Page 61 of The Unkindest Tide

“See, she’s the reason I would have expected you to say more than you did when Annie decided to put a bounty out on my entire clan—and not only because those skins my darling love traded for your daughter’s education are what kicked off this whole mess.” Liz’s lip curled as she lowered her glass. “If I were a more vengeful woman, I would have left that girl standing on the sand when I pulled the rest of my people to safety. You’re lucky I take my responsibilities seriously. You’re lucky one of us knows what it means to be a mother.”

Tybalt took a step forward, toward her. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. Out of everyone in the world—everyone except for me, and May, who remembered being Gillian’s mother even if she never had been—Tybalt understood the best how much it had killed me to let her go, even when she’d been demanding I do exactly that.

I caught his arm, preventing him from going any further. Liz looked at him impassively, either too drunk or too resigned to her fate to be concerned about the fury in his eyes.

“Go ahead,” she said. “It’s not like you’d be casting my clan into chaos. Hundreds of years of governing ourselves, keeping ourselves safe and tucked away and not violating the laws of either Faerie or humanity, and this is how it ends. No more need for Selkie clans, not when there aren’t any Selkies anymore.”

I forced myself to take a breath, in through my nose and out through my mouth, focusing on how much we needed Liz to help us voluntarily, and not how much I wanted to punch her in the face. It wasn’t easy. Quentin looked as furious as Tybalt, but he was channeling it into a perfect stillness, one that spoke of his early training in his parents’ Court, where he’d been expected to be the perfect prince at all times, poised and polished and deadly.

Sometimes I think Faerie is way too hard on our kids.

Finally, I said, “Elizabeth Ryan, I’m here because the Selkie clans are permitted to govern themselves, at least so far as their relationship with their mortal kin. But you need to tell me where my daughter is and whether she’s all right before I can continue.” If she said Gillian had been hurt—if she said Gillian had been killed—I was going to—

I didn’t know what I was going to do. Except possibly go looking for the Luidaeg and get myself killed trying to challenge the sea witch. The Luidaeg had always said she was going to kill me one day. If Gillian was dead, that day might well be today.

“Your brat is fine,” said Liz. She took another drink from her tumbler, deeper this time, almost gulping. “She’s with a bunch of the kids, showing them how to make paper cranes. She’s still new enough to be good with her hands. The webs’ll slow her down soon enough.”

Connor’s hands had always been a little clumsy, hampered by the webs that connected his fingers to the first knuckle. But he’d done well enough. Gillian would, too. I forced my shoulders to relax as much as possible, letting go of Tybalt’s arm.

“What do you do when someone hurts one of your human clan members?”

Liz blinked slowly, finally putting her glass down. “What do you mean?”

“You take care of them, you protect them, you tell them about Faerie—the Law doesn’t cover them, because they’re not purebloods, but that doesn’t matter to the Selkie clans. What do you do when someone hurts one of your human clan members? It’s not a difficult question. Or should I go looking for an alchemist who can mix you something to sober you up? Because we don’t have a lot of time here.” Isla, dead in the water, shorn of her sealskin and left to drown like any other human. That wasn’t what the Luidaeg had approved. She’d given the Selkies permission to steal from each other. She’d never given them permission to kill. Sure, once a Selkie lacked a skin, they were exempt from the reach of the Law, but if I was right about Selkie governance . . .

“The Law.” Liz laughed again, bitter and unsteady, like she couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. “Did you know, I didn’t even know there was a Law until I received my skin? My parents always told me to stay away from the rest of the fae, said they wouldn’t understand how a human girl could consider herself part of Faerie, or worthy of speaking to them. My mother said if I ever wound up in a situation where I couldn’t hide what I knew, I should pretend to be the au pair of some noble house. They steal humans for that. Almost always girls. I can’t decide if that’s tradition or chauvinism.”

“A little bit of both,” I said.

