resident Cephali. “Maps should be accurate, or they’re useless.”

“So there should have been a door a few feet ago, and there wasn’t.” I walked back the way we’d come, studying the walls as I went, until I reached a patch that was a little too smooth, a little too regular, compared to everything around it. “It doesn’t make sense for the architecture to start getting weird on us now, not when it’s been this regular. Which means someone is trying to hide something.”

“You think it’s Peter?” asked Quentin.

“Can you think of a better explanation?” I touched the wall. It felt ever-so-subtly wrong, slick and almost icy under my fingers. I smiled. “Aw, good boy, Peter. Look, Quentin, put your hand here. Feel it?”

Quentin pressed his palm to the wall, face scrunching up in concentration. Then he relaxed, slanting a smile in my direction. “It feels like flower petals.”

It didn’t feel like flower petals to me. It felt like a glacier, like something that was doing its level best to reject my presence. I wasn’t going to argue. Quentin had flower magic in his veins, the same as Dean, and I had only blood. Of course things would feel different to me.

“Now, the sensible thing to do here would be to knock,” I said, running my fingertips across the holes in my shirt. The bleeding had long since stopped and the flesh had long since healed, but there was still blood there, thick and ropey and coagulated. I slathered it on my fingers, then pressed my palm against the wall.

The shape of the illusion came into view, looking like a sheet of glittering threads woven into a fishnet formation. It was good, solid work. His father would have been very proud.

“Toby? What are you doing?”

“Untying a knot.”

Seeing spells is another Dóchas Sidhe trait, although not the most useful of them, since I can’t do it fast and I can’t do it without bleeding and there’s a lot of “can’t” to balance out a relatively narrow amount of “can.” But I can find the edges of an illusion, and when I find them, I can grab hold of them, hooking my fingers into the fabric of the spell itself. I can pull. I can pull until they come apart.

I tugged and the spell unraveled, illusion falling into the distinct, ashen smell of magic that had been dismantled by someone it didn’t belong to. A door appeared in the wall in front of us, exactly like every other door in the hallway, except that this door had been magically concealed, and this door was between me and the faint, frustratingly appealing scent of Peter Lorden’s blood.

Leaning closer, I knocked on the door and called, “It’s October. I have Quentin and a Cephali whose name I don’t know with me. We’re coming in. Please don’t stab us.”

“If that works, that’s how I want you entering every room from now on,” grumbled Quentin.

“Ha, ha,” I said, and opened the door.

It was another storeroom, this one filled with apples and potatoes and onions, piled in bushels that threatened to overwhelm the shelves they rested on. There were no visible people. I sighed.

“I know you’re scared, and I know you’ve only met me once, so you probably don’t trust me very much, but I promise, I’m here to help,” I said. “Your parents are safe in the Duchy of Ships, Peter. I need to take you back to them. The sea witch gave me and my squire the ability to move through these waters without drowning, but the spell only lasts for so long, and we need to move. Whatever it is you need to hear from me, can you please pretend you’ve heard it already and come out, so we can get the hell out of here?”

There was a rustling noise from one corner before a tentacle uncurled, slowly shifting from nondescript gray patterned with blotches like a bushel of potatoes to the bright, sugary red of cherry cough syrup. The rest of Helmi uncurled a moment later, sliding to the floor and revealing a skinny boy with green-blond hair, enormous gray eyes, and a tail that shaded from slate gray at the hips to silvery-white at the flukes.

Peter Lorden stared at us, hiccupped, and began crying. He seemed angry with himself for not being able to keep the tears in, but that didn’t stop them from coming. Helmi put her arms around him and glared, not at me or Quentin, but at the other Cephali.

“Your loyalties have shifted,” she accused.

“The knowe has been taken,” the Cephali replied. “We cannot raise forces against the Merrow; we would surely die. But we have not served them. They can’t command what they cannot see.”

“Okay, this is a great little window on Undersea politics and all, but can we maybe hurry up and skip to the part where you let us take Peter, please?” I spread my hands. “Dianda’s been arrested, Patrick’s panicking—and rightly so, since this all sucks—and I don’t trust Torin not to order Peter’s execution to solidify his own claim. So, please, if you could just come on, we’ll get out of here.”

“We?” Helmi looked surprised.

“Of course ‘we,’” I said. “I’m not leaving you here for Torin’s guards to capture. You serve your liege best by going to your liege. That goes for you, too,” I added, to the Cephali at my side. “Hell, that goes for all the Cephali in Saltmist. If your people would rather hide than be forced to serve Torin, they can come with us to the Duchy of Ships.” Hopefully, Pete wouldn’t mind that I was offering the hospitality of her home to someone else’s vassals. At the end of the day, I didn’t actually care. Let her be pissed at me. I’d tangled with the Firstborn before. I could take it.

The unnamed Cephali stared at me for a moment before executing an elaborate bow that mostly involved her tentacles going in what seemed like an impossible number of directions at the same time. “My name is Kirsi,” she said. “I am honored to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too, and if that’s not the right form, I’m sorry; we don’t have time for a lot of etiquette,” I said. Shifting my focus to Peter, I asked as gently as I could, “Do you feel up to changing forms? I know you’ve been dry for a while now, but this will be easier if we don’t have to carry you.”

“My . . .” He sniffled, wiping his nose with his forearm, exactly like teenagers the world over, before trying again: “My mom and dad are really okay? They’re not . . . they haven’t stopped their dancing?”