Page 60 of The Unkindest Tide

“There,” I said. “Elizabeth came out of that one.” Out of all the Selkie clan leaders, Liz was the one I actually knew and felt like I could talk to. She might listen to what I was going to propose. The fact that the Ryan clan had claimed responsibility for Gillian didn’t have anything to do with it, honest.

All right. Maybe it had a little bit to do with it.

We trudged across the sand, the waves crashing against the pillars of the boardwalk and the wind whistling around us, and we could have been anywhere; we could have been in Santa Cruz, or Half Moon Bay, or Ventura Beach, any place where people lived alongside the sea. It was a cunningly constructed little community, allowing the people who lived there to pretend that they weren’t on a floating duchy in the middle of the empty ocean. It was probably good for the mental health of the Selkies, who could, as we had seen so brutally demonstrated, drown.

The curtains were drawn at Elizabeth’s house. There was no doorbell, which made sense, given the level of technology around us. Raising my hand, I knocked briskly.

There was no answer. I knocked again.

When there was still no answer I sighed, leaned closer, and called, “The Luidaeg isn’t with me, Liz. It’s just me, Toby, and a few of my friends. Let me in. This is important.”

There was a long pause, long enough to make me question whether she was there at all. Maybe she’d gone somewhere. Maybe all the Selkies had gone somewhere, choosing to flee rather than stay here and face the Luidaeg’s justice. Maybe—

The door swung open, just a crack, wide enough for me to see a single blue eye peering out at me. Like all Selkies, Elizabeth Ryan had stopped aging when she’d received her skin. She was a woman in the prime of her life and always would be, unless she elected to pass her own skin along before the deadline passed and it was too late. And for all of that, she had never looked older, or more exhausted.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not really up for visitors right now,” she said. “You should go.”

“We can’t,” I said. “Let me in, or we’ll do this with me standing on your front porch. I don’t think either one of us is going to enjoy that, do you?”

There was another pause, even longer than the last, before she huffed and pulled the door all the way open. “Fine,” she said. “Come on in.” She turned and stomped away, not waiting for us to enter.

I exchanged a glance with Tybalt. Liz seemed antsy, but that made sense. She didn’t seem scared.

She didn’t know.

“Nice place,” I said, stepping inside and looking around the room. It was larger than it looked from the outside, decorated in a quaint, old-fashioned style that managed to look almost modern when contrasted with the rest of the Duchy. While Pete’s quarters, and the quarters we’d been assigned, were like something out of a period drama about piracy, Liz’s house was all white wicker and faded damask. It looked like the sort of place that should come with a kindly grandmother pre-installed. The only piece that carried any of the shipwreck aesthetic of the other rooms I’d seen was the table, wide and ragged around the edges and apparently carved from a single piece of some sunken vessel’s side. There were even barnacles on the bottom, dried out until they became ashen and cracked.

“It’s not mine,” said Liz, with a careless flap of her hand. She kept walking until she reached a sideboard and picked up a green glass bottle, its sides too clouded to let me see the liquid inside. She considered it for a moment before setting it aside in favor of another bottle, this one red and equally obscured. “It belongs to whoever leads the Ryan clan. Which, I suppose, means it’s about to belong to no one. We won’t need clans anymore, not once you’re done with us.” She laughed unsteadily as she uncorked the bottle and poured a stream of dark purple liquid into a tumbler. “Anybody want a drink?”

“No,” I said.

“No,” said Quentin at the same time.

“I would be delighted to have some of whatever you’re having,” said Tybalt. Quentin and I both turned to stare at him. He rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “I’m not ‘on duty,’ as you might so quaintly put it; I’m not the hero here. I’m merely an onlooker, raised in a time where, if someone offered you a drink, it was considered polite to accept their hospitality.”

“I like you slightly more than I like the company you keep, which means I still don’t like you at all,” Liz informed Tybalt, filling a second tumbler and thrusting it toward him. “Why are you here? Come to laugh at the wake, when there’s never going to be a funeral?”

“Where is everyone?” I asked, as Tybalt took the glass and sniffed curiously at its contents. His nose wrinkled. I did my best to ignore him, focusing as much as I could on Liz. “There were children earlier. Playing in the sand. Remember?”

“How could I forget?” She fixed her gaze on me, and it was all I could do not to recoil. We had never been friends, had only met in the company of the Luidaeg, but she had never looked at me like that before. She looked at me like I was her executioner, come to drag her away from everything she’d ever known. “That was when my lovely Annie, my dear, beloved, only true love Annie, stood before a council of my fellows and said there’d be no punishment for anyone who wanted to steal a skin. You didn’t seem overly concerned about the children then. You just stood there and let her do it.”

“She’s the sea witch, Liz. It’s not like I exactly have a lot of leverage with her.”

Her laugh was low and bitter and more than a little inebriated. The drink in her hand was far from her first. “You have more leverage than any of the rest of us do, and substantially more than you think. She needs you, liar’s daughter, or she’ll never be rid of my kind. So yeah, you could have said something.”

“She said the children were exempt.”

“Because they don’t have skins to steal, for the most part,” said Liz. “Doesn’t mean it won’t hurt them to see their futures stolen, or to see their families attacked. Just because no one attacks them, that doesn’t mean they’re going to get out of this unscathed. You could have said something, and you didn’t. You cared more about your own hide than you did about theirs.” She laughed again, wildly this time. “Hide. What a good word for this mess. We should all be doing it, in order to save it.”

“Okay, so she’s discovered the joy of homonyms and it’s a little creepy,” said Quentin.

Tybalt shot him a fond look. “My lady love has ruined you for courtly matters.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” I said, and focused on Liz. “Liz—Elizabeth—I need you to listen to me, please. It’s important that you listen to me. When was the last time you saw Isla?”

“Isla Chase? Oh, that would be shortly after she tried to stab me in the shoulder so she could knock me down and peel the sealskin from my body. Clumsy scag.” Elizabeth sipped her drink, trying to look nonchalant. “I kicked her in the groin and ran. Most of us are hiding in our homes, if we made it clear of the fray. Things aren’t really bad, not yet. The deadline is still far enough away that most are biding their time, waiting for the rest to get here. Newcomers will be easy targets for the rest of us, right? Show up late, don’t get all the information, lose. Lose big time. Mostly, right now, it’s people looking to settle scores, and people going after the easy targets. The weak. The unaffiliated. No one’s taking care of them.”

There seemed to be a stone stuck in my throat. Something about the way she looked at me when she said the word “weak” was setting off alarm bells in the back of my mind. “And Gillian?”