“There was a time when stolen girls were less likely to be missed,” said Tybalt. He had the good grace to sound ashamed, even as he kept talking. “A time when sweeping them away into Faerie might have been considered a blessing for all concerned, as they could be fed and safe and not subject to the affections of the first man to make their fathers an offer he felt he couldn’t turn down. In those days, it was tradition. Now, when someone insists they must have a woman to tend their young, because their parents did, and their parents’ parents before them, it’s pigheadedness and a refusal to understand that times have changed, and keep on changing.”

“I love you,” I said, before returning my attention to Liz. “Oberon’s Law doesn’t protect changelings, and it doesn’t protect skinless Selkies, but you don’t go around murdering your human kids and dumping their bodies in the Summerlands where the mortal authorities would never find them. So what do you have?”

“We have our own covenants,” said Liz. There was a suspicious glint in her eye. She could tell I was getting at something, even if she hadn’t figured out precisely what it was. Boy, was she going to be surprised. “We don’t kill our human kin, if that’s what you’re asking. We sometimes imprison them in our clan homes, for their own good, when they cross certain lines. And when they . . .” She stopped and swallowed. “When they seem like they might become a threat to Faerie, we have ways of stopping their tongues. We don’t like to do it. It’s small and petty and cruel and unfair, but it’s sometimes necessary.”

“Magically, you mean,” I said.

Liz glowered. “Yes, magically. What do you take us for? The fact that our place in Faerie has to be earned doesn’t make us less a part of it than you. If anything, it makes us more a part of it. We chose.”

So had every changeling, ever, but somehow that never seemed to get us a better place at the table. I looked at her expression and decided it might be better not to point that out. “So is it ever, under any circumstances, acceptable to kill one of your human kinfolk? Just so I know we’re on the same page here.”

“No,” she said, utterly affronted. “A Selkie without a skin is still a Selkie where it counts. We respect the Law among our own kind, even if no one else will.”

“Wait,” blurted Quentin. We turned to look at him. His cheeks flared red, but he pressed on, saying, “I thought if a prospective Selkie refused to accept the skin, you, um, drowned them. So they couldn’t go back to the others and tell them the truth about where you all come from.”

I didn’t remember the Luidaeg telling him that part, but that didn’t mean anything: I wasn’t always there, and the two of them had a relationship that existed outside of their mutual relationship with me. I turned back to Liz, waiting for her response.

“We drown our children, yes,” she said. “It kills me that we do, but it’s the agreement we made with the sea witch when she put the enchanted sealskins into our hands, and we keep our word. If you’re asking whether I’ve ever drowned a child, the answer is no. I had to have an heir when I became head of my clan, but I sought out a Roane man, and I lay with him to get my Diva. She’ll never need a sealskin to reach the sea, and so there was never any need to offer her the betrayer’s bargain. And before you say it, yes, I know I cheated, and yes, I know the sea witch would be within her rights to strike me down for going against the spirit of her deal with us, and no, I don’t care. I was never going to sacrifice a child to the water.”

“Okay, that’s . . . really awful, but given what the Divided Courts do to changelings who choose their human parents, I don’t think I get to judge you,” I said.

“Nor does the Court of Cats,” said Tybalt. “It’s rare for our children to choose anything aside from Faerie, and those who are born in feline skins never need to make the choice at all, but when it happens that a human-born child selects the mortal world as their home, their blood is on our hands. You shall find no censure here.”

Liz looked briefly startled. “Well, good,” she said, voice gruff with unshed tears. “Why are you asking me this?”

“I have one last question, and then I can explain,” I said. “What would happen if someone killed one of the skinless Selkies? Not Diva—I’m not sure she’s technically a Selkie at all, if she doesn’t need a sealskin to be part of Faerie—but one of your mortal kin.”

“If the killer was of Faerie but not of the clans, we would approach the local regent,” she said. “In Roan Rathad, that would mean approaching Baron Aberforth and hoping he was in the mood to listen to our petition. Not because that person would have done anything wrong in the eyes of the Law, but because sometimes, we can convince those in charge that our human relations are our property, and at least get the perpetrators fined for their crimes. It’s not enough—it’s barely this side of wergild—but it means they don’t do it casually.